The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman

Aaron Colvin was Doing triceps pushdowns at the gym when he saw a cartoonishly large bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The guy was coaching a woman through a series of cable rows, and the 18-year-old Colvin stopped to study his technique. When the bodybuilder caught him watching and crashed, Colvin became worried. He thought he was going to be accused of ogling the man’s girlfriend – one of the cardinal sins of gym culture.

But the bodybuilder just wanted to have a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his first year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm at college; he wanted to dedicate himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin had vowed to follow in his footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher who had raised him with little help. As an intensely driven teenager, he had launched a series of one-man businesses that never met: t-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. She was currently working daily shifts at Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal training business.

Colvin’s muscular new acquaintance wanted to steer him toward a different opportunity: “What do you know about the sun?” he asked. When he wasn’t competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man said, he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading system installers of solar power. The bodybuilder had just returned from a trip to Florida where he had joined a “blitz” – solar industry slang for a sales event in which packs of youngsters in crisp polo shirts and khaki shorts they descend on a city, crash at a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spend weeks knocking on as many doors as possible. He boasted of making “mad money” – as much as $20,000 in just one month – by convincing a bunch of people. of owners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

Colvin, a muscular former high school wrestler whose round silver glasses give him a scholarly air, was very intrigued. “I’m like, holy shit,” he recalls. “Like, yeah, great, I’ll look into it.”

A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime call with the manager of the bodybuilder at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Although his college semester had just begun, Colvin told Will that he was thinking of dropping out: as someone who had been trained by hardship – he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls drugstore that was regularly burglarized from drug addicts – he had. a hard time relating to his classmates, most of whom came from darker backgrounds than his own. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” says Colvin. Will pressed him to join his door-to-door sales team, which he had named Seal Team Six. The job was a breeze, he said — just a simple matter of letting homeowners know they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling surplus electricity to the grid. As long as Colvin delivers this message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions will decrease his salary at Chipotle. “Behind every door is $5,000” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its 2023 gross revenues will exceed $1 billion.)

After some mulling, Colvin declined the offer. He was afraid he would regret leaving the school without whipping her. But Will was a relentless recruiter. Almost every day that fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “solar brothers” that showed his six-figure commission checks, his penthouse apartments, his exotic cars. These influencers – tanned, chiseled, full of confidence – stressed that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to trade their mundane life for a place in the forward trenches of the green economy.