ECO businesses know how to sell, but selling funded measures to eligible households is a completely different discipline from selling to homeowners spending their own money. With the scheme ending in 2026, Jamie Duncan explains what needs to change and why the able-to-pay market is a bigger opportunity than ECO ever was.
Jamie Duncan
The Energy Company Obligation is ending. ECO4 runs until December 2026 and there is no ECO5. For businesses that have spent years delivering insulation, heating upgrades, and renewable installations through funded schemes, this is the biggest operational shift they have ever faced. Not because the work disappears, but because the way you win and deliver that work changes completely.
Let's be clear about something. Many ECO businesses have large, well-organised sales operations. They employ teams of canvassers, appointment setters, and field assessors. They know how to hit targets, manage pipelines, and move volume. Saying "ECO businesses don't know how to sell" would be wrong and dismissive of the real capability these teams have built.
But the ECO sale and the private sale are fundamentally different disciplines.
Under ECO, your sales team is convincing eligible households to accept a funded improvement. The homeowner pays nothing or very little. The core sales challenge is trust and access: getting through the door, explaining the scheme, overcoming scepticism about "free" offers, and qualifying the household against eligibility criteria. It is a volume game where conversion depends on reaching the right people and building enough confidence for them to say yes to something that costs them almost nothing.
The able-to-pay sale is the opposite dynamic. You are asking a homeowner to spend £8,000 on insulation, £12,000 on a heat pump, or £15,000 on a solar and battery system. They are making an active purchasing decision with their own money. The objections are different, the decision timeline is different, and what they need from you at every stage is different.
Your ECO sales team's skills in door-to-door canvassing, appointment setting, and high-volume pipeline management are genuinely valuable. But they need to be redirected toward a sale where the customer is spending real money, comparing you against competitors, and expecting a level of professionalism and aftercare that funded scheme work rarely demands.
ECO businesses already have sales teams, appointment setters, and pipeline infrastructure. That is more than most companies starting from scratch. The challenge is redirecting those people toward a completely different type of sale. Selling value to someone spending their own money is a different conversation, a different proposal, and a different customer journey.
Under ECO, the sales and delivery process is shaped by the scheme. Managing agents coordinate the supply chain. Eligibility criteria define the customer. Funding flows from the energy supplier through to the installer. Your operations are built around compliance with PAS 2030/2035, TrustMark lodgement, and measure reporting.
The able-to-pay market strips all of that away and replaces it with a direct relationship between your business and the homeowner. Here is what that looks like in practice:
The biggest gap is not in the sale itself. It is in everything that surrounds it: the quoting, the customer communication, the scheduling, the aftercare. ECO businesses are typically very strong on installation quality and compliance. What they often lack is the commercial and operational infrastructure to run a retail business.
Having onboarded dozens of businesses making this transition at Payaca, the gaps are remarkably consistent. Almost every ECO business moving to private work needs to build or significantly upgrade the same five capabilities.
Your ECO pipeline tracks eligible households through qualification, survey, installation, and lodgement. A private pipeline needs to track a buying journey: enquiry, consultation, proposal, follow-up, acceptance, deposit, scheduling, installation, sign-off, final payment, review request.
The stages are different because the customer's mindset is different. An ECO lead has been told they qualify for a free improvement. A private lead is researching options, comparing installers, and weighing up whether to spend the money at all. Your pipeline needs to reflect that longer, more considered journey and give your team visibility into where every opportunity sits.
In Payaca, you can build custom sales pipelines with stages that match the private customer journey, then set up automations to move deals through those stages and trigger actions at each step. No manual chasing, no leads falling through cracks.
This is where the gap between ECO and private work is most visible. Under ECO, pricing is driven by the scheme. In the private market, you are competing for the customer's money against other installers, against the option of doing nothing, and against other ways they could spend £10,000.
Your proposals need to be professional, clearly presented, and persuasive. That means branded documents that explain the benefits, show costs transparently, include available grant deductions (like the £7,500 BUS grant for heat pumps), outline energy savings projections, and make it easy for the customer to accept and pay a deposit online. A PDF attached to an email does not cut it when you are asking someone to make a significant investment in their home.
Payaca's quoting and proposal tools are built for exactly this. Interactive proposals with product options, imagery, grant breakdowns, and one-click acceptance. Your customer gets a professional buying experience and you get notified the moment they open, view, or accept.
Private customers expect to know what is happening at every stage. When will the survey be? What did the survey find? When will the quote arrive? When is installation booked? Who is coming? What do they need to prepare?
This is a big shift from ECO, where the homeowner's main interaction is with the installation team on the day. The businesses that win in the private market are the ones that make the customer feel looked after from first enquiry to completion. That means confirmation emails, appointment reminders, project status updates, and post-installation follow-up. Ideally through a customer portal they can check at any time, not through phone calls to your office.
ECO work is often batched. You might do 15 loft insulation jobs in the same postcode over a week. Private installations are more varied and more scattered. You might have a heat pump installation in Bristol on Monday, a solar survey in Bath on Tuesday, and a battery retrofit in Swindon on Wednesday.
This demands proper scheduling tools that your office and field teams can both see and update. Drag-and-drop calendars, engineer availability tracking, and automated appointment notifications become essential rather than nice-to-have. Your field teams need a mobile app that gives them full job context on site, lets them capture photos and signatures, and triggers the next step in the process without calling the office.
