Herve Billiet (00:00)
Hello everyone to another episode of What Solar Installers Need to Know. So I had the great pleasure to invite Geoff Mirkin to the podcast and Geoff, you're the former owner, co-owner of Solar Energy World, residential solar installer in Maryland.

Geoff Mirkin (00:15)
Correct.

Herve Billiet (00:15)
So let's go back in time and let's speak a little bit how you kind of got started in the solar industry. And I think a lot of other solar CEOs and managers listening to the podcast can learn from you about how you were able to grow a solar company to actually significant size. And I'll add an immediate disclaimer so people know that my solar company, Ipsun Solar, we were competing head on with you guys.

And we were in Maryland, we were in Virginia, Maryland, D.C. So we were operating in the same area. So we've been competing for many years. And so bring us back to the time where you started. Like, why did you start and how did it start?

Geoff Mirkin (00:52)
Sure, well first of all, you were very well respected in solar business, I enjoyed competing against you guys. But first, one of the biggest things I learned from all the business I've been involved with is partnership. I tell my kids all the time, whoever you surround yourself as friends with is so important, whether it's friends or future spouse. And I learned partners to be with and not to be with. But just to give you a quick history of how I got all started in solar. I was floundering in college, I kind of went to a

Herve Billiet (00:58)
Same here.

Geoff Mirkin (01:19)
couple different colleges and didn't know what I wanted to do. My dad was a Harvard grad, so if you didn't go to Ivy League and get a master's or a doctrine, you weren't going to be able to eat. But anyway, I bounced around and a good friend of mine who became a partner at Solar Energy World, Tope Lala owned a decent roofing company back in 1990. And, you know, I was kind of floundering again in college and I decided, let me get into the roofing business, make some money, you know, I

Herve Billiet (01:29)
Bye!

Mm-hmm.

Geoff Mirkin (01:45)
waiting tables, doing different stuff, working at men's Bloomingdale's department store. And I need to make more money and have something a little more serious. I got in the business not knowing I'd be in it for long time. But I got pretty good right away. I understood what customers wanted and delivered a product for them. And so I quickly ascended up to the business. was sales manager, was top salesman, then I was sales manager, then I was regional manager. And then from, you know,

1990 or around 2000 as we grew the company quite a bit. Tope came to me and said, listen, you and your current partner who was kind of running one office, you guys are doing a great job. I'd love to give you the opportunity to buy one of the locations. I was like, you know what? It's great. Let's do it. So after several talks, we decided to do it. And like I said, he and I, my partner, we work really well together when we work for someone else. But when he was now a co-owner and

He had the ultimate say. Everything changed. Work habits, our communication. But that didn't happen for about five years. So from 2000 to 2005, 2006, we had tremendous years. We had great growth. He worked a lot, almost too much. I mean, this guy came home from his honeymoon early to go back to work. So I'd have conversations with him like three, four years in. I'm like, listen, you got a family now. You need to take more time away and kind of.

there's enough time in a day you can work and enjoy your family and what have you. So he kind of took that too literally. And then all of sudden he's working from 70, 80 hours a week to like 10 or 15. So you know metrics, know, if your leads are down, you know, I was in charge of sales and finance. He was a install and a marketing guy. So if our leads were down 8%, guess what? The sales were down 8%. So there came a time where we were still doing pretty well, but I'm like, listen, we got to scale our salaries back.

We're taking distribution that's just not there. He's like, I'm not taking a pay cut. I'm like, what's on a pay cut? It's not commensurate with what we're doing. So those were the conversations. So in 2008, was like, just, we peaked and we were kind of coming back down a little bit and I just, we didn't get along. We were in each other's weddings and we were at each other's throats. We were supposed to have two meetings every week and that became one meeting a week and then we'd speak once a month.

