Background
Meridian Renewables designs and installs air-source heat pumps and solar for homeowners across the West Midlands. Demand for low-carbon heating is climbing across Europe — but for Meridian it arrived in waves. Every time a government grant or subsidy hit the news, the phone rang off the hook; in the quiet weeks between, the pipeline dried up and the crews had gaps.
The business was good at installs and poor at being found. There was no steady stream of local content, no visible authority, and no system to nurture the homeowners who were curious but not quite ready to buy.
The problem
A pipeline at the mercy of the news cycle
Heat-pump buyers research for weeks or months before they commit. Meridian was capturing the ready-to-buy few, but had nothing to stay in front of the much larger group still weighing it up — and no consistent presence to win trust before a competitor did.
- Lead volume spiked around grant news, then collapsed, making it impossible to plan crews.
- Almost no local content or social presence, so the brand was invisible between referrals.
- Curious-but-not-ready homeowners went cold with no nurture or follow-up.
The solution
A brand engine plus a net that catches everything
We led with the AI Authority Engine to build consistent, on-brand local visibility, and paired it with the AI Lead Capture System so the demand it created never leaked. During onboarding we trained the systems on Meridian's expertise, the grants and schemes their customers care about, and the questions homeowners actually ask.
What went live
- Daily, on-brand content answering real homeowner questions about heat pumps, grants, and running costs.
- Local authority building that kept Meridian visible and credible between referrals.
- Instant capture and qualification of every enquiry the content generated.
- Automated nurture that kept not-yet-ready buyers warm until they booked a survey.
- Monthly analytics tying content and pipeline back to booked installs.
The rollout
Full deployment took six weeks — most of it spent getting the brand voice and technical accuracy right, because in renewables, credibility is the whole game. Content began publishing in week two, and the capture and nurture layers were live shortly after.
The results
A pipeline that no longer waits for the news
Within a few months, Meridian's qualified pipeline was 3.2× larger and — crucially — steady rather than spiky. The Authority Engine was producing 90+ pieces of content a month, and the steady flow of educated, pre-warmed enquiries pushed the close rate up 22%. For the first time, the team could plan crews weeks ahead instead of reacting to whatever the week brought.
"We used to pray for a grant announcement. Now we've got a pipeline that fills itself, and homeowners come to us already understanding the tech because they've been reading our stuff for weeks."
This case study is a representative composite of a typical Vagus Labs deployment and has been anonymised. Results vary by trade, region, and average job value.