We paid our first clients' ad bills and it nearly broke us.

Our brilliant mistake (covering ad spend)

An opportunity arose to present our ideas for how Solar could be advertised at the largest Solar conference in the UK, Solar & Storage Live.

With one week to prepare, Jude stepped up on stage and revealed the plans.

25 sales calls later, we hand-picked our first 4 clients.

The problem?

We pitched the idea that we would cover the advertising spend for every client we signed - and would only charge them commission on the deals they closed.

We were that confident (or stupid (most definitely both)).

Perspective

At this stage, we were running all of the traffic from our ads to custom multi-step forms built on the Framer websites we had developed.

We opted against Facebook Lead Forms since the start as they had too little friction, customisability and in turn, generated very poor quality leads.

Our Framer forms looked great, but they were VERY unreliable.

They broke almost every day and we had very limited visibility over what was actually happening once someone had landed on the page.

That was, until we discovered Perspective.

Perspective is a multi-step funnel builder, specifically for mobile traffic.

We trial the tool with one client.

Reliability? 0 downtime.

Conversion rates? 8x higher.

Speed of implementation? 10x faster.

Boom.

We migrate all clients over to Perspective overnight.

Results go through the roof and remove hours of wasted efforts per day on fixing the problems our original solution was causing.

Consolidate & restructure

Satisfied we had proven the potential of our new advertising strategy, we asked all clients to move from the existing model, where we covered the advertising spend, to a more traditional commission/retainer model.

Every single client stayed.

It was also at this point where Joe fully took over fulfilment & operations, leaving Jude to drive sales & marketing.

AJ Renewables on steroids

Jude pitched up against a more established agency who had a poor reputation and at the time, were convinced that videos were gimmicky and couldn't outperform the package price ads they were running.

Despite watching Jude physically choke for three minutes straight on his sales call, Ally Galloway agreed that videos were the future of marketing Solar & renewables.

We shot the ads & launched the campaigns.

It dawned upon us quite how powerful the system we had created could be.

2 deals sold in the first 24 hours.

Over £100,000 closed inside 30 days.

For every £1 of ad spend, £25 of sales came back.

We celebrated with a steak dinner & beers (below).

Over £4,400,000 in sales from our Facebook ads later, AJ Renewables remain one of our best-performing clients.

Belittling the bargains

Next was Kimble Solar.

Pessimistic after underwhelming performance of a previous agency, with a gut feeling that Facebook could only yield low quality leads with small average order values, Chris Sadler decided to give it one last shot.

£18,152 residential solar average order value.

An average deal value & size previously unheard of from Facebook Ads.

Undeniable proof that our approach not only generated volume, but it generated quality.

Prospects looking for large systems, who wanted to pay extra for quality & who wanted to work with a company they trusted.

We doubled down.

We ran ads that opened with:

• "Looking for cheap solar? Go find someone else"
• "You'll find a cheaper solar installer, but you won't better."

£2,400,000 in sales from our Facebook ads later and Kimble Solar are still stomping over the "£5,995 for 12 panels and a battery" that stood before them.

Charlotte joins the team

Charlotte joins us as our first full-time hire, as a Creative Strategist.

Bringing with her 3+ years' experience as a performance marketer at the likes of Audi, THG, My Protein and LookFantastic.

Andromeda

Meta (owner of Facebook) completes its rollout of the Andromeda update.

The Andromeda system represents a fundamental re-engineering of how ads are selected, delivered, and personalised across Facebook and Instagram.

Meta rebuilt how it picks which ad each person sees. The more different ads you feed it, the better it matches them, and we already had more than anyone.

What did this mean for us?

All of the effort we had put into achieving creative diversity for each client, producing unique, educational ads that appeal to one individual viewer with as much relevancy as possible, got put on steroids.

As Meta's ability to show the right ad to the right person at the right time improved, so did our results.

We hit record days, including a day where we generated 209 leads across our portfolio.

Competitors are left scrambling, trying to catch up to the monster of a production system that we had created.

Shoot volume goes through the roof

We decided to shoot with every client, every 3 months, free of charge.

Our shoot volume went through the roof.

We shot with clients 20/31 days of October.

The largest Solar sales & marketing event the UK has ever seen

After weeks of preparation and a last minute stage hire, we put on the event of the year.

80+ attendees.

90%+ of our client portfolio (95% of our mainland UK clients).

Companies ranging from 8 installations per month to £12.4Bn in yearly revenue.

An agenda ranging from life changing talks on belief sets from David Jacob to sales masterclasses and group discussions on how to win in Solar in 2026.

We had feedback that some attendees spent the entire 4+ hour drive home plotting how they were going to dominate 2026 with the new information, connections & strategies.

Others said it was "the best event I've ever attended."

Some even put their learnings into practice the evening of the event and yielded the rewards.

Enterprise-grade attribution software rollout

We always had a strong grasp on what was driving client results but in many areas, we lacked the concrete data.

We wanted to know EVERYTHING.

• What was the true CPA?
• What ads were truly driving sales?
• Which ads were playing more of a supportive role?
• Were some ads driving higher average order values or larger systems?
• What overflow lead volume were we generating via phone calls & website forms?

And most importantly…

Could we feed this information back to Meta's targeting algorithm?

With our new attribution & tracking setup, not only do we have all of this information, but for accounts with enough conversion events, we are feeding it back to Meta.

So Meta stops hunting for people who fill in forms, and starts hunting for people like the ones who actually signed.

We nailed the creative side of advertising on Meta.

Now, we've nailed getting those creatives in front of the right people.

The board

Darren Cornish and David Jacob join as non-executive directors.

David had already been in the room every month, coaching the team on sales and mindset. Now he had a seat at the table.

Two people whose job is to ask the questions we would rather not answer.

They ask them.