177 | Door-to-Door Sales, Personal Development, and Business Success In The Solar Energy Industry with Dakota Malone from Community Solar Authority

Today on the show, I'm happy to have Dakota Malone. He's the founder of Community Solar Authority. What they work on is simple sustainability for large consumers of electricity. You were just telling about a call you took from your father years back that when he was telling you to quit your job.

I was in a Stewart's gas station in the middle of winter, it was so cold outside. I was doing door to door sales at the time. It was my third day doing door to door sales and I remember sitting in a booth in a gas station and I could remember my hands wrapped around the coffee cup when my dad called me. And I had zero sales, no experience, no reason to believe I was going to be good at it. And my dad gives me a call. He has a job in a local manufacturing plant where I'm originally from a small town in upstate New York. And basically he was telling me to quit my job, I could come home. He lined me up with a job the same place he worked and I would've had a simple life, stayed local. And I made the decision to tell my dad on that phone call, I said, dad, I think I just want to keep doing door to door sales instead. And he was very upset with me at the time and didn't really understand the logic behind it until a few years later when I really got into my career. And door to door sales unlocked really a trajectory and growth path that I otherwise wouldn't, have, otherwise wouldn't have been able to access. So that's, that's really how I got my start in the energy industry was through door to door sales. Direct marketing built my way into kind of regional management position for Fortune 1 through 500 energy companies taking care of their direct marketing channels and saw the writing on the wall for renewables and made the jump and ended up starting Community Solar Authority, which is where I'm at today.

So what was it about Deuterocells that you took and still stays with you today?

Oh man, so much. I'm a big believer in foundational skills. And so for me I was the type of person who, you know, I went to community college for two years. I handed my parents my degree and I knew that university was not in the cards for me. Wasn't something that I wanted to pursue or do, but I was the kid. I remember having the blankets pulled over my head at two in the morning Googling like jobs that make over six figures, no degree required. That's who I was in high school. And so I always had these aspirations of freedom Chad, which really came from. I've had five heart surgeries throughout my childhood, which really changed the scope of my life and really how I viewed life and really just wanted to squeeze the juice out of it. And so for me, door to door taught me the foundational skills where some people may go to college and pursue a higher education route. Door to door sales gave me the foundations of entrepreneurship from communication, sales management, et cetera. And really the big things that I pulled were in between studying top performance and high performance individuals. I also study nlp, neuro linguistic programming and really applied that to my sales career. Taken all of those skills and really just put it into a new opportunity vehicle where door to door sale was a one on one interaction. I've got over, I don't know, 5,000 sales one on one in residential settings under my belt. And so taking a very deep sales skill and then applying it to a new opportunity vehicle, which is what we do today, and really being able to leverage those same skills I learned in door to door and just a much higher leverage setting.

At that time in your life, were you reading a lot of sales books?

So I was really big into personal development. I did a hundred hours under Tony Robbins. For those of your audience that know Tony, I got into him as a result of my heart surgeries, actually. So for my third heart surgery, I was 16 years old, short story, I was wide awake for it. And if you can imagine the physical trauma someone would be left with, I was looking for a solution holistically to, to face a lot of the things that I was scared to look at inside of myself. And so I started studying under Tony Robbins, learned what he does with nlp. And within that there are a bunch of things that map over into the personal development, high performance and sales world. So the same tools that I was using to heal my body holistically were the same things that I could apply in a sales and personal development setting. And so I wouldn't say I was all in on sales, books, et cetera at the time, but definitely personal development as a whole. I was all in and got a very strong foundation from that. Yes.

For some our listeners that are just getting into that kind of stuff. Do you have any recommendations?

Yeah, totally. Right now I'm really big on Alex Hormozi. For those that know him, I think he's a fantastic dude and I think he puts out a lot of valuable content. Right now. I think a majority of the personal development stuff you can throw away. I'm a big believer in the 8020 principle. There's 20% of the books out there. That will bring you 80% of what you're looking for. I think Alex is a great place to start. I think he's got a new book coming out next month or sometime in August which would. Yeah, would be about a month away from now. And some of the books that he recommends would be the same that I do. Robert Cialdini, which is. He wrote like the book Influence and talks about everything. He really studied the art of influence. And I think that as a good place to start really looking into human behavior and how that maps over into buying decisions for like salespeople, for example, I think that's a fantastic place to start.

First of all, Alex needs to give you credit for the plug just now.

Yeah, right.

If you could tell your younger self any one thing, what would it be?

I remember it's so funny. Like the memory that comes up is that it's all gonna pay off in 10 years. I remember having that conversation with myself as my younger self and really tapping into the frame of myself as an older person, if that makes sense. So I'm about to be 30 in September. 30 years old. And I remember when I was. I don't know, I must have been 19 or 20 at the time. Cause it was about 10 years ago, it was 8 o' clock at night. I was outside doing door to door sales in the middle of winter. Most door to door teams don't even knock doors during the winter. And I was out after dark closing deals and in freezing temperatures. And I just come back to this memory. I was in somewhere around Columbus, Ohio on a street corner and just being like, you're just going to keep doing what other people aren't willing to and this is going to pay off in 10 years. And that's the exact advice that I would go back and give to myself. Thankfully that followed through on that and I listened to it and I just again, I think given the context of my childhood and I was committed to exchanging my 20s, dedicating it to diligence, discipline, entrepreneurship, learning those foundational skills which I talked about. And I just knew that it would pay off and unlock a lot bigger opportunities for my next 10 years.

