Nico Johnson  00:00

Aaron Nichols, welcome to the show. You know, on the outside, I see that a lot of folks probably look at a company like Exact Solar and have a lot more questions than answers. It seems like it's a company that's been gaining momentum at a time where other companies are forced to be on the defensive in terms of posture, especially on the tail end of O Triple B and the solar industry broadly being kind of caught on its heels, what happened? What decisions do you feel like set in motion? Exact Solar's escape velocity at a time when others seem to be stuck in the in the quicksand.

Aaron Nichols  00:39

Exact Solar, I started in 2023, and that year we grew by 23% Actually, from 23 to 24, from 24 to 25, we grew by 50% And so far this year, we have grown by 73% and we're on track to vastly more than double our revenue. And so the reason that I wanted to come on today is because I know that so many people are struggling. I know that we're in a new world, and a lot of stuff is really hard right now. And I wanted to share, without giving away our secret sauce, I wanted to explain where we're putting our energy, so that anyone who wants to follow along can definitely try to do what we've done,

Nico Johnson  01:21

I want to qualify that when Aaron says he started in that sentence, it came out like you started Exact Solar. Oh, sorry, yeah, I started

Aaron Nichols  01:29

at Exact Solar in 2023. The company is 20 years old. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  01:32

yeah, exactly. In that time, though, you've been able to see sort of the industry go through this. I'm going to call it upheaval, especially in the residential sector where Exact has traditionally focused most of the effort. What specific decisions internally do you feel set Xact Solar in a different trajectory than its peers?

Aaron Nichols  01:54

There are so many, and I think to summarize it broadly, our president Doug Edwards, who we're so so lucky to be led by, says that the best shortcut is no shortcuts. So it's very hard to summarize because we've we've basically done everything as much as we could. But if I could talk at a high level about what has worked really well, it is speed to response. It is not ghosting people after we finish installing solar on their roof, and it's making a ton of content for years and years with very little reward that we're just starting to see the reward of.

Nico Johnson  02:32

You know, we spend a lot of time generally on podcasts and in business circles talking about business growth, how to unlock customer demand, how to get more revenue, how to gain more market share, but growth in and of itself doesn't compound. What I'm finding is learning does compound. The companies that seem to pull away over time are the ones that aren't just getting bigger; they're getting better at capturing the things that they've learned, especially from customers, and turning that into a system that makes the next customer easier to win, the salesperson's next engagement more effective, and the decisions made internally in the company each and every time a little smarter. I think that's something that I am watching as an outsider, observing the things that I get from you, Aaron, and the exact solar ecosystem are differentiating you from others. You've had an exceptional run for sure over the last few years, as you just outlined. And if I had to encapsulate some of the things I'm, I've been thinking at a philosophical level, there's a difference at exact. Of one of the things that you've said to me is that the owners of Exact aren't looking to sell the business? This is a lifetime business. They're they're they're thinking about how to build a committed team for a forever company, and that is a key differentiator and distinction to be made in a market where most of the businesses that we've seen fail fail because they were trying to be all things to all people. They were trying to grow extremely fast. They were trying to focus on the valuation of the business rather than the value the business delivered to the homeowner. Despite the lip service to the contrary, what I've seen you talk about in private circles and even in your podcast is what feels to me like a growth flywheel that, in part, I think you've architected, and in part you've been able to sort of feel around and discover and sort of find in the process. So I want to try to reverse that, reverse engineer that for the audience today. I'm curious to think about the timeline and how far back you would go. But if you look back, what do you what do you think are the two or three key decisions that let's just say like either you've recommended or Doug has made that continue paying dividends long after they were made?

Aaron Nichols  04:58

Yeah, we've got it's. Been such a fun, interesting science experiment to figure this all out. I think that content has been a huge, important part of our growth, and you know, like for for anyone who is wondering how to do that, Nico is a great resource. Like, talk to SunCast, but content takes so long to get right, and it's good. It takes longer than you think. It's like I mean, Dave Ramsey likes to say the three rules of business are: it takes twice as long as you think, it costs twice as much as you think, and you're not the exception.

