About
Swift Renewables is a Southwest-based renewables installer covering Bristol, Somerset, North Devon, South Wales, Wiltshire and Hampshire. The company specialises in air source heat pumps, solar PV and battery storage.
Director Josh joined Swift in 2014 after launching Samsung's air-to-water heat pump in the UK. At the time, the team was 3-4 people fitting around 10 heat pumps a year. Today, Swift employs 30 engineers with 3 more joining shortly, and installed roughly 100 heat pumps last year. Spruce helped Swift handle that growth in installations without needing to grow the office at the same rate.
"You're doing seven or eight different forms just in the hope that they're going to say yes."
The Challenge
A full-time admin role
Before Spruce, the paperwork side of running heat pump installations was effectively a full-time job. One person in the office spent their days manually doing heat loss calculations, compiling survey data from radiator sizes, window dimensions and room measurements into one place, and assembling it into something Josh or his colleague could turn into a professional-looking. Each survey took a long time on site. Each calculation took longer back at the desk. The whole process took up to a full day per job.
Forms before commitment
The MCS paperwork side compounded this manual work. The handover pack checklist alone was 25 separate documents. Before sending a proposal, the team was producing 7-8 different forms per project. Sound assessments, performance estimates, MCS estimates, design documents. All manually filled in, saved into shared drives, and built before the team knew whether the customer would even proceed. When a job did complete, finalising the handover pack meant going back through everything and chasing up anything that had been missed.
"It was effectively one person's full-time job to manually do heat loss calculations using Easy MCS and their toolkit. It took a long time."
The Solution
Proposal from the car
Josh received a postcard from Spruce in late 2024 and let it sit on his desk for three months before trying it.
The first thing he wanted to improve was the survey. The old process meant taking manual notes on site and then spending hours compiling them, but surveys now take 45 minutes to an hour. Floor plans are traced beforehand using uploaded plans. On site, Josh uses LiDAR and tells the customer directly what things need changing and what can stay. Afterwards, the proposal comes together in around 20 minutes. He has finished surveys, sat in the car outside the property, completed the proposal and sent it before driving off.
That speed matters competitively. Josh has won jobs where the customer received Swift's proposal on a Tuesday morning, having only been surveyed on Monday, while the next installer they'd seen the week before still hadn't sent anything.
One process, end to end
Spruce’s smart enquiry tool sits on Swift's website, giving prospective customers an initial estimate before they ever speak to anyone. That filters out the tyre-kickers who would previously have consumed a full survey and a day's worth of paperwork before deciding they weren't going ahead. From quote tool through to handover pack, customers see one consistent document set.
The same install pack that Josh sends the customer for design sign-off also goes to the lead installer the week before the job starts. Radiator sizing, heat pump location, signal placement. All decided weeks in advance rather than sorted on the morning of the install.
"You're sending the most accurate information you can give them as quickly as you can. You're more likely to get a positive result.”
The Results
Key outcomes:
Scaled installations: 10 heat pumps a year → around 100
Grew the team: 3-4 → 30 engineers, with three more joining
Reduced proposal turnaround: Up to a day → around 20 minutes
Faster surveys: Lengthy manual process → 45 minutes to an hour on site
Freed up a full-time role: Spruce now does the work of an admin role that used to be dedicated to heat loss calculations
With the admin work that used to occupy a full-time role now handled by software, Swift could redirect that time to other parts of the business rather than growing headcount in line with installations. As Josh puts it, the industry tends to run a high admin-to-onsite-staff ratio, and avoiding that trap was central to how Swift grew without becoming top-heavy.
The growth came from getting their processes right. Without that, Swift couldn't have taken on the extra work, and couldn't have justified the extra engineers.
"If we had stuck with our old processes, we'd still be looking at 60 installs a year [versus the 100 we did last year]."
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