Lesedi Solar Care Business Plan — Operations Plan & Depot Network

Field services businesses succeed or fail on route density. Lesedi clusters contracts geographically so that crews, robots and bowsers move between…

Operations Plan & Depot Network

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Field services businesses succeed or fail on route density. Lesedi clusters contracts geographically so that crews, robots and bowsers move between neighbouring sites with minimal dead travel. Three depots anchor the initial footprint, each with a workshop, deionised water plant, robot maintenance bay and crew accommodation where sites are remote.

10.1 The depot network

Depot	Coverage	Rationale
Upington (Northern Cape)	Northern Cape solar belt, southern Free State	Highest concentration of utility-scale plant and the most severe soiling; also the most water-constrained
Midrand (Gauteng)	Gauteng, North West, Mpumalanga, Limpopo	Dense C&I rooftop market; head office and central spares holding
Worcester (Western Cape)	Western Cape, southern Northern Cape	Growing utility and agricultural C&I base; different seasonal soiling profile smooths crew utilisation

The Worcester rationale deserves emphasis because it is a genuinely sophisticated piece of operational design. Coastal Western Cape soiling runs at 2% to 4% annually against 6% to 9% in the Northern Cape, and, critically, it peaks in a different season. A single-region operator faces sharp seasonal swings in crew utilisation; a two-climate operator can move crews between regions as soiling cycles alternate, raising utilisation on a fixed labour base. That is a margin lever unavailable to a regional competitor.

10.2 Organisation at year 3

Figure 14. Organisation at year 3, scaling to approximately 186 by year 5.

Function	Headcount	Notes
Executive	4	CEO, CFO, COO, CTO
Regional operations managers	3	One per depot, accountable for SLA and margin
Field supervisors	9	Crew leadership, safety, quality verification
Field technicians & cleaning crew	78	Core delivery workforce; majority recruited locally to depot regions
Robotics & workshop technicians	8	Fleet maintenance, robot deployment and repair
Performance analysts (LumenIQ)	6	Monitoring, dispatch triage, client reporting
Commercial & contracts	5	Bidding, key accounts, renewals
Finance, HR & administration	7	Shared services
Total	120	Excludes contracted security; scaling to ~186 by year 5

10.3 Service levels

SLA element	Commitment
Emergency response (utility)	On site within 8 hours; remote triage within 30 minutes of alarm
Preventive schedule adherence	≥ 97% of scheduled tasks completed within window
Cleaning cycle compliance	≥ 98% of contracted cycles delivered, verified by geotagged completion
Plant availability contribution	≥ 98.5% technical availability on controllable systems
Reporting	Monthly performance pack by the 7th; quarterly performance review meeting
Recovered yield verification	Pre- and post-clean performance ratio comparison published per cycle

Figure 15. Productivity rises and debtor days fall as the platform matures.

Revenue per field employee rises from R415,000 in year one to R798,000 by year seven, a 92% improvement that is the operational expression of route density. It is the metric an investor should track most closely, because it captures crew utilisation, travel efficiency and scheduling quality in a single number, and because it is the mechanism by which the margin trajectory is actually delivered.