And that's not a healthy relationship. So at the end of 2008, he bought me out and it allowed me to look into solar. And so I knew that Obama and the administration were going to uncap the tax credit. know, that was, everyone was pretty well aware of that. And I was looking for a new business, but I also wanted solar in my home. in, well, I sold it to him in November of 2008. And so in February of 2009,

kind of looking around what to do next and I invited a couple solar companies to come out and give me an estimate. we had an in-depth presentation when we sold roofing, windows siding. We were there an hour and a half, two hours. It was a heavy, intensive presentation where at the end of the presentation we're asking for a yes, you know, right? So kind of like solar. So these guys came out and they were in and out of my house in seven minutes,

Herve Billiet (04:41)
and

Geoff Mirkin (04:46)
10 minutes. You know, like some of them wouldn't even come out and show up. You know, I went through several people that never even came to my home. And I tried to get five estimates. I only got three. They were all, let's just say it, unimpressive. No one even gave me a quote on the spot. They emailed it to me. They mailed it to me. They called back with a quote. So that was a light bulb for me. I was like, I got to get in the solar business. ⁓ Yeah.

Herve Billiet (05:08)
You saw an opportunity like you could do

it.

Geoff Mirkin (05:11)
Just like with you with Sunvoy, it made sense. You kind of look for something for yourself and ended up turning into what it is now. So it was like so clear. So further take it back, take it like a month later, there's a convention. was kind of, I what was called, Renewable Energy World or something like that. It wasn't SPI, but it was one of the first like solar conferences. So I grabbed Tope, who's my...

was my partner at Solar Energy World and Al, who is Tope's neighbor, is a commercial electrical contractor. I said, let's go out to Vegas, they're gamblers. I said, let's go out to Vegas. You can gamble if you want little bit, but I want to learn about solar. And if you guys like it, I think we should get involved and get into the business. We all shared certain strengths that it made sense, right? So, you know, then I tell my wife, I'm not working, I have no job, I'm not doing anything. And I'm like, you know, I'm going to Vegas for a solar conference. She's like,

Okay. I'm like, no, I really am. It's a solar conference. It's something I want to do. We've talked about it. She's like in Vegas. like, yeah, I didn't choose where it is. That's where it is. So bottom line is we went out to Vegas. We sat through workshop after workshop and we, no offense to people that were in the industry, but we, we looked at what, who was running these companies. had a, This woman was teaching a sales, solar one-on-one sales, how to like do a presentation in the home. And again, the light bulb again, went off.

And so after three days of doing that, was, I mean, we were working, it was eight, 10 hours a day in these workshops. All three of us were like, let's do it. So we put a business plan together and we launched in June of 2009. So 2009 and then our exit was November of 24. So we had a pretty big run for 15 years.

Herve Billiet (06:33)
Mm.

So how did you go from like having the idea, starting a business, then you need your first customers? I guess you were your own first customer.

Geoff Mirkin (06:54)
Yeah, so Al is a commercial electrical contractor. He has an office in Bladensburg Heights, you know, like kind of PG County, Maryland. And so we put like a 12 KW on his building. That was the first job we did. And it took like two weeks, two weeks. mean, at the end we were doing that in a day easily, but it was a two week project, right? So that was the first client. ⁓ him. And I was a football and basketball coach. So when we launched,

we're very good at lead generation, by the way. We were very good at lead generation. We're very good at sales and the presentation. And so I just use my own network. I sent a massive email to parents and friends, like the people I coached, and got several leads in business that way. that was kind of, we kind of turned the faucet on pretty quickly in the lead department.

Herve Billiet (07:40)
But let's speak about that facet, I think currently in the soul industry, people are still hungry for leads and then they try all types of different things, right? So over the lifetime that you've been with Solar Energy World, what are some different lead generation tactics that you saw work? Well, or ones that you see like we try that, don't ever try to spend your money there. Like you remember some of those, ⁓ what would be some points?

Geoff Mirkin (07:57)
Okay.

Yeah,

so early on we did some really basic stuff. I mean, we literally went door to door, had a door to door team. There wasn't a lot of people talking about solar. So everyone was intrigued. Like, no, we'd knock on the door, people knock on the door and say, yeah, we want to talk about lowering your electric bills. No one's like, I don't know. love Pepco. I'd been with them 15 years. I don't want to breach that relationship, right? So it was just, you know, not worth it.

Herve Billiet (08:10)
Mm-hmm.

Geoff Mirkin (08:28)
Today you think about door to door, are like, oh, another solar guy knocking on our door. So the door to door worked very well. We did a lot of home shows, the booths. I mean, again, people would come up to our booth. If there was one more solar company, that was very rare. So we were normally the only solar company there. So that was great for us. People literally come up to us as opposed to us pulling them in. We did workshops where we'd sell a job, install a job, and we'd have a

Herve Billiet (08:30)
There's another one.

