He made $100M in solar

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom Pod. We have Ahmad Ali with us today. He's a CEO at Team Sunshine Construction, Boston. Interesting business, made, uh, yeah, $40 mil in less than 3 years, and nowadays like even higher than that. I'll let him speak about the numbers, but yeah, guy started at SolarCity, was a banker before that, uh, started Da Vinci Energy, and then went to Team Sunshine Construction, which is well diversified. 4 co-founders. Intense state. So, Ahmad, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Yeah, I appreciate you having me, Charles. Um, you got some great stuff going on. Um, I don't know how you can— you manage all that stuff, man. Like, I got one job and I'm, you know, I'm all over the place. It's crazy. But, uh, yeah, man, it's been— it's been a ride, you know. So I've been in this— I've been in this industry for 11 years now, um, and It's been a ride, like it's been a lot of fun. Like I went from being a door knocker, like those annoying people knocking on the door trying to sell solar, um, to, you know, that company got bought out, SolarCity, they're, they're now Tesla. You've probably heard of them, pretty big company. Um, they cut their direct team and then I went out and started my own company with a, you know, with a partner. Did that for a couple of years. We learned a lot about sales and marketing and I think that was like super valuable. Uh, was able to take that. I, I stayed in the residential solar space at the time as well. Took that, um, did it for a few years and just kind of kept messing around with the, like, hey, let's try the mom-and-pop shop, you know, and sell for them. And let's try the national company that can raise money, hundreds of thousands and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars, and let's try selling for them. And We, we really were not super satisfied here in the Northeast. There's a lot of issues, um, you know, finding a good contractor and, uh, really having like a good client experience. So we ended up founding our own company. It's been a little over 4 years. We've done close to $100 million revenue. You know, started off same thing, residential solar in Massachusetts, but we've expanded, you know, we've installed in over 10 states, um, doing a lot of HVAC business, um, a lot of battery storage, a lot of roofing as well. It's really our idea was kind of, you know, changed, but not changed, but really like developed over time. Like got a little bit bigger. And now we're just thinking about this whole home energy services, you know, solution, right? Whole home energy service provider. Um, and really we've invested a lot into some software right now. Um, and that software is, uh, it's something that it's really important to us. Um, and I think it's, it's gonna change the industry. I think it's going to be a big deal. Um, it's helping us sell a lot of projects, helping us present things, you know, in a way to the customer with speed. We're leveraging as much AI tools as possible to be able to, be able to present proposals and really have like a holistic kind of experience, you know, with client. So that's, that's what I've been up to, man.

Most guys never scale, um, solar business up to $100 mil. What was your secret to do that? Was it sales?

Yeah, I mean, you gotta, you gotta lead with sales. Like, there's a lot of different— there's different things that you can sell, right? But like a product like solar, for example, which is really like our, you know, our heart and soul, that's our base, that's something you have to sell, right? It's a product that's sold, it's not typically bought, right? Like, the amount of, you know, inbound leads coming in versus outbound and pushing is, is tremendous. Like, it's, it's a, it's a world of difference. So You got to be able to sell. You got to be able to present yourself in a certain way, and your product, your idea, your company. Um, and doing the right thing, I think, is also— I think it's underrated in business, right? I think, you know, do what you say, say what you do, that kind of thing, highly underrated, um, in business. Um, and I think that's one of the things that's legitimately helped us, uh, be able to scale the company, because you get to work with the right people. And, and with, with people, people can help you scale.

Right?

It takes an army. You're not going to do it alone.

In your case, uh, you decided to start that business with what, 3 co-founders? Isn't that overkill? Why, um, why scale with that many co-founders and dilute cap table?

