Solar Adjacent Opportunities

What do critters, zip ties & Windex have in common?

They're all companies you can start around solar installation

Forget installing or selling solar, let's go deep on adjacent solar opportunities & why they're awesome.

What gave me the idea to write about this? I had a sit down on Wednesday with my friend Matthew, and we were talking about door to door sales. He's the one I did a post on "The Economics of a Door to Door Sales Bro."

He was talking about door to door solar bros and said the phrase "critter guard," and it triggered me. I instantly knew that that phrase was too funny to not dive deeper on.

I need to hang with Matthew more, because he sure does generate good writing ideas (you'd love Matthew).

So I went to post about critter guards, and then I realized this is too high quality to thoughtlessly post to X before emailing out to my loyal newsletter friends first.

Let's dive in:

We all know that solar is BOOMING. Rebates and credits abound, financing options can make the economics a no-brainer, and it's better for our planet.

Win - win - win, great. So how to ppproooffiiittt???

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Well, solar sales and installation is pretty saturated at this point. Not that you can't make money, but it's a tough road to hoe.

There's a ton of hungry solar sales bros hitting the pavement, and that's your competition.‍

If it were me? I'd go solar adjacent. I'm talkin':

1. Critter Guard: Protects panels from animals.

2. Cleaning Services: Keeps panels clean for efficiency.

3. Tree Trimming: Reduces shade for better efficiency. (I'm biased, of course)

4. Affiliate website: Generate leads for companies outside of solar.

You could find customers in pretty similar ways in ideas #1 - 3 above, but #4 is a little different. I'll touch more on that later.

Let's start with critter guards, because the word "critter" is criminally underused in English vernacular outside of Alabama and Mississippi.

What's a critter guard? I had the same question. Critter guards protect the underside of solar panels from birds and squirrels, and they look like this:

Pretty obvious, right? Of course solar panels need critter guards! You've got a $40k asset up there and we can't have rodents chewing up the wires while they escape the cold of winter.

Guess what? Critter guards are an afterthought for solar bros. Why? They're a distraction from selling their core product.

I would make money with critter guards in 2 different ways:

1. Wholesale distribution.

2. Critter guard install.

‍Here's how I'd do #1:

• Search for critter guards on Alibaba and start ordering samples, much like I did for my iPhone parts biz

• Find a solid supplier

• Start a Shopify site and list your products

• Use Outscraper to scrape a list of all solar install and critter guard companies for $20

• Start reaching out to all companies to pitch your website

• Profit

But seriously, just follow my iPhone parts biz framework to launch this. Match a website with a supplier with customers and then ship orders.

And #2?

• Use Outscraper to scrape a list of every solar sales and install company in your area.

• Call them up and offer to piggyback your services onto theirs

• Contact Freedom Forever (massively large solar installer) and ask to be a preferred vendor. I talked to a friend in the industry and he said they are ALWAYS hungry for good vendor partners.

• Order the materials from Alibaba, watch some YouTube videos and learn how to install the stuff. Based on what I see in the pic above, it looks very straightforward. How's that for research?‍

What's great about a piggybacking biz is that it's a stupid easy sale. (that gives me an idea, I should write a newsletter about all the piggybacking biz opportunities out there) These adjacent offerings are an afterthought to the end customer, you just need partnerships with the sales and install companies. The homeowner is about to pay $40k for panels, what's an extra $400 to keep them safe?

With 3-5 partnerships you'll be extremely busy. Do it yourself to start and then either hire someone or sub it out.

"Why don't install companies just do this themselves?"

Because it's out of their wheelhouse and it's a high opportunity cost. It's a different material they have to store and keep track of. They'd rather sub it out to someone like you.

Matthew told me he had a friend quit solar sales, move to Omaha and start slangin' critter guards and guess what? He's crushing it! In Omaha freaking Nebraska! That's what sparked this email.

What about my other 3 ideas listed above?

1. Cleaning Services

2. Tree Trimming

3. Affiliate website

The playbook is much the same for the first 3.

Cleaning services

With this one I'd do target solar partnerships, B2B and end consumers.

Solar partnerships: Use the same scrape and contact method I keep repeating. Find sales companies to upsell your service at closing in exchange for a referral fee.

