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How I Made -$563 on a Solar Deal
40 Plays5 years ago
How do you make negative dollars on an account? People out here are making 20 to 30 grand on single counts. So how can someone go to making ridiculous money to making negative on an account? In this episode, I wanna go through the mistakes I made with this particular account and hopefully help you guys avoid these same mistakes.
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Transcript
From Financial Struggles to Solarpreneur Success
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
00:00:08
Speaker
My name is Taylor Armstrong.
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Speaker
I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fell.
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Speaker
I teach you how to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro, and closing more deals.
00:00:31
Speaker
What is a solarpreneur, you might ask?
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A solarpreneur is a new breed of solar pro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery, and you are about to become one.
00:00:43
Speaker
What's up, solarpreneurs?
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Taylor Armstrong back with another episode here to make your life as a solar professional more profitable, easier to do, and more enjoyable.
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So if I can do even a fraction of that, you're welcome.
00:00:58
Speaker
Just kidding.
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Speaker
But really, that's what we're aiming to do.
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And hopefully we make it a lot easier for you to close more deals, get more referrals and have success in this awesome industry.
Valuable Training Resources for Solar Professionals
00:01:11
Speaker
Today, I want to basically tell a little story, something that happened to me recently that I think a lot of you, the listeners, can learn some lessons from.
00:01:21
Speaker
A big mistake I made.
00:01:23
Speaker
So I'm going to go through that story.
00:01:24
Speaker
But first, before I get to that, just wanted to give a shout out to my boys over at Noxstar University.
00:01:32
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If you haven't checked out,
00:01:35
Speaker
Noxstar, it is a six-week program I'm going through right now.
00:01:40
Speaker
It's really cool.
00:01:41
Speaker
They have a competition for six weeks.
00:01:44
Speaker
They put you in a seeding round.
00:01:46
Speaker
Then they do weekly trainings.
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So if you're looking for some extra training for you or your team, great resource those guys have over there.
00:01:55
Speaker
I'm going through it and also just wanted to throw out a little teaser.
00:01:59
Speaker
We are also working on something super exciting that has to do with training.
00:02:04
Speaker
I can't spill the details yet, but is going to be releasing very soon here and I'm super stoked when it does to go over more details, but can't say anything.
00:02:17
Speaker
I want to.
00:02:20
Speaker
Anyway, just a couple quick shout outs for those that are looking for more trainings.
00:02:25
Speaker
Go check out Noxstar.
Navigating Financial Losses and Mistakes
00:02:28
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So the story I have, what's going on is this is basically just to illustrate to you guys what can go wrong with an account.
00:02:37
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The title of this episode is called How I Made Negative $563 on a Solar Install.
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And I'm in San Diego, so especially people that are familiar with the California market, you're probably thinking like, what?
00:02:52
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How do you make negative dollars on an account?
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Like people out here are making...
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thousand two thousand a kilowatt ridiculous amounts I mean guys are making 20 30 grand on single accounts even I've heard okay so how can someone go to make making ridiculous money to making negative on an account I couldn't believe it when it happened to me and I don't think I'm the first person that it's happened to so I want to go through the mistakes I made with this particular account and
00:03:24
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and hopefully help you guys avoid these same mistakes.
00:03:28
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So here's what happened.
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First of all, this was back about seven months ago.
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I get an online lead, which if you're not running online leads, why not?
00:03:41
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You should be running online leads.
00:03:42
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You should be knocking.
00:03:43
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You should be getting leads from all sources.
00:03:47
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That's for another episode, though.
00:03:49
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I was running online leads, though.
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I get a lead.
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It's a solid lead.
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I go...
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set it up for next day appointment.
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I go, we're sitting outside, I find out it's actually a home that hasn't been moved into yet.
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The dude had been renting it out and he was gonna move in with his family in the next few months is what he told me at the time.
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Okay, unfortunately it didn't work out exactly how this guy was saying.
