The summer months are not usually a time of expansion for a boiler and stove company.

The Heating Hub and its sister business the Stove Hub are aiming for turnover to reach £1m by the end of next year thanks to a combination of bright new websites, marketing and finance offers for customers.

Run by husband and wife team Jo and Ben Alsop, their growth plans seemed unlikely a few months ago as Ofgem scaled back incentives for businesses spending money on renewable heating technology.

Over the last four years, the company became a specialist in installing biomass boilers for small firms happy to invest in clean energy at a time when the Government was prepared to give them discounts to do so.

Turnover at the business reached £1.2m last year but as Ofgem were forced to cut the value of subsidies as demand passed expectations, the Heating Hub was hit with a 40% decline in business.

“There was a boom and fortunately I had seen the solar PV boom and how a lot of companies had gone under when that stopped,” said Jo, the face of the business compared to “background techy” Ben.

“I’m quite a conservative girl so I would never put all my eggs in one basket. Anything tariff driven creates artificial demand and it predictably fell away.”

The firm responded by returning to selling boilers and stoves, the core products it began selling from the couple’s spare bedroom eight years ago.

“Losing biomass frees us up to go back to our original ambitions,” said Jo at the company’s showroom in King Street, Rochester, where it has been for five years.

"Anything tariff driven creates artificial demand and [biomass] predictably fell away...” - Jo Alsop, The Heating Hub

“We can be more innovative with boilers and stoves. There’s a demand for biomass but it consumed all our time. The stuff we started out to do – to become a great Medway heating company – had become secondary.

“I can be more of a business owner and do the strategic stuff rather than run biomass projects. It has given us time to be innovative with marketing.

"By re-writing blogs and guides I’ve done over three or four years – and giving them a national focus – it has given us a well-optimised content-driven website which attracts 5,000 hits a month.”

This summer, the Stove Hub became the first company in Kent to offer finance on wood burning stove installations.

Jo and Ben have big ambitions for the firm, which employs 11 people and is recruiting.

“There is not a strong medium-sized heating company serving Medway and north Kent,” said Jo. “We are working on being that.

“We couldn’t have grown as quickly as we did without biomass. I don’t regret it. It has got us where we need to be quicker and we have got all these skills.

“People will come back to the idea of biomass and we will be one of a handful of operators who know how to do it well.

“We are a local company but we don’t want to give up the benefits of being a customer of a national company like a good warranty and someone being there on the phone six days a week.”