Nico Johnson  05:35

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  05:36

I think the thing that a lot of people fail at with content, even like just as someone who's who's been running a podcast only for a year and a half. I've seen these dramatic podcast launches that have just come and gone. People have made a few episodes and then they're they're out of it. And

Nico Johnson  05:51

in our in our sector, or just generally

Aaron Nichols  05:53

in our sector, certainly yeah,

Aaron Nichols  05:55

yeah. And people make a big deal out of it, and then they don't continue. And the because content is very fun, it's very fun to make.

Nico Johnson  06:03

Yeah, but

Aaron Nichols  06:04

it gets boring after a while. After a while, you're doing the same stuff. So difficult, yeah. And this is this is why I love what Doug says. The best shortcut is no shortcuts. Like we we have improved on our content system over time, and we've just gotten better at better and better at multimedia content and putting it in different places, and recycling it in different areas, and publishing it to different things, which has you know begotten gotten better and better over time, and has served us well in the AI era, where AI is now taking the amalgamation of what a company does and using that to judge whether they're worthy of showing up in search rather than just SEO, where you know it was a much simpler game. All that has served us very well, but we also think of content as an internal resource, which I think is a key thing that a lot of people miss.

Nico Johnson  06:56

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  06:56

and in the AI era, I personally think AI is a much better internal resource than it is an external resource so far. Like there's everyone on our team hates AI content on the internet. When I can see an AI video that's an ad, I'm like, skip, remember, never talk to that company again. But it's wonderful for categorizing things internally, and this is something that has been a very, very big key to our success. I'm not going to talk about which platform we've used, but you need to think about an internal database that is automatically updated, that follows every member of your team around, and is updated constantly, so that anyone on your team can get a resource that they can show to a customer, but that can also get their questions answered quickly. Because one of the things that will happen in any organization as you grow is that everyone is going to have more and more questions because you're solving more and more complex problems. And the less that you can have your highest level people needed to answer those questions, and the more that there's some sort of mechanism for capturing what they do and recording it, so that someone can go get those questions answered. The easier things are going to be because, like, there's there's organizational entropy over time. So you need you need to make content, but you need to think of it as an internal resource resource as much as an external resource,

Nico Johnson  08:22

when you talk about and think about content inside of a company like Exact, it's been around for 20 years. When you first started talking about it internally, did they get it? Did do you have to constantly redefine and say this is content, or do you look like an alien to a company, or did they rock what you were talking about from the beginning?

Aaron Nichols  08:39

So I would define content as a piece of media that your company owns. I wouldn't call earned media content. I would say a piece of media that you have created, that you have put on a platform that is fully owned by your company on a channel that you own.

Nico Johnson  08:57

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  08:57

that's how I would define content.

Nico Johnson  08:59

Yeah, and I want to expand on that, which, at its core, answers a fundamental question someone internally of your company or externally in your customer base needs to know to succeed. Because, like, just creating content for content's sake, like, you know, what's our what's our lunch plan on a weekly basis, and you created a video around that is not itself content,

Aaron Nichols  09:21

of course.

Nico Johnson  09:22

However, if you've documented the onboarding process for your accounting team and you've saved it on an internal drive, that's content because now you never have to say that again. So anything, my my sort of adaptation of that is content is that thing with that you've recorded in a physical medium or digital medium that allows you to do it once and have it repeat multiple times to internal external stakeholders. So, like it's an it's a teaching tool. Yes.

Aaron Nichols  09:51

Okay. And in order for content to work well, I mean, this is you can go listen to the episode that Nico and I did on. Storytelling, I think it's called. I and I wrote an article called "Four Rules of Storytelling That Corporate America Desperately Needs. Like december

Nico Johnson  10:06

31, 2025.

Aaron Nichols  10:08

Nice. And storytelling has become a buzzword. Yeah, but taken on its own, it's meaningless. There's rules that you have to follow. I don't want to get too much into that, but like if if you're putting out stuff that's too technical for the average person to understand, it's going to be relatively useless, and it's not going to get people interested in what you do. Now, if you are making the user the hero of their own story, and you show how your product solves that, once again, go listen to the episode if you want more in depth.