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But I ended up closing the deal, closed it a little bit higher, so I thought I was going to make an awesome commission on it.
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But here's the kicker with this account.
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This guy, before he moved in, he was doing a ton of remodeling on the house, and he wanted to get a new roof along with his solar.
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And at the time, I had just started working for the dealer that I'm with now.
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I wasn't super familiar with their processes and their roofers.
00:04:49
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I didn't know exactly how you did a deal with a roof over there.
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This is the first deal, first roof-solar combo I'd done with the new dealer.
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So I call...
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our office and I kind of ask them how to do this and I'm in the heat of the moment which you guys should all try to close deals as quick you know quick as possible don't want to leave them hanging don't want to leave loose threads so I'm like all right I'm just gonna get this closed but tell me about what to price it at so we can be good to throw a roof in there
00:05:23
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Because here we just, even if we don't have to necessarily add a roof into the financing, just price it high enough and we can pay for a roof with the commission.
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This is what we do a lot of times.
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Just price it high, make so much that you can pay for a roof with it.
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So I price it pretty high thinking, okay, I'll be good.
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I can pay for a roof with this and I can figure out the details later, right?
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And we were working with a roofer, his name was Juan, and he got us really good prices on roofs.
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So especially knowing about this guy, I'm like, okay, yeah, Juan's going to hook us up with an awesome deal.
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I'm going to have plenty in the commission to pay for all this.
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We'll be good to go.
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So fast forward several months down the road, Juan does the roof.
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and then the installer goes to install up there and they put up the system they actually do the install but the first problem that we encounter with this account is I get a call from the customer actually after they had already installed the solar they didn't do a full installation which I'll get to in a second
00:06:32
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They did a personal install and I get a call from the customer and the customer says, hey, Taylor, I see that you didn't put gutters on with my roof.
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You guys need to come finish up the gutters.
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And I'm like, OK, yeah, I'll look into that.
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So I call Juan, our roofer, and he says, oh, I don't do gutters.
00:06:54
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The gutters that they had up there, they're rotting.
00:06:57
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They're just causing all sorts of problems when I was trying to do their new roof, so I had to take them off.
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So yeah, they're in the dumpster now.
00:07:04
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We can't use those gutters.
00:07:05
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And I don't do
Challenges in Installation and Communication
00:07:06
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gutters.
00:07:06
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That's a separate thing.
00:07:09
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So I'm like, okay.
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So I actually don't know.
00:07:12
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Maybe some of you listeners can tell me, is that normally included with roofs?
00:07:18
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Because I actually don't even know.
00:07:20
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But I took Quan's word with it.
00:07:21
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I'm like, okay.
00:07:22
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So I called a customer in, say, Mr. His name was, he was like Middle Eastern, so he had a tricky name.
00:07:33
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So I just call him Z. I'm like, hey, Z. They actually didn't do your gutters because that's not included, so that's going to be separate.
00:07:40
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Do you want to pay for it?
00:07:42
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And at that point, when the customer heard me even say that he was going to have to pay for something, this guy flipped the lid.
00:07:49
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He's like, are you kidding me?
00:07:50
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That is included with a roofing project.
00:07:53
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That is part of the project.
00:07:55
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I am not, throwing some expletives in there.
00:07:58
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I am not paying for a roof.
00:08:00
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I'm not paying extra to put gutters in with my project.
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Just super furious, not listening to me.
00:08:09
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Wouldn't have anything to do with it.
00:08:12
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And the good news is that he had solar on his roof.
00:08:17
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But what ended up happening is we did a partial install on his home.
00:08:24
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And with his other projects he was doing, he was adding like a wall around his property.
00:08:30
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And I don't know the full details on this, but the wall that he was building somehow interfered with us being able to put just the box for the inverter down by his electric panel.
00:08:42
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So we couldn't finish the installation because we were waiting for his other contractors to finish this wall.
