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Thank you for joining on the Path to Warren Podcast. This is episode one. Thanks for joining today’s episode. My main goal is to share with you what my life is like now, kind of what happened and what life was like prior. I want to start off by saying that I grew up in the Irmo, South Carolina area. I was born in Aiken, South Carolina. My parents lived in Aiken off of Herndon Dairy Road when I was a young boy. My parents moved to the Irmo, South Carolina area because my father transferred jobs. I lived in Irmo for several years and went to Irmo elementary and then later transferred to Mint Hill, North Carolina because my dad took a position to be over the Charlotte Territory in North Carolina. So we quickly moved to North Carolina. But after about a year or a year and a half, my family moved back down to Irmo again, and my father started his own engineering firm. So today I’m 37 years old. I have a daughter who is eight years old. You’ll hear her many times in this podcast. Her name is Maddie, Madeleine, and I have a wife. Her name is Meagan. She’s a wedding planner, been doing wedding planning around the area for many years, and I’m excited about the growth of her business. She’s getting into the interior design space. What we found was as people get married and they purchased a home. She’s got several clients that she’s worked for over the years that love her and love her work, and she’s now able to reach out to those folks and offer interior design services, which we’re super excited about. So my daughter being eight years old. I’m doing this whole podcast because of what happened about two and a half three years ago, when I hit a bottom in life, I was addicted to drugs and alcohol and have for the last 24 hours or so, I’ve been sober. It’s actually been over two and a half years now with no alcohol or no mind altering drugs put into my body. It’s changed my life. There’s no questionable piece to that. Being sober and being clear headed and finding a spirit inside of me has been a journey. Let me tell you. So this podcast is to try to explain what life was like, what happened and what life is like today. That’s the whole goal of this podcast. I want to share my experience, strength and hope for people that are going through or have gone through what I went through. I want to share that as I share it, I’m helping myself become more comfortable with who I am and grow. So I can tell you that spiritually, I’m a different person. Mentally, I’m a different person physically, I’m a different person, and I have to share about this. I have to get it out, not from an ego standpoint that is obviously a character defect. Mine. But this is coming from the heart this podcast is meant to help people, and it’s not meant to sell anything today. It’s meant to help someone today. So I really appreciate you being along for this first podcast to continue on a little bit about my journey. It all started when my grandfather passed away. My grandfather was a huge role model in my life. He was in the Navy. He worked for Purina as their controller for 30 years. He was a thrifty man. He died with money in the bank. He was a Christian man, a religious man. I never saw him drink alcohol, never saw him act out or yell or cuss anybody out. When he passed away, I was so far away from God that I’ve mentally broke down. I realized how out of balance my life was at the time. I had a solar business. I was chest deep in trying to grow a business from ground zero and the hottest market of our time of my time being 37 years old, the solar industry, the renewable energies industry was hot. I mean, red hot. Our Governor Haley, South Carolina, passed legislation about five years ago to make solar make sense. They passed what’s called a net metering system where the utility were mandated to the utilities were mandated to buy back your excess solar energy that you created. So basically, the example I like to use is when it’s 200 in the afternoon and your solar is producing more power than you’re needing, because you’re at work, 200 in the afternoon. You’re probably not turning on a lot of lights, running a bunch of appliances. You’re not doing laundry, you’re not using a dryer, but you’re making killer solar. So while you are at work, the meter is spinning backwards, essentially because you’re making more power, more kilowatt hours, you’re making more power than you’re using. So what happens to that excess? Well, the utilities passed legislation called net metering, which means that they will buy back the excess. They’re going to buy back the excess at a one for 1 kw hour exchange. So it’s 10:00 at night and you need power and you’re not able to make solar. The utility is going to sell that to you for. Let’s just say $0.10 a kilowatt hour or $0.18 a kilowatt hour, whatever that is during the day, when you’re making excess solar, they are required to buy back that excess and give you a credit on your bill. That is a one for 1 kw hour credit that’s called net metering. So at the end of the month, when it comes time to settle up with the bill, they will look at how much you produced, minus how much you bought from them. And that is what your net bill is. And they’ll send you a bill for that amount. So when Governor