Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your Tuesday & Friday email, where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

So Fresh and Solar Clean

Don’t rain on my parade… I have a confession to make. I’ve been lying to you. At the end of every email I put “each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea”.

Turns out there IS just an idea that can be successful and this is that very idea.

There’s a significant trend happening around the world, people are going solar. It makes sense:

• it’s getting hotter outside 🔥 

• natural gas costs are soaring ⛽️

• the cost of solar is going down 💰

• solar cell efficiency is going up ☀️

All this makes for a nice equation of a sunny side hustle (just check out the below graph)

I love looking at ancillary opportunities when it comes to trending ideas. Solar panel cleaning is an obvious one for this scenario.

So I’m going to take the playbook from the Cleaning Agency guy (from this email) and apply it here. Meet The Solar Panel Cleaning Agency Guy 👍

Okay but how would I start this hustle?

• Research how much roof and gutter cleaners make per hour

• Create a landing page for the business

• Create a Facebook and Google business page

• Hire a couple of contract workers with pre-negotiated hourly prices

• Start door knocking with some flyers (on houses with solar panels, duh)

Total cost so far: $30

How this will work is:

1. We provide quotes to customers

2. We hire someone to do the work

3. We pay the person that did the work

4. We keep the dollar difference

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Gunna learn today… Getting your first customer will be a numbers game. The more you door knock, the more quotes you’ll send out. You’ll want to provide estimates about 20% to 40% over what you think the actual pay to the contractor will be.

Once you land a ready and willing customer, it’s time to spring into action.

If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to:

• set up an LLC

• get insurance

• open a business bank account.

You send out the contractor to the customers home to complete the work. Accept payment from the customer, then pay the contractor.

That’s it.

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

Sunny D… When the sun is shining, business is booming. Scaling this business can be pretty simple once you have the playbook written. You’ll hire a VA (virtual assistant) to do sales and coordinate contractors for you.

But you’ll have the most important job: Collecting checks.

At this time you’ll start to spend some of that money on running ads and paying others to do more door knocking.

So how much can you make in this business?

• The average solar cleaning job can cost $300

• The cost per panel comes out to $15 to $25/panel

• If you’re making an average of 30% profit = $90/job

• The number of homes with Solar in AZ (where I’m writing from) ~191,000

• That is a market cap of $57.3M

• Getting just 1% of that market is $573k in revenue or $171k in profit

Yes, you will have unexpected issues of customers not paying, contractors not showing up, damage done to panels, etc.

BUT THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY!

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Count me in… as I typed this out I got VERY excited. The solar industry’s future is bright and this is an opportunity worth exploring.

This will take 6mo to a year of hard work and grind. BUT once you get over that hump, you’ll be able to have a very profitable business while only working a couple hours a week.

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