ivygo: why aren't small hospitality businesses monetising their EV chargers?

Context

ivygo works with small hospitality businesses — cafes, motels, and similar venues — that have EV chargers installed on-site. This was a qualitative B2B research study looking specifically at why so many of these businesses aren't monetising the chargers they already have.

Problem

ivygo's founder needed to understand, directly from small hospitality business owners, what was stopping them from turning an installed EV charger into a revenue source — and whether that reason was the same across every business, or something that varied by owner.

My Role

I worked as one of a cohort of researchers on this study, responsible for my own recruitment and interviews: writing the research plan, cold-calling to recruit participants, conducting in-depth interviews with business owners, and contributing to synthesis alongside cohort data gathered by six other researchers.

Process

I built a research plan to define who we needed to talk to and what we needed to learn, then recruited participants directly through cold-calling — reaching business owners who hadn't opted into research and had no existing relationship with ivygo. From there I conducted in-depth interviews with hospitality business owners about their chargers, their customers, and their reasoning around pricing.

Synthesis combined my interviews with data from the wider cohort of seven researchers, which let patterns emerge across a much larger sample than any one researcher could reach alone.

Key Insights

• Willingness to monetise wasn't a single yes/no trait — it sat on a spectrum, which I framed as a three-tier "monetisation readiness spectrum": Demand Skeptics, Hospitality Enhancers, and Strategic Energy Investors.
• Each tier responded to a different lever: flexible pricing, host dashboards showing usage and revenue, and loyalty-style incentives each mattered more or less depending on where an owner sat on the spectrum.

Outcome

I delivered evidence-based recommendations around flexible pricing, host dashboards, and loyalty mechanisms directly to ivygo's founder and CEO. My mentor, Natalie Pauchard, highlighted the readiness-spectrum framing as a particularly strong and original insight, and noted the strong commercial awareness and strategic thinking behind the research.

What I'd Do Next

I'd want to test the recommendations directly with owners in each tier of the readiness spectrum — a pricing pilot with Hospitality Enhancers, for example — to see whether the framing predicts actual willingness to adopt, not just stated intent.