So when did you found Community Solar?

So we started Community Solar Authority back in 2018 is when we first got into the space. The story goes, I started in door to door sales. I started off as a sales rep. Zero sales experience. I've carried two W2 jobs my entire life. They were both. One was in high school, one was in college, one I rolled burritos at this place called Fajita Grill. And the next I was a server at a kids restaurant called Friendly's. So literally zero sales experience. And I jumped into sales, became a, a top performer as I had mentioned, worked my way up into management, into regional management, and then really saw the writing on the walls. With the growth of renewables, I'm very aligned with the idea of sustainability. Just again, simply because of my background and what I've gone through. On a personal level, I think sustainability is a bedrock foundation for my life and I wanted to bring that into entrepreneurship. And at the time I went from, I took a pause on regional working with energy companies. I took a sabbatical, lived in Italy for a little bit with my best friend, so moved to Europe, got into remote work. The idea of being a digital nomad came back to the States with a fresh perspective and had an energy brokerage going online. So doing the same stuff I was doing with residential, but now getting into commercial space and then seeing the writing on the wall with renewables, we just made a full brand transition into community solar, which is state level legislation. That's the name of the program. It's the idea that people can subscribe to solar farms, which is why it's called community solar. So instead of putting glass on your roof or on your own property, you subscribe to an offsite solar farm. It's a completely $0 investment. People can participate and in exchange for helping clean the energy grid, they get a guaranteed discount on their electricity. And so we started doing that for commercial properties that we were already working with and then slowly scaled that into our niche of working with the largest consumers of electricity across the country.

Yeah, and you're five years in and I'm sure that sales experience helped to get it to this point. So are there some major obstacles that you've had to overcome?

Yeah, totally. We started with the wrong people. So, you know my business partner that I'm working with now, I've been with him since day one. He was actually my first sales manager in door to door sales. And so we started that long ago together. And really working with him has made life a lot easier. When you have a 10 year relationship with your business partner, it definitely helps us. We already know what each other are thinking. We're very aligned in our thoughts and our values, which I think baseline is like a requirement for partnerships. But in, in between that and the partnerships that we've extended to, we've just done, we've learned our lessons as far as partnering with the right people. And really the way that we filter that out now, as far as how we learn those lessons and what we do moving forward is we base things on people's timelines for people that are trying to make short term gains and quick wins out of desperation or otherwise, greed, et cetera. Those aren't the people that we do business with. And so we can tell where a lot of our partnerships will go based on how long term and what the timelines people are thinking on. Now when we talk to people about forming relationships and building out our ecosystem because we are hyper lean in the sense that it's myself, my business partner and our third managing partner and that's Community Solar Authority. So we're very much a startup, we're very much bootstrapped and really we've scaled our company to seven figures and beyond through our partnership, ecosystems, affiliates, et cetera. But really it comes down to learning those lessons early on of making sure that we're partnering with the right people for the right reasons for the long term. And I think that's definitely been a huge obstacle to the obstacle is the way. So it's something that you can't necessarily avoid. There's a lot of lessons to be learned. And yeah, over the last five years we've, we've definitely had our fair share of people that we know we don't want to work with really we focus on those that, that really want to do stuff for the long term.

Now on that theme, what would be your top tips to new entrepreneurs?

Yeah, so for new entrepreneurs, I would say that you definitely want to know yourself, which I think is important beyond business. For example, I think a lot of people talk about intrapreneurship and there's such a wide depth of stuff that you could really get into and it really does come back to your why. So for us with Community Solar Authority, we want to stay lean. We have zero interest in building out and growing an employee base. And that's just for personal reasons. I know I'm not a good manager. It's not my skill set. I'm a visionary. I know how to bring things to life. My business partner's an operator. He basically takes my ideas and runs with them, turns them into SOPs, dissolves them into automations. And we built something that was intended to be built, meaning we had an end result and we worked backwards. And so really when you know yourself, you know your strengths and in addition to that, when you know your end result. This is going Back to Tony Robbins 1 on 101 is when you know your end result, you know how the movie ends. You can basically fill in the gaps by working backwards. And I think a big mistake that people make is for new entrepreneurs, it's like, what do you do when you have a million options? And a lot of times the answer is 90% of people. Which also is part of why people fail is that they don't begin with the end in mind and personal development. One on one entrepreneurship. One on one. One on one is you. You gotta know what your end result is.

So, Dakota, if our listeners wanted to learn more about your company or get in touch with you, how could they do?

Yeah, so I'm super active on LinkedIn. I have been creating content on LinkedIn for the past year now. I have come to really appreciate LinkedIn because I can share all facets of my life. So it's mostly catered towards large commercial sustainability, but I have a wide network of people that relationships that I've built, people that I like to follow, topics that I like to discuss, including sustainability has four pillars. It just so happens that we run a commercial solar brokerage, but outside of environmental sustainability, you have human, social and business as the big primary four and then environmental being the fourth. As far as sustainability pillars, I'm super interested in all of those topics. And so LinkedIn's really my place to share that information. And if people want to get connected, follow along and just really have conversations with me. LinkedIn's my place to go. So I believe it's just LinkedIn.com in Dakotam alone. It's my URL.

Perfect. Thank you, Dakota, for coming on the show. And thank you everybody for listening to another episode of Failing to Success. Make sure to smash that subscribe button. I'm your host, Chad Galecki with Cosmic Web Design and Development, and we'll see you next time.