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

But the bodybuilder only wanted to strike up a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm on college; he wanted to devote himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin had vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special-education teacher who had raised him with little help. As an intensely driven teen, he’d launched a series of one-man ventures that never quite panned out: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working daily shifts at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal-training business.

Colvin’s brawny new acquaintance wanted to steer him toward a different opportunity: “What do you know about solar?” he asked. When he wasn’t competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man said, he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading installers of solar-energy systems. The bodybuilder had just returned from a trip to Florida where he’d joined a “blitz”—solar-industry slang for a sales event in which packs of young men in crisp polos and khaki shorts descend on a city, crash in a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spend weeks knocking on as many doors as possible. He boasted of having made “crazy money”—as much as $20,000 in a single month—by convincing just a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

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

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

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

As he slogged through accounting classes, Colvin became increasingly receptive to Will’s spiel. Midway through his second semester, he agreed to fly to Orlando for spring break to try out a blitz. If all went well, he’d even try to capture the flowering of his new career on video, in hopes of maybe becoming a solar bro himself.

No one buys solar systems to address an urgent need. They are what marketers refer to as “proactive products”—items you can live without but which may provide advantages down the line. In the industry’s early days, the systems were so pricey that they were marketed solely to wealthy homeowners who wanted to reduce their carbon footprint. But around 2010, the price of solar panels began to plummet as more manufacturing facilities came on line, particularly in China. At the same time, solar companies concocted leasing arrangements that helped limit up-front costs. Going solar could now be pitched to the masses as a decision with long-term financial benefits. But installation still ran upwards of $20,000, an investment that consumers were hesitant to make when their electrical situations seemed just fine.

To jolt them out of their complacency, the solar industry came to rely on one of the oldest—and most annoying—sales techniques: indiscriminately banging on doors. Companies such as Sunrun, which reported $2.25 billion in revenue in 2023, operate on the principle that there’s no good replacement for the intense persuasion that can be exerted in face-to-face conversations. And because commissions are much higher than those for typical door-to-door products, like magazine subscriptions or burglar alarms, there’s been no shortage of young recruits willing to heed the industry’s call for manpower.

As Colvin learned soon after landing in central Florida, the profession doesn’t coddle its newcomers. He was taken from the airport to the crew’s house in Kissimmee, a swampy city in the shadow of Disney World, to throw down his bags. Will then informed him there was no time for rest—the four-member crew was going to go “rip,” or knock on doors. They piled into Will’s Toyota Camry and drove 30 miles to the suburb of St. Cloud, where Colvin was briefed on the basics. He would be working as a “setter,” the person who makes the initial contact with homeowners and persuades them to book an appointment with the “closer,” the person who gets the contract signed. Colvin was instructed to use a script in which he told potential customers that he’d been dispatched to check on the neighborhood’s utility poles. (Exactly who had dispatched him remained vague.) He was then supposed to say the poles were about to be hardened against hurricanes, an expensive upgrade that would allegedly raise everyone’s electric bills by close to 40 percent. When a look of panic crossed a homeowner’s face, that was Colvin’s cue to tout solar panels as a money-saving solution.

Colvin rarely got that far. As Will periodically rode by on a Segway to monitor his work—Segways were for closers on Seal Team Six—Colvin flailed in his efforts to charm the residents of St. Cloud. Some people were outright hostile to his presence, perhaps because solar bros are widely stereotyped as dishonest. Their employers, including some of the biggest companies in the solar industry, have been sued hundreds of times for allegedly engaging in fraud. In May 2024, for example, the state of Nebraska sued Everlight Solar for using “misleading savings models that omit relevant information and accurate data that could result in projections that show consumers spending more on panels than they would save.” Homeowners familiar with solar’s shady reputation often feel entitled to heap abuse on any salespeople who set foot on their property.

Colvin encountered a lot of polite Floridians, too, but they were always quick to offer an excuse: They were renters, they were broke, their spouse wasn’t home, they’d already said “no” to 15 other salespeople who’d come knocking in recent months.

Managers in the solar industry are adept at making novice salespeople like Colvin push through the job’s darkness. They do so by convincing their crews that the work has a quasi-spiritual component—that it’s a path to not just wealth but also radical self-improvement. For Seal Team Six, that meant adhering to an almost monastic routine. Colvin woke up early each day to study books like Door-to-Door Millionaire and videos on how to handle customers’ objections. He and his three teammates would then hit the gym to lift weights together before ripping until 9 pm. They’d stop only to wolf down a burrito or a few tuna packets for sustenance. At the end of the day, after “bageling”—that is, logging zero appointments—Colvin would pass out to the strains of Fortnite emanating from the living room.

