The Spectacular Burning of the Solar Panel Dealer

It was Aaron Colvin While doing triceps push-ups at the gym, he saw a cartoonish giant bodybuilder in front of a mirrored room. The boy was coaching the woman through a series of cable rows, and Colvin, 18, paused to study their technique. Colvin was alarmed when the bodybuilder caught him by swinging him. He figured he’d be accused of teasing a man’s girlfriend, one of the cardinal sins of gym culture.

But the bodybuilder just wanted to have a friendly conversation, so he asked Colvin what he did for a living. In August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was hot in college; he wanted to dedicate himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozy, two of his personal heroes. At age 13, Colvin vowed to follow in their footsteps to ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher who raised him with little help. As an intensely driven teenager, he started a series of one-man ventures that never panned out: a T-shirt salesman, a carpet cleaner, an affiliate marketer, a shipper, an Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working the day shift at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal training business.

Jolvin’s brave new acquaintance wanted to direct him to another opportunity: “You know what about the sun?” – he asked. When he’s not competing in amateur bodybuilding competitions, he says 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. The bodybuilder had just returned from a trip to Florida, where he attended a “blitz” – sun industry jargon for a sales event where young men in open polos and khaki shorts descended on the town, crashing at a cheap hotel. or Airbnb and knock on as many doors as possible for weeks. He bragged about making “crazy money” of up to $20,000 in one month by convincing several homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

Colvin, a dapper former high school wrestler whose round silver glasses gave him a scholarly piety, was intrigued. “I was, like, holy shit,” he recalls. “Yeah, awesome, I’ll look into that.”

A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime call with an energetic 21-year-old named Will, the manager of a bodybuilder at Freedom Pros. Although Colvin had just started the semester, Colvin told Will that he was considering dropping out: He lived with his mother above a drugstore in Niagara Falls that was once regularly robbed by drug addicts. was of a softer origin. “I was having a midlife crisis in my bedroom,” says Colvin. Will has him join a door-to-door sales team he calls Seal Team Six. The job, he said, was easy – a simple matter of informing homeowners that they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling excess electricity back into the grid. As long as Colvin delivered this message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions would undercut his salary at Chipotle. “There’s $5,000 behind every door” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims gross revenue will exceed $1 billion by 2023.)

After some thought, Colvin declined the offer. He worried that he would regret leaving school without a fair shake. But Will was a ruthless employer. Almost every day in the fall and winter, he showed Colvin with Instagram reels produced by the “sun brothers”, six-figure commission checks, penthouse apartments, exotic cars. These influencers – tanned, sculpted and brimming with confidence – emphasized that anyone can reap such rewards if they have the courage to trade their everyday lives for a place in the forward trenches of the green economy.