Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman

Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he noticed a huge cartoon bodybuilder in the mirrored room. The man trained the woman through a series of wires, and 18-year-old Colvin stopped learning the technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and lumbered over, Colvin was shocked. He figured he would be accused of ogling his girlfriend-one of the gym culture’s cardinal sins. But the bodybuilder just wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, when he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that time in August 2023, Colvin was about to start his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm in college; he wants to dedicate himself to being an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At the age of 13, Colvin vowed to follow in her footsteps in order to ease the financial pressure on her mother, the special education teacher who had raised her on so little. As a strongly driven teenager, he launched a series of one-man ventures that never made it: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He now works daily shifts at Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal training business. Colvin’s brave new acquaintance wants to direct him to a different opportunity: “Do you know about solar?” When not competing in the amateur bodybuilding circuit, he works for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading installers of solar-energy systems from a trip to Florida where he joins a “blitz” – solar industry slang for a sales event where young men in plain shorts and khakis descend on the city, crash at a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spend knocking on doors as much as possible. He bragged that he had made “insane money” – up to $20,000 in one month – by convincing only a few homeowners to cover the roof with solar panels. “I was like, shit holy,” he recalls. “It was like, yeah, great, I’ll look into it.” A few weeks later, Colvin was on a FaceTime call with the manager of a bodybuilder at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Even though his college semester had just begun, Colvin told Will that he was thinking about getting out: As someone who had been through adversity—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls pharmacy that was regularly broken into by drug addicts—he was experiencing it. hard times with his classmates, most of whom come from a cushier background than his own. “I had a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin said. Will forces him to join the sales crew from the door, named Seal Team Six. The job is simple, he says—it’s just a simple matter of making homeowners realize they can save thousands by installing solar panels and selling more electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin delivers that message while standing in front of the door, his sales commission will cut his salary at Chipotle. “Behind every $5,000 door” is the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims 2023 gross revenue will top $1 billion.)After some mulling, Colvin declined the offer. He was worried that he would regret leaving the school without shaking hands. But Will is a relentless recruiter. In almost every day that fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “solar bros” showing off six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars. This influence-tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence-press that anyone can reap such rewards if they have the courage to change their mundane life for a place in the trenches of advanced green economy.

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