OVO Solar & Heating

Energy Supplier · 16 franchises · United Kingdom

Franchises

live across the UK

Platform

shared by every franchise

Millions

Build costs avoided

no in-house platform team

“There was nobody we could see in the market that offered a tenth of what Payaca did within the renewable energy space.”

Andy Sellick

CTO, OVO Solar & Heating

Background

OVO Energy is one of the UK's largest energy suppliers. OVO Solar and Heating is its move into clean tech installation, set up as a separate venture at the start of 2025. It employs no install teams of its own. Instead it runs a franchise network of one vetted regional business per area, trading under the OVO brand. OVO says it assessed and interviewed around 200 businesses to arrive at the 16 franchises operating today.

The challenge

OVO Solar and Heating was carved out of OVO Energy at the start of 2025 with a national franchise network to build and nothing to run it on. CTO Andy Sellick could either build that platform in-house or find a partner who already knew renewables.

Why Payaca

Andy had already run this kind of software. Two of his four years at OVO were spent as CTO of Kantan, an OVO-owned field service platform for gas engineers, so he knew what building one properly costs and how long it takes to get good. His answer was to spend OVO's money on the part customers actually see, and buy everything underneath it.

Why a franchise network instead of in-house install teams

Solar and heating was not new to OVO. The group had spent two or three years trying to grow it with directly employed install teams, and Andy is blunt about why that stalled.

The franchise model was the fix. One regional business per area, chosen for quality, trading under a brand customers already recognise. Andy wanted the reach of a national supplier with the service only a local firm can give.

“Having your own in-house install teams just doesn't scale well. It's not very cost effective and it becomes a bit of a negative impact from a customer standpoint, because you're not really hand holding the customer. You're not going to be there on site a week before the install.”
On why OVO stopped employing install teams directly

Where the build versus buy line got drawn

Andy's rule was to own the customer experience and buy the rest. Telephony, CRM and sales pipelines, and quality management tools were all bought in, which left the small team he kept free to work on the part that makes OVO different from anyone else selling solar.

He makes a second argument for staying small, and it is the one most people have backwards. A bigger engineering footprint does not make you faster.

“The more that you scale your business in terms of technical footprint, ironically it's not the faster you go. It becomes an anti-pattern. Your lines of communication become longer and harder, and you can't operate as quickly.”
On keeping the technical team deliberately small

What the big CRMs couldn't do

OVO did look at the large horizontal CRM vendors. What put Andy off was the cost of making one of those platforms useful for solar and heat pump work before anyone could sell anything through it.

Payaca arrived with the renewable-specific work already built, then added APIs as OVO pushed further into the integration.

“Those tools often require a heck of a lot of investment upfront, really big teams to build out everything you want to integrate with it. Whereas Payaca came out the box with a really strong base level package.”
On evaluating the large CRM platforms

Eight months in, one or two bugs

Andy has built this kind of software himself, so his read on the product after eight months of working against it carries more weight than most.

“I can't really even think of more than one or two bugs that we've seen within the system at all, full stop. Within the eight months that we've been working together, I think we've produced more bugs than you have in that timescale.”
On product quality

Growing faster than planned created a data problem

Twelve franchises when we recorded the interview, sixteen by May 2026. That pace put its own pressure on OVO's data, and it is the reason the customer record now lives in one place rather than spread across systems.

“You become a slight victim of your own success. We've grown quicker than we could have imagined, and that's really pushing us harder towards, we need a single source of truth for data. Making sure we haven't got fragmented data sets across multiple systems, and really having that single source of truth for our customer live within Payaca.”
On scaling the franchise network

How OVO measures the funnel

Andy runs the network on a chain of conversion rates rather than one headline number. Leads to proposal, proposal to acceptance, acceptance to deposit, deposit to installation, with customer satisfaction sitting over the top of all of it.

Pulling one lever moves the others, and not always the way you wanted. More leads sounds good right up until the franchises are working volume that was never going to buy.

His other habit is worth stealing. He points at the Second World War study of returning bombers, where engineers wanted to armour the parts that came back riddled with holes, until someone pointed out those were the planes that made it home.

“The customers you really want to be talking to are those customers that you didn't win. Really trying to find out from those customers, what was the thing that tipped the balance against you?”
On the feedback most companies never collect

The solution

Every franchise runs on Payaca, and OVO's central team sees across all of them. Sales pipelines with stage guards, quoting, change proposals, documents and invoicing sit in one place, with OpenSolar wired in for system design. OVO built its own customer experience layer on top using our APIs, which is how a network this size launched without an in-house platform team.

Key features used

Franchise network running on a shared account structure
One customer record across every franchise
Sales pipelines with stage guards
Quoting, proposals and change proposals
Custom fields and automations across the project lifecycle
Document templates and invoicing
OpenSolar integration for system design
Open APIs for OVO's own customer experience layer

The results

OVO Solar and Heating went from a standing start in early 2025 to a franchise network covering most of the British Isles, without building or buying a platform of its own to do it.

Sixteen franchises trade on Payaca today, picked from around 200 businesses OVO assessed. All of them work in the same system, so the central team reads the whole network's pipeline without stitching sixteen sources together.

The technical cost base stayed where Andy wanted it. There are no engineering squads building an internal platform, and the team he does have is small enough to spend its time on the parts of the journey customers actually notice.

Looking ahead

Andy wants the next phase to close the loop between OVO's other systems and the project record. He'd like OVO tariffs pushed into Payaca so franchises can put customers on the right energy deal at the point of sale, and Safety Culture site reviews flowing back to the franchise that did the work. Telephony is on his list too, with call recordings and transcripts sitting against the project, along with WhatsApp as a customer channel.