The spectacular burning of a solar panel salesman

Aaron Colvin was doing triceps presses at the gym when he noticed a caricatured hulking bodybuilder in the mirror room. The man was coaching a woman through a set of cable rows, and 18-year-old Colvin stopped to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and flipped over, Colvin became alarmed. He thought he would be accused of looking at the man’s girlfriend – one of the cardinal sins of fitness culture.

But the bodybuilder just wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At this point 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 lukewarm in college; he wanted to dedicate himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozy, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher, who had raised him with little help. As a high-spirited teenager, he launched a series of one-man ventures that never panned out: T-shirt salesman, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketing, dropshipper, Amazon arbitrage. 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 muscular new acquaintance wanted to steer him toward a different possibility, “You know what about solar?” he asked. When he wasn’t competing in the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man said he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales division of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading solar installers. The bodybuilder had just returned from a trip to Florida where he had joined a “blitz,” solar industry lingo for a sales event in which groups of young men in clean polos and khaki shorts descend on a city, crash in a cheap hotel or Airbnb and spend weeks knocking on as many doors as possible.He boasted that he made “crazy money” – up to $20,000 in one month – by convincing just a handful owners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

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

A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime conversation with the bodybuilder’s manager at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Even though his college semester had just begun, Colvin told Will he was considering dropping out: As a man who had been shaped by adversity—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls drugstore that was regularly robbed from drug addicts – he had a difficult time relating to his classmates, most of whom came from nicer backgrounds than his own. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin says. Will urged him to join his door-to-door sales team, which he called Seal Team Six. The job was a breeze, he said — just a matter of homeowners realizing they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling excess electricity back to the grid. As Colvin delivered this message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions would be less than his wages at Chipotle. “Behind every door is $5,000” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its 2023 gross receipts exceeded $1 billion.)

After some consideration, Colvin declined the offer. He worried that he would regret leaving school without giving him a fair shake. But Will was a ruthless recruiter. Almost every day this fall and winter, he loaded Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “sun bros” showing off their six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars. These influencers—tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence—highlighted that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to trade their ordinary lives for a place on the front lines of the green economy.