Geoff Mirkin (08:55)
like a cookout at the neighbor's house, at that house, and the neighbors would come over. So those were like basic, basic stuff. And then we had a lot of paper lead providers. Now that was tricky because as you know, most everybody uses paper lead providers. Some are really good and some are really bad. So we just constantly vetted them out. We were constantly looking at lead generators, who was good, who was bad. And sometimes you lose a little bit on them, but it's if you...

can gauge how quickly the leads are good or bad, you can get rid of them. But you've got to put your toe in the water with those. And then as we got a little more sophisticated, we X'd out the door to door. We did a lot of search engine optimization, a lot of SEO, a lot of direct mail. And so those were our two biggest providers, direct mail and search engine.

Herve Billiet (09:38)
By direct mail, mean like, did you do it yourself or you had like a service provider that did it? Okay.

Geoff Mirkin (09:43)
We had a service provider, yeah. Usually we

geo-targeted where we did a job site. But we had to be very careful with that because remember, 2009, 2010, we didn't have, you know, we weren't a Sunrun partner yet. You know, at that point, you either had to get a cash customer or you had to be cash flow negative. So you could get a loan for somebody, but it was five years, maybe 10 years. So they were paying more

for the solar and electric building as opposed to today where lot of folks are like, oh, you'll exchange this payment for that payment, whether you're buying it or leasing it, it's lower. I always had a hard time understanding when we had cash flow negative loans or cash customers, we were closing probably 30%, right? I mean, so three out 10 people we closed. And I was mystified that with all these programs recently, last five, seven years, I'm like, how do we not?

How's our team not closing 90%? But back then, you really had to be careful on the demographics that you were in because you just didn't have a program for everybody.

Herve Billiet (10:42)
Now I want to congratulate you because as one of your competitors, what we've done a few times, like you go to your competitors and you put in like a request for quotes with your home address or your neighbor's address and kind of see what they do. And I was usually not super impressed by my competitors. Oops, maybe I should not have said that, but it's like, okay, we do better. The website is a higher level. We are more responsive. If you've placed a call with us, like we called you back if we missed you and all that.

Geoff Mirkin (11:00)
Yeah.

Herve Billiet (11:08)
But you guys went to an extreme. I put in my address and I received mail after mail a week, a month later, like, hey, we still have not had the sit down with you. And nice flyers. And there was a variation on that, you were like a pit bull. If somebody gave you your address and asked for a quote, you would really try hard to give it a quote. So.

That was impressive. We didn't have like that follow up of leads. We kind of gave up after a while. A few phone calls, a few emails, and then you kind of in like a general bucket of like, we'll keep you updated. We're like, once in a blue moon, we'll send out something. But you guys had like a full system that you kept going. It was very impressive.

Geoff Mirkin (11:37)
Yeah.

Yeah, well the cost of acquisition has always been super high and that's what will make or break you. If your cost per acquisition is lower, you know, it makes everything run smoother. So we definitely, it's funny, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but with the changes now with tax credits, a lot of folks now are taking that lead for solar. Now they're doing home automation or they're doing roofing now, right? But they weren't doing it before

that lead cost so much money now you have different avenues and lanes you can take them in. But yeah, lead gen was always very important to us.

Herve Billiet (12:21)
If you were focusing on the sales, how did you grow the sales team and how do you manage sales people? Do you have any experience or stories to share?

Geoff Mirkin (12:34)
Well, yeah, mean, so a lot of people early on, you know, we made some, we learned that some of the hires we made were really poor hires. And, you know, it didn't have to be sales. could be somebody admin pick up the phone. It could be a wrong installer. It could be a bad salesperson in your home because at the end of the day, you interview somebody and you think they sound good, they look good and all that stuff, and the references check out, but

you can't really track them what they're doing in the home. You don't see what they're doing. You don't hear what they're doing unless they really do poorly and you get a complaint. It was really kind of funny because my partner Tope and I, consider ourselves pretty good interviewers. I mean when you're salespeople, you ask a lot of questions. You ask that extra layer of questions. So we decided, you know what, instead of being concerned of whether we're hiring the right person or not, we took it upon ourselves, even more so Tope, I would say.

