Chasing the $20,000-a-Month Solar Bro Dream: How a Teen’s Ambition Ran Up Against the Door-to-Door Grind
Eighteen-year-old Aaron Colvin was mid-tricep pushdown at his local gym when his eye locked on a cartoonishly massive bodybuilder across the mirrored workout floor. The man was walking a young woman through a set of cable rows, and Colvin paused, curious to study their form. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and trundled over, Colvin’s stomach dropped. He braced for an accusation of ogling the man’s girlfriend—one of unforgivable gym culture cardinal sins.
But the bodybuilder only wanted to strike up a friendly chat, and soon asked Colvin what he did for work. It was August 2023, and Colvin was days away from starting his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was already lukewarm on college; his real goal was to become an entrepreneur like his personal heroes, Grant Cardone and Alex Hormozi. At 13, Colvin had vowed to follow in their footsteps to ease the financial strain on his single mother, a special education teacher who’d raised him with almost no outside support. A fiercely driven teen, he’d already launched a string of solo ventures that never quite panned out: T-shirt sales, carpet cleaning, affiliate marketing, dropshipping, Amazon arbitrage. At the time he met the bodybuilder, he was working back-to-back daily shifts at Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus, saving $3,000 for a course to launch his own personal training business.
Colvin’s brawny new acquaintance had a different opportunity to pitch: “What do you know about solar?” When he wasn’t competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man explained, he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the United States’ largest residential solar installers. He’d just returned from a sales “blitz” in Florida—industry slang for a concentrated sales push where teams of young reps in crisp polos and khakis descend on a city, crash at cheap hotels or Airbnbs, and knock on hundreds of doors a day for weeks on end. He bragged he’d pulled in “crazy money” that month—up to $20,000—just from convincing a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs in panels.
Colvin, a lean former high school wrestler whose round silver glasses give him a studious air, was instantly intrigued. “I was just like, holy shit,” he recalls. “Yeah, that’s awesome, I’ll look into it.”
A few weeks later, Colvin hopped on a FaceTime call with the bodybuilder’s manager at Freedom Pros: Will, an energetic 21-year-old. Though his college semester had only just begun, Colvin told Will he was already considering dropping out. Shaped by a childhood of hardship—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls pharmacy regularly burglarized by drug addicts—he struggled to relate to most classmates, who came from far more privileged backgrounds. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin says. Will pressed him to join his door-to-door crew, which he’d named Seal Team Six. The work was easy, he promised: all Colvin had to do was tell homeowners they could save thousands by installing solar and selling excess power back to the grid. As long as he delivered that pitch on strangers’ porches, his commission checks would dwarf his Chipotle wages. Seal Team Six’s unofficial motto: “Behind every door is $5,000.” (Freedom Forever reports its 2023 gross revenue topped $1 billion.)
After some thought, Colvin declined the first offer. He worried he’d regret quitting school without giving it a fair shot. But Will was a relentless recruiter. That fall and winter, he bombarded Colvin daily with Instagram Reels from “solar bros” flexing their six-figure commission checks, penthouse apartments, and luxury cars. These tanned, jacked, confidence-brimming influencers insisted anyone could reap these rewards if they just had the courage to leave their mundane lives behind for the front lines of the green economy.
As Colvin dragged himself through accounting classes, Will’s pitch grew more appealing. Midway through his second semester, he agreed to fly to Orlando for spring break to test out a blitz. If it went well, he’d even document his new career on camera, with hopes of becoming a solar bro influencer himself.
No one buys a residential solar system to fix an urgent problem. It’s what marketers call a “proactive product”: something you can live without, but that may offer long-term benefits. In the industry’s early days, panels were so expensive they were only marketed to wealthy homeowners eager to cut their carbon footprint. But around 2010, solar panel prices began plummeting as manufacturing scaled up, particularly in China. At the same time, solar companies created leasing models that lowered upfront costs. Suddenly, going solar could be pitched to the masses as a smart long-term financial investment. Even so, installation still cost $20,000 or more, and most homeowners hesitated to drop that much cash when their current electric setup worked just fine.
To jolt consumers out of complacency, the solar industry fell back on one of the oldest, most reviled sales tactics: indiscriminate cold door-knocking. Major companies like Sunrun, which posted $2.25 billion in 2023 revenue, operate on the principle that nothing beats the intense persuasion of a face-to-face pitch. And because commissions are far higher than for traditional door-to-door products like magazine subscriptions or home security systems, there’s no shortage of ambitious young recruits willing to answer the industry’s call for labor.
Colvin learned quickly that the industry doesn’t coddle newcomers. Right after landing in central Florida, he was driven from the airport to the crew’s rental house in Kissimmee, a swampy Orlando suburb in the shadow of Disney World, to drop his bags. Will immediately told him there was no time for rest: the four-person crew was heading out to “rip,” or knock doors. They piled into Will’s Toyota Camry and drove 30 miles to the St. Cloud suburb, where Colvin got a crash course in the job. He would start as a “setter”: the rep who makes first contact with homeowners and convinces them to book an appointment with a “closer,” the salesperson who signs the final contract.