00:08:49
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So the good news is he already had solar up there.
00:08:51
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So in my head, I'm thinking, okay, well, he can't cancel or anything.
00:08:55
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He has solar up there, so he can't cancel the project or say he doesn't want it anymore, even though that's actually what he's threatening to do, saying I'm going to cancel if you guys don't finish this.
00:09:06
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So it's coming from all that, but then the issue we ran into is we couldn't complete this installation.
00:09:13
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He needed to finish the other wall.
00:09:17
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So what happened is he started using this as leverage, basically.
00:09:21
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He knew that he needed to finish the wall.
00:09:24
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So his side now was, oh, I'm not going to finish the wall until you guys come get my gutters or come fix my gutters.
00:09:32
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So we're just locked in, essentially a stalemate.
00:09:35
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I mean, we had leverage against him because the solar is up there.
00:09:39
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But his leverage was, I'm not putting this wall in until you guys, or I'm not repairing this wall, whatever needed to be done, until you guys come and put the gutters up.
00:09:50
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So it turned into just a big nightmare.
00:09:55
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the other issue is we'd already actually paid one to do the roof so one is paid he's happy he's taking care of in the meantime our you know dealer is fronted all this money to pay one and rather than just being locked into the stalemate our office made the decision text to just go ahead and pay for these
00:10:22
Speaker
gutters so we hire another contractor we pay the gutters they come up and do it that's that and then i didn't really think anything of it until i see in my bank account i see finally after six seven months finally i'm getting paid on this account about freaking time it's been so long been months and months and months which we all hate waiting for installs we all hate waiting to get paid on installs sucks
00:10:52
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have to wait but finally I see it come in commission for Z and then I look at it and this time it says 300 I think it says 300 something I'm like oh my gosh 300 bucks that's it so you're probably asking wait didn't you say you got paid a negative amount on this account so yeah it gets worse
00:11:19
Speaker
what happened was I got paid 300 first but then I as time goes on about two weeks after I got paid this 300 bucks we get another message from the customer saying hey you guys forgot to do you didn't do the back part of my gutters you only did the front you need to come back and do it and our team
00:11:44
Speaker
schedules this and by the way I didn't really at this point I didn't really know what was going on behind the scenes so I'm lack of communication and I'll get to the mistakes after this but definitely lack communication our team just goes ahead and schedules the back gutters to be done not really thinking much of it and we get this customer taken care of but guess what we get a bill from the contractor
00:12:12
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We paid, I think, $1,500 for the gutters, which again, I thought all this was included.
00:12:20
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I thought all this was paid.
00:12:21
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I'm like, okay, $300, this is ridiculous.
00:12:25
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But then it gets worse.
00:12:27
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We end up owing extra money on the account.
00:12:32
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And yeah, that's why I say negative $500, whatever it was.
00:12:38
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563 is because what happened was after we paid this contract to do the back cutters yeah I am being now charged back money plus some and this isn't even all that we owed on it I mean luckily our office is kind enough to front some of the money but there's faults on both sides okay so more look moral of the story there were a ton of mistakes made
00:13:06
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And I'm going to break down a few of them.
00:13:09
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And if you have a story like this, I'd love to hear it.
00:13:12
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Shoot me a message on Facebook, Instagram, whatever.
00:13:15
Speaker
Shoot me a message.
00:13:16
Speaker
Let me know if you've had anything like this happen to you before.
00:13:21
Speaker
But first of all, number one, know how much a roof is going to cost you, all right?
00:13:26
Speaker
Like I mentioned in the beginning, I had no idea that the roof was going to be...
00:13:32
Speaker
Well, as much as it was, this one was more than I was thinking.
00:13:37
Speaker
We were using Juan, our roofer.
00:13:39
Speaker
Okay, and here's the second mistake made is make sure you're working with quality contractors.
00:13:45
Speaker
Okay,
Key Takeaways for Solar Professionals
00:13:47
Speaker
because Juan, he was a great guy.