He probably did 60, 70 % of the interviews. I did 30, 40%. Now he had other businesses. He was managing other businesses. So I couldn't interview all the time because I was trying to run the day to day. But that was a huge lesson for us, like interviewing. And then we would put that person in and we kind of knew what we were getting more so than relying on someone else interviewing them. So long story short, when you're saying how do we expand the sales force, how do we expand marketing, everything,

grew and we constantly were hiring, even when we didn't need somebody for a position, we interviewed daily. We were always interviewing for positions not even available at that time. And because you never know who's coming through your door. So sometimes we didn't really have a position for somebody, but their talents were above and beyond a lot of people that we had already, we created a position for them. We eliminated position, unfortunately, sometimes that had to happen. But interviewing all the time, even if you don't need that person is crucial.

⁓ because there's just a lot of town out there.

Herve Billiet (14:21)
And you've done that throughout the entire time at Sony G-World.

Geoff Mirkin (14:25)
Yeah, we probably,

yeah, mean, up until the last couple of years, we kind of relinquished that role a little bit, but for the most part, we had a 15-year run for 13 years. We pretty much knocked out all the interviews.

Herve Billiet (14:39)
And that's any position in the company going from sales, marketing, and so when you grew the company, how did you set up the management structure? At some point you need like official departments and management heads and how did you grow into that?

Geoff Mirkin (14:45)
Install everybody. Yeah. Yep

Yep.

Well, usually it was promoted from within. you've, you're gonna, you know, we pride ourselves on, we had a really high retention. You're always gonna lose people, but we felt like industry-wide, we were kind of, we were strong in the retention department. And we learned a couple of days, a couple of ways. Number one, we hired a chief experience officer, which initially I've been put, I was like, what do we need a chief experience officer? And like, well,

You you make the employee experience better and the customer better. I'm like, all right, I'm really more into the line of making it better for our customers. We'll get better reviews and if customers are happy, we're happy. at the end of the day, selfishly, we're going to get referrals and we're going to do better. But at the end of the day, we want our customers happy. But what I didn't know was I thought we had a high retention, but our eyes were opened by the CXO because he came in and he's like, you know, if you just tweak this, it's not going to cost a lot of money. If you do this,

you know, like bringing a food truck once a month, you know, have better coffee and snacks and little things like that to make the employee experience better, you're gonna have even more retention, you're gonna have even happier employees. And at the end of the day, it's gonna pay for itself. My job is gonna pay for itself. And it was true. Yeah.

Herve Billiet (16:06)
I can, can, I can,

it was very true. can, I can totally agree with that one. Not that I, when I see people from, from, from, from my former hips and you know what the one thing they say they miss the most besides, besides me, of course. ⁓ no, they don't say that, but it's actually that every month we did an event. one in one month was like a food truck and we had a few different food trucks.

Geoff Mirkin (16:19)
⁓ Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Herve Billiet (16:31)
But then people like to kind of see the same dynamic to figure out what this food truck is. So if you're the same food trucks come, came again. But then every other month we had like a special thing, a bit more expensive, like carding or laser tagging, something bit special. But the fact that we did that, that we took the time, usually it was like a Thursday, we had four day work weeks. So we didn't work on Fridays, we kept Friday for for rainy day.

Geoff Mirkin (16:44)
Yeah.

Herve Billiet (16:56)
So we usually did on Thursday afternoon, but the crews had to be early back from jobs and people in the office had to make it. So, but just spending a few hours there, obviously the cost of the food truck is not your will cost. The will cost of the company is like people not working. But I heard it again, again, again, that is one thing people valued the most in the company. I was surprised by that. Like it comes up all the time. So what you mentioned there, like,

Geoff Mirkin (17:10)
Yeah, totally, yeah.

Yeah.

Herve Billiet (17:23)
customer experience with employee experience. you hire a person to analyze the experience of your employees.

Geoff Mirkin (17:30)
Yeah, what we were doing and what we weren't doing. You know, cause one of the ideas he had, was tremendous. Probably the best idea he had was there's so little engagement with the installers. Those guys are out there working hard. It's hot, it's freezing. mean, it's a really difficult position and that's where you have the highest turnover. He's like, what are you doing for them? And we're like, well, we pay them well. you know what? Some of them would rather have other things than money. And so them engaging with the admin teams and

really socializing with everybody as a whole, made them feel like more part of a team. And then we kind of took it further where we wanted the salespeople to appreciate the installers more because those guys, guys, women, everybody involved there, they were tremendous. we would go out, you know, we would pick a crew once a week and a couple salespeople would go out, whether it was their job or not, and bring the crew lunch and bring the crew gatorade or whatever. Sometimes it was breakfast.

