The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman

Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he spotted a cartoonishly huge bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The guy was coaching a woman through a set of cable rows, and the 18-year-old Colvin paused to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and lumbered over, Colvin got concerned. He figured he was about to be accused of ogling the man’s girlfriend—one of gym culture’s cardinal sins.

But the bodybuilder only wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that 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 on college; he wanted to devote himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin had 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 an intensely driven teen, he’d launched a series of one-man ventures that never quite panned out: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working daily 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 brawny new acquaintance wanted to steer him toward a different opportunity: “What do you know about solar?” he asked. When he wasn’t competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man said, he worked 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’d joined a “blitz”—solar-industry slang for a sales event in which packs of young men in crisp 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 of having made “crazy money”—as much as $20,000 in a single month—by convincing just a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

Colvin, a sinewy former high-school wrestler whose rounded silver eyeglasses give him a scholarly mien, was plenty intrigued. “I’m like, holy shit,” he recalls. “Like, yeah, awesome, I’ll look into it.”

A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime call with the bodybuilder’s manager at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Though his college semester had just begun, Colvin told Will he was thinking of dropping out: As someone who’d been shaped by hardship—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls pharmacy that was regularly burglarized by drug addicts—he was having a tough time relating to his classmates, most of whom hailed from cushier backgrounds than his own. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin says. Will pressed him to join his door-to-door sales crew, which he’d dubbed Seal Team Six. The work was a breeze, he said—just a simple matter of making homeowners aware they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling surplus electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin conveyed that message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions would dwarf his wages at Chipotle. “Behind every door is $5,000” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its 2023 gross revenue topped $1 billion.)

After a bit of mulling, Colvin declined the offer. He worried he’d regret quitting school without giving it a fair shake. But Will was a relentless recruiter. On a near-daily basis that fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by “solar bros” showing off their six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars. These influencers—tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence—stressed that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to swap their mundane lives for a place in the green economy’s forward trenches.