Haley passed legislation, what happened was I was working on a farm and I was the agricultural operations manager of a huge vegetable producing farm with over 4000 acres of crops in South Carolina alone. My job was to. The specific task was to try to find a solar quote. I had installed solar panels on my home a year before and pretty much every day at lunch, I was showing my boss how much solar I had produced. Well, I was finally able to convince him, hey, let’s just get a quote. Let’s just get a proposal and see if this solar makes sense. I mean, our power bills at the farm in the production facility, our power bills were $100,000 a month. No joke. I’m not exaggerating. They literally were $100,000 a month. We were processing kale, processing vegetables, chopping, dicing, bagging vegetables. So the power bills and the cold storage were huge, massive. We had 4000 acres of land. We had a huge roof with no trees over top. I didn’t understand why we were not pursuing solar. It made sense. So I convinced them to get a quote. When I was at work at the farm, at my desk, I was looking on the Internet and I Googled to try to get some proposals for my boss. And all of a sudden, all of these ads popping up in my face, all of these ads that were trying to get sales reps, they were saying we’re hiring, we’re hiring. We’re hiring South Carolina. We need reps in South Carolina. It was unbelievable. I was blown away. So what I did was actually was thinking about leaving to begin with. I had been there almost five years. I had decided that I had reached a plateau at that company. I had reached the ceiling. I wasn’t going to be able to make any more money. And I was just ready to probably make a move. And when I started talking to these recruiters, it went from looking to ads to actually talking to recruiters. I was lured into the fact that I could make potentially $250,000. That was a number that was floated in my face. And at the time, I was making about 70 when someone dangles 250 in front of your face with the chance of making 250, even if it’s straight Commission, it seemed like it was a no brainer. Well, to cut that little story short, I ended up telling my boss that I didn’t want him to counter offer. I didn’t want him to counter because I had set in my head that I was going to go and dive in and become a sales rep for Legacy Power. LGCY Power Legacy Power was an affiliate or the sales arm for Sunrun. Sunrun is a billion dollar, publicly traded company, and I was working for this sales arm. Basically, what happens is when a market like this opens up. When a solar market opens up in a new state. For example, like what happened in South Carolina? Governor Haley passed legislation. These massive companies roll into town, so Sunrun rolls into town, sets up shop. But they don’t have anybody to sell yet. So what happens is this affiliate comes in as the sales arm. They don’t do any installations. They’re strictly to sell. And Legacy Power is that arm? Well, I was persuaded by the recruiter who did a really good job. I was persuaded to go and sell for Sunrun Legacy Power. That didn’t last very long. There was so much shadiness going on that I will explain in a later podcast. There’s a whole chapter of that, probably to explain. But I left Sunrun and started looking for other companies. I was working with Vision Solar. After that, I worked with Vision Solar because what happened was it’s quite fascinating? Sunrun had this policy of we only do residential installations with a roof that’s got more than ten years of life left that has a certain slope and a certain shade requirement. I mean, they had what my father said is basically like shooting squirrels on a corn pile. You’ve got these residential folks, they only did residential. So you’ve got residential folks that have the perfect. There were about eight to ten requirements. They had to have perfect credit or within a certain amount of credit. That little model. My sales manager at Legacy Power was saying, if they don’t fit in the criteria and they don’t qualify, go to the next one, go to the next one. Well, being a local guy, my contacts were huge. I had over 4500 people in my outlook, contacts from the two businesses I had started prior. These people trusted me. They liked me. They were my friends. They were my contacts, my acquaintances. They trusted Matt Warren, and my manager was like, if they don’t qualify for solar, just go to the next one. What are you talking about? This is my family, my friends, my old business clients. I am their solar guy. If you don’t want to help me, help them go Solar, I’m going to have to find somebody else. So what happened was a very interesting process of me finding who was the next company that I was always competing against. So when I would present a residential client with a proposal, there was always another one on the table. And that other one was Vision Solar. Vision had moved in before Sunrun, and it seemed like they had knocked on all the doors prior to the Legacy Power folks. They had knocked on all the doors prior. So people were normally comparing a proposal from Legacy Power with a Vision Solar proposal. So when I talked to the guys at Vision, they were blown away at my skills to sell my confidence. And they signed me up right away to