About
Elite Services Group is a 27-person renewable energy installer covering heat pumps, solar, battery storage, and air-to-air systems. They have four directors each heading up different parts of the business. James runs the heat pump division.
Elite installs around 100 heat pumps a year alongside their other renewable work. Spruce handles roughly 90% of the heat pump workload outside of the physical installation, from initial estimates through to handover packs. James does it all from a laptop without the all the back office staff.
"Without a question, I wouldn't be able to do my job as well as I'm doing without Spruce. It's given us the ability to scale whilst keeping the overheads and staffing manageable."
"It probably gives you the equivalent of four or five admin staff in an office. And I can do all this myself on a laptop." — James, Director
The Challenge
Elite had been doing heat pumps for years before Spruce, but the admin behind each job relied on multiple disconnected tools. Estimates went out through one piece of job management software, heat loss calculations happened in another, and proposals were created separately. Every time something changed - a different heat pump model, an updated design - James had to update it across each system manually.
Three to four hours just for the heat loss
Five or six years ago, James was doing heat loss surveys on paper sheets, handwriting measurements and then manually entering every U-value for every room into software. Even a small property took between three to four hours for the heat loss element alone. After a full day of installations, breakdowns, and callbacks, the paperwork happened in the evening.
"Five or six years ago, I was doing heat loss surveys on four paper sheets and writing it all out. Just the heat loss survey element on a very small property took about three or four hours. And I used to do that on a night."
Too many roles, not enough hours
The challenge wasn't just the volume of admin - it was that James, like most people in the industry, wasn't only doing design work. He was onsite, commissioning systems, handling callbacks, visiting customers. Finding a full day to sit down and get a proposal out was rare, and the longer it took, the more likely the lead was to go cold.
"You're probably not just the designer, you're the installer as well. You're doing breakdowns, repairs, callbacks, lots of different elements within the business. So to have just the luxury of just doing design is really rare."
The Solution
Elite originally adopted Spruce as an estimating tool plugged into their website. Over the last 18 months, it's become their full workflow - estimates, design, proposals, installation packs, and handover documentation.
The biggest difference to Elite’s workflow has been how the data carries through. When he selects a heat pump at the estimate stage, that populates the design, the proposal, and the handover pack automatically. Where previously any change meant updating three or four systems manually, now it happens at once.
What James really likes is the flexibility of the heat loss survey. Rather than being locked into one method, he can use whatever approach suits each room as he walks around a property. Standard rooms can done as blocks. A complicated hallway gets drawn out in detail. He can overlay existing plans or sketch freehand; all in the same visit, on the same tool.
"There's lots of different ways you can do a heat loss survey all in one visit. It's whatever method lends itself better to that particular room. So it's really fluid and flexible - you don't have to stick to one way of doing it."
The Result
Key outcomes:
Maintaining heat pump volume: Around 100 per year, two per week
Reduced admin time: Full proposal finished by early afternoon rather than late at night
Higher efficiency: James handles the design and admin workload that would otherwise need three to five office staff
Faster response time: Estimates out to customers within 48 hours
James builds up each proposal as he goes rather than compiling everything at the end. Work that used to stretch past midnight now gets done by lunchtime. That shift means he can handle the design workload for 100 heat pumps a year without needing to grow his headcount.
The speed also matters commercially. James reckons that getting an estimate to a customer within 48 hours significantly improves the chance of winning the job. Even spending two or three days getting something out means losing work to whoever got there first.
"The quicker you can get an estimate out to a customer within 48 hours, your win rate's gonna go up. If you're spending two or three days on just getting something out in the first place, you're not gonna be winning jobs."
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