Colvin was given a script to follow: he would tell homeowners he’d been dispatched to inspect the neighborhood’s utility poles (who dispatched him was left intentionally vague). Next, he’d explain the poles were being upgraded for hurricane hardening, an expensive project that would raise everyone’s electric bills by nearly 40%. Once panic crossed a homeowner’s face, Colvin would pivot to pitch solar panels as the money-saving solution.
Colvin rarely even got that far. As Will cruised by periodically on a Segway (closers on Seal Team Six used Segways to patrol their territory) to check his progress, Colvin struggled to win over St. Cloud residents. Some were openly hostile, thanks to the widespread reputation of solar bros as dishonest. Major solar companies have been hit with hundreds of fraud lawsuits. In May 2024, for example, the state of Nebraska sued Everlight Solar for using “misleading savings models that omit relevant information and accurate data that could result in projections that show consumers spending more on panels than they would save.” Homeowners familiar with the industry’s shady reputation often feel justified in lashing out at any salesperson who steps on their property.
Colvin also met plenty of polite Floridians, but they all had a ready excuse: they were renters, they couldn’t afford it, their spouse wasn’t home, they’d already turned down 15 other solar salespeople that month.
Solar managers are experts at getting new reps like Colvin to push through constant rejection. They frame the job as almost spiritual: it’s not just a path to wealth, but a path to radical self-improvement. For Seal Team Six, that meant sticking to a nearly monastic routine. Colvin woke up early daily to study books like Door-to-Door Millionaire and training videos on handling customer objections. After lifting weights together at the gym, the crew would knock doors until 9 pm, stopping only to scarf down a burrito or a few tuna packets for fuel. On days he “bageled”—logged zero appointments—Colvin would collapse into bed, passing out to the sound of Fortnite from the living room.
By the second week of his trial, after a long day knocking doors on a quiet cul-de-sac, Colvin hit a wall. He tried his go-to mood booster: opening a Notes app file full of kind things people had said to him over the years. But this time, he was too drained—sapped by Florida humidity, sick of being told he deserved to be arrested. Then he spotted a man sitting on his curb, watching kids play in the street. Sensing the man was open to chat, Colvin sat down and ditched the script for raw honesty. “My boss has me out here working, and I’m getting my ass kicked today,” he told the man. “I’m just trying to save people money on their electric bill.” The line worked: the man was intrigued, and agreed to book an appointment with Colvin’s closer.
Colvin made a classic rookie mistake, though: he scheduled the appointment eight days out. That gave the customer too much time to cool off, and the meeting never happened. Still, the small win gave Colvin a boost. Confident bigger wins were just around the corner, he promised Will he’d return in May, and that he’d make enough money to make dropping out of college a no-brainer. Will said it would be a personal failure if Colvin didn’t walk away with $40,000 in his pocket by September.
Back in New York, Colvin went through the motions of his final weeks of classes. He couldn’t stop thinking about his taste of the solar life. Buoyed by that small win, he started recruiting other people to join, just like the bodybuilder who’d found him. One recruit was Connor Dougherty, a Niagara University student and friend of a friend.
A large, preppy young man with a gentle, goofy energy, Dougherty shared Colvin’s admiration for bold entrepreneurs; his father owns a successful meal-prep business in Rochester, New York. He told Colvin he wanted to build his sales skills, and was considering working at a car dealership for the summer. Colvin convinced him door-to-door solar would give a far more intense (if admittedly less pleasant) sales education. “It seemed like it’s just the coldest sales experience you can get,” Dougherty says. “I figured that would be the best.”
Colvin also reached out to Dakota Williams, a lean 17-year-old with shaggy hair who speaks with a skater’s casual cadence. The two had met a year earlier at a party, and bonded over shared interests—Colvin was impressed Williams was a fan of The 48 Laws of Power, the popular self-help book. Williams had also grown up with far more hardship than Colvin, which resonated. A member of the Tuscarora Nation, whose New York reservation lies east of Buffalo, Williams was intermittently homeless while earning his GED as a teen. When Colvin reconnected with him in spring 2024, Williams was living in a shelter and flipping burgers at McDonald’s.
Colvin introduced Williams to Will, who offered a free bed in the Kissimmee house to start (crew members normally paid $500 a month in rent). But Williams couldn’t afford a plane ticket, so the two drove down from New York together. The night before they left, Colvin started filming for his fledgling YouTube channel, which he saw as his ticket to becoming an inspirational media figure. He’d launched it back in high school to document his “journey from broke to billionaire.” Now, he filmed himself jubilantly clocking out of Chipotle for the last time. Then he recorded a more serious clip in his dorm while packing. “I know I’m not going to fail, because I don’t have an option,” he told his phone camera, pacing in a white palm-tree print T-shirt. “Because literally if I fail, I’m fucked, I’m going to be homeless. And that’s not going to happen. I will knock until I die.”
He was even more upbeat the next morning, grabbing his last things from his mom’s house. “I’m ready to be the best rep,” he said, weaving through the kitchen with a huge grin. “Go down there, give it my all, and start making some fuck-you money!”