00:13:49
Speaker
But what we find out later, we actually found out Juan wasn't even licensed.
00:13:54
Speaker
Okay, that's why we're getting such good prices on his roofs.
00:14:00
Speaker
This guy wasn't even licensed.
00:14:02
Speaker
And maybe you're fine working without a licensed roofer.
00:14:07
Speaker
Probably not in most cases.
00:14:11
Speaker
But if you are, or whatever the case may be, make sure that customer is in some type of agreement with the roofer.
00:14:20
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And whatever you do, whether it's you working independently or your company or your office, make sure you're setting these things in place.
00:14:28
Speaker
What's the agreement?
00:14:29
Speaker
What's the standard of quality they need to work with?
00:14:32
Speaker
What can they do?
00:14:33
Speaker
What can't they do?
00:14:35
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Because in our case, Juan, he just ripped off these gutters, threw them in the dumpster.
00:14:40
Speaker
But if we would have had that set in place, what can you work on?
00:14:43
Speaker
What can't you work on?
00:14:44
Speaker
If we would have had that agreement set in place between him and the customer, then it wouldn't cause an issue.
00:14:49
Speaker
Because guess what?
00:14:50
Speaker
That would have been Juan's issue.
00:14:53
Speaker
He would have been dealing with the angry customer saying, you didn't do my gutters.
00:14:58
Speaker
But what did we do?
00:14:58
Speaker
We just paid it directly out of our profits.
00:15:02
Speaker
And so we had to deal with all these issues because the whole time, I mean, basically the customer hired us to do the work.
00:15:10
Speaker
We just outsourced it, right?
00:15:12
Speaker
So set some type of agreement in place.
00:15:14
Speaker
What is your roofer going to do?
00:15:16
Speaker
What are the expectations?
00:15:18
Speaker
You can't just rip off the gutters and then get blamed for it, right?
00:15:22
Speaker
Have that in place.
00:15:24
Speaker
Have it in place what's going to happen.
00:15:27
Speaker
Okay, and the fourth mistake that was made, make sure your communication is super clear.
00:15:34
Speaker
Again, I mentioned that we had a lot of things being paid for, a lot of things being scheduled that weren't clear, and a lot of it's my fault because after six, seven months of the same account, for me, it got to the point where I'm just like, whatever, just do whatever.
00:15:49
Speaker
I'm not going to look at it if it gets installed.
00:15:52
Speaker
great out here where I'm at I mean I'm used to a month one to two month installs so after that starts getting pretty pretty what's the word redundant yeah pretty redundant stuff to sit and look at these accounts that aren't going through
00:16:10
Speaker
So make sure you have communication and don't be like me.
00:16:14
Speaker
Be patient with it and always look at what's going on.
00:16:17
Speaker
Because I didn't really look at the updates that were happening with this deal because I just got so tired of it.
00:16:24
Speaker
But it's important to go back and see what happened with it.
00:16:27
Speaker
See what updates were left by your team.
00:16:29
Speaker
We use Asana personally.
00:16:32
Speaker
Just like a...
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, you know, projects, management.
00:16:36
Speaker
I mean, use it for a lot of things.
00:16:38
Speaker
But in Asana, our team members would basically go and leave comments.
00:16:42
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Hey, we talked to this contractor.
00:16:43
Speaker
This happened.
00:16:45
Speaker
This went down.
00:16:47
Speaker
And I didn't really look much at what was paid, what happened.
00:16:51
Speaker
So you need to be looking at your team communication, whatever you're using.
00:16:55
Speaker
Make sure you're in the loop.
00:16:57
Speaker
And make sure your team isn't scheduling stuff without your...
00:17:01
Speaker
you know permission and I I think I did give him permission but again I was just sick and tired of it so look at what's happening and then you as the independent contractor which most you should be highly recommend you being an independent contractor
00:17:18
Speaker
We're solopreneurs, right?