And the homeowners would see us taking care of our installers. And they were like, we're so glad we chose you and we're even happier now because of the way you treated the installers. I it was real. And it was a feel good thing too, obviously. But those were big moments for us. Like we really, that was kind of a light bulb moment too, when you create that kind of culture, your head hits the pillow a little better, business improves. And there's really, can't think of any negative about it. A lot of wins there.

Herve Billiet (18:48)
Yeah.

I totally agree. One's like. It has a major impact. I'll give another an example. Like we wanted to have like nice pictures to put on the website and marketing and so on. Getting those pictures is actually hard. At the end of the day, the guys are tired. They want to go home, say goodbye to the customer, drive away. But we needed what we call that the money shot. At the end of the day, when everything's finished right now, when you're trashed back or your ladder's still on like

Geoff Mirkin (18:51)
I'd was my idea, but it wasn't.

Yeah.

Herve Billiet (19:17)
or like the safety works, like when a job is finished before you drive away. And something happened where the crews were like felt taken care of. They start naming their vehicles and they start having kind of like a championship. Who can take the best picture? Do you model good pictures we got when through the roof? And then, well, I put like a newsletter on every Monday morning, kind of

told the entire company what's going on about like in this department or that department, maybe some new hires. And I always selected one picture of that week. And it was like an internal competition, like which picture is you gonna pick next? And some were very artistic. It was unbelievable. But as soon as the crews feel part of the company, not just the installation part. Yeah.

Geoff Mirkin (19:48)
Nice, huh.

Pride. Huge

Pride. That's great actually, I like that. That's awesome. I love to hear that story.

Herve Billiet (20:05)
We spoke to him about sales, about lead generation. What about running the operations of the business? Any stories there? How do you everything in the company running? Enough sales, that's usually out of balance. You either have too much work or too little work. How is running the operational part of

Geoff Mirkin (20:21)
Yeah. You know,

thankfully, my partner, Al Gleeson he owns Gleeson Electric. He's managed electrical, the electrical business for, he took it over from his father. I think he took it over in maybe the late 80s. So thankfully, I didn't have a lot to do with that, the operations on the install side, engineering. He was tremendous.

So we all played a role. At Solar, I was the sales and finance guy. Tope was the human resources marketing guy. I was all the engineering and installation. And we really didn't cross over each other's paths much. So I give all the credit for him operationally because that was his division. But later in like, we kind of we talked about selling the company really from day one, we designed it. We knew eventually we'd sell it. But we didn't realize how important

Herve Billiet (21:04)
Really?

Geoff Mirkin (21:06)
leadership is and if we're the entire leadership, there's nothing to really offer. And you can't grow. At the end of the day, one of the things I learned by early on was I managed a sales team and I'm like, well, now I'm kind of managing them different than other teams because they were quote unquote, my guys. And that's not healthy. So the first real manager we hired was a sales manager. And I kind of took myself away and kind of managed the manager. And then we eventually hired

Herve Billiet (21:11)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Geoff Mirkin (21:34)
you we went to market the first time, actually a couple people approached us the first time, they're like, all right, your revenues are good, your EBIT is good, but do you take the three of you away? You're going to have to do like a 10 year earn out, like, and bring on managers, like, cause there's no one below you. And so that was a great lesson learned. So we, you know, we eventually hired a CFO, CEO, COO and a CTO. And that's when really things really, really took off.

Peter Bellman, who is now the current CEO, was a huge part of that. We brought him in in 2019 and he had different roles before we made him the CEO in 23. But for four years, we had an opportunity to watch him kind of do various positions with us. he was, we interviewed outside for CEO, but we kind of knew deep down that he was the guy. And we actually hired a third party company to interview him

right before we made the offer to him because we're like, we're kind of biased. We really liked him a lot. We saw everything he did, but we were biased because we did like him a lot. And that 30-party interviewer said to us, you better hire that guy immediately before someone else does. And yeah, he was a high level, that's what this guy did. He was a third-party interviewer. And we always thought we were very good interviewers. So hearing that made us really good.

