Chief Operating Officer / Canada
Decisions that gave up sales, capital and savings
- Revenue, 2025
- C$486M
- Mostly fuel sales priced from wholesale markets
- Customer accounts
- 74,000
- Heating oil, propane and service plans in three provinces
- Heat pumps commissioned in 2025
- 3,140
- All by in-house crews
- No-heat calls answered within four hours
- 93%
- Winter 2025–26, across 16 depots
Decisions & consequences
01Capping heat-pump sales at the number we could commission properly
By autumn 2022, rebate programmes for oil-heated homes had made heat pumps our fastest-growing business. Sales were booking about 610 installations a month. Our in-house crews could commission roughly 260 a month to our own standard; the remainder went to three subcontract crews working faster than we could check. Ninety-day callbacks on subcontracted jobs had reached 14 per cent, against 5 per cent for in-house work, giving a blended rate of 11.2 per cent. A failed unit in January means a cold house, an unplanned oil delivery and a customer who no longer trusts the change we had encouraged.
Callum Driscoll, our vice-president of sales, argued that the rebate window would not last and that customers who could not book with us would go elsewhere. He was right about that. Several family directors were reluctant to slow what they saw as our future. I recommended capping intake at 300 installations a month, ending two of the three subcontracts and telling every customer in the 1,100-job backlog their likely installation month.
We gave up an estimated 1,700 installations, about C$11.9 million of revenue, in the 2022–23 season. We hired thirty-eight apprentices, set up a training bay at our Truro depot, introduced a sizing visit before every confirmed price, and required a signed, photographed commissioning record before invoicing. Sales commission moved from booking to commissioning.
By the fourth quarter of 2023 the ninety-day callback rate was 4.1 per cent, and warranty cost per installation had fallen from C$612 to C$238. We completed 2,640 installations in 2023 against an original plan of 4,800. In 2025 we commissioned 3,140, all with in-house crews, and installation and service became our second-largest source of gross margin.
Since then, our board approves installation capacity alongside the sales plan. I would now change the commission structure in the spring, before a surge, not in the middle of it, when it felt to the sales team like a penalty for success.
Keeping oil in tanks at homes that had nearly stopped buying it
In early February 2023 a short, severe freeze reached the Maritime provinces. Over three days, 286 of our automatic-delivery customers ran out of oil. Of those, 191 had installed heat pumps and kept their oil furnaces as backup, and 23 were on our priority register because someone at home relied on medical equipment or was especially vulnerable to cold. Our forecast estimated each tank's level from degree-days and past consumption. For hybrid homes, past consumption was a poor guide: they had burned almost nothing in December and then burned heavily once their heat pumps lost output.
There were three options. We could recalibrate the forecast, but we lacked the consumption data to do it reliably. We could move hybrid customers to will-call delivery, which would have shifted the risk onto them. Or we could fit remote tank monitors. Teodora Vasilescu, our chief financial officer, accepted the monitors but proposed a delivery charge on low-volume accounts to cover their higher cost. Sales opposed any charge while electricity utilities and installers were courting the same customers.
I recommended monitors for every priority-register account first, then for all hybrid automatic-delivery accounts: 9,000 units for C$2.4 million, plus about C$310,000 a year in data charges. To fund them, we deferred a yard and storage upgrade at our Moncton depot by a year. We did not introduce the charge. Instead, hybrid customers were asked to accept a minimum fill of 450 litres, which cut the number of small drops.
In the comparable cold period of January 2025, automatic-delivery run-outs fell to 37, nine of them at hybrid homes and none on the priority register. Serving a hybrid account still costs about 2.3 times as much per litre as a conventional one, and I report that figure to the board rather than averaging it away.
Next time I would share the monitor readings with customers from the start. When we added that view in 2025, it removed many anxious calls to our dispatchers.
Closing three depots and keeping two the first analysis would have closed
By 2025 the fuel we delivered had fallen about 18 per cent from 2019, and our nineteen depots were sized for the earlier volume. A network review proposed closing five of them, saving C$2.1 million a year in leases, staff and yard costs. Most of the analysis was sound. It left out one measure: our written standard of a technician on site within four hours for a service-plan customer's no-heat call, and same-day emergency fuel in winter.
We modelled drive times from the remaining sites using road conditions on storm days in the previous three winters, not average travel times. Three closures held the standard. Two did not. In western Cape Breton and the upper Miramichi valley, closing the local depot would have pushed about 38 per cent of winter no-heat calls beyond four hours.
Teodora and the director appointed by Saltcairn preferred all five closures, with mobile crews covering the rural areas. Neil Brannockmere and our chair, Morag Kilbrannan, asked for the alternative to be costed. I recommended closing three depots and converting the two rural depots into crew bases, each with one delivery truck, two technicians and no customer office. The board approved that. We gave up about C$800,000 a year of the proposed saving and committed C$600,000 to containment work at one of the retained tank yards.
Of fourteen people whose roles moved, eleven transferred to other depots and three left with voluntary packages. In winter 2025–26, 93 per cent of no-heat calls across the network were answered within four hours, and 91 per cent in the two retained areas, where the closure model had suggested about 62 per cent. The net saving was C$1.3 million a year.
Next time I would bring the response standard to the board as a service commitment before any network review. Because it first appeared inside the review, the debate felt like an argument about two depots, when it concerned what our rural customers had been promised.