You know, um, I believe in leverage, um, and I think that there's some stuff that I'm really good at. There's some stuff I'm terrible at, and I think that goes the same for my business partners. So we had all been already working together, uh, you know, some way, shape, or form. We've all been in the industry for years together, and, um, we liked each other, and we all had some— we all kind of had something that the company really needed. Um, and, you know, you give people skin in the game, and they have now a vested interest in, in doing, you know, that job and helping you, helping you scale, right? Like, you know, when we actually— we didn't even have a CEO for maybe like 2 years. We were just like the owners of the company. We were the founders. And it was like I picked the short straw because it was, you know what I mean? Like, um, I was qualified to do it, but, you know, at the end of the day, we're all partners. We all offer, you know, different kinds of ideas and, and things in the business. And You know, does it work for everybody? No, it's not. I'll say that for sure. Like, you really got to have the same vision and idea in mind. And I would also mention, like, being in a kind of similar place in life too. I think that also matters a lot because somebody who's super young, they might be aggressive and they want to grow and scale, and they're willing to, like, you know, eat shit— excuse my language— for a little bit. But some other people, maybe they're, like, older, maybe they're more conservative, maybe they're not interested in doing that kind of thing. So you gotta have like the same alignment for sure.

And the sales system, what does it look like? Is it Facebook ads, Insta ads, top of funnel, and then calling them and then meeting them physically, follow up with a CRM and close, I don't know, 1 out of 3?

Yeah, I mean, I'd say the numbers are pretty good. I'd say on the presentation side, that's probably pretty accurate. That's one way we get business. Yeah, Facebook is big, Google's big, um, you know, for some of the— some of that stuff. But even traditional door knocking is still huge in these industries. Um, you know, the referral business, um, is also a really big business. We do a lot of kind of like a channel partner business as well. Um, so we work with a lot of channel partners and they do their own marketing, they bring their own business. And then we even work with some national companies, bigger companies that just send us business because we, we do good work. So they, you know, we have different kinds of arrangements and different levels of business. I think that's also one of the things having 4 partners, you can be a little more open-minded and you can also find different avenues to acquire, you know, business. It's important.

Have you started doing B2B, uh, whether it is direct, uh, selling or partnerships?

Yeah, so on the, on the software side of the, of the business, it's technically a different company, but that's something that we're just starting to license right now. So we offer a service where, you know, you're— if you're in the home services industries and you sell some of these products that we sell, we can offer you a proposal tool that can be customized for the way your sales reps want it have a sales proposal within 30 seconds and have integrated financing options, um, as well. So everything can be done in one portal. Um, that's something that we've just started doing B2B. We also— I mean, I don't know if it counts like B2B. We do commercial, um, solar as well. You know, that's like— also, it's a different conversation for sure when you're talking to somebody that's like a business owner and it's like a financial thing versus it's like a homeowner and that's a big emotional conversation for a lot of people, you know.

Interesting. Um, your equipment, uh, so like the margins on that business depends a lot on the equipment that you install, right? How do you make sure that your margins are healthy while the, the panels last for a very long time?

Yeah, so one thing that was really important to us, you know, industry standard is like 25-year warranty, uh, because a lot of people do 25-year leases. That's just industry standard, I'd say people buy, sure. So what we did was, you know, we wanted to make like, hey, if you purchase from us, you're going to get the same warranty that the leasing companies are offering. So we offer the same warranty. Now, in order for me to feel comfortable with offering people a 25-year warranty, it's a big commitment. What we needed to do was make sure that the equipment manufacturers that we were aligned with also had a 25-year product warranty, that matches, right? So it's not something that we're just— it's not coming out of thin air. I feel confident about it because I know that 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the line, when I, you know, if something breaks, something's not working, we go and want to service it, I can go to the manufacturer and they're going to send me the product for free, and they're going to pay us for labor as well. And that's how we can make this a sustainable business model. Alignment's super important.

And how do you scale now versus like in the early days, right? Because when you scale to, I don't know, $30, $40 million a year, it's a different game than when you started at $1 million.

