When I was preparing to leave my salary job as Agricultural Operations Manager for WPRawl, someone wise told me to make a list of 50 people who would most likely buy your product.
I had been at this job for five years, gone from ~$37,000 per year as Food Safety Specialist to working my way up the ranks. By year five, I was Agricultural Operations Manager of the Field Operations Department of a $180 million dollar vegetable grower-processor-shipper. I had a weekly paycheck and benefits that added up to $70,000 per year.
When I told my boss that he had hired an entrepreneur, he nearly wrecked his truck. We were driving back from lunch one day and I’m not sure exactly how it came up, but I’ll never forget that look on his face. He knew that I had started and sold two businesses by the time I was 22, but he seemed to have maybe forgotten that.
My wife and I had saved up about $10,000 and I purchased from WholeSaleSolar.com 8 solar panels and installed them on the roof of our home. I learned to install them by watching about two hours of different YouTube videos over the course of 2 or three weekends. I ran the conduit, rented a cherry picker lift and installed them myself. I hired an electrician in the area, who was the only one around who had ever worked with solar at the time and he did the final tie-in to my electrical meter. That was the only part that I subbed out.
After I had the solar panel installed and I was tracking the solar production on my phone, I would brag and show it off almost daily to my boss at work. He loved it. WPRawl had a monthly power bill from SCE&G of over $100,000 per month, a HUGE roof over the processing facility and 4,000 acres in Pelion, SC. It was a no brainer in my mind and I was relentless to get them to go solar.
Finally, after working on him pretty hard, he conseeded to allow me to get a few quotes from solar companies. So, I was sitting at my Field Operations desk researching on the the internet solar companies in the area. All of a sudden…BOOM, BAM, BOOM….advertisement, after advertisement popped up on my computer monitor.
Not only did I find that from the time I had purchased the solar panels for our personal residents to the time that I was searching for a quote for WPRawl, Governor Haley, had just passed legislation finally allowing solar to make sense. Dozens and dozens of companies from across the country either were setting up shop in SC or were now making serious plans as fast as they could to move into our state.
They were moving her and HIRING. Before I knew it, I was on the phone and being sold HARD by recruiters from these solar companies. One after the other were quickly convincing me that I could make an easy $250,000 per year with this new “gold rush”…they said. I figured if that comment was only 1/2 true, I’d still be making more than I was making currently on the farm. I’d be making $125K. It was too good to pass on. The opprounity was too rich. What was I to do?
I decided that the best thing for me to do was to go through my entire contact list. That meant everyone that knew me or knew of me, including every homeowner from when I had my lawn service and my pine straw business and even when I was in the landscaping business after college. Everyone was fair game, if I had their home address and phone number.
I took the recommendation of a recruiter and spend days going through my entire rollidex of contacts making a list of all my “A-contacts”. These were people that if I called them they would be happy to talk to me. They were raving fans of Matt Warren or they would mostly at least call me back. My goal was to get all the A’s on one list. That worked. My list went form 4000+ to about 200 that were A’s. Then, I looked each and every on up on Google Earth and checked out their chances for solar.
Some were covered up with shade, some had an impossible roof line for solar and some I knew had no money or credit. I was able to narrow this list of 200 A’s down to 50 A’s that were qualified prospects. I figured that if I could sell 10 of those A’s that were qualified, (20%) and the recruiter said that with the solar leasing option the average sales commission was about $3,000. I would make $30,000.
If I sold 10 people in the first 6 months…which totally seemed doable, then the 2nd 6 months of the year I would be more efficient and have my sales pitch down, I knew I could probably sell 15 clients. So, according to my estimate, year one I’d sell 25 clients @ average $3,000 = $75,000! Lets Go! I thought….