Nico Johnson  10:40

It's good,

Aaron Nichols  10:41

but that is going to be a much more a much more useful resource for you. And I think, like like I was saying, the part of the success we've had is external facing content that we then reindex for internal use. And you can go look at our website, our YouTube channel. We have blogs. We have YouTube videos. We have this week in Solar, the podcast that I host. We have all of this is content that generates attention and then directs people back to our website and shows AI bots that we're a serious player.

Nico Johnson  11:15

Yeah, it has a purpose. I think I shared this on the episode that we talked. You just talked about, but this is one of my favorite books on that topic. It's called "They Ask, You Answer" by Marcus Sheridan. This is a guy who created probably the fastest growing, like most well known pool installation company, and he did it on on the sort of the cusp of the internet age, where he realized, oh, I could write this blog, and this blog would help drive people who are on the internet searching Google or Yahoo for answers about backyard pools to my website, and even if they never install from me, I can create this flywheel of attention that tells Google that I'm the one that answers it. and And he was able to sort of build concentric circles around where he lived in Virginia, and eventually expand across the East Coast, being the pool answer guy, in the same way that in any zip code exact solar, you know, if if exact wanted to expand to Colorado, it frankly wouldn't be terribly difficult from an an internet optimization perspective because you could simply start answering this the questions that folks in the zip codes in Colorado you want to expand to are asking and and having them find you in the places they're looking online, like Reddit or or Google or even ChatGPT or other search engines. I think it's fascinating, though, to your point that people under index on certain aspects of content and over-index on other aspects of content. When you got to exact, what was the company doing well already, if anything, and what have you all put into place to create sort of a systematic approach to content creation, indexing, and utilization?

Aaron Nichols  12:57

I think this is the caveat under everything that we're talking about none of this works unless you already do amazing work, and that is what Exact was doing when I got there. But it was also a company that had just changed hands, that was started by a husband and wife, and then run for I think 15 or 16 years. That was then sold to Doug Edwards, and Doug has a lot more experience building companies, and he knew that we needed a content engine. So we were already doing very, very well installing. Like that, and you know, I like to joke that it's not even a joke. I was at our Christmas party a couple years ago, and our head engineer had a couple too many glasses of wine and just came over and just started me showing me pictures of how beautiful our wiring is on jobs. Like he's such a geek about it, and that I love telling people that because it's just like the our engineering team will die for our customers. Yeah, which which I love. So none of this works unless you're already doing great work. But then the thing that I think people miss when you talk about you ask they answer is that the things that you care about as someone who's very interested in solar and may be a technical-minded professional are probably not the things that the average person who's looking for it cares about. Right? They want to know what can this do for me. My bills are expensive. Can this help? Like they don't care about the brand of micro inverters or the brand of panels, they just want to know how it can help them, and those are the questions people are asking. But I, I also, I don't want to get bogged down too much in content because it's it's important, but it's a small facet of what we're doing. The other things are speed to response and making sure people don't forget you, and I have a story I want to make sure I tell. So, as a user, and this is something that I think a lot of marketing professionals miss, and something that I'm very grateful for because neither me nor the other member of the marketing team, Alyssa, that. I work with have a marketing background. We were both educators. We both have the heart of a teacher, and I think a lot of people miss being curious about what the experience is like rather than over-indexing on how they think things should be. So, if you're someone who works in a home service company, you need to pay attention to what the experience of someone who wants home service is, and it's awful. Like the you you go talk to all these companies, and there's people tramping through your home, and you don't know like which person you should go with, and everyone's a different price, and you don't know why. And generally, you just want it out of your life as fast as possible, and so you're probably going to go with the person who got to you the fastest and gave you a relatively cheap quote, and then you want to feel good about them because it's your home that we're talking about, right? And so, getting to people fast in home service is so important. I cannot overstate the importance of that because they're talking to six other companies and they hate this whole process.

Nico Johnson  16:06

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  16:07

and solar's unnecessary. It's not like they need a tree removed. Like they're thinking of putting this thing on their house that they don't need. Now, also, a lot of people install and then don't stick around. They don't. They don't message anyone afterwards. They don't ask anyone to refer any anyone, and that's also something that you have to do in a specific way because, like, people want to know that there's something in it for them. And once again, thinking about your own experience as a user, you have to think about what is the what is the monetary threshold for which I would bother my friends to tell them that they should do this thing, and I'll bet you it's not 150 bucks. Like you would need to offer a significant reward for someone to refer you, yeah, and that needs to be in every facet of your sales process, and then ongoing for years.

