It was Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he saw a cartoonishly large bodybuilder in a mirrored room. The man guides a woman through a set of cable rows, and 18-year-old Colvin stops to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and stunned, Colvin became worried. He thought he was about to be accused of watching the man's girlfriend—one of the cardinal sins of gym culture.
But the bodybuilder just wanted to start a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin will begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm in college; he wants to dedicate himself to being an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At age 13, Colvin vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher who raised him with little help. As an enthusiastic teenager, he launched a series of one-man ventures that never ended: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He currently works 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 burly new acquaintance wants to take him later: “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 participated in a “blitz”—solar-industry slang for a sales event where packs of young men in crisp polo shirts and khaki shorts comes down to a city, crashes in a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spends weeks knocking on as many doors as possible. He boasts that he made “crazy money”—up to $20,000 a month—by convincing a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.
Colvin, a strong former high-school wrestler whose round silver glasses give him a scholarly mien, is deeply intrigued. “I was like, holy shit,” he recalled. “Like, yeah, awesome, I'll check it out.”
A few weeks later, Colvin FaceTimed the bodybuilder manager at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Although his college semester has just begun, Colvin tells Will that he's thinking about dropping out: As someone shaped by adversity—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls drugstore that was regularly robbed of drug addicts—he has a difficult time relating to his classmates, most of whom come from softer backgrounds than his. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin said. Will forces him to join his door-to-door sales crew, which he calls Seal Team Six. The job is easy, he said—it's a simple matter of letting homeowners know they can save thousands by installing solar panels and selling excess electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin delivers that message while standing on strangers' doorsteps, his sales commissions will dwarf his wages at Chipotle. “Behind every door is $5,000” is the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its total revenue by 2023 will top $1 billion.)
After some thought, Colvin declined the offer. He worries that he will regret quitting school without giving it a fair shake. But Will is a relentless recruiter. Almost every day in the fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels made by “solar bros” showing off their six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars. These influencers—tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence—stress that anyone can reap such rewards if they have the courage to trade their mundane lives for a place in the forward trenches of the green economy. .
