The 90-day playbook for scaling an EV installation business

Most installers do not have a growth problem. They have a system problem. They are getting work done, the team is busy, the customers are happy, but they cannot tell you with any confidence what next month looks like, let alone next quarter.

This piece is the 90-day plan I use with installers who want to move from "busy" to "predictably growing". It assumes you have a working business, a small team, and 5 to 8 hours a week to spend on the systems that will eventually replace your hustle. By day 90 you should have a marketing engine that does not need you to keep refilling it manually.

01Days 1 to 30: foundation

The first month is unsexy. You are not going to see a flood of new enquiries. What you are going to do is fix the leaky bucket, instrument the business, and get the basics so good that everything you do later actually works.

Week 1: audit the truth

• Pull the numbers. How many enquiries did you receive in each of the last three months? What were the sources? What was your average reply time? What was your close rate? You probably do not know. That is the first problem.
• Set up a simple CRM. HubSpot Free or Pipedrive at £15/mo. Drop in your last 90 days of leads.
• Talk to your last five customers. 10-minute call each. Ask three questions: what made you pick us, what almost made you go elsewhere, what would have made the experience better. Five conversations is enough to spot the patterns.

Week 2: fix the front door

Your website probably has the seven leaks I cover in our website conversion piece. Pick the four highest-impact fixes: rewrite the hero copy, compress images, cut the form to four fields, add three trust signals. Half a day of work. Big lift in conversion rate before you have spent a pound on traffic.

Week 3: build the follow-up engine

• Auto-acknowledge SMS within 60 seconds of a form submission.
• Auto-acknowledge email with a calendar booking link.
• 14-day nurture sequence with the eight templates.
• Phone tracking number on the website so you know which calls came from organic vs paid.

Setup time: one Saturday. Effect on close rate: usually 50% lift in 30 days.

Week 4: instrument and review

• Google Analytics 4 (or Plausible) on the site, with form submission events firing.
• Conversion pixel installed for Meta and Google ads, even if you are not running ads yet.
• A weekly review meeting. 30 minutes on a Friday. Four numbers: enquiries, reply time, close rate, cost per install.

02Days 31 to 60: turn on the engine

Month two is when you start adding fuel. The foundation from month one means every pound spent here actually works. If you skipped the foundation you are about to waste a lot of money.

Week 5: the content engine

Start the 30-day content plan. Phone camera. Ten minutes a day. By end of week 5 you should have 5 to 7 pieces of content posted, with momentum building.

Pick two platforms (Instagram and LinkedIn for most UK installers). Post daily on weekdays. Focus on real installs, customer reactions, and answers to common questions. Captions matter as much as the videos.

Week 6: paid ads, properly

Now turn on a paid channel. Most installers should start with Google Local Service Ads (LSA). Pay-per-lead, not pay-per-click, with built-in vetting through your reviews and licensing. Start at £30 to £50 per day for 14 days minimum.

Inside the same week, set up one Meta ad campaign for retargeting (people who visited your site, did not convert). Lower budget (£10 to £15 per day), high conversion rate. This is the cheapest channel you have access to and most installers ignore it.

Week 7: location pages and local SEO

• Audit your Google Business Profile. Categories, hours, services, photos.
• Set up the review-asking process. Every customer gets a SMS link 24 hours after install.
• Build location pages for your top 3 service areas. Real, specific content. Local proof.
• Add your business to the top 10 UK directories with consistent NAP (name, address, phone).

SEO is the slowest channel but the one that compounds the most. The work you do this week pays back over the next 18 months.

Week 8: review and adjust

By day 60 you should have:

• Roughly 30 pieces of content live across two platforms.
• An LSA campaign producing leads at a known cost per lead.
• A retargeting campaign converting at 3 to 5x the cost-efficiency of cold traffic.
• Local SEO foundations laid.
• A weekly review showing the four numbers trending the right way.

Pause for a half-day. Review what is working, what is not, and where to push more budget.

03Days 61 to 90: scale

Month three is about pouring fuel on the channels that are working and starting to think structurally about the next quarter.

Week 9: double down

Look at the data from month two. Whatever channel is producing the lowest cost per qualified enquiry should get a 30 to 50% budget increase. The worst-performing channel gets cut or paused.

Do the same with content. The two highest-performing content formats from month two get more weight in month three. The lowest two get retired or remixed.

