From Semiconductors to Green Power: Borrego CEO Mike Hall (Part 2)

SM: So you had a perspective for your search for a green economy job.

MH: Exactly. It’s funny because in 2001, my brother and the original founder of Borrego Solar had re-incorporated the company and moved it to San Diego where they tried to grow the business. They had been talking about the business, but I did not take them seriously at all.

SM: What is your brother’s background?

MH: His name is Aaron Hall. He went to Northwestern and got an economics degree. He took an entrepreneurship class and wrote a business plan to start a solar power purchase agreement company. That was in 2000. We had a family friend, Jim Rickard, who had a dormant solar company in Borrego Springs. He helped Aaron write the plan. He got a pretty good grade on the plan but the professor told him he had all kinds of issues. In the end he graduated and decided this would be his first job out of college. My family put in $20,000 and Jim put in $20,000 and they restarted the company. This is what he has done since.

SM: What was the idea behind Borrego Solar?

MH: The original business plan was to do power purchase agreements. It was to go into energy services and sell solar energy. It required bringing in investors and taking advantage of tax credits and state rebate programs. The idea was to invest in projects, buy them, put them on buildings, and then sell them to building occupants. It was all on the retail side.

Between Jim, Rickard and my brother, they did not have the connections or structured finance experience to put something like that together. They did observe that there was an emerging market in residential solar. They started building solar electric systems for friends and got referrals to continue.

SM: It became a solar integration system company.

MH: Yes. It really only focused on very small businesses and homeowners.

SM: Where do you come into the picture? You got laid off from Applied Material, Borrego Solar is happening in parallel and you had not been paying attention to it.

MH: He is my little brother so I never pay attention to him! Joking aside, he had been trying to get me interested. When I no longer had a job he told me to come down there because he really needed some help. He had one other guy and Jim was about 70. He was starting to get calls and was swimming in work.

I went down and helped him organize his business. I had no business experience but I am a process engineer. I do process design, so it was easy for me to design better business processes. I designed a work flow for him. I worked with him for about three weeks and we got the workflow down, and I then helped him hire someone else.

We then felt we were prepared for more work. I started to explore marketing the company. I have always been a big Google fan and had noticed the ads on the right. I figured we should do that so I started Google AdWords. Back then there was not a single competitor on AdWords and the bids were between $0.03 and $0.05 for each ad.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Semiconductors to Green Power: Borrego CEO Mike Hall
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