During the second week of his trial period, while ripping at the end of yet another featureless cul-de-sac, Colvin hit the wall. In such moments, he tried to lift his spirits by perusing a Notes file he keeps of all the nice things people have said to him over the years. But this time he was too low for that trick to work—he was sapped by the humidity and sick of being told he deserved to be arrested. But then he noticed a man sitting on the curb—presumably the father of some kids who were playing in the street. Sensing that this dad was open to being chatted up, Colvin sat next to him and tried to use raw honesty to his advantage. “My boss has got me out here working, and I’m getting my ass kicked today,” he told the man. “I’m just trying to save people money on their electric bill.” That line piqued the man’s interest, and he soon agreed to meet with Colvin’s “design specialist”—his closer.

Colvin, however, made the rookie mistake of setting the meeting for eight days in the future. That gave the customer too much time to get cold feet; the appointment never happened. Still, Colvin took heart in the minor victory. Confident that greater triumphs were just around the corner, he promised Will he’d return in May and that he’d make so much money that dropping out of college would be a no-brainer. Will said he would consider it a personal failure if Colvin didn’t end up with $40,000 in his pocket by September.

Back in New York, Colvin sleepwalked through his final weeks of school. He couldn’t stop thinking about his brief fling with solar success. So buoyed was he by the high, in fact, that he became an evangelist for solar himself. Like the bodybuilder he’d met the previous August, he was eager to recruit others to the cause. One of them was Connor Dougherty, a Niagara student who was a friend of a friend.

A hulking and preppy young man who exudes a gentle goofiness, Dougherty shared Colvin’s reverence for bold entrepreneurs; his father owns a thriving meal-prep business in Rochester, New York. He told Colvin that he wanted to hone his sales chops and that he was looking into working at an auto dealership for the summer. Colvin convinced him that door-to-door solar would provide a more intensive—if, admittedly, less pleasant—education. “It seemed like it’s just the coldest sales experience you can get,” Dougherty says. “I figured that would be the best.”

Colvin also reached out to Dakota Williams, a wispy and shaggy-haired 17-year-old who speaks with a skater’s cadence. The two had met a year earlier at a party, where they’d bonded over mutual interests—Colvin had been impressed to learn that Williams was a fan of The 48 Laws of Power, a popular self-help book. Williams also talked about the difficulties he had faced growing up, which struck Colvin as far more harrowing than his own. A member of the Tuscarora Nation, an Indian tribe whose New York reservation lies east of Buffalo, he had been intermittently homeless while earning his GED as an adolescent. When Colvin reconnected with him in the spring of 2024, Williams was living in a shelter and flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

Colvin introduced Williams to Will, who offered up a free bed in the Kissimmee house—at least to start. (The standard rent for crew members was $500 per month.) But Williams didn’t have any money for airfare, so he and Colvin decided to make the long drive together. The night before they set out, Colvin started gathering footage for his fledgling YouTube channel, which he envisioned as his ticket to becoming an inspirational media figure. He had set it up while still in high school to document his “journey from broke to billionaire.” Now, he filmed himself jubilantly clocking out of Chipotle for the last time. He then recorded a more contemplative video in his dorm room as he packed up the last of his things. “I know I’m not going to fail, because I don’t have an option,” he said into his phone’s camera as he paced around the room while wearing a white T-shirt festooned with palm trees. “Because literally if I fail, I’m fucked, I’m going to be homeless. And that’s not going to happen. I will knock until I die.”

He was more upbeat the following morning as he gathered a few last items at his mother’s house. “I’m ready to be the best rep,” he said as he weaved through the kitchen wearing the broadest possible smile. “Go down there, give it my all, and start making some fuck-you money!”

After 20 straight hours on the road, Colvin and Williams were given just three hours to rest before being sent out to rip with Seal Team Six. The crew was in the process of doubling in size from March—it would soon have up to 10 members on any given day, some of whom slept on air mattresses in the living room because all the bunks were taken. Will had also moved the crew to a different solar company, Sunder Energy, that he said offered more generous commissions than Freedom Pros.

The sales script remained the same, however—as did the poor results. When Colvin looked at the large group chat that Sunder Energy’s setters used to log their activity, his frustration would bubble to the surface. Peers would announce that they’d snagged multiple appointments in a single day, an achievement that too often eluded him. Sometimes he was forced to do punishment push-ups when he bageled hard. (The reward for setting more appointments than expected was the Ric Flair—two claps and a loud “WOOOO!” from the rest of the crew.)

