The amazing burnout of the solar panel seller

It was Aaron Colvin He’s doing triceps push-ups at the gym when he spots a cartoonishly large bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The man was training a woman on a set of cable rows, and 18-year-old Colvin stopped to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and sulking, Colvin became concerned. He thought he was about to be accused of flirting with the guy’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 does for a living. At that time in August 2023, Colvin was about to start his first year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm in college. He wanted to devote himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At the age of thirteen, Colvin vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could relieve the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher who raised him with little help. As an eager teenager, he launched a series of one-man ventures that never panned out: a T-shirt seller, a carpet cleaner, an affiliate marketer, a shipper, and an Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working day shifts at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal training business.

Colvin’s powerful new acquaintance wanted to point him toward a different opportunity: “What do you know? About solar energy?” he asked. The man said that when he wasn’t competing in the amateur bodybuilding circuit, he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading installers of solar energy systems. The bodybuilder had returned He’d just come off a trip to Florida where he joined a “blitz” — solar industry slang for a sales event in which groups of young people in polo shirts and khaki shorts descend on a city, crash into a cheap hotel or drive-thru Airbnb, spending weeks knocking on as many doors as possible. He bragged that he had made “crazy money” — as much as $20,000 in one month — by convincing a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

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

A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime call with Freedom Pros’ bodybuilder manager, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Although his college semester had just begun, Colvin told Will that he was considering dropping out: as someone affected by hardships – he and his mother had once lived above a drugstore in Niagara Falls that was regularly robbed by drug addicts -He had a hard time relating to his classmates, most of whom came from more comfortable backgrounds than his own. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin says. He would pressure him to join his sales staff, which he called the Sixth Seal Team. He said the work was easy, just a simple matter of educating homeowners that they could save thousands of money by installing solar panels and selling surplus electricity back into the grid. As long as Colvin delivers this message on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions will dwarf his wages at Chipotle. “Behind every door is $5,000” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its total revenue for 2023 exceeds $1 billion.)

After some thought, Colvin declined the offer. He was worried that he would regret leaving school without giving it a fair shake. But Will was a relentless recruiter. On a near-daily basis in the fall and winter, he would fill Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “solar bros” showcasing their six-figure commission checks, penthouse apartments, and exotic cars. These influencers—tanned, chiseled, and brimming with confidence—asserted that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to trade their mundane lives for a place in the front trenches of the green economy.