Last year was the most stressful for North Carolina-based Accelerate Solar (No. 310 on the 2018 Top Solar Contractors list) in its six years in operation. A trifecta of trials befell the company in a short timespan: A crucial utility rebate reached its cap, a colleague was caught embezzling money and one of its salespeople tried to scam customers with a copycat company.
Accelerate works in both North and South Carolina. As an important South Carolina Duke Energy solar rebate neared its cap and ended earlier than the company expected in early 2017, many Accelerate jobs were canceled by customers not interested in solar unless they got extra money back.
“We ended up having a load of cancels from customers getting wary of even seeing a rebate,” said CEO Xavier Veille.
Accelerate ended up paying the rebates for many of those customers in order to keep the jobs, but still lost almost $80,000 in projects because of the abrupt cutoff, said head project manager Chris Verner. Only two or three customers on the wait list actually received a rebate from Duke.
In mid-2016, Accelerate hired a person who would eventually be an equal partner to run the sales team. He was tasked with building a sales team, handling dealer fees and sales payroll and commissions. That meant he had control of the sales bank account.
When the man was unable to even pay sales payroll, Veille and Verner audited his credit card statements and found he’d been misappropriating funds and giving big bonuses to his friends on the sales team.
Luckily, they had an agreement in place where he wouldn’t be brought on as an equal partner until he brought in 2 MW in sales—and he did not meet that goal in his time there. Accelerate terminated his employment in January 2017 along with the entire sales team of over 50 people, since they could no longer trust the salespeople either after discovering the embezzlement.
“We lost the rebate and we lost our entire sales force with his termination,” Veille said. “We basically were back at Ground Zero, building a company with $100,000 a month overhead.”
Then, a former salesperson for Accelerate hired in 2015 set up a copycat company called “Accelerate Solar SC LLC.” He used Accelerate’s old lead list to sell systems to customers under the guise of the real Accelerate Solar. He was able to cash checks that were written to Accelerate Solar because his company name was so close to it.
Some of the systems were actually installed, but the real Accelerate got a lot of phone calls to fix the errors of that sham installer. Some customers put down deposits with the fake company, then couldn’t contact the salesperson. To win back consumer trust and safeguard against a scam happening again, Accelerate put a disclaimer on its website instructing customers to call if they’d been contacted by the rogue former salesperson and implemented processes to let consumers know they were talking to the right company. “Accelerate Solar SC LLC” was officially dissolved in June 2018.
To recoup the money lost in the embezzlement, Veille, Verner and a third partner did not take a paycheck for almost one year, and Accelerate had to change the way it operated.
“We decided maybe having a large internal sales team was just a little bit much to deal with when it comes to residential projects, so we ended up with just a small five-person sales team, mostly focused on our commercial [projects],” Verner said.
Now, the company outsources most of its sales functions and has found success in that strategy.
“It’s a much better relationship, much better flow,” Veille said. “We’re back on track.”
A couple of medium commercial projects for Kannapolis Middle School and Royal Oaks Elementary School helped set Accelerate back on the path of growth after the turmoil.
“Getting those projects done helped keep the cash flowing to survive, but we also got them done really well and got our foot in the door with some good projects in the ground for commercial,” Verner said.
Veille still sees the positive side in the nearly disastrous series of events. Accelerate Solar made it through, and new North Carolina Duke Energy rebates in 2018 aim to help reduce the upfront cost of solar and grow the industry even more. The hard times forced Accelerate to reassess its goals and focus on what it wanted to all along—increase commercial jobs to make up 80% of its project pipeline with residential at 20%, instead of the opposite.
“Everything was trying to put us under, but we survived,” Veille said.
This story was featured exclusively in our 2018 Top Solar Contractors issue. See the issue and full list of top U.S. solar installers here.
Andrew Breiter-Wu says
Wow this truly represents the solar coater for solar entrepreneurs. Thank you for sharing their story!