00:17:19
Speaker
We're building our own businesses, so we're taking control of all this.
00:17:23
Speaker
But if it's not you, have an assistant or have someone that's keeping track of all this stuff because you can't just authorize everything and not know what's been paid, what hasn't been paid.
00:17:33
Speaker
Okay, and message me.
00:17:37
Speaker
I know some people have made like spreadsheets to keep track of adders on deals and extra costs because the last thing you want to happen is go negative on a deal like this.
00:17:49
Speaker
And then the last thing is just figure out a resolution with everything.
00:17:56
Speaker
I talked about how we're in a stalemate with this customer.
00:18:03
Speaker
Things didn't really come to a resolution, but figure out a solution on both sides.
00:18:08
Speaker
I was sick of talking to the customer too.
00:18:09
Speaker
I didn't want to hear from them.
00:18:12
Speaker
But yeah, you need to be willing to have those tough conversations with your customers.
00:18:16
Speaker
Admit when you've made mistakes and then come to a resolution.
00:18:20
Speaker
Okay, so those are just a couple things I've learned and still working on being better.
00:18:26
Speaker
With complicated accounts, you got to pull out all the guns.
00:18:30
Speaker
You got to be ready for the long fight.
00:18:33
Speaker
Okay, because there's some complicated accounts out here, whether they need main panel upgrades, whether they need...
00:18:39
Speaker
Roof work and a lots of people Especially out here now are adding in AC units They're adding in maybe even paint jobs Before I talked to guys at companies doing all sorts of things adding in insulation So point is keep track of all this stuff.
00:18:58
Speaker
Okay, depending on how your office is set up and
00:19:03
Speaker
very likely that you got to keep track of this and even if your company is organized even if you have project managers managers that are on top of everything I would suggest still just being in the loop okay because that's another thing I know for me I've been hit with adders and things that our back offices have has done that aren't weren't right either where if I would have been keeping track then things like that wouldn't happen
00:19:30
Speaker
Okay, so just wanted to share this story.
00:19:32
Speaker
Let me know if something like that's happened to you.
00:19:34
Speaker
Would love to hear it.
00:19:36
Speaker
Love to learn from other people's mistakes.
00:19:38
Speaker
But don't get hit with a negative commission.
00:19:42
Speaker
It is the worst feeling in the world.
00:19:45
Speaker
And it's definitely a momentum killer.
00:19:47
Speaker
So let me know what you thought of this.
00:19:49
Speaker
Let me know if you liked hearing from the mistake.
00:19:52
Speaker
And with that, learn from it.
00:19:54
Speaker
Let's move forward and let's crush it this month.
00:19:57
Speaker
Peace, solopreneurs.
Promoting the Podcast and Additional Resources
00:20:00
Speaker
Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode.
00:20:03
Speaker
I know when I got into the industry, I had almost no resources like this.
00:20:07
Speaker
So I hope this show is helping you get the success you deserve.
00:20:11
Speaker
If you found value from anything in this episode today, think about someone who can benefit so you and I can help people fulfill their potential.
00:20:19
Speaker
Zig Ziglar said if you help enough people get what they want, you will get what you want.
00:20:24
Speaker
So I promise by sharing this it will help you grow and improve.
00:20:27
Speaker
The value bombs on today's show will take you one step closer to success, but it's always to the degree that you apply and execute the principles.
00:20:36
Speaker
I've spent the last few years interviewing the top solar experts and helping other reps and businesses discover their potential.
00:20:43
Speaker
If you want more help achieving your goals, then I put together an exclusive video training on three hacks that helped me close multiple deals a week while knocking less than 10 hours.
00:20:53
Speaker
And who doesn't want that?
00:20:54
Speaker
So go check it out at webclass.solarpreneurs.com.
00:20:58
Speaker
Once again, that's webclass.solarpreneurs.com to get exclusive access to the training and take your skills to the next level.