sell for them. So now I was selling the two main companies in the area. I was now repping an independent sales rep, making Commission on each one. I was an independent sales rep for both of the main companies. Vision Solar, Legacy Power. I mean, it was a perfect little match. So what happened was I soon realized people were not buying solar because they weren’t buying solar because of my Legacy Power business card or my Vision Solar card, which I never had a Vision Solar card. I didn’t want one. I realized very quickly. People were buying solar from Matt Warren because of Matt Warren. They liked me. They trusted me. I had the rapport. The entrepreneur in me very quickly branded Warren Solar because I realized they were buying from me. I bought T shirts. I bought collared shirts that had Warren Solar on it. I made business cards. I had the graphic designer that my wife used for her wedding planning business. I had her design. A Warren Solar logo had a pretty fun. It was very creative. Loved it. I had hats made within six months. I was now a broker. I was selling for Legacy Power Vision Solar, and then it went to Hannah Solar. Hannah Solar could do large commercial jobs. Vision Solar Every company had their expertise. I quickly started selling for Strata Solar. Strata could do utility scale. It was like each customer had a unique situation. Some customers wanted solar in their backyard. Some customers wanted solar on their shed on their farm. Some customers wanted it to be parking canopies like one guy worked in the energy sector for Michelin. There’s this huge Michelin plant in Lexington, South Carolina, that makes these large tires that go on big dump trucks to be shipped out overseas. So he was like, hey, Matt, I want solar to cover the parking lot of the Michelin plant to be a megawatt of power. A megawatt is massive. A megawatt was the largest amount of AC net metering that they would allow. The utility SCE&G would allow 1 MW. This quickly grew within eight months or so of getting into the solar market. I thought I was jamming. I was on cloud nine. I was a solar broker. In a matter of months. I was representing multiple companies to try to find the best fit for the client. I was very customer centric at that time. Then I started to get greedy. When I was working at the farm, I had a Hispanic guy named Mario who I convinced to come and work for me full time. Mario was my main man at the farm. He had basically followed me around from my job right out of College, which I met him at the job. He was a crew member on a commercial landscaping company. At the time it was Springdale Outdoor. They’ve now gone out of business. The 2008 recession, 2009 recession really shut them down. But I convinced Mario, who I met at the landscaping company to come and work with me at Springdale Outdoor. When I became agricultural operations manager over all of their food safety, I needed somebody to help me. He was my main man. Worked like a mule. He was amazing. I learned most of my Spanish from Mario. I convinced him to come to the farm at the farm. He worked with me there. I told him stay at the farm. I’m leaving to start my own business. When I get the business to where I can afford to hire you on, I will convince the company to hire you. You then can work for me at the farm. Well, that’s exactly what happened. He came. He worked for me at the farm. He stayed there until I left. I told him to wait. When the solar business got going, I called him. I said, Mario, it’s time. After a lot of selling, I was able to get him to come over and work for me. That was a game changer. What he was going to be doing was helping me with the installation. Mario would be my crew Superintendent. I could trust him to this day. I could trust him, but he needed housing. Mario needed housing because on the farm, he lived in this crappy trailer that he was able to stay on the farm and work as a tractor driver. He could live directly on the farm. Being an agriculture business, they were exempt from what you call overtime pay, so they didn’t have to pay overtime. So Mario, literally for I think it was $7 an hour or $8 an hour at most. He worked on the farm, but worked like 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. There was no limit on the amount of work he could do. So he wasn’t making much per hour, but he got a ton of hours. Housing was a piece of that they had to pay to live on the farm. They actually had to pay the company that owned the trailers. It was the biggest racket I’d ever heard. They had, like, a cartel. The company that was housing, the labor owned the houses. That’s a whole other podcast. But the point is, he needed housing. So I convinced him that I would work very hard to figure out the housing component. But I needed him to come. I had all these clients in the funnel. They were very close to being sold, and I could flip them to not go with those companies that I was brokering. But to convince them to go with Warren Solar, Warren Solar could install these panels. What happened next was probably I don’t know if you want to call it greed or just wanting to do more. I don’t know, but I saw how much money was being left on the table by these large companies. I was only getting about $2000 to $3,000 per residential sale when I was selling