Driving Solar Growth Through Financing: SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive (Part 7)

SM: What is your plan, at this point, for the continued evolution of SolarCity?

LR: To continue educating the way we have been doing, and to innovate in expansion areas so that we can bring clean power to more homeowners in more locations. We want to bring as much clean solar power to as many people and businesses as possible. Whatever bottlenecks exist will be addressed.

SM: Talk about the job creation aspect. At scale, you are doing a lot of installations.

LR: We have gone from two to 350 in two and a half years. We will probably be adding another 10–15 crews in the next two months. Each crew is three people, so we are looking at another 30-40 people being hired over the next two months. A crew can do four homes a month. If you want to do 1 million homes you need a lot of crews. That is our plan.

SM: In many ways it is a body-based business.

LR: It is absolutely a local business that gives back to the community. You hire those who are in the most need. Construction and housing businesses have collapsed, and that is the exact talent that we need for installing solar systems. The job fulfillment aspects are high. Our crews really enjoy the work, and they really care about the environment. It addresses their concerns, and they are incredible teams to work with.

SM: What about geographical expansion? You are in three states right now. What do the next 24 months look like?

LR: There are 14 states in which we can make the program work. We look at cost of power, local subsidies, and sun exposure. Based on those three ingredients we have to be able to show customers savings. Our sales are financial sales, not environmental. We can still offer savings in New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Connecticut, Hawaii and others.

SM: Do you consider that your territory?

LR: We will not expand to all of them immediately. We will expand to a handful of states next year.

SM: What is involved in expanding into a new state? Is it a big investment?

LR: It is really the cost associated with launching the program. You have to spend money advertising and to get the overall program up and running. Every state has about an eight-month payback for that region to become profitable.

SM: What is your marketing program?

LR: We use traditional marketing. We use the web, direct mail and radio. Our customers are extremely happy and now the majority of our business is referrals. Initially you have to spend money because the word of mouth is not there yet.

SM: It looks like this will be several years of work to get to the 1 million goal.

LR: That is the plan. We have done about 3,500 now.

SM: What is it like working with your brother?

LR: Fantastic. He is one of the smartest people I know. We have totally opposite skills.

SM: Who plays what role?

LR: He is the technologist and runs operations, design and engineering. He handles anything that requires the work to actually get done. I do the sales, marketing, and all the fluff. I have the CEO title for no other reason than I am outbound and he is inbound. There are really two CEOs. We are fortunate because I know there are many CEOs out there today who wish they could have a strong peer they know they could rely on. It is lonely out there, but in our case that is not true. We have each other.

Our company is run extremely efficiently. I never have to worry about operations and he does not think about sales and marketing.

SM: Great. Good luck!

This segment is part 7 in the series : Driving Solar Growth Through Financing: SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive
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