I know in a lot of these articles we’ve focused on the positive aspects of running a solar business.

Bumping sales, generating solar leads, automating processes… It’s important to operate from a positive mindset, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of potential negatives.

What happens when the worst case scenario occurs?

What are the habits and mistakes that allow it to happen? And are you prepared if it does?

So today we’ll touch on the fastest way you can fail in your solar business so you know what NOT to do if you want to see your business expand.

The reason for this is that our brains are better at finding problems than solutions.

But if you already know all the problems, then it’s easier to flip them and find the solutions.

1- Following the opinions of people who don’t have the results you want

Think back to when you first became an entrepreneur.

How many people told you it was a waste of time?

That you were better off sticking with the corporate 9-to-5 route?

Just because someone offers you their opinion doesn’t make it valuable.

If a homeless guy on the street came up to you and told you that your strategy for producing exclusive solar leads was garbage… would you listen to him?

Of course not.

But very often in life we take the advice of people who have little to no clue about our industry.

I’m not telling you to be rude to these people. But never seriously consider the opinions of someone on a subject they have no experience in. This includes your friends and family.

They might think they’re looking out for your best interests – but respectfully, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Be your own council. Trust your own opinions and advice.

If you’re going to listen to people, make sure they’re where YOU want to be.

If you want to get a better bang for your buck from solar lead providers, then listen to people who are already doing that.

Want better-performing solar reps?

Find and listen to someone with a sales rep dream team.

Listening to people who don’t have the results you want is the quickest way to ending up with those results.

And a lot of the time, that means being broke.

Reason being you’ll wind up implementing inefficient, misguided, or flat out wrong information.

The quickest way to success?

Find people who’ve proven what they do works, and ignore everyone else. 

2- Waiting to do your work later

Entrepreneurs love to brag they’re all about the hustle lifestyle.

But truth is, it’s not as easy as some people make it out to be.

There’ll be days when you just don’t want to work.

Maybe you gotta set up social media marketing for your solar business.

Or revamp your training process. Or recruit more reps. And it’ll just seem like too much work. So what do you do? 

You put it off ‘til tomorrow, when you hope you’ll feel better.

The best way to never get something done is to put it off.

Newsflash: that’s also the best way to get overwhelmed. Because if you delay a task once, what’s stopping you from doing it again? And again?

And again, until your solar business is starting to sink and you’re buried under an avalanche of to-do items?

Train yourself to take care of things as soon as they come to you.

Execute your follow up with solar leads on schedule. Revise your marketing strategy the first time it’s brought up.

You’ll be 100x more productive than if you were to push it for later. And the more you keep up that momentum, the easier it is to maintain.

Now, don’t make the mistake of thinking this means you should never take a break.

Burning out is a very real risk and sinks just as many businesses as procrastination does.

But those breaks shouldn’t come at the expense of your work.

You should be scheduling them for when you’ve taken care of everything that needs to be done.

The more you put off a task, the longer you allow it to suck up your attention even when you’re not working on it.

Think – how many times have you put something off, only to spend the rest of the day thinking about it or dreading having to get it done later?

This reduces your focus and quality of work on the things that you’re actually taking care of.

3- Collecting information without executing on it

A lot of people get stuck in this mode.

It’s easy to take a dozen courses on how to generate 500 exclusive solar leads a day.

But if you never actually ACT on the information, then what good is it doing you?

And that’s assuming the info you’re gathering is right.

If you spend more time gathering info on solar lead generation without implementing any of it, how will you know what actually works and what doesn’t?

Which means the more you gather without acting, the more you risk internalizing objectively bad strategies.

If you had a map to a treasure chest with $10 million inside and you never followed the map, you don’t have $10 million. All you have is a worthless piece of paper.

Information is only worth something once you apply it. Until then, you’re just spinning your wheels and burning cash.

4- Quitting after failing

Nowadays you see all these entrepreneurs bragging about how perfect their lives are.

They post photos of themselves on Instagram with their smoking hot partner in front of neon-colored Lamborghinis and insist all YOU gotta do to get the same lifestyle is “hustle.” 

Hell, you may even think that my life is perfect.

When I say that Better Earth pulls in hundreds of solar leads a day, or that we do over 1,200 deals a month – that probably gives you the idea that I’m doing everything perfectly.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Fact is, failure is part of the process. It’s inevitable. We all make mistakes to a greater or lesser degree.

But people will rarely post about their failures because they think that’ll compromise their public image.

In reality, they only got where they are because they learned how to fail the right way. And if you want a 7-8 figure solar business, you’ll have to do the same.

