What are the participants’ profiles?
Participation in the project was targeted, by design, to those who are owners – or in other senior/responsible positions – of microbusinesses. Through our qualitative interviews, we verified that we have reached the target group profile we had intended. This section explores that profile in more detail. Note that all participants were men, which is reflective of the overwhelming majority of men in the plumbing and heating workforce.
Start at home project participants are sole traders or small family businesses, with the largest business involved in the project having a total headcount of 12 people. Most people described their business as a ‘family business’, employing at least one family member (often their son, but also a spouse or parent) and one or two other employees, often apprentices. One heating engineer states:
“So for all those years it was, it was my father and I. We just built the business up that way. Then I was lucky enough to be blessed with a son, and then a daughter, and then another son. They grew up and they came of age and they've come straight into the trade. And I'm lucky because both my sons really like the trade. You know, they like the plumbing.”
Many of the companies involved are staffed by the owner who continues to be active ‘on the tools’ on a daily basis while dealing with administrative tasks as well. As one interviewee describes:
“Most days you'd say that you're out and actually doing the work, and then you just do the admin in the evenings and the weekends.”
Overall, the people we spoke to are time-poor and divide working time between many different responsibilities, while still being flexible. One engineer explains how they are:
“Spinning plates, juggling balls, smashing plates, dropping the balls! I'm still hands-on, so I'm still doing stuff as well. Then some days in the office, … [It] just changes, to be honest. And so I'm still hand in, in regards to doing the plumbing and heating myself… Still involved with that bit of it.”
This matters for the Start at home project as they need to find the time to do a full heat pump installation alongside all the other work that they do. For example, we heard from some participants that they typically work on their installation in the evening or during the weekends.
Unsurprisingly, the people we spoke to describe themselves and their respective businesses as being busy year-round, particularly throughout the winter heating season. Most also describe their customer base as returning customers, getting customers from word-of-mouth and not needing to advertise much to get sufficient business to fill their capacity, although some mention online advertising as a way to attract new customers. A few participants also explained being subcontracted for commercial work. Some engineers also described themselves as having existing links to particular brands in the heating industry – for example being an accredited installer for a given manufacturer.
Most participants have been in the trade for some time – often for over 10 years. This means that all of them are experienced heating engineers, with established businesses and customer bases. Many went into plumbing and heating through an apprenticeship, having immediately left school. A few people told us they were introduced to the trade by their father, who was also in the trade. For example, two heating engineers explain:
“I went through school thinking it was a complete waste of time because I wanted to start serving my time. I started my apprenticeship in my father’s company when I was 16 and that’s how I came into the industry.”
“When I was in school, I was deciding whether to be a joiner. But my father pointed me towards plumbing because where I was growing up, everyone was either a joiner or a brickie and nobody really spoke about electricians or plumbers.”
However, there are a couple of project participants who joined the plumbing industry having previously worked in other industries or having had a first career.
The businesses involved in Start at home also typically cover most aspects of plumbing and heating, mostly domestic. Each of our project participants tends to have a diverse customer base and a wide range of income sources for their business. Many of them describe themselves in terms equivalent to “no job too big or too small”, or doing “bits and pieces of all kinds of plumbing and heating works”, reflecting that they would cover a wide range of plumbing and heating tasks. Many participants describe the polyvalent nature of the job and the wide range of situations they encounter day-to-day:
“I do everything. Sometimes I can be out on a roof doing lead or gutters or downpipes, and other times I'm in doing bathrooms and heating and everything. We do everything.”
We had intended to recruit individuals with no prior experience with heat pumps, that is, companies that are currently not offering heat pump installations to their customers. This was so that project participants would be in the very earliest stages of transitioning their business to heat pumps.
Interestingly, in practice, this was more difficult to apply, as some potential participants had only a little experience installing heat pumps under supervision. Some participants describe their installation experience as “hand-held, just doing what [they] were told”. As one engineer describes, “They just gave us a big schematic and we followed it. Their engineer came out, checked it over and signed it off. We were left not really knowing much else about them.” Others echo this installer’s experience, “I have fitted heat pumps on sites that we've been on, but that's as an installer, not as a main contractor, or knowing to do MCS or anything like that.” In these circumstances, the other company had done the design and commissioning of the heat pump.