Herve Billiet (22:42)
New message.

Geoff Mirkin (22:52)
Those were the key components, putting a great staff in place. The CTO, the COO, the CFO, everybody was very impressive. And they bought into that team, can they get to the next level? And they've done very well from what I heard. I don't know the specifics, but I know that

25 was tremendous for them and 26 is off to a great start as well.

Herve Billiet (23:10)
But so I have another question about financials. I always I'm not going to say struggle but worry may not be the right way like it was on my mind let's put like that. Cash flow was on my mind all the time. So how did you guys

Geoff Mirkin (23:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

flow. yeah.

Herve Billiet (23:27)
handle the cash flow over the years because when you grow you need more obviously. So any magic tricks or advice about how to manage cash flow?

Geoff Mirkin (23:36)
Coffee,

lack of sleep. I mean, you know, we were self-funded. It's funny, when we started in 2009, we all have phenomenal credit, businesses. It was really tough to get a loan back then for business. So we self-funded initially and then we were always, sometimes that was a complaint to our customers. We were always so aggressive with, you know, getting paid when the job was installed.

And it's a fine line because you want to get paid, you don't have the customer angry with you. It's all how you lay it off. You know, if the salesperson says, tells everybody, here's how the system works, we keep our prices down, which is true, because we don't have to use cash flow. So we don't have to use, you know, credit lines. This is the way it works. And so some salespeople were very good at it. They would they would tell them exactly how the job would go down.

The job would go down that way. The customer was gladly, we wouldn't even ask. They'd give a check or sign off the completion, whatever they had to do. It was no problem. But the bad salespeople were promising everything under the sun, didn't explain collection properly. That was it. So, you know, we had to train the salespeople how to say the right thing and make sure they were all doing it uniformly, right? So really, really important. But then eventually, as we grew as a company, we did have credit lines and the credit lines grew

tremendously to a point where several times where we'd have conversations with the bank where we needed a higher credit line because, you know, we dipped our toe in commercial, which we didn't do often. I mean, oh my goodness, now all of sudden your profit margin, you're a whiteboard stampian, right? You got a, you know, a 400kW job, but you made, you know, 12% profit margin. You and it's, you you're not, can't get paid on the project. So it's like, those were hard lessons. So it was like,

Herve Billiet (24:57)
Hmm.

Geoff Mirkin (25:13)
Let's stick to what we know, keep our costs down or acquisition costs down. You know, sometimes turn down the job. If a sales rep turned in a job, they grossly undersold it. You know, we would just initially like, let's take it. We'll make it work. We'll figure it Well, that's, that's bad business. So, you know, it was telling a sales person, no, we're not taking this job. It's got to be within the parameters. And then that's a tough conversation, you know, telling Mr. Jones that, Hey, I apologize. We're not, you know,

And a lot of times they think it's bait and switch. We didn't even say we need X more money. like, you know, the salesperson made a big mistake and unfortunately we're not going to be able to do this job. And if they want to say, well, how much more do they need? We do it. But the last thing we wanted them to think it was a bait and switch that we sold one product and tried to get them for a higher price. So those are all super lessons learned. Yeah. Gross profit's important. You got to draw a fine line on what it is and lead acquisition costs if you want it again

those pay-per-lead providers. This one's burning a hole in our pocket. We're buying thousands of leads and what's our close rate? What's our cost per build? mean, so you really have to keep an eye on everything. And so that helped more when we had several VPs in our company because we could spend time in mining those businesses.

Herve Billiet (26:24)
That makes me think about another process that we had. So a salesperson gave a price, we had like a pricing sheet, and every on the first of the month, we had a new pricing sheet. We looked at our actual costs, and then we looked at like the estimated cost of panels and so on for like different project size. Those are the new prices you can sell at. We did that every first of the month, prices changed. The price usually went down. And then at some point, I remember like the price

Geoff Mirkin (26:35)
Mm.

Yeah.

Herve Billiet (26:49)
going up so we just had to increase our price. People hated it. But then what we've done is we gave a salesperson, they had a margin, plus minus, I forgot, their sales commission was 5% but they had a margin until like, for example, you forgot an adder. Like you have multiple arrays, that's an adder.

Geoff Mirkin (26:53)
yeah, the salesman, that's their worst nightmare.