Once a sales or install company is done, they're done. They're off to the neighbor's house to make another sale. They sure aren't coming back to clean the panels, and if they don't clean them, they won't run as efficiently. They're gotta get cleaned, and a homeowner sure doesn't want to do it either.

B2B: Same scrape and contact method, but for bigger companies that have a zillion panels. Did you know that Kohls has hundreds of thousands of solar panels?

Guess what you can charge to clean them? $20 each, twice a year! Let's do the math:

1 big customer

200,000 solar panels, twice a year at $20 each

That's an $8,000,000/year business with one big customer.

Don't get me wrong, you've still gotta do the work, find subs, etc, but it's right there for the taking. If you think that there's no such thing as companies with 1 $8,000,000 customer, you are wrong, my friend. What do you think government contractors do?

Do you think less companies are going to start adding solar panels, or more? Exactly.

Set up a Google Alert that notifies you every time a company announces a solar initiative and then start doing outreach.

Pay a VA to look at Google Earth for large buildings with panels.

Partner with industrial property management companies to clean their tenants' panels.

Start with the city you live in and go from there.

Residential: Use someone like Melissa Data to buy contact info of homeowners that have solar panels installed and send them mailers.

Start asking around in local Facebook groups.

Residential is a smaller opportunity, and you already get the idea, so let's move on.

Tree Trimming

This is top of mind because we're in the middle of this initiative ourselves. No, I promise not to pitch anything, it's just relevant to this solar conversation. Guess what, the mortal enemy of solar panels is shade, and tree trimming companies can solve that problem for you.

If install companies aren't going to install critter guards themselves, then they sure aren't going to climb and cut down a tree. But man if this isn't an alignment of interests then I don't know what is.

A sales bro literally can't close the sale unless those branches come down. So they desperately need a tree trimmer. And you know what's beautiful? It really doesn't matter how much the trimming costs.

Why?

Because there's virtually 0 price sensitivity. Why? Because the tree trimming costs get rolled into the solar loan! It adds a few extra bucks to the homeowner's monthly payment, and the sales guy couldn't care less about what it costs.

So you get to enjoy higher margin and lower customer acquisition costs, because it's just a partnerships game.

So go do what we did. Start a tree biz, learn how it works, and then go make some solar partnerships so you're on speed dial during those sales meetings.

Affiliate Website

Did you know that SolarReviews.com gets millions of organic visits per month? It's a $100m company. How? Because it's merely an affiliate site for a product that costs $40k, and it owns the Google search rankings.

Use web.archive.org to dive deep on what they've been up to in the 18 years they've been around and copy their playbook.

Dive deep on their founder and executive team and listen to every podcast and read every article.

It's actually shocking how much you can reverse engineer about a company when you dive deep on stuff the founder has said.

Maybe someone will dig up by newsletter in 18 years to reverse engineer what I'm doing? hehe

What will be the "solar" of the next 20 years? Make an affiliate site of that.
Conclusion

Thanks for reading this. I hope it sparked a cool idea or two for you. I hope it causes you to act on your instinct and go start, build or buy something.

What am I spending my time on nowadays?

Well, other than confronting my electrician for stealing (he'll be here in 15 mins, BTW), I've just been working way too much. I'd love to talk to you about work life balance and how you can have it all, all the time, but this is just a busy season for me, plain and simple. I leave very early, come home for dinner, and work after bedtime. One of my companies (that I purposely never talk about) is going through a huge transition phase and sucking the life out of me right now.

I bought last minute tickets to Main Street Summit next week and would love to meet you there. I might be moderating a panel or two, it's still up in the air.

I've also been helping my wife with her new real estate endeavors.

She's working on getting some cool stuff under contract, including a motocross park! It's rad! She's also looking for SMBs to list, thinking that I could do a deep dive on them on Twitter to help spread the word, and I really like that business model.

I helped my buddy Keith sell his bread biz with this tweet, and it felt really good! He got a 48 inquiries and 8 offers and I thought man, I could charge for this! But not Keith, as we go way back and I did it as a favor.

Anyway, if you'll be in Columbia, MO next week, let's hang at the conference! It'll be nice to get away from the computer for a couple days.

Chris