Desperate to juice his lackluster numbers, Colvin deepened his commitment to self-improvement. He spent the mornings memorizing techniques such as “tie-downs,” questions designed to make a potential customer see no way forward but to adopt solar. (“Are you guys planning to stop using electricity and go Amish anytime soon?”) He and Williams also practiced trying to sell each other a ballpoint pen, a classic drill from how-to books about sales.

“Do I want to be the best? Yeah,” Colvin said in one of his YouTube videos, recorded for his 153 subscribers as he sat cross-legged on a patio sofa beneath a radiant late-afternoon sun. “Am I doing everything in my power to become the best? Yeah. I’m doing the trainings, I’m reading the books, I’m putting the hours in on the doors. In between doors I’m taking notes on what I did right and what I did wrong. So, yeah, I’m getting better every day. And I know as long as I continue to do this every day, I’m going to win. And for me, it’s less about the work and more about the work that’s being done to myself.”

A big point of emphasis in door-to-door culture is that salespeople must always maintain a “positive mental attitude” no matter how many disappointments they encounter. Yet when Seal Team Six relocated to an Airbnb in Tampa in late May for a 10-day blitz, Colvin admitted he was struggling to put up an optimistic front. “I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t getting discouraged,” he said in a video one night as he nervously twisted the edges of his hair. “I’ve been doing solar at least 20 days, I have not got a single sale yet.” But then, having seemingly remembered that vulnerability is taboo in the world of sales, he stared into the camera and expressed his resolve: “I don’t give a fuck if I have zero dollars in my bank account. I’m not quitting until this shit works.”

On his sixth day in Tampa, shit finally worked: An appointment Colvin had set up resulted in a closed deal. Since he’d been promised a 50-50 commission split with the closer, Colvin calculated he was due to make at least $3,500. “It’s like I cannot fathom—I’ve never seen so much money at once in my life,” he said in that night’s celebratory video. “I can’t believe it’s real.” Looking at the records he’d been keeping, he estimated that he’d been through about 850 face-to-face rejections before this one success.

Colvin kept a close eye on his bank account in the days that followed, checking to see whether the first of his two payments had arrived. Then, more than a week later, it finally did: The amount was $180.

Will offered a circuitous story when Colvin confronted him about the payment issue. He said the closer had been forced to do more work than usual because Colvin had failed to provide the homeowners with adequate information; as a result, Colvin was entitled to only an 18 percent cut of the commission. Will added that the customer’s roof also needed unforeseen work to accommodate the panels, which further ate into the project’s profit margin. Colvin would have to be grateful for what he received. It was a learning process, after all.

A Sunder Energy spokesperson told me that Colvin was either misinformed or misunderstood Will: “Shortly after the sale, the homeowner for this project decided not to move forward and canceled their agreement. This results in no further commissions for a project and a reversal of any initial commissions already paid.”

As Colvin grappled with his bewilderment over the payment discrepancy, Dougherty also had one of his appointments lead to a closed deal. He believed he’d earn a commission of roughly $6,000. He continued to knock on doors as he awaited his first payment, and one day he thought it would be fun to try out a closer’s Segway. The vehicle took off with more thrust than Dougherty expected and he was thrown to the ground, tearing his medial cruciate ligament in the process. At the emergency room, Colvin tried to lift Dougherty’s spirits by making him recite sales slogans as he bench-pressed the pole that held his IV fluid bag.

The hobbled Dougherty had to return to New York for an MRI and physical rehab. Weeks into his recovery, after being told several times there was a snafu with his banking information, he finally received his cut of the solar deal: $600. The closer couldn’t convincingly explain the reasons for the shortfall, though he claimed that he, too, had been paid less than expected. (The Sunder Energy spokesperson says that both Colvin and Dougherty could have escalated their concerns “to other sales leaders, department heads, and even company executives.”)

Despite the slightness of his paycheck, Colvin moved with the crew to the next 10-day blitz in Ocala, where they rented a pair of houses on a horse farm. He also kept posting a new video every day. “I know I’m at the point in my life where if I want to earn more money, I have to increase my skill set, and in order to increase your skill set, you’re going to have to eat shit for a short period of time,” he said in one. “Absolutely a hundred percent, when I hit month six of this, I’m going to be a completely different person spiritually, financially, physically.” In private, though, his bitterness over the commission dispute was starting to blot out his faith in Seal Team Six.

