Every month, solar installers pour thousands into advertising that generates clicks, celebrates "cheap" leads, and quietly loses money on every installation. Within these pages is the cautionary tale of an operator who spent $8,250 a month on Google Ads to earn $720 in profit—because she tracked cost per lead instead of cost per installed system. If that sounds uncomfortably familiar, Under the Sun was written for you.
Solar is a high-ticket, low-volume business. One installed system can be worth five to twenty thousand dollars, yet a single qualified lead often costs fifty to two hundred dollars, and only ten to twenty percent ever convert. That math rewards precision, not volume. Author Brett Callahan delivers a complete marketing operating system built exclusively for solar installation companies—one that ties every dollar of spend to your close rates, your average system size, and your true customer lifetime value.
The modern solar homeowner begins researching four to six months before committing, then compares two to three companies during an active window averaging forty-five days from first touch to signed contract. This book maps every stage of that journey—awareness, consideration, evaluation, decision—so you can put the right message in front of the right buyer at the moment they're ready to act.
You'll learn how to build map-based pay-per-click campaigns that target decision-stage buyers by city, zip code, radius, and custom-drawn boundaries—then trace every installed system back to the exact keyword, ad, and campaign that produced it, so weekly optimization replaces blind scaling. You'll discover why SEO is infrastructure rather than a campaign, following a six-month roadmap that took one installer from 200 to 1,200 organic visitors per month, cut cost per lead from $145 to $22, and freed up more than $7,200 in monthly ad spend. And you'll master the channels where homeowners actually decide: Facebook feeds where a neighbor's post beats any billboard, Nextdoor's verified-resident audiences, YouTube education that builds trust, and authentic installation creative that pulled forty-two leads at thirty-one dollars apiece against an eighty-nine-dollar paid-search benchmark.
The book also rebuilds your back end. You'll implement segmented, behavior-triggered email sequences that lifted open rates from eleven to twenty-eight percent and multiplied email revenue fivefold in sixty days. You'll engineer a website around speed (bounce probability jumps thirty-two percent between one and three seconds of load time), five-field minimum quote forms, and calls-to-action specific enough to answer "what happens if I click?" And you'll design referral systems—the channel proven to run twelve times more efficiently than paid search on cost per acquisition.
Just as important, you'll learn the discipline most marketers skip entirely: capacity-constrained growth. Worked audits show how a three-crew installer calculated his six-installation monthly ceiling, determined he needed forty qualified leads to fill it, and aligned every marketing dollar to demand his crews could actually serve—protecting reputation, margins, and sanity.
Every strategy arrives grounded in detailed worked examples with hard numbers, paired with seven-day implementation sprints and troubleshooting guides that expose the failure modes killing solar marketing today: vanity metrics, attribution gaps, the broadcast trap, permission problems, and measurement myopia.