Nico Johnson  17:03

So, can you tell me about how Exact has tested the thresholds that work versus what doesn't work?

Aaron Nichols  17:09

Absolutely. I mean, by the way, I'm willing to tell everyone all this because it has been so much work that I don't think anyone's going to do it, and I dare you. I dare you to do this because I think one of the. I

Nico Johnson  17:26

love that you say that because I share this book with people, I give it to them, and I say you're still going to come hire us to do this for you because it is so it is so paradoxical that you can have the answer and not take action.

Aaron Nichols  17:40

Yeah, and it is so it is so much work to do this, and you will see such little reward for so long.

Nico Johnson  17:46

That's right,

Aaron Nichols  17:47

and you will quit. Hit that

Nico Johnson  17:49

compound.

Aaron Nichols  17:49

I dare you. I defy you to do this. Yes, I'm going to tell you you're not going to do this, and I want that to motivate you to do this.

Nico Johnson  17:57

I love it,

Aaron Nichols  17:58

but yeah, like I, our referral process has just gotten better and better, and we have just gotten more and more referrals by just putting our referral process in more places. I cannot explain it to you any more simply than that. But then you have to

Nico Johnson  18:12

you have to define like you decided on something more than $150.

Aaron Nichols  18:17

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  18:18

did you test up to a threshold where people stopped referring and then scale back. Did you need a certain pool of folks to test that on? You know, from a marketer, my my brain is like, well, how do you know that your sample size is big enough? Is this a is this a one off? Was that neighborhood maybe just more friendly?

Aaron Nichols  18:33

I wish I could tell you we were that organized. We're growing so fast that we're holding on for dear life. Yeah, sure,

Aaron Nichols  18:39

but we are. So part of what we're

Nico Johnson  18:40

trying to reverse engineer is how you're growing so fast when people are not growing fast at all.

Aaron Nichols  18:44

Of course, yeah. But like, I think just putting that in as many places as possible and then running campaigns where we increase it temporarily has been huge. Sure.

Nico Johnson  18:54

Okay.

Aaron Nichols  18:55

And then scaling it back. Now's the time.

Nico Johnson  18:58

Do people do you find that people wait until the reward, no.

Aaron Nichols  19:02

Because this is another thing you have to understand. No one is thinking about you. Like you will sit there, especially as like a local home services company. And this is the second half of that story. I wanted to make sure I told.

Nico Johnson  19:14

Sure.

Aaron Nichols  19:16

I had my house painted earlier this year, and I had HVAC put in earlier this year,

Nico Johnson  19:21

the

Aaron Nichols  19:21

house painters came in. They painted my house and they left. They don't have a referral program. My dad asked me the name of them. My dad is a realtor. By the way, these painters did an incredible job.

Nico Johnson  19:33

Impeccable, yeah,

Aaron Nichols  19:33

yeah, like insane. It was so good. I loved it. And my dad's a realtor, and he said, "I have a client who wants their house painted. What was the name of the company that did your home? And I said, I don't know.

Nico Johnson  19:44

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  19:45

and we were just having a face-to-face conversation, and I had to I had to look it up. Now I can tell you that the company that put my HVAC in is Elephant Energy because they told me, like, if you refer anyone and they go. Us, we will give you this amount of money, and then they gave me a link. Isn't that the

Nico Johnson  20:04

local? Sorry, I don't want to geek out. Isn't that the local guys that work with Jet Jetson?

Aaron Nichols  20:09

I believe so. I'm not sure, but they're very good. Did they do

Nico Johnson  20:13

a what kind of track did you get?

Aaron Nichols  20:15

I got a Mitsubishi. Yeah, nice a heat pump. Yeah.

Nico Johnson  20:18

Okay, so it's not. Yeah, it wouldn't be Jetson because they would be installing in Jetson. But keep going. But you know that Elephant is the company because they reinforced not only that they wanted to know that they had done a good job for you by getting feedback, but then that for that feedback they were going to give you a reward.

