We’re delighted to have appointed Andrew Chilcott as our Vice President of Service. We are building on the aftercare capability needed to support our expanding critical power portfolio across the UK and Europe, and Andrew is on board to facilitate and guide us in this process.
Chilcott takes responsibility for our service organisation across three areas of the business. He will continue to support the established standby generation service team, while creating dedicated service functions for AVK PowerPods, our modular power platform now entering deployment, and for our prime power microgrids, the first of which is operational at Pure Data Centres Group’s DUB01 campus in Dublin. Building the supply chain, leadership and engineering teams behind those two newer offerings is his central task.
He joins us after 16 years at CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, most recently as Global Operations Director within its data centre business. In that role he supported managing directors and business leaders across every region, helped stand up critical operations in new territories, and led the onboarding of senior appointments internationally, including a period in Australia mentoring an incoming managing director.
For the latter part of his CBRE career, Andrew led the Yondr Group account, which he grew into a global portfolio of live campuses across the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Malaysia, the United States and Canada, supported by a workforce of around 150 people. Earlier, as a business unit director in the UK, he built a new team and almost trebled the size of the unit within two years.
His route into the sector began on the tools. Chilcott served a four-year apprenticeship as an electrician in heavy industry in South Wales, then moved into contracting with Mechwind, where he progressed to contract manager and became a part owner of the business. Work at the DVLA in Swansea led to a technical manager role with Norland, and Norland was acquired by CBRE two and a half years later. He first worked with AVK equipment in 2019, when he began supporting data centre generator contracts across the UK.
Paul Hood, our Chief Operating Officer at AVK, said:
Andrew and I worked closely together for several years while he ran the Yondr account at CBRE, so I have seen at first hand how he operates. He understands critical power operations from the customer side of the table, and that is exactly the perspective our service business needs as it scales. He is also a genuine developer of people, which matters enormously when you are recruiting and training the engineers who will look after PowerPods and prime power sites for the next decade. Andrew brings the operational credibility and the ambition to build something significant here.
Chilcott added:
AVK was a supplier to me for years, so I have followed the growth journey closely and I know the quality of the engineering. What struck me once I got closer was the breadth of what the business is doing now. It is big enough to lead the market and still agile enough that you can make a real impact, which was a large part of the appeal after 16 years in a global corporate. Coming in with a customer lens is my advantage. I have sat on the other side of the table and I know what operators actually need from a service partner, so I know where AVK is already strong and where we can go further.
Value engineering is the pattern I would most like to change across the industry. Cost pressure is real and I understand why those decisions get made, but the answer is putting the evidence for the investment on the table early and showing what it returns over the life of the asset. The immediate priority is supporting a generator service team that already performs well, then building the service organisation around PowerPods and prime power alongside it. That means the supply chain, the leaders and the engineers who will look after this equipment for the next decade, and developing those people properly is the part of the job I care most about. AVK is entering a period of real growth and I want our service capability to be the reason customers choose to stay with us.
Welcome, Andrew, to AVK!