After winning Startup of the Year at Solar Media’s EV Innovation and Excellence Awards at the beginning of October, EVCP Solutions recently installed its first UK chargepoint under the brand ‘Charge & Go!’.
Off the back of that busy month, EV Infrastructure News caught up with the company’s head of EV charging, Graeme Patton, to hear about the company’s efforts to be a chargepoint operator “with a difference”.
Why did EVCP Solutions launch?
We want to be a chargepoint operator (CPO) with a difference, focusing on the needs of the driver and providing chargepoints in more underserved areas.
Our primary focus is on installing ultra-rapid chargepoints in those underserved areas, at multi-use venues like sporting grounds and retail parks. As all CPOs know, though, the development time for projects—from inception through to installation and delivery—can easily be 9-12 months or longer.
So, what we want to do is offer our services to other CPOs or independent connections providers (ICPs), focusing on our civils expertise to be able to deliver installs at pace for other clients.
Companies often expand when they win a contract, but once that contract’s been delivered, they might shrink operations back down. This can see a boom and bust cycle, hiring to complete contracts but having to lay off staff again when things slow down.
EVCP positions itself to be an extension of other people’s supply chains. So, if a company is awarded a contract that requires them to ramp up their delivery capability, instead of scaling up in-house, they can call on us to add capacity to their supply chain.
Our own CPO activity, under the ‘Charge & Go!’ branding, has us developing sites at pace, but while we wait for things like planning and legals, we also install for others to keep bringing in month-to-month revenue.
What sets EVCP apart as a startup?
One reason we were successful, and what resonated with the judges, is that we acknowledge that breaking in as a new CPO is difficult because there are so many amazing CPOs already out there.
We want to be a small-to-medium CPO in our own right, but that will take time and money, and we want to do this in an organic way. We want to grow slowly. Because we are able to do all our installation work in-house, rather than subcontracting it out, we should be able to bring about projects that otherwise would have been cost-prohibitive—for example, in those rural, underserved areas.
Having those two strands to our business, Charge and Go and the EVCP Solutions B2B brand, means our expertise and knowledge is offered to others.
We are basically de-risking the start-up because we aren’t relying on CPO revenues coming in years down the line; we are keeping ourselves profitable from day one, which is not easy for a CPO to do.
Is coming to market with a combined offer necessary in this industry, where there isn’t much profit available?
Margins are being squeezed a lot through supply chains, and it’s important to differentiate, prove that you’re attractive either to the end user or other businesses in this way.
That’s what winning this award has enabled us to do: to get that external recognition from industry peers and the judges. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes; developing charging hubs takes a very long time and you can’t shout about anything until the site is live.
Having the judges recognise what we’re doing as a business, giving us that badge of honour, means a lot to us and will really help us in our growth.
What does having an EVIE Award mean for EVCP Solutions?
At the time of the award submission, our first site was close, but it wasn’t quite there yet (the project has since come online). It was great that the judges were able to see what we’d been working on and how it’s all coming together.
Now, to be able to talk about our first site in our own right as a CPO and the award is really giving us gravitas, opening doors to some big blue-chip clients that previously we might have struggled to get in the same room with.
To find out more about the awards and register interest for 2026, visit the event page here. Our full list of winners is available here.