Aaron Nichols  20:36

Yeah, and you mentioned like, do we get more referrals when we increase the budget, sometimes a little bit, but mostly because we're doing campaigns around it, we still get all kinds of referrals, and those people still get our normal $500 referral bonus. Except you know, when we double it to 1000, it's a bit more. But this is what I want to get at: is that no one is ever thinking about you, and this is something like people will say, "I don't want to bother people, and you do have to make sure that you have all of your legal, you know, like text and email stuff in place to make sure you're following all the rules. But like, the average person is super busy; they're stressed out. They're going to see five words of your email, and then they're never going to think about it again. And we're like in in this era where no one has time to pay attention to anything. You just want as many high quality pieces of content as you possibly can to just bring people to top of mind occasion, or bring yourself to top of mind occasionally. And like the average person is thinking about you so much less than you think.

Nico Johnson  21:40

So, couple questions. One: Have you tested physical mailers?

Aaron Nichols  21:44

We have. Yeah.

Nico Johnson  21:45

Okay.

Aaron Nichols  21:45

They've done quite well. And

Nico Johnson  21:46

then the second is: I know that one of the strategies for you is partnerships in the community. How have how has that approach expanded or changed over time? To like what what tweaks have you made to partnerships with with schools, churches, affinity groups, community groups to create top of funnel, top of mind referral of their community members?

Aaron Nichols  22:12

Well, we've just gotten a lot better at it, but there's so many local organizations that are either directly clean energy involved or clean energy adjacent, and you should find all of them, and you should meet everyone you can, and you should do a great job closing whoever they send you because that is its own ongoing flywheel of referrals. That's also brought us a ton of commercial work. There's so many nonprofits in our area that are specifically just trying to, you know, do sustainability initiatives just to get solar on more homes and businesses.

Nico Johnson  22:48

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  22:49

and we work so hard to make sure that we close as many of their leads as we can, so that we're the top company that they send leads to, and we make sure that those leads get closed, and then we we do great work, and we do the solar tour through American Solar Energy Society every year, and then we reuse that content a lot. Which that's been a goldmine for us, and it's hilarious because no one else does it the way we do it. Everyone else will just like put people on the map, maybe put a picture of them up, and we will like email people who want to be part of the solar tour, and then we'll set up a video interview with them, and we'll do a drone flyover of their job, and we get to reuse that as ads and on our YouTube channel. And like it's, but it's a ton of work.

Nico Johnson  23:31

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  23:31

it is so much work. But like it is, it has paid so many dividends to us, and not even just from a views perspective. If you go to our YouTube channel, you're going to see that those videos don't have a ton of views because our YouTube channel isn't as consistently updated as say this week in Solar's YouTube channel is, but those videos are internally indexed, and so now our sales team can like use AI to say, okay, I have a customer who has a certain type of roof in this area. They have this power company, and what are some people that we've worked with who were in their exact same situation? Yeah, and then we just send them these videos, and we're like, yeah. And who do you think someone's going to go with when they're looking for someone who's not going to ruin their home? Are they going to go with the people who are just like, hey, we're brand new. We're going to do a really good job. Or the people who are like, guess what? We have six videos of people who were just like you. I have three people you can call who say we did a great job, and you can read all of these amazing reviews.

Nico Johnson  24:34

What changed operationally in the organization to turn that knowledge into something the company could benefit from like you're not the first to capture customer testimonials. Was it like the ad the advent or bolt on of AI? Like how did from the perspective of Doug? Very like as you mentioned before, it was prescient to start hiring on a marketing team to believe that content is a tool that she. Be leveraged. You know the the notion of getting back to the customer quickly is one that when I first started my solar company in 2006, my business partner said, "What makes us? I asked him what makes us different, and he said we answer the phone and and we respond quickly. Yeah, I'm trying to get

Aaron Nichols  25:16

a tree taken down in my yard right now. I haven't even gotten anyone to contact me yet. It's been crazy. It's

Nico Johnson  25:21

crazy how hard it is just to get contractors to answer the phone and respond with a quote. So, can you unpack like that? If I'm an operator running a solar company and I want to thrive and grow, like exact, are there are there things that you've identified as a layperson sort of watching Doug manage this business that you think distinguished management style, the operational decisions that sort of institutionalize this this sort of playbook.