Yeah.

Herve Billiet (27:14)
like two arrays were included, you have a third, a fourth, a fifth, like that's always, and so we have a lot of different aders of stuff like that that influence the price of the project, the time we spent and hardware cost. And if they forgot a few, we start taking it out of their sales commission. I was first against that. I was too often a salesperson, my sales commission were not paid because of some whatever rule the company came up with. Still have a company owning me $200,000 in sales commission, we'll never see that one.

Geoff Mirkin (27:31)
Mm-hmm.

Herve Billiet (27:42)
It's like some ridiculous rules. They're like, no, a salesperson worked hard, earned a commission, gave it up. But credit to credit is due, Joe really kind of like put his foot down. And that is when the salespeople sold more on the actual price. Like the first few times they lost some sales commission, they got hurt. Guess what? They were selling better and better at the right price because of that.

Geoff Mirkin (27:57)
Beer.

Consequences matter.

You know, and at the end of the day, listen, we all, you know, meet with our customer, we give, hopefully promise them things and we follow up with it, but we all tell them, great, you've got X warranty for X amount of years. And if your profit margins are low and you're doing things the wrong way, you're not going be around. So all these promises sound great, but if you're not doing it, it's irresponsible, not only for the business, but for the customer. Cause if you're not around, you're promising a

30 year warranty and you're around in five years, well you know what? You're a liar, whatever, you're bad business person, whatever it is, it's not good for anybody. So yeah, it's really important you gotta correct those margins because it's not fair to anybody. I always say you have to sell with a responsible profit margin. You shouldn't slam somebody and you shouldn't undersell them either. It's gotta be a responsible profit margin.

Herve Billiet (28:51)
that makes total sense. Responsible profit margin. That's well put. Well, let's speak about how to sell a business. You've done, you actually know ⁓ two businesses already. Now, the Comcast deal was like, they are a large corporation. So I'm sure it was not just deal, win or a napkin and exchange of some money. There was probably a bit more involved than that.

Geoff Mirkin (28:52)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Herve Billiet (29:15)
But you also mentioned already on the podcast here that you from the beginning knew there would be an exit, which for Ipsun, I thought I would be running Ipsen for the rest of my life. So how did you, what did you put in place over the years with the next in mind? What did you do without that? Some advice you can give.

Geoff Mirkin (29:32)
Sure. So the first sale was easy. My partner and had a buy-sell agreement on the roofing company. That was the number. And incidentally, I took less than the buy-sell agreement because I wanted it to get out of there. So that was an easy one. And people thought I was crazy for what I exited for. Anyway, with Solar Energy World, the first couple of times we did have an agent working with us. quite frankly, we weren't ready. We didn't have a good management team, let alone, a good one.

And we probably didn't have the right representation. So we actually hired a great broker and that helped us out a lot. But putting those, the COO together, the CFO, CTO, CEO, once we put all that together and we went to market, we just knew that we had everything in place. So whether they want us involved or not, we had assembled a team where we really didn't matter at that point.

Herve Billiet (30:20)
That's what a value is why you have a business to sell not just a buy these and I keep running it and trust me so

Geoff Mirkin (30:26)
Yeah, I was a little upset. They didn't want me to stick around for something, you because I

like the story. No, it really worked out well. I tell you, I think I mentioned you on LinkedIn, like being part of the team, the camaraderie that wins the losses. Like I was a coach football and basketball for years and I love it. so I don't know, I might coach again. not sure what I'm, I don't have the network down here and the sports network down in Florida, but

you know, it's assembling a team is crucial because if you're not there and eventually you have to leave, who's going to run the company and how can you get that? Someone's not buying you to maintain it. They're buying you to grow it exponentially. So they were, everyone commented how confident they were that the objectives could be made with that team.

Herve Billiet (31:14)
I'm gonna ask maybe an obvious question, but if somebody buys a company, what are they actually buying? What's the value that they are willing to pay money for? What do they buy?

