Aaron Colvin was He was doing tricep pushdowns in the gym when he saw a huge cartoon-like bodybuilder in the mirrored room. The man was coaching a woman through cable rows, and 18-year-old Colvin stopped to study his technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and staring at him, Colvin became concerned. He thought he was going to be accused of stalking the man's girlfriend – one of the cardinal sins of gym culture.
But the bodybuilder just wanted to have a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At the time in August 2023, Colvin was about to start his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was disinterested in college; He wanted to dedicate himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozy, two of his personal heroes. At the age of 13, Colvin vowed to follow in his footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special-education teacher, who raised him with little help. As a deeply motivated teen, he started a series of one-person ventures that never succeeded: T-shirt salesman, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He was currently working daily shifts at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save $3,000 for a course on running a personal-training business.
Colvin's adventurous new acquaintance wanted to lead him to a different opportunity: “What do you know? about solarhe asked. When he wasn't competing in 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. Is. The bodybuilder had recently returned from a trip to Florida, where he participated in a “blitz”—the solar-industry term for a sales event in which a swarm of young men in crisp polos and khaki shorts descend on a town, looking for a cheap Crash into a hotel or Airbnb, and spend the week knocking on as many doors as possible. He claimed he made “huge money” – up to $20,000 a month – by convincing just 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 personality, was quite intrigued. He recalls, “I'm like, bullshit.” “Like, yes, great, I'll look into it.”
A few weeks later, Colvin set up a FaceTime call with the bodybuilder's manager at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Although his college semester had just begun, Colvin tells Will that he is thinking about dropping out: as a man who was shaped by hardships – he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls pharmacy. Lived where drug addicts stole on a regular basis – he was doing that. A difficult time in relation to her classmates, most of whom were from more comfortable backgrounds than her own. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” says Colvin. Will pressured him into joining his door-to-door sales force, which he named Seal Team Six. The task was simple, he said – just a simple matter of making homeowners aware that they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling the excess electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin continues standing at strangers' doors delivering that message, his sales commissions will dwarf his salary at Chipotle. The unofficial motto of SEAL Team Six was “Behind every door is $5,000”. (Freedom Forever claims its 2023 gross revenues top $1 billion.)
After some consideration, Colvin declined the offer. She was worried that she would regret leaving school without thinking. But Will was a tireless recruiter. On an almost daily basis in the fall and winter, he showed Colvin his six-figure commission checks, his penthouse apartment, his exotic cars, with Instagram reels produced by the “Solar Brothers.” These impressive men – dark brown, chiseled, full of confidence – emphasized that anyone could achieve such awards if they had the courage to trade their mundane lives for a place in the front trenches of the green economy. Have courage.