for legacy power per residential sales. So I’d work for three months to sell a client to go residential because it’s a long process. I’m in a huge long process. Three months, six months. I sell the client at $3,000. And then what I realized was if I sold commercial, I could get maybe $5,000 if I sold Michelin, I could make $50,000. So the lure of money and what I talked about in the trailer of this podcast is I was so lured by money, I thought money would make me happy. Man, what happened next was life changing. So I had to figure out housing for Mario. I didn’t pay anything for it. Mario was able to apply for Graceland Homes. Graceland is the company that makes these portable sheds that you see in the backyards of houses. It’s these sheds that come ready to go. They’re dropped off and they have skids under them so that you don’t need to get a building permit or anything. They’re pretty mobile, but they had zero money down financing I might have put down, like, $300 or something. I just considered it a signing bonus for Mario because I was confident that I would get the money back. But I bought a Graceland home shed, and I had them deliver it without even talking to my wife. I kind of told her I’m building a tiny house for Mario, and she just kind of rolled her eyes. I guess I don’t remember exactly what she said because I was so set on doing it. But I moved this Graceland shed to my backyard and downtown historic District of Columbia without any permits without telling anybody. I kind of did it. One Friday afternoon, I had them deliver it behind my house, and that would start a three month process of putting materials and supplies to build a tiny house that was going to be a solar off the grid. Tiny house. I built this tiny house in the backyard, and Mario was living in my shed. When we were not trying to install solar panels. He would help build this tiny house. He lived in my shed. The winter came. I had to insulate the walls of my shed. He had heaters in there. He was actually living on mattresses in my shed. Unbelievable. I can’t believe it happened today. He had a little gas cooker. He would Cook his little hot dogs and rice and beans and Mexican tortillas in my shed, on a camping stove. It gives me heartburn just thinking about it. The mornings before my wife and my daughter would wake up, Mario would have to come inside, use the bathroom in my house, in the hallway, use the bathroom. When my wife was not even awake yet, I would let him use the shower or when my wife left, I would say, okay, now is the time to go take a shower when my wife’s not there so it wouldn’t bother her. But this went on for like, three months, and it happened very quickly. There was no asking permission. I just did it. Another character defect. Very impulsive. So long story short, with that, my granddad passes away. I had installed about five solar projects at the time. I was massively in debt. We’re talking $225,000 in debt, probably massively in debt. At the time, and that does not include my house debt. That was strictly business and personal debt when my granddad passed away. Well, I don’t know if you want to call it depression or the sadness in general. I ended up seeing a doctor psychiatrist that he didn’t know. I didn’t tell him all of the other things that I was doing, the Adderall that I was on to stay focused and work like hell. The Adderall. I was smoking marijuana to calm my nerves, and I got addicted to that very quickly. I had done some of that in College when I left the farm. That was like one of the first things I got back into real quick. I was drinking bourbon every day. After bourbon, I would switch to wine. I had gotten into the habit of taking wine all the way to bed at night. It was out of control. I didn’t tell the doctors all that. All I told them was that I’m sad that my granddad died. My granddad died. My granddad died. I told that I used that excuse. That was the truth. But that was my crutch. So what happened next was the doctor put me on Zoloff as an antidepressant and the antidepressant with all of the other prescription drugs I had. Xanax, too, by the way, Xanax was used whenever I needed it to calm my nerves. With all of the things I was on, the Zolloft sent me into a downward spiral very quickly. The stress of owning my own business, the stress of making payroll, the stress of my parents wondering what the hell I was doing. My wife, Mario, my little girl who was starting to say things like noticing dad was drinking, noticing dad and mom were upset, noticing that dad and mom were not happy all the time. She would say things and repeat things that I was like, oh my gosh. Did she just hear that? Oh, my gosh. Did she just hear mom yell at me for smoking weed? Oh, my gosh. I was freaking out, and it was a crash. That was my bottom. I ended up hitting bottom and surrendering. I literally surrendered and gave in and said, you know what? My life is out of balance. I was working, like, 90 hours a week, so I hope you stay tuned for episode two. I’m going to pick up at the bottom in episode two. As hard as it is for me to talk about this stuff, it really helps me articulate what happened and replay so that I can become a better man. Thank you for paying attention. 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