Yeah, it's a completely different beast. And so much of, you know, year 1 and 2 was, "Trust me, bro." It was a lot of that. And, you know, like, Some people did, some people didn't, and it is what it is. But, uh, the good thing is it, like, it wasn't our first venture as owners. We had— we've been involved, all of us separately, in different ventures. So we have a good network circle of trust with a lot of people who, when they found out that we were installing, that we're getting into this construction side of the business, they automatically wanted to do business with us because they know that we're not gonna do them dirty. Like, we're gonna give them good business, their customers are gonna be happy, they're gonna get paid. Um, and I— that's what it goes back to, like, doing good business, because you do it in year 1, right? I'm not looking at year 1, I'm looking at like, hey, what can we do together in year 5, right? And that kind of thing. You know, my goal is when we were bringing in outside, you know, contractors and people and, and channel partners to come in and do business with us, I said, listen, man, like, you're doing 5 deals a month right now, that's good, you can make a living off of that. But I'm like, my goal is to scale you to 20, 30, 40, 50 a month, right? Because I'd rather work with like 10 of you than 100 guys doing one a month. That's not my interest. I want to help them scale. So help your partner scale, and then you're going to be able to scale as well.

The team itself, how do you recruit, um, team members, make sure that they stay? Because I, I guess that's also, uh, heavily reliant on the team members and their skills, right? Like in that business, and training them takes some time, and you don't want them to mess anything up on the roof. So what are your criteria nowadays?

Yeah, well, the, the really good thing is, um, what we did was very early on is a strategic decision to bring on very high quality people very early on, and they were expensive. And then they were coming to a startup, they made them extra expensive. Um, but that was a crucial step for us because we brought those people on and then we started to build around them, right? Um, and some of them, they're not even there. They've gone and built their own companies and they're doing their own thing. But we established a base core of people who do really, really good work, um, in the beginning. And then as we bring— we trained a lot of people. We brought on people that have never been on a roof before and trained them and, you know, showed them exactly what it is that was needed.. But because the standard was already so high, people get sussed out quickly. So there's been chance, you know, opportunities like where we bring somebody on, they get on the roof, they're working, within a week or two it's like they realize it's not good for them, or honestly the crew kind of susses them out. Like they're like, listen, this guy's not it, he's not gonna— he's not cut out for this, or he's too slow, or they're not doing good work, or there's something that they didn't like about them. Filters itself out. Once you set that high bar in the beginning, it's incredible what it does though. It's important.

At what time did you start integrating with roofing and heat pumps, for example? When was that an obvious decision? And it seems like a no-brainer to me, but must have come with its lot of challenges as well, right?

Yeah. Roofing happened pretty early on because we were looking at 20-30% of projects needed a new roof. And I said, like, listen, like, we gotta, we gotta find some kind of way to do this in-house, somewhat in-house at least, as much as we can, um, because it's just part of the business that we're already doing. So it's like, we should not be paying a retail price for, for this, right? Like, we got to do wholesale pricing. So we were able to make some really good partnerships on the roofing side. Early on just through volume. Um, so that was, that was pretty easy. Heat pumps was an interesting one, right? And I kind of saw what was happening. I mean, even a couple of years ago, before the bill was passed last year, before any of that stuff happened, we were really looking at it and we're like, what kind of thing aligns like tangentially, looks like with what we're doing, right? And we realized it was heat pumps was just, it was next up, right? I'm like, my family, like, I'm American, born here, but I'm ethnically Lebanese. Like, I, you know, I go back every— in the summer and hang out. We spend time in Europe. Like, I see heat pumps everywhere, and I really— I looked around me and I was like, I don't see them here. People are like, oh, did you hear about those new split units they're doing? I'm like, dude, they had split units 20 years ago over there. I don't know why this isn't big yet. So it kind of dawned on me, and I'm like, dude, we're already doing solar, why wouldn't we just do this as well, and it's fully aligned because you help somebody get off of oil or gas or propane, and then you transition them to, you know, electrification, right? Like electrification of their appliances and their heating. And then naturally, like, you kind of have to go solar at that point too. And also the trend of electrification across the board, that includes vehicles too, right? Fuel, right? Like I don't know, 100% of cars were, you know, fuel like 20, 30 years ago, almost, almost 100%. And now it's maybe 20 to 30% of new vehicles are EVs. So we're already going through electrification as a country. So knowing that, knowing like on the, on the front end it's electrification, on the back end what is going to power all that electrification? Because we're not ready for it. And that's why you need solar for it. So it just, it almost just, we work backwards. It strengthened the case that we already had that solar is the right place. But I'm like, why not hit it on the front end too? Why not hit them with the EV chargers, right? Hit 'em with the battery storage, right? It made a lot of sense.