Under ECO, you invoice the managing agent or energy supplier. Payment terms are agreed and the process is largely B2B. Private customers need to pay you directly, which means you need invoicing, payment collection, deposit management, and the ability to take payment at every stage of the project. The businesses that collect deposits at acceptance, stage payments at key milestones, and invoice promptly at completion maintain healthy cash flow. The ones that wait until the job is done to think about getting paid run into trouble fast.
Start building these capabilities now
The ECO deadline is December 2026. But the transition does not happen overnight. Businesses that start building private market capabilities now, even while still delivering ECO work, will have a massive head start over those that wait until the funding stops.
Reading that list of capabilities, you might be thinking: this sounds like months of setup work. It does not have to be.
Payaca's automations engine handles the repetitive operational work that private market businesses need: automatic quote follow-ups, appointment confirmations, stage-change notifications, payment reminders, review requests after completion. You define the trigger and the action, and the system runs it every time without anyone in your office having to remember.
But the real accelerator for ECO businesses making this transition is Agent Dave, our AI agent built directly into the platform. Dave is not a chatbot that answers questions. He takes action inside your account.
Tell Dave you need a pipeline for private solar installations and he will build it, with stages mapped to the customer buying journey, automation triggers at each transition, and notification rules for your team. Ask him to create a proposal template for heat pump installations and he will generate a branded document with product options, grant deductions, and energy savings projections. Need a set of automated emails for your post-survey follow-up sequence? Describe what you want and Dave builds it.
For ECO businesses, this is transformative. Instead of spending weeks configuring a new system from scratch, your team describes how they want the private operation to work and Dave sets it up. The configuration that used to take multiple onboarding sessions can happen in a conversation.
Agent Dave is available to all Payaca customers
Dave can set up automations, build document templates, create pipeline stages, configure custom fields, and analyse your data. He does the work, not just answers questions. See what Dave can do.
It is natural to see the end of ECO as a threat. But the numbers tell a different story.
ECO4 delivered approximately 660,000 measures across the UK between 2022 and 2026. That is substantial, but the private market dwarfs it. The government's Warm Homes Plan targets upgrades to 5 million homes by 2030. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme alone has a £2.7 billion budget running until 2029/30. And that is just the grant-funded segment. The self-funded homeowner market, people who want solar, batteries, heat pumps, or insulation and are willing to pay for it, is growing faster than any government scheme.
Beyond government schemes, the broader market dynamics are strongly favourable:
The key difference is that this market requires you to earn the work rather than have it allocated. The margins are typically better than ECO work, the customer relationships are direct, and you build a reputation and referral network that compounds over time.
And here is something ECO businesses often underestimate: your installation quality and compliance expertise is a genuine competitive advantage in the private market. Many private installers cut corners. Your PAS 2030/2035 accreditation, your TrustMark registration, your experience with proper retrofit standards: these are selling points that private customers increasingly care about.
The ECO businesses I've onboarded that are doing best in the private market all say the same thing: they wish they had started sooner. The work is more rewarding, the margins are better, and they finally feel like they're building their own business rather than being a part of someone else's supply chain.
If you are running an ECO business today, here is a practical sequence for building your private market operation:
Phase 1: Set up your systems (now). Get a platform in place that can manage leads, quotes, scheduling, customer communication, and invoicing. Do not try to build this from spreadsheets. You will hit the same scaling problems that drove you to ECO's managed supply chain in the first place. This is where Payaca fits. We have purpose-built the platform for exactly this type of clean tech installation business, and Agent Dave can have your private-market pipelines, proposal templates, and automations configured in days rather than weeks.
Phase 2: Start taking private work alongside ECO (next 3-6 months). You do not need to stop ECO work overnight. Start generating private leads, even a handful per month, and run them through your new systems. This builds confidence, refines your processes, and creates case studies and reviews you can use to attract more work.
Phase 3: Retrain your sales team. Your canvassers and appointment setters have real skills. Redirect them. The consultative sale to a homeowner spending their own money requires different objection handling, different value articulation, and a different pace. Role-play the new conversations. Build out your proposal templates. Get comfortable talking about ROI, energy savings, and payback periods rather than eligibility and scheme funding.
Phase 4: Diversify your services. ECO businesses often specialise in a narrow range of measures: loft insulation, cavity wall, or heating upgrades. The private market rewards businesses that can offer a broader package. Solar, batteries, heat pumps, EV chargers, and whole-house retrofit are all interconnected. The more you can offer, the higher your average project value and the stickier your customer relationships.
Phase 5: Scale your private operation. As ECO winds down through 2026, your private pipeline should be growing. By the time the scheme ends, private work should be the majority of your revenue. Businesses that reach this point find they never look back.
Payaca is built for this transition
We have helped dozens of installation businesses move from funded scheme work to direct-to-homeowner operations. The platform handles the full customer journey: pipeline and quoting, scheduling and field ops, customer portal and comms, compliance documentation, invoicing and payments, and automations that tie it all together. Book a demo and we will show you exactly how it works for businesses making this shift.
The end of ECO is not the end of the energy efficiency industry. It is the end of one business model within it, and the beginning of a much larger opportunity.
The businesses that will thrive are the ones that treat this as a chance to build something better: a direct relationship with their customers, a brand that stands on its own, and operations that can scale without depending on government funding cycles.
The ones that will struggle are those that wait for the next scheme, hoping something like ECO5 materialises. It will not. The government has made it clear that the future is a mix of targeted grants for fuel poverty and consumer finance for the able-to-pay market. The model of energy suppliers funding installations through bill levies is over.
If you are an ECO business reading this, the best time to start building your private market operation was six months ago. The second best time is now.
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