Retrofit and getting funding is complex so it's likely at some point that you'll look for external help to navigate it and bring some funding in. In this blog we look at some of the risks to look out for which can impact the amount of funding you get and ultimately how much retrofit you get done.
Ensuring the correct and optimal funding solutions for any business is vital. It’s extremely important to have a clear, and transparent funding arrangement that has no conflicts of interest or other influencing factors.
When looking at finding external funding, it’s important to focus on achieving the best/ optimal funding package for you and to meet your needs alone.
In order to be able to deliver a transparent and independent funding process for clients. Optify only specialises in retrofit funding; we do not install, assess, co-ordinate, project manage, or need to meet any obligation other than providing our customers with the best funding package for their individual needs.
This ensures that where funding is obtained for our clients, our process dictates that the funding ends up in the clients’ hands for them to control and funding amounts are transparent from start to finish.
Doing retrofit projects to PAS involves a formal project methodology with a lot of moving parts and various parties and specialists involved.
Through the project, there are numerous opportunities to introduce conflicts of interest if a single party was to be responsible for multiple parts of the process.
This is nothing new. In your financial systems, procurement protocols and payment processes there will be controls and mechanisms in place to ensure such conflicts of interest can't materialise. This would usually be dealt with at source by ensuring that responsibilities are segregated to prevent the risk of someone serving their interests instead of the company's. Your retrofit project should be no different whatsoever. In fact, that too will have potential to have vast amounts of money flowing through it so putting checks and measures in place to ensure integrity of the process is absolutely the right thing to do. For anyone accountable for such projects, knowing that project integrity is assured because they're managing in this way is a must.
It's quite common for contractors to have a funding partner (or their own funding source) or for a funding partner to have their own preferred contractors.
In these types of circumstances, it can be the case that the client gets partial or no visibility of how much funding was awarded from the funder.
It is of course a fantastic result for that client to be getting energy efficiency measures installed at reduced or no cost however without full visibility of funding it's impossible to quantify the benefits, for example, there could be a scenario where the funding awarded may have exceeded the cost of the installation.
Would that client then feel short changed that they didn't reap the full benefit of that funding settlement?
If the scenario was slightly different; if the client received the funding, paid the contractor a fair price for the installation and the client then benefited from the surplus from the funding and was able to fund more retrofit measures, would that be a better outcome?
Optify's Response: Remove Conflicts of Interest to Maximise Retrofit Funding
We specialise in decarbonisation funding and nothing else. We offer various forms of funding but don't do anything other than find funding solutions. This is by design. It would help our cause and make some projects easier to execute if we did other things too but we've purposely deconstructed our funding process so that it is:
Transparent
Fair
Completely geared to acting in the clients interests
Focused on getting the maximum amount of funding into the clients hands
Prioritising getting more retrofit done
It's our mission to get more retrofit funding into the hands of those that need it. Eliminating conflicts of interest from the funding process is just one of the many ways we're doing that.
When it comes to your retrofit funding, insist on transparency of funding amounts that any funder has provided and that the funding is paid to you so you're ultimately in control of the project and dictate where the money is spent.
Talk to us about our best practice funding process that eliminates these risks and delivers maximum funding for you and your retrofit projects.