I’ve made plenty of mistakes as a solarpreneur. Some of them were pretty big, and cost me more sales and solar leads than I’d like to admit.

But the reason I’m now running a 9 figure solar company instead of looking for greener pastures is I learned how to leverage those mistakes.

Understand that the path to success isn’t a straight line.

Roll with the punches and push through the hard times. If you want your dreams to come true and your vision to be realized, they won’t hurt nearly as bad as the idea of giving up.

5- Blaming others for your problems

When you don’t take responsibility for your actions and you blame someone else, guess who you’re giving the power to?

To another person!

Say your team is burning through solar leads without closing a lot of deals and you blame them for it.

What you’re effectively saying to them is “Your actions have more of an impact on this business than mine do.”

Obviously that’s not true. But if you act like it is only when it’s most convenient to you, then so will those around you.

This is why business owners who constantly lay blame at their team’s feet always feel like everyone’s them or doing things they shouldn’t be doing.

That is not the problem. The problem is they haven’t taken enough responsibility over those people and their actions.

Remember, YOU are the CEO. The captain. The leader. This is YOUR business.

Thus, everything that goes on in it is YOUR responsibility.

And as the leader, you absolutely must accept this responsibility. That’s the only way your team will respect you and your business can truly succeed

6- Expecting others to save you

One of the fastest ways to fail in business is to wait for other people to hand success over to you.

If you’re paying through the nose to solar lead providers and still struggling to close more than four deals a month, no one’s gonna walk through the door with the solution. YOU need to take initiative.

Or your business will fail.

You are the captain of your own life and your own circumstances.

Everyone has their own problems, and the faster you realize that you are the one responsible to solve your own problems, then the happier you’ll be.

This might sound simple and obvious, but it’s very important.

When we’re at a loss for a solution, some people have a tendency to freeze up and just hope the answer will fall out of the sky.

The world doesn’t work like that. Your business needs more qualified solar leads to survive?

Then you’d better get busy either finding them or applying to jobs.

7- Just doing comfortable things

The easiest way for your business to stay stagnant is for you to stay comfortable with your circumstances.

All growth happens outside the comfort zone. That’s not some stupid platitude.

It’s a proven fact of life.

This goes not just for you, but your reps as well.

If you’ve got a solar rep who makes $50,000 in one month and then lays back for three months because they feel they “earned it”, your business will stay small.

Your reps should always be pushing to one-up themselves.

No matter how well they did yesterday. And you should always be pushing YOURself to get your business running more efficiently. Find a way to increase your close rate.

Look at social media marketing strategies for your solar business that drive more engagement.

Figure out how to optimize your sales process.

This is how businesses make the jump from staying small to runaway growth – by learning to thrive outside their comfort zone.

8- Tolerating mediocrity

If you want excellent results, then you gotta make excellence a way of life.

And not just for yourself, but for your business and everyone in it as well.

This means not tolerating anyone showing up to meetings or drills late.

Not tolerating falling short of your goals. Not tolerating half-hearted follow up campaigns to your solar leads.

Getting accustomed to functioning on a level higher than you’re used to can be a pain at first.

But once you’re running on that higher level, it’ll be easier to produce higher-quality results with less effort than it’d normally take.

9- Breaking your commitments and promises

This is how you lose friends, partners, and customers.

And once it starts, it becomes the real cancer of your business.

If you say you’ll do something, then come hell or high water you need to do it! Don’t make the other person wrong or change your mind at the last minute.

Your own integrity and honor is more important than any immediate benefit you could get from breaking a commitment or lying about something.

If you have a meeting with your head of marketing to revise the social media marketing plan for your solar business and you bail, they’ll mentally prepare themselves for you to bail on the next one.

Over time, that single seed of doubt can grow enough to the point they stop respecting you and trusting your word. And your business will suffer for it.

All it takes is one time for you to break a promise for people to start doubting you.

Even if you never do it again, they’ll always remember that one time you didn’t follow through. So who’s to say you won’t do it again?

10- Stopping the strategies that are working

Testing new strategies is important. But it should never come at the cost of a successful strategy.

When you’re getting a lot of sales or exclusive solar leads from a source, the best way to stop expansion is to pause that source so you can test something else.

You’re always free to test new things but NEVER STOP SUCCESSFUL ACTIONS.

It’s up to you as the CEO to figure out what the successful actions in the business are and keep them up.

Despite what anyone says or wants to comment about it.

If something works, it works. You can test new ways to improve it, but never, ever stop it.
Zain Jan