After 20 straight hours on the road, Colvin and Williams got just three hours of rest before they were sent out to rip with Seal Team Six. The crew had doubled in size since March, soon growing to 10 members; some new recruits slept on air mattresses in the living room because all bunks were full. Will had also switched the crew to a new solar company, Sunder Energy, which he said offered more generous commissions than Freedom Pros.
The sales script stayed the same, though—and so did the poor results. When Colvin checked the group chat Sunder Energy’s setters used to log daily activity, his frustration boiled over. Peers would announce they’d booked multiple appointments in a single day, a feat that rarely came for him. Sometimes, reps who went a full day bageling had to do punishment push-ups. (The reward for beating your appointment goal was the “Ric Flair”: two claps and a loud “WOOOO!” from the whole crew.)
Desperate to boost his lackluster numbers, Colvin doubled down on self-improvement. He spent mornings memorizing techniques like “tie-downs,” questions designed to box customers into agreeing solar makes sense: (“Are you guys planning to stop using electricity and go Amish anytime soon?”) He and Williams also practiced the classic sales drill: trying to sell each other a ballpoint pen.
“Do I want to be the best? Yeah,” Colvin said in one YouTube video, filmed for his 153 subscribers as he sat cross-legged on a patio sofa in the warm late-afternoon sun. “Am I doing everything in my power to become the best? Yeah. I’m doing the trainings, I’m reading the books, I’m putting the hours in on the doors. In between doors I’m taking notes on what I did right and what I did wrong. So, yeah, I’m getting better every day. And I know as long as I continue to do this every day, I’m going to win. And for me, it’s less about the work and more about the work that’s being done to myself.”
A core rule of door-to-door culture is that salespeople must always maintain a “positive mental attitude” no matter how much rejection they face. Yet when Seal Team Six moved to an Airbnb in Tampa in late May for a 10-day blitz, Colvin admitted he struggled to keep up the optimistic front. “I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t getting discouraged,” he said in a nightly video, nervously twisting the ends of his hair. “I’ve been doing solar at least 20 days, I have not got a single sale yet.” Then, remembering vulnerability is taboo in solar bro culture, he stared into the camera and reaffirmed his resolve: “I don’t give a fuck if I have zero dollars in my bank account. I’m not quitting until this shit works.”
On his sixth day in Tampa, it finally worked: an appointment Colvin set turned into a closed deal. Since he’d agreed to a 50-50 commission split with the closer, Colvin calculated he was owed at least $3,500. “It’s like I cannot fathom—I’ve never seen so much money at once in my life,” he said in that night’s celebratory video. “I can’t believe it’s real.” Looking back at his logs, he estimated he’d faced 850 face-to-face rejections before this first success.
Colvin checked his bank account constantly over the next week, waiting for his first of two commission payments. When the money finally hit more than a week later, it was just $180.
When Colvin confronted Will about the shortfall, Will gave a roundabout explanation: he said the closer had to do extra work because Colvin didn’t give the homeowners enough information, so Colvin only deserved an 18% cut. Will added that the customer’s roof needed unexpected repairs to fit the panels, which further cut into profits. Colvin should be grateful for what he got, Will said—after all, it was a learning experience.
A Sunder Energy spokesperson gave a different account: Colvin was either misinformed or misunderstood Will. “Shortly after the sale, the homeowner for this project decided not to move forward and canceled their agreement. This results in no further commissions for a project and a reversal of any initial commissions already paid.”
While Colvin grappled with the confusion, Dougherty also closed his first deal. He expected a roughly $6,000 commission. As he waited for payment, he decided to try out a closer’s Segway for fun. The vehicle accelerated faster than he expected, throwing him to the ground and tearing his medial cruciate ligament. At the ER, Colvin tried to lift his spirits by making him recite sales slogans while bench-pressing his IV pole.
Dougherty had to return to New York for an MRI and physical rehab. Weeks into his recovery, after being told multiple times there was a problem with his banking information, he finally got his commission: $600. The closer couldn’t convincingly explain the shortfall, though he claimed he’d also been paid less than expected. (The Sunder Energy spokesperson says both Colvin and Dougherty could have escalated their concerns “to other sales leaders, department heads, and even company executives.”)
Despite his tiny paycheck, Colvin moved with the crew to the next 10-day blitz in Ocala, where they rented two houses on a horse farm. He kept posting a new daily YouTube video. “I know I’m at the point in my life where if I want to earn more money, I have to increase my skill set, and in order to increase your skill set, you’re going to have to eat shit for a short period of time,” he said in one. “Absolutely a hundred percent, when I hit month six of this, I’m going to be a completely different person spiritually, financially, physically.” But privately, his bitterness over the commission dispute was starting to erase his faith in Seal Team Six.
Right before July rent was due, Colvin told Will he was quitting. He asked to stay a few more days to celebrate Fourth of July with Williams and the rest of the crew, even offering to keep knocking doors over the holiday to pull his weight. He was shocked when Will told him to pack his bags and leave immediately. More than 1,000 miles from home