How to Select the Most Profitable Projects (and clients) for Your Business

In the last post, we discussed “the sales equation” that every solar company should maximize. As a reminder, here is the equation (Note, for this article the questions are applicable to both solar and geothermal companies):

“The Sales Equation” = High Gross Margin * Project Closes Quickly / Marketing Dollars Spent

There are 3 variables to the equation, two of them have to do with your marketing activities. Specifically, selecting the right customers. You can influence how fast projects close and spending the least marketing dollars by selecting the correct customers. Yes, you heard correctly, all customers are not created equal. Money is not money. High gross margins on a project and marketing dollars spent on a lead have a large overlap. The jobs with the highest margin are likely the ones that are managed the best from an operations perspective. Well run jobs are also the ones that tends to lead to the most referrals, and these are the cheapest leads.

In a future post we will discuss strategies on the best ways to create referral business from a project. For now, back to selecting the right customers. You need to find leads that are the cheapest, and that will close the fastest. These are highly qualified leads.

What does a highly qualified lead look like? These will apply to both solar and geothermal projects. They can take many forms, but it’s likely they’ll meet many of the following criteria:

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Renewable Energy is Making the Trades Sexy Again

Although I went to Babson College, a relatively conservative business school, I grew up in rural Maine working on farms and doing carpentry. I find huge value in craftsmanship and hard work and its why guys like Gerry Wagner are awesome to me.

Gerry came to HeatSpring’s IGSHPA geothermal training a few years back and is now an IGSHPA Accredited Trainer. He works through his company ESPCO Training to provide contract product training for manufacturers and distributors of solar thermal and geothermal products.

Gerry is proficient in both geothermal heating and cooling and solar thermal. After talking with Gerry, I realized he has installed the northern most Sunnovations pump package on his home.

Needless to say, Gerry is super cool, and has a great perspective on the industry. It’s great to speak with someone who has been in the trades his whole life, loves it, and is now applying his mastery to these new technologies. So, I decided to give Gerry a call and get his perspective on the industry.

Here is our conversation

Question – Chris : What’s your story in the renewable energy industry?

Answer – Gerry: I’ve been in the HVAC industry for 30 years. I got into it by necessity, I was looking for a job that would pay for college and I responded to an ad for a boiler company in New Jersey. At the time, I didn’t know a boiler from a furnace, from a washing machine.

In the process, I fell in love with the business, I read all the literature and I was lucky enough to get mentored from a bunch of older guys in our shop. Two years ago, I got burned out and turned my knowledge into training. I provided technical assistance and training with a manufactures rep. I wasn’t inspired anymore and really wanted to learn again. I felt I wasn’t learning anything new and just relying on the skills I learned when I was younger.

I first got involved in solar thermal and it sparked a new fire in me. I then got into geothermal. Geothermal has made me feel young again because I’m learning so much and its such an exciting technology.

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October 12th, 2011|Categories: Alumni Stories|Tags: , , , , |

How to Use Lean Startup Methods in Renewable Energy to Increase Profits

In the last few posts I’ve written about the process of expanding an existing construction company into renewable energy business and the single thing our marketing planwill focus on. If you’re new to the solar industry, go to the Solar 101 Reading list. It has free tools and articles on solar design and installation, sales and marketing, policy, finance and best practices.

The main metric I’m using is “profit per time invested”. I’m not as interested in increasing top line growth rather then profitability, especially as we get stared. My goal is to reach a profitability of 20% pre-tax. This seems very “doable” given the general construction industry has a profit margin of around 10%. How does this number impact the scale of the business? I can live well with a business that sells $500k a year in revenue providing me with $100k in profit. That is not a lot. This is a little under $48k revenue per month. That is 2 solar pv or geothermal jobs per month, equally 24 jobs a year. Or 4 to 5 solar thermal jobs per month or a combination of solar pv, geothermal and solar thermal. Very “doable”, especially if you look at the number of jobs that companies are doing and the small profit they’re making. From a marketing perspective, the key will be to understand what really is the cause of these jobs so that we can make sure the revenue will be stable and predictable. Most companies take jobs as they come and think its because of something they’ve done. When revenue decline they’re end up in the dark.