Geoff Mirkin (31:24)
Well, mean,

there's a multiple in every business. So in other words, whatever your revenues, sometimes they're going to pay for your revenue. Sometimes they're going to pay via EBITDA. I think today's world is all EBITDA, at least in the home improvement business, solar business. There's a multiple there. But they're buying systems. know, when they came in and saw Solar Energy World, they saw that we had even, you know, the crazy thing is when you think about the home improvement business or solar business,

You get referrals, you might have a great, you know, we're sitting here in February, you can have a record February. You turn the calendar, March 1st, you have zero. And so a lot of businesses that have better multiples that are like, you have recurring revenue. You know, I always tell people, if you can get into a business where have recurring revenue, like Sunvoy, that's a great business, right? Because you could sleep for a month and you're probably gonna, maybe your business will be down, but you still have a lot of that recurring revenue, right? So.

But they saw the systems in place. had a marketing team that knew how to generate. We had a track of year over year growing that lead percentage, the lead generation. We had a track where we maintained a certain close rate. We knew what our cancel rate was. We knew what our credit turn down rate was. So when you look at the metrics, they're always consistent and they are always growing. We had a couple down years, but for the most part our graph was hockey stick.

They saw 15 years of that and so that was important. If you're up and down, you're up 32%, then you're down 18% the next year and you're up. You have to be consistent because that's a scary graph to look at.

Herve Billiet (32:56)
I have the exact same opinion about what they bought from Epson. was like systems. Like you have a management team in place. If you go on holiday, everything keeps running. That was actually the reason why I put the management team in place. I could do other stuff and things just didn't crash down. I didn't have in mind to an exit plan. I said a management team because I thought it was the next thing to do. But yeah, they bought, besides the marketing value and the name recognition, they bought systems. That's what they are buying.

Geoff Mirkin (33:04)
Mm.

Herve Billiet (33:24)
Glad we agree there. So then once you sign a dotted line and the company sold, then what? What do you do then?

Geoff Mirkin (33:30)
I became a little bored. I'm a small partner in a company called Pure Finance Group. And so I'm doing a little bit of business development now for them. And what we do there is home improvement financing. So again, one of the things I learned early on was at Solar is when, if you have the right financing programs,

you can run the table. And so I wasn't a founder of Pure Finance. My partner Tope was, and he has several partners within. And one at one point was looking just for a little bit of cash flow. So he allowed me the opportunity to buy into it twice. So I'm a very minority partner there, but basically we offer home improvement loans for roofing, windows, siding, kitchens, bathrooms. And so we were very good at it because we know what it's like at the kitchen table, what tools you need

to help the customer and what programs are needed. So anywhere from five year loans, 10 year loans, 20 year loans, same as cash financing. We may do solar financing, we do not yet. So that's kind of my next thing. It's great because I can kind of work from anywhere. I can work five hours a week or 80 hours a week. it's a comfortable conversation for me because it's very similar to what I've done in the past. So that's kind of

what I'm doing now aside from having fun, enjoying the family and friends and sunshine, mean, it's cold today. It's 61 in Naples, but you know, there's no snow on the ground. So I'm grateful.

Herve Billiet (34:46)
you

Now you need to keep busy. Once you sell a company, it's not that, you know, there's gonna be another driver. You need to be doing something. And so it's interesting. Somebody asked me like, you know, once you, what did you miss about, about Ipsun? And I went on and on and on, but basically you miss a camaraderie and just getting stuff done that matters. ⁓ So yeah.

Geoff Mirkin (34:54)
Yeah.

Big time.

Yeah.

Herve Billiet (35:06)
Good. I want to thank you very much for sharing your experience, how you're part of Solar Energy World and make it grow. And thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Geoff Mirkin (35:07)
Oof.

Yeah, hey, listen, thanks real quick if you don't mind me plugging. I'm considering and just on a very limited basis, if somebody wanted like just me to join a sales meeting for 30 minutes, hour, I'm doing that for some of our customers at Pure. So if any of your listeners are A, interested in home improvement financing, love to have a conversation. I'll turn it over to somebody on that team or B, like a case by case occasional sales consultation, kind of look at the presentation or hold a quick.

Herve Billiet (35:23)
Mm-hmm.

Geoff Mirkin (35:44)
20 minute sales meeting with the teams. I am doing that a little bit more too, so it's something I'm open to.

Herve Billiet (35:49)
No, thank you for the plug. And no, I think you have all the experience done it for many years. So I wouldn't be surprised if people here take you up on it.

Geoff Mirkin (35:58)
Alright, well thanks again for having us - it was fun! Alright, bye bye.