Just before the July rent was due, Colvin told Will he was quitting. He wanted to stay a few more days so he could celebrate the Fourth of July with Dakota Williams and his other solar comrades; he even volunteered to rip through the holiday to pull his weight. He was stunned when Will told him to pack up his things and leave. More than a thousand miles from Niagara Falls, Colvin was now homeless and jobless, with less than $200 to show for his two months of labor. (When I contacted Will, he told me one thing of note about Colvin before ending the conversation: “He’s a good kid, just negative.”)

Now tumbling toward despair, Colvin asked for help from a Freedom Pros closer named Doug Hotz, whom he’d met during his original March stint. Hotz, a 24-year-old born and raised in Orlando, had been aimless as a kid. Solar, he tells me, gave him the discipline he needed to get his act together. He was now a quasi-nomad, shepherding a sales crew he called Bouknight from one blitz to another around the country. “I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t have any kids,” he says. “I miss my parents’ birthdays. I miss my siblings’ birthdays. It’s just, right now, this opportunity is not going to be here forever, right? So I’m just trying to take full advantage of it.”

After hearing Colvin’s tale, Hotz let him join his team and crash at his parents’ house, in an un-air-conditioned room filled with Florida Gators memorabilia. Colvin was free to rip with Bouknight in the Orlando area, but soon he’d have a choice to make: Hotz and his crew were about to drive to Illinois in search of virgin sales turf. That meant Colvin would have to leave behind his friend Williams, who was still very much committed to “getting 1 percent better each day” with Seal Team Six.

Colvin decided to head to Illinois to keep chasing the solar dream. On July 8, he recorded his Florida post-mortem in a wispy white tank top while preparing to drive north toward the state’s panhandle. “It seems like every time things couldn’t possibly get worse, they got worse,” he said. “But this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, which is crazy because this is also the most unstable I’ve been in my entire life. Yet I believe the true reason I feel so much fulfillment is that I’m doing what I know I’m destined to do.”

Bouknight was a smaller crew than Seal Team Six, with just three setters and Hotz as the lone closer. Colvin developed a fast friendship with a 25-year-old colleague named Nikita Dornan, a native of Russia who’d been adopted by a Nebraskan family when he was 6. Like so many other solar salesmen, he’d rejected college as the best path forward: He’d started selling burglar alarms door-to-door out of high school, later moving on to Andersen windows. After so many years of knocking on 150 doors a day, he’d developed a sixth sense for when a “no” contains a glimmer of a “yes.” “Maybe a homeowner’s attention got too focused on a dog or a kid, so they can’t see in that moment how beneficial this would be for them,” he says. “Going back to those people definitely helps.”

The crew set up shop at a Holiday Inn Express in Litchfield, Illinois, a sleepy town in the farm country south of Springfield. Then they discovered that they were the fifth solar crew to sweep through the area in recent months. Colvin also sensed that the locals didn’t take kindly to the fact that he’s Black, and that one of his colleagues, Yusuf, is from Egypt. (Nikita concealed his Russian origins by introducing himself to homeowners as Ken.) Colvin was accustomed to angry Floridian homeowners telling him they would call the police, but Illinois was the first place where someone actually followed through: The cops in Litchfield harassed the crew for operating without a solicitation license (an oft-ignored requirement in many municipalities). Bouknight brushed off the setback and fanned out to Edwardsville and Decatur to knock on more doors.

Colvin had good luck with setting appointments in Illinois, but none of his deals closed. The majority of his potential customers failed their credit checks; the rest had structural issues with their roofs. He pressed on, but the tab for the Holiday Inn room he shared with Nikita was becoming daunting. The money he’d saved from his 50-hour weeks at Chipotle was almost gone. So as the start of Niagara University’s fall semester drew near, he admitted defeat and went back to school.

Hotz was mystified. To him, college is a pointless endeavor that robs a person of prime earning years; the only reason someone would choose the classroom over the doors was fear. Colvin explained that he was drowning financially, that the $180 he’d earned in Florida wouldn’t even put a dent in his hotel bill. He would get back to ripping as soon as he could, but he needed to hedge his bets by working toward his accounting degree.

Once back in New York, though, Colvin couldn’t shake the strange grip of door-to-door. “When all you do is grind, and you come back to how the average person lives, something in you dies,” he says. “I felt so empty. I’m like, ‘I don’t know what to do with my life.’ Even though I made no money, there was so much purpose driving me every day. I had something to strive for.”