Many people  like to think big, going after larger and larger projects and getting into commercial work. Often times, they do this by suffering through slimmer and slimmer margins while having to deal with more and more headaches. I’m into thinking big, but by big, I think of net profit. Basically, I’d like to focus more on efficiency then growth of absolutely numbers. A company making 20% margin on $500k in revenue makes the same money as a company with a 5% margin and $2 MILLION in revenue. I’d argue it’s easier to increase efficiency then to grow revenue because you have more control over your own operations then the decisions of clients.

I’m a huge believe in the “crawl –> walk –> run” philosophy of business development and that’s why I spent the last two posts discussing my entire marketing strategy, the goals and metrics of each business task. Now I’m going to outline the operational strategy.

In order to run a super efficient service based business (all construction companies are service based) there are two critical components that need to be optimized. First, your marketing and sales and second the design and installation. On the marketing and sales side this mean decreasing the number of leads you’re getting but making sure that more of them close. Again, you’re goal should to be getting 5 to 10 leads month and have a 50% close rate, rather then sifting through and doing site visits on 50 leads, only to have 3% close. Remember this, dealing with leads takes time and is expensive.

Enough about marketing, for this article let’s focus on operation of running the business.

Many people have been looking for a connection between clean energy and technology for some time now and there aren’t many, other then the goal of “world-changing” technology. However, I believe I’ve found a similarity that can be used to increase operational profitability of small clean energy companies. In tech startups, there tends to be two teams of people. One group is focused on the customer and the other on developing the product. Here’s the reason for this. In most new tech companies, not only does the team not know exactly what the product will be, but they don’t know who the exact customer will be either. So, the customer development team is always performing tests with the product to determine who the customer is and what they will pay for the product. While the product development team is tweaking the product to see if a certain customer will pay for it. I’m not a tech guy, so I might have missed a few things. But to my understand these are called Lean Startup principles.

We can apply a similar model to the sales/marketing and operations activities within a small clean energy company. NOT that the sales/marketing team don’t know who the customer is and the operations team doesn’t know what the product should be. In clean energy both of these variables are known. The logic applies to how the teams are organized so that it a has a huge impact on their effectiveness and the profitability of the company. To display this, let’s review how the “traditional” organization structure of most construction companies is focused.

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11 Tips for Proper Manual J Calculations for Geothermal Contractors

Many geothermal and general contractors pay a subcontractor to perform Manual J calculations when its required.  Accurate heating and cooling loads are absolutely critical to properly designing a geothermal system (See 4 Steps to Designing a Geothermal System) and according to Ryan Carda creator of Loop Links, its the number one more common mistake that geothermal designers make in the design process. If you’re new to geothermal, download the geothermal survival kit to get a better understanding of how the technology works.

In many states, it is now a requirement to perform a manual J calculation to pull a permit for any HVAC job. If you are a general contractor or geothermal installer it will pay to do your own Manual J calculations because so much of the job depends upon accurate loads.  Continue reading to learn the 11 tips to creating the best Manual J calculations for your job.

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Designing a “Sellable” Solar (or Geothermal) Company – Part 2

In my last post, I wrote about my marketing plan for starting a renewable energy company that will be an offshoot of an existing construction company in the great state of Maine. Now, I’m going to discuss how we’ll be setting up the marketing and sales engine that will drive the businesses. Some have asked if I’m nervous about posting this information (as if I’m giving away some sort of “trade secrets”). My answer is absolutely not. Not only do I think it can help other solar and geothermal contractors dealing with similar issues but if anything it will help me more. Writing down the plan down forces me to focus the idea and ask myself if it makes sense.

In this article I will discuss how I plan on creating the processes and metrics necessary to optimize the marketing, sales, design and installation process of a new company that will sell geothermal, solar pv, solar thermal products. Read below for the full article and if you have any questions or comments on the article please feel free to leave them in the comment section, email me at cwilliams@heatspring.com or ask a question on HeatSpring’s facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/heatspring. Enjoy!

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August 22nd, 2011|Categories: Solar|Tags: , , , , , |