Hire Fractional CTO for Solar Companies
Senior, direct, no layers
Fractional CTO for solar companies: fewer redesigns, fewer install-day surprises, and customers who always know what happens next.
A senior fractional cto for solar companies
A solar companies firm that is growing usually reaches a point where technology decisions stop being occasional purchases and start being bets: which systems to keep, what to build, what to buy, who to hire, and what to stop paying for. Those decisions are too important to leave to vendors, and too infrequent to justify a full-time technology chief.
A fractional CTO fills that gap part-time: a senior technology leader working with the firm on a regular cadence, owning the technology roadmap, the vendor decisions, the hiring calls and the architecture judgement, without joining the payroll full-time. The firm gets experienced leadership for the decisions that matter, and no leader for the days when there is nothing to decide.
The engagement is advisory and accountable in equal measure. Advice that nobody implements is theatre, so the role includes following decisions through: checking the build, challenging the vendor, and reporting plainly when a plan is off track, including when the honest advice is to spend less.
If technology decisions need a steady hand, start with a leadership conversation and we will start with an inventory of what exists and what it costs.
What this engagement covers for solar companies
- Design accuracy treated as a revenue decision — A proposal built on a wrong roof measurement or a shading assumption becomes a redesign, a delayed install, or a customer who no longer trusts the savings figure. Aurora Solar, OpenSolar or Solargraf outputs are checked against EagleView and Nearmap imagery and against what surveyors actually find on site, and the gap between modelled and installed output is tracked job by job.
- Proposal, contract and install kept on one job record — When design, sales, operations and finance each keep their own version of a job, the customer hears three different dates. This engagement defines a single job record — design, equipment, permits, install date, inspection, interconnection — and makes every system feed it or stop pretending to be the record. Scoop Solar, JobNimbus, HubSpot or Salesforce is judged on whether it can hold that record, not on its demo dashboards.
- Interconnection and permitting sequenced, not hoped for — Utility interconnection, permits and inspections have their own clocks, and a sales pipeline that ignores them promises dates operations cannot keep. The roadmap builds those waits into scheduling and customer communication, so a customer is told a realistic window at sale time rather than discovering a delay after signing.
- Monitoring and service work priced into the sale — PVsyst or the NREL System Advisor Model gives a performance expectation; the monitoring platform then has to prove, panel string by panel string, whether the installed system meets it. Service capacity, warranty claims and truck rolls are planned from that monitoring data, so a growing installed base does not quietly become an unfunded service burden.
- Equipment and supplier choices with a failure path — Inverters, batteries and panels are chosen with a named answer to what happens when a unit fails in year six: who holds spares, who handles the warranty claim, and how the customer is kept running in the meantime. A cheaper component without that path is costed as a future service problem, not a saving.
- Roof, battery and maintenance data kept usable after handover — As-built designs, serial numbers, warranty documents and monitoring logins are handed to the customer and stored in a form the service team can find years later. A job file that only the original designer can decode is treated as a defect in the process, not a filing quirk.
Built around the tools solar companies already use
A solar firm's stack tends to grow job by job: a design tool for proposals, imagery for roofs, modelling for production estimates, a CRM or job platform for the pipeline, accounting somewhere else, and monitoring portals that each installer or manufacturer runs separately. The CTO's work is to stop that sprawl from becoming the customer experience — where a customer gets a design number, a contract number and a monitoring login that never agree with each other. The first artefact is therefore a job-lifecycle map, from lead to design to permit to install to monitoring, with each handoff named and each system assigned exactly one job in that chain.
The second discipline is about promises. A modelled production figure is not a guarantee, and a sales team paid on signed contracts will round it upward unless the process stops them. So design assumptions, shading inputs and equipment choices are recorded on the proposal itself, and installed performance is reviewed against the proposal in a regular review. When the gap is systematic — a particular roof type, a particular inverter, a particular survey shortcut — the design process changes, not just the next proposal's number.
From kickoff to delivery for solar companies
- Follow five completed jobs from lead to monitoring
Five jobs, chosen across roof types and install crews, are traced through design, proposal, permit, install, inspection and monitoring. Every point where the customer was told something the next team contradicted is logged, and those points, not opinions about software, set the agenda.
- Fix the job record before buying anything new
One system is named as the job record, the fields it must hold are written down, and other tools are either connected to it or demoted to working tools that do not speak to the customer. No new platform is bought until the record it would feed is agreed.
- Build the permit and interconnection clock into scheduling
Scheduling and customer updates are rebuilt around real utility and inspection timelines for the firm's operating areas, with the waiting stages visible to the customer. A date is only promised when the stages before it are complete or genuinely predictable.
- Review installed performance against proposals every quarter
Monitoring data is compared with proposal figures by crew, equipment and roof type, and the findings feed back into design assumptions and service planning. A pattern of underperformance changes the design process; a single bad job changes how that job is serviced.
Why hire Omer
- Design checked against what surveyors find: Proposal numbers are tested on site conditions and on installed results, so a modelling error is caught in the design process instead of on a customer's roof.
- One job record, not five versions of it: Design, sales, operations and finance work from the same job, so the customer stops hearing different dates from different teams.
- Permit waits built into the promise: Customer dates reflect utility and inspection realities, which protects trust more than an optimistic date that slips twice.
- Service capacity planned from the installed base: Monitoring and warranty workload is forecast from systems already installed, so growth in sales does not silently become a service backlog.
- As-built files a stranger can use: Job files are judged on whether a service technician years later can find the design, serials and warranties without calling the original designer.
Questions, answered
How is this different from hiring a developer or consultant?
How much time does the firm get?
Do you manage our developers directly?
What if we already have an IT provider?
What do you need from us to start?
Ready to get started?
The best way to explore working together is a quick conversation. Reach out through your preferred channel and let us discuss your project.
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