Colvin had every intention of sticking with solar as his sophomore year got underway. To stay connected to the industry until he could get back to ripping, he signed up with another solar company and started making cold calls from his dorm room. He rented an auto-dialer for $50 a day and paid a middleman for a list of supposedly promising leads. He never earned a dime and quit by late September.

Now fearing that he wouldn’t have enough money to eat or fill his gas tank, Colvin switched to working for a personal-fitness company. His job was to upsell existing customers to products like meal plans and training programs. Right off the bat, he was making $150 a day. But by the end of October, Colvin was miserable: He could no longer muster the moral blindness required to push products he thought were both useless and exorbitantly priced. “I was closing deals, and I realized I was completely fucking over customers,” he says. “That’s really what pissed me off, because at the end of the day I’m trying to do the right thing.” So he quit and found another sales position at a headhunter of sorts, a company that purports to find high-paying tech jobs for its clients. Colvin can’t say more because of a nondisclosure agreement, but he does tell me the first paycheck he received in November was the biggest of his life—more than enough to put him back on decent financial footing. He is now saving up to buy some personal coaching services. (Colvin estimates that he has cumulatively spent around $30,000 on self-help books, online courses, and coaching to boost his odds of success.)

Colvin was so busy hustling throughout the fall that he lost all interest in door-to-door solar sales. Although he has never felt any ethical compunctions about selling panels—he truly believes he was helping people save money—he came to view the profession as cultlike for how it isolates and controls its workforce. “I was out of their propaganda,” he says. “I could not be brainwashed anymore.” He doesn’t regret the days he spent knocking on doors—he’s now comfortable striking up a conversation with anyone, an essential business skill—but he also can’t believe how much the reality of his experience differed from what he’d glimpsed in the solar-bro fantasy. And he can’t help but wonder if the fault lies not with the influencers for exaggerating but rather with himself for being weak.

“Every night when I got home, I’d be like, ‘Fuck, I don’t want to go to sleep, because when I wake up in the morning I got to do this again, I got to do this shit again,’” he says. “That was my mentality. And maybe that was my downfall.”

Connor Dougherty also returned to Niagara University, and the knee he shredded in the Segway mishap is almost back to full strength. Several other students have asked him whether they, too, should try out solar for the summer. Though he doesn’t counsel against it, he tries to make sure they’re genuinely obsessed with personal enrichment. “You have to really, really, really want it bad,” he says. “If you don’t, you’re going to get into it, it’s just going to suck, and you’re going to quit.”

Dakota Williams stuck with Seal Team Six for longer than either of his New York–based compatriots. After Florida, the crew went to Southern California to rip. It disintegrated just a few weeks after the move, however, and its members dispersed back to their hometowns. But Williams—who is coy about how much he earned over the summer and early fall—has nothing but fond memories of his time on the doors. “It was a wild experience,” he tells me. “Being able to have a team of that many like-minded people together is such an amazing thing to have at such a young age.” He is now trying to start his own solar company, though he’s short on details about making that happen.

Doug Hotz remains committed to his itinerant solar lifestyle. When I talked to him in September, he was still in Illinois and had just crossed a major milestone: He had sold enough systems to generate a megawatt of electricity. The achievement would soon earn him a special shout-out on the Freedom Pros Instagram account; the post’s cover image would bear the title “The Rise of Doug Hotz.” He also acknowledged that the work has taxed his emotional endurance at times. “I don’t think it ever gets easier,” he said. “You got to be immune to it. You got to fix your heart.” With many utility providers now trying to slash the rates they’ll pay for surplus electricity, Hotz may find it increasingly hard to convince homeowners that solar is a wise decision. But he doesn’t seem to have given any meaningful thought to an exit strategy: When I pressed him about what he planned to do next, Hotz hemmed before mentioning he might put together a real-estate portfolio of some sort.

One thing Hotz does know is that he wants Colvin back in the Bouknight fold. He pesters him frequently, urging him to skip a week or two of school to go rip. Colvin has resisted the entreaties so far. He’s keeping his focus on school, work, and making videos with titles like “You Don’t Need Better Habits, You Need a New Identity” for his YouTube channel (up to 192 subscribers). “If I lose everything, I have no phone, no money, no transportation. I will fall back on door-to-door,” he tells me. If it comes to that, he’ll start off in the red—he still owes Freedom Pros more than $1,500 for his Holiday Inn bill.

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