The Elli Flexpole was built at Volkswagen’s plant in Hannover and delivered rapid DC charging across two simultaneous outlets. An integrated battery is what made it unusual: it needed no grid upgrade, trenching or excavation to go in.
That matters because grid capacity, not demand, is what stalls most rapid-charging rollouts. A unit that sidesteps the civil works reaches sites that would otherwise wait years.
Most manufacturer networks are built to route jobs. Elli’s problem was the other way round. The Flexpole opened up commercial sites that installers could not previously serve, so the constraint was not finding work for installers, it was getting the product into the hands of installers who could sell it.
Appointing a small panel would have limited reach. Recruiting broadly and then managing orders by email would not have scaled either.
Rather than starting cold, the network was built from people already known to be doing the work. A campaign went out to current and former installHUB users, an audience of EV charge point installers who needed no explanation of what the job involved.
Recruitment does not have to be limited to an existing mailing list. Find installers surfaces candidates against the coverage a network actually has, and installers can be invited to register themselves, so a network is grown where the gaps are rather than where the contacts happen to be.
Any EV charger installation company in the UK could join Elli’s official installer network. No fee and no subscription, which removes the usual reason an installer never gets round to signing up.
Installers were brought up to speed on a product most had not fitted before, so network membership meant capability rather than just a listing.
Pre-qualification and approval levels sit alongside an open network, so a channel that starts wide can be tightened into a graded one later without rebuilding it. Competency, insurance and product training are captured in the same structured shape from everyone.
This is the part that made the network work. An installer who had won a site submitted the purchase order request from within their own installHUB account, alongside the job it belonged to. Ordering was not a separate process in a separate system.
Survey, quotation, scheduling, the field operative on site and invoicing all ran in the installer’s own installHUB, the way the rest of their work did. Joining Elli’s network added a product line rather than a second system to learn.
An open network trades curation for coverage. For a product limited by how many installers can sell it, that is the right trade.
Installers order and deliver from the account they already run their business in, which is the difference between joining a network and using one.
Elli is not routing leads. Installers find the sites and bring the orders, so the manufacturer scales through the trade rather than around it.
Pre-qualification and approval levels are available if an open network ever needs to become a graded one.
Elli’s open supply channel is one of four models. See it against nationwide competitive allocation, a single subcontractor and a partner channel.
Compare the models →ProductThe network, vetting, branding and oversight capability behind every story on this page.
See Enterprise →More about Elli at elli.eco.