Aaron Nichols  25:52

Yeah, when I was writing down all the stuff that we're doing, it was really funny because you know I'm just like the frog in the water. I've been slowly cooked over time, and then I didn't realize how much we were doing when I had sent it to you. But I think the thing that's been so helpful from, I mean, working under Doug is amazing because Doug is a high energy, action-oriented optimist.

Nico Johnson  26:14

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  26:15

and he wasted no time after OBBB was passed, just being like, "How do we win now?

Nico Johnson  26:21

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  26:21

and that was that was amazing because we needed clear leadership in that moment, and we were all scared, right? Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  26:27

and he has done such a good job. I mean, we joined Amicus right before then. Amicus has helped us negotiate all of these things that we weren't doing before, all these financing products in a way that serves customers, in a way that is ethical, that we feel like we can stand behind. That's not just gonna, we're not just gonna grow as fast as we can with some financing thing and then just disappear and leave everybody high and dry. We're still growing sustainably, and like through that process, Doug was able to go pre safe harbor about 13 megawatts of materials that we can use commercially and residentially. A very small part of it is residential, and it's a different financing thing. And don't press me on this because I don't understand all the mechanisms. But we're now sitting on all of this work that we can pre sell at a tax credit, and we just became our whole service area just was designated an energy community a few weeks ago, so we are in an incredible position to just keep growing. And this is what I love so much about Doug. It's just he always goes and finds like, okay, so that avenue is closed. Like, and I, as I've been on calls with people through this, and as I've seen people who are struggling, there's all these conversations about how things should be different. And what I'm very grateful for with Doug is that we're just like, yeah, but they're not. Like we're gonna we're gonna prepare for drought and pray for rain, and we wasted no time. Just like, yeah, but you know this administration shouldn't be doing this. Yeah, but it is, right? Like yeah, but we're here. So now what?

Nico Johnson  28:08

It's really interesting for me, kind of observing this over the last 18 months as well. That sounds like less like the company is creating content and more like its organizational memory. Like I've, you know, you and I've talked about the content itself needs to answer a question. So, like, so what? The customer has a question about the impact to their yard or their roof or their their their service panel. That content can be created and shared as tactical tools through the sales team, but it needs to be discoverable. I think this is the thing that most people don't slow down long enough to figure out: is how do you actually serve the sales team with sales enablement tools that, to the rest of the world, look like content, look like marketing? The marketing team wasting their time asking a bunch of questions, trying to find the answers that the customers desperately want to know. Does that resonate?

Aaron Nichols  29:05

Yes, and I want to hit on a point that I think is super important because once again, I want to help, and I know that there are people out there who are creating content and haven't seen the value yet, or they're putting energy in the wrong place and it's not going anywhere. And one thing I see is that a lot of people are still creating content to demonstrate expertise, and that's that is still important. But in the era where anyone can pretend to be an expert on anything, it's not that important. Like you still want things that you have written that are free of the the cliche AI phrases like it's not it's not this it's that it's not X it's Y like you need things like that but when you're thinking of a formula for content the the question you're answering now always is how does our unique expertise apply to what. We just did, and here is what we just did.

Nico Johnson  30:03

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  30:03

irrevocably. You cannot argue with this. Yep,

Nico Johnson  30:07

and over and over and over, demonstrating the the thing that you did. Yeah, and that you have the the demonstrable physical world sort of example of that that neighbors can see.

Aaron Nichols  30:20

Yeah, and everyone's going to think it's fun in the beginning, and then they're going to be bored, and then you still have to do it. You have to create case studies until your eyes bleed, and no one is going to care for so long. And then one day, all of a sudden, it's going to be amazing.

Nico Johnson  30:39

Well, I want to pull a thread on ads, but before I do that, I want to sort of see if I've understood what what I'm sort of roughly referring to as a flywheel here. So, regardless how the lead drops in, you service the customer. The customer becomes a project. That project then creates documentation that demonstrates success. It also demonstrates sort of the nuts and bolts of execution work. The documentation then is indexable and improves sales because it becomes a sales enablement tool. Sales conversations uncover new questions that haven't been answered before. Those questions become content that the marketing team puts into the same indexable operational system. The content attracts better customers, and the cycle