Week 10: add a second paid channel

If LSA was your starting channel, this is when you add Meta cold prospecting (not just retargeting). Use creative learnings from your content engine. The clip that worked best on Instagram organic almost always works as a Meta ad.

If Meta was your starting channel, this is when you add Google Search ads on high-intent keywords like "EV installer [town]" and "OZEV approved installer [area]". Smaller budget, higher intent, complementary to your LSA.

Week 11: hire or partner

By month three you have probably hit the ceiling of what one person can run alongside actual installs. Two paths:

• Hire a 1- or 2-day-a-week marketing assistant. Junior, smart, willing to learn. They run the content engine and reply to comments. £80 to £120/day.
• Partner with an agency on the parts you cannot do well yourself. Specifically the paid ads and CRM automations. Avoid generalist agencies. Find one that focuses on installer or trade businesses.

Either path frees up your time. The point is to stop being the bottleneck on growth.

Week 12: review and plan the next quarter

End of month three. Big review. Look at:

• Total enquiries vs month one.
• Close rate change.
• Cost per install across all channels.
• Time you personally spent on marketing each week.

You should see roughly: 2x to 3x more enquiries, close rate up 10 to 30 percentage points, cost per install down 30 to 50%. If those are not the directions, run a deeper diagnostic. Something is broken structurally and the next 90 days will not fix it on their own.

04The financial picture

What does this cost? A rough budget for a 2 to 4-person installer running the 90-day plan:

• Tools: CRM + SMS + analytics ≈ £80/month
• Ad spend: Starting at £1,500/month in month two, rising to £3,000/month in month three as channels prove out
• Optional marketing assistant: £700-£1,000/month from week 11 onwards
• Optional agency: £2,500-£4,000/month if you bring one in for ads and CRM

For a typical installer, a healthy month-three return looks like £6 to £10 of install revenue for every £1 of ad spend, with the content and SEO compounding into months 4-6 even if you flatlined ad spend.

05Common reasons the plan fails

• Skipping the foundation. Going straight to ads in week 1 is the most expensive mistake. Without conversion tracking and a working follow-up system, you will scale a leaky bucket.
• Trying to do everything at once. Five channels at week 5 will exhaust you and produce mediocre results in all of them. Two channels at depth beats five at surface.
• Not measuring weekly. Without a Friday review, problems compound silently for weeks. Catch them in 7 days, not 47.
• Stopping content too early. Most installers see their first attributable lead from organic content around week 5 or 6. If you stop at week 3 you will think "it does not work" right before it would have started working.
• Hiring too late. If you are still personally writing every Instagram post in week 11, you have hit your ceiling and the plan stalls.

06What you should be feeling at each stage

• End of week 4: Slightly underwhelmed. Like you have done a lot of plumbing without seeing a tap turned on. This is normal.
• End of week 8: Cautiously optimistic. The dashboards are starting to show movement. A few attributable enquiries from new channels.
• End of week 12: Clear sense that the business is operating differently. You can predict next month. You spend less time chasing leads. The team has more work in the diary than they did 90 days ago.

07What comes next: months 4 to 12

The 90-day plan builds the foundation. The next 9 months are about deepening it.

• Months 4 to 6: Add a second service line (commercial, fleet, solar bolt-on). Diversify cold ad creative. Start filming testimonial videos with paying customers. Begin building partner relationships with adjacent trades.
• Months 7 to 9: Hire your first full-time team member dedicated to ops or sales. Move from manual quote production to a systemised process. Open a second service area.
• Months 10 to 12: Start building a brand, not just a business. Local PR, partnerships with EV manufacturers, sponsorships. The brand work compounds in years 2 and 3 in ways that ads cannot.

By month 12, an installer running this consistently has roughly tripled their monthly install volume, halved their cost per install, and built a system that does not need them to be running it day to day. That is the actual goal: a business that grows without you having to grow it personally every day.

08Final thought

The honest truth about scaling an EV installation business is that nothing in this plan is clever. None of these tactics are secret. They are all written about widely. The reason most installers do not get the results is not knowledge. It is consistent execution over 90 days, with a willingness to do the unsexy foundational work first.

If you genuinely run this for 90 days, you will be in a different category of installer. Not because you are smarter. Because the gap between "people who know what to do" and "people who do it" is enormous, and almost nobody crosses it. Be one of the few who does and the maths starts working in your favour for years.