Right. And do you feel solar's a no-brainer for most people nowadays, like the economics?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's simple, man. Like, solar makes a ton of sense. Um, at the end of the day, you're paying somebody for something, right? So you, you now have the ability to make a conscious decision, uh, an educated decision about what you want to do with your money, right? So you can decide to continue paying the utility company, right? Like, just for, for people here who know, like, 11 years ago when I started doing this, National Grid was 20 cents, right? Right now they're between 35 to 40 cents per kilowatt hour, right? You do the math on that. Um, I can, I can make math on solar look good right now for the next 5 years if the utility rates don't go up. But if you started running the numbers on utility rates as well, forget about it. Like, it's, it's a— it really is a no-brainer. Yeah, yeah.

What are your goals for this year?

Yeah, this year is, uh This year is fun, man. You know, we're kind of going through a little bit of a transition period in, in this year, um, where a lot of the business is transitioning to, uh, HVAC. Um, and we've spent a couple of years developing this software, and, you know, we, we started kind of trialing and beta testing and started using it like soft launch end of last year. We wanna go hard launch this year on our software and really get this thing out there and start to license it. 'Cause right now our team's using it and it's helping us like crazy. So once we get this thing out there, I know it's just, it's gonna be crazy.

Right. Is the plan to exit eventually that business a couple years down the line or keep on scaling?

I'd say we're open-minded. You know, as founders, you always gotta look to, be aligned with your partners and figure out what the next move is. And if that's an exit, if the opportunity's there, I mean, sure, that's something that we'll talk about and, you know, have some discussions on. There's a lot of different things that you can do here, right? Like there's, you know, there's investments, there's, you know, seed funding, like there's different kinds of ways to go about it. We also have like the construction business, we have the software business, We have the HVAC business. We're definitely open-minded. Like, an exit would be, would be cool. Obviously, I think for a lot of founders, that's the goal. You know, I've been an entrepreneur for 13, 14 years now straight. Um, you know, I haven't had a massive— I've had a couple exits, not any massive exits. So, you know, if that opportunity presents itself, we'd sure be open-minded. But at the end of the day, I think we're also building a legacy company, and if that You know, if we just keep scaling it and, you know, I could be pretty happy with that too.

And what's been painful about that business? What challenges have you faced?

Yeah, I would say the biggest— it's a bit of a roller coaster, you know, and I think uncertainty is the biggest thing that actually affects us a lot. Um, sometimes you get bad news, right? Um, and it sucks, but at least with the news, and if you know what's going on, you can kind of maneuver. You can make plans, you can work around it. What I don't like working with is uncertainty, and obviously there's always a level of uncertainty, but when it's like the federal government doesn't really know what they're doing and they're uncertain about stuff, that's when it's— it causes waves, right? And waves, waves can be problems, right? Like some of these waves have included like, you know, bankruptcies for major financing companies that we work with. Right? Like, it's not so much the bad news that killed them, it's the uncertainty. Uncertainty kills investors. Investors don't want uncertainty. They can readjust, they can change their rates, they can change the compensation, the payout, they can try to make it work. They can't work around uncertainty for too long.

You're referring to tariffs, right?

Tariffs is part of it. Regulation, just, uh, cutting of, uh, taxes. But even some stuff right now, there's you know, language around what is domestic content, um, what is— what percentage of the products have to be made in the USA, and what does that even mean. I think we got some language on it a few weeks ago, but this is something that's been going on for over a year now. We're just finally figuring out what that even means. So I'm talking about you have massive companies, you know, that are like based in China, and they're not allowed to operate in China anymore. And they need to invest billions of dollars into operations here, but they don't even know exactly what they need to do, or they already did it and maybe it doesn't qualify. These are the kind of things that it hurts business overall, I would say.

