Why solar installers should collaborate, not compete

▶ 0:00Welcome back on this fine Thursday evening. We are going to see a client tomorrow to do a shoot for a load of ad creatives, and they are a part of the solar nation. If you haven't heard of that, then you should definitely go check out. It's headed up by a guy called Kevin Holland. Really, really recommend going and following him if you're in the solar space. That has prompted me to do a little video on collaborations and partnerships. Also had a call with a really cool guy who's in a similar space to kind of doing what we're doing, just in a different fashion. He reached out, saw my content, said, you know, it would be good to,

▶ 0:29to connect and we got chatting and there's potential that we work together in the future, right? So really exciting stuff. So I wanted to just do a bit of a breakdown on why collaborations and partnerships are so important. The whole thing is about this concept of making the pie bigger attitude, rather than just focusing on creating a bigger slice or taking a bigger slice. Now, the reason I say this is that many solar installers are very much they kind of keep themselves to themselves. They don't want anyone else using their strategy

▶ 0:59or their techniques or their techniques. They think that everything they do is unique. And sure, there's an element to that, you know, some of the things you are doing will be unique. But at the same time, I'd be surprised if out of all 5000 installers in the country, you're doing something completely, completely different. Or that you couldn't learn from any of the other 5000 installers in the country is the more important point.

▶ 1:23So often we focus too much on what our competition is doing and on protecting our ideas rather than collectively improving, especially if you kind of take a small group and try to collectively improve against the rest of the market. So, you know, Solar Nation, for example, I think there's about 800 installers, I'm not quite sure. If those 100 beat out the other 4900 in the UK alone,

▶ 1:47then that's a huge success, right? And each of those individual installers that are part of that are going to get monumental benefits. So that's the kind of concept that I want to drill down on. Like, for example, with this, this is the MCS installers map. In Buckinghamshire alone, there are 51 solar installers. So even this concept of like, well, yeah, but I don't want people right next to me getting my ideas because they're still my customers.

▶ 2:14Okay, but you're currently if you're currently if you're the average installer in the area, if there's 50 people that you're currently getting 2% of the installations that are happening in your immediate area, if you partner with another solar installer, or you just share ideas and strategy, you have monthly meetings with them to just bounce ideas off the wall, then you too, are competing against the other 49.

▶ 2:39And hopefully, you can both respectively increase the percentage of that market that you're taking by, you know, another percent, another 2%, in which at which point you're doing 3%, they're doing 3%, or you're both doing a combined 8%, right, if you push it further. Now, the other side of that is not only you trying to take more of the market together, but you can actually grow the market together, you can drive up demand, you can say things in a different way, you can come up with new ideas, new offers, new ways to position solar.

▶ 3:09That you may not have come up with on your own. And not only this, but there's obviously the potential direct benefits as well. So if you're part of a group where there's installers up here over here in here and here, if you get a lead that's way out of your service area, you should have someone that you can pass on that customer that you can trust, they're going to get a really good service as good as you would have provided.

▶ 3:28And vice versa, you should expect that referral back, right? So we would argue at this point, this is becoming more of a necessity. If you're running paid advertising campaigns, so meta ads, Google ads, etc, then you need to get some sort of leg up in order to compete with the behemoths like heatable, like the energy companies like make my house green, right?

▶ 3:49Because every month they will be deploying 10, 20, 50 times as much budget to those channels than you can currently deploy. And with paid advertising, the more you scale it up to a certain extent, the quicker your ads learn, the more conversion events you have. So the quicker meta knows who to target, right? And the quicker you can test new ideas and get meaningful data to be able to either adjust funnels, like conversion mechanisms, or the actual ad creators themselves, the hooks, the scripts, the single image ads, the angles, the offers, you're going to be really lagging behind if your 1000 pounds is competing up against a 50,000 pound advertising budget.

▶ 4:26But there's a way that you can compete with that if you join sides with 10 2050 installers, and you basically assimilate the data that you're all collecting all of the learnings, the strategy you're all collecting together, you can start to bridge the gap between you and those nationwide lead aggregators and technology companies and energy companies. And of course, that's one of the benefits of working with us shameless pitch, but we're running ads for over 10 solar installers throughout the UK at any one time.

▶ 4:56commercial and residential. And of course, being the central piece of that and doing all of the reporting, managing all of the campaigns, we have all of the insights across all 10 of those installers and many more coming in the future. So we can assimilate all of that together with those learnings. And that's why it's so powerful being a specialist renewables, or solar specifically, digital marketing agency, because another agency might be working with a cafe, a restaurant, a e commerce store service business. And

▶ 5:25the learnings, you know, they're improving their skill of running paid advertising, but they're not improving at understanding a one like one specific market, beyond just getting better at running ads for the one client that is in that market. You see, so if it's not with us, I would encourage you to find some sort of group where you can get that kind of shared learnings and approach. And finally, do we practice what we preach? We were asked this recently, like, you know, it's all well and good you saying you should form partnerships and things. But are you doing that yourself? Would you partner with another marketing agency?

▶ 5:55Absolutely, 100%. We have existing partnerships with multiple marketing companies that where we cross refer and do things like that. But even those that we don't, we don't actively go out to, to spite them or to hide our ideas from them. If any of them are watching, I would highly recommend that you reach out and we have a chat, we put all of this value into this content, which is obviously completely publicly available.

▶ 6:17publicly available. There's nothing stopping our competition from using this content to to advance their services. And we would encourage that they do because at the end of the day, that just gets us closer to our mission of actually providing good services to the clients that we service and getting more solar installed throughout the UK. So it's a win. And I would hope that they would do the same. And I will be able to learn from them. And I will be able to take those learnings and get better results for my clients and grow the market itself rather than grow just my

▶ 6:47I share of said market. Make sure that every advertising agency is on average delivering a higher quality of service. And as an industry, we're getting better, as opposed to just me hiding and closing grip on my ideas, thinking that ideas are this incredibly valuable thing. When in reality, if I shared them, I would get 10 times more back from the people that see this stuff and find it valuable and come to me and say, Oh, have you considered doing this? This was really valuable. Can I show you this? Can I can I help here? It's a no

▶ 7:17brainer is an absolute no brainer. So if there's any actionable tip from this video, it would be to find a solar installer that you trust that you believe delivers a very high quality of work. Maybe you start with one that is really far away and outside your service area. So there's no worries about that. But it doesn't really matter. Because I would also recommend that someone that you can actually go and visit in person that always helps just start up the conversation, try and learn a thing or two from them and try and give some value as well. And you never know what that could develop into that could even go

▶ 7:47as far as you actually become the same company and you've got different branches throughout the UK. That quite often happens. Or maybe you sell both of your businesses to private equity to a bigger company to a bigger installer. Why not? Right? So if you resonate with that attitude of making the pie bigger, as opposed to just taking a bigger slice, then you should definitely go ahead and get this document because everything in here is all just nothing held back advice, and guidance and value that you can use and deploy within your business and hopefully share with others as well. So

▶ 8:17So put your email and get access to this document. And then if you want to work with someone that actually shares those attitudes and 10x or 20x the amount of data that you have access to, in order to enable the success of your advertising campaigns and your general marketing strategy, then you should definitely go ahead, stay on that same page and book a call with myself. Thank you very much for watching. Have a lovely evening and I'll see you in the next one.