Yeah, politicians are usually terrible businessmen. Most of them have never run or scaled a business, right? So it's pretty sad. Yeah, in, in the case of, uh, your business and your, uh, day in the life of a CEO, what does it look like? Is it mostly on sales? Is it on operations? What does a day in your life look like?

I think for a lot of CEOs it, it could change, right? It depends on what stage you are in the business and what you're involved in. Like me personally, I'm involved in a lot of financial, uh stuff that's going on, uh, large partnerships, you know, um, I'm kind of like involved in a lot of deal making, um, as well. And, uh, like legal, high-level legal matters, like we have, you know, 3 legal teams that we use, but I still, I'm kind of like at the front of it as well. Um, so it really, like, in, in one day I, I'm jumping from here to here to here to here to here, like all over the place. Um, but that's kind of my skill set, like, you know, I've I'm one of those like ADHD types. It really helps me as a, as an entrepreneur. Um, it's kind of like a superpower for me, but you know, it also like, it becomes a lot sometimes. But you know, um, I wouldn't say this thing is built, you know, not everybody's built for entrepreneurship, I'll say that, or to be a CEO. And personally, I got— I would say this to a lot of people, um, like personally, I wouldn't be a CEO of a company that I didn't have like a major stake in. The job is not, is not worth it. Like, I think it's, it's worth it if you're, uh, you know, you have a stake in it and you kind of are on the upside. Otherwise, stressful job.

What do you need to scale to $100 mil a year?

I would say stability. Stability around us would be, would be great. Um, it's been a rocky time. Um, over the last few years just around us. Like, we're a ship, we're in the ocean, and, you know, around us it's like, you know, the meme where the guy's in the house and everything's on fire and he's like, it's fine. Um, that's kind of like what we've been operating on. Um, seeing some like smooth waters would be, would be cool. I mean, I'm talking about since like COVID times too, you know, like that kind of rocked the boat across the board. Um, some stability would be great. I think it allows us to just build and not have to like rebuild, um, because, you know, like this, this pathway, this thing just like got ripped up from underneath us.

But isn't that your moat as well? Because like most of your competitors will go out of business, and if you're stoic and resilient and you last through the storm, you're gonna pretty much be one of the only guys left, and you can buy them out also while— yeah, while they go out.

We've already done that. So I mean, it's kind of already— a lot of it's already happened. I think we're probably through the worst of it. But I mean, I've seen, I've seen it happen around me, like the companies— literally, I'm talking like in our building, like across the street from us, there's a bunch of them. And a lot of them have gone under, and we've scooped up some of their best assets. And sometimes that's brainpower and salespeople. Um, and our goal is to just be you know, the one that's, that's there by, by the end of it. Because, uh, you know, naturally that's— it will— it's filtered out a lot of the bad players too, which I think is a positive. Um, but I do agree with you. Yeah, I think, I think being there at the, you know, at the end of the tunnel, um, is, is, is a goal of in and of itself. Because naturally, um, when like, for example, Solar becomes something that's you know, purchased and not something that's bought and not something that's sold, um, we're gonna be like the most established, you know, company with the, with the most stable ground.

Yeah, where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, uh, you can find me on, uh, Instagram. I'm not super active, but it's, uh, @mindofamod. Um, that is probably the best place to find me, or on LinkedIn. I haven't been posting too much, but, uh, you know, I've been, I've been super busy. But I'd love to, uh, you know, I, I do have a lot to share. I'm on a little bit of a podcast run right now, a little bit. Um, I've done a few and they've just kind of caught a little bit of steam and it's kind of like going around. So I'll have a website on the, on the Instagram at some point for all the, all the podcasts and all the media stuff that we're doing, um, because I love doing this and People tell me that like I should have a podcast, I should do it, and I'm like, I wish, man. Like, I wish I could find the time, but get me on your podcast and I'll, you know, maybe, you know, for all these people out there, you know, try to find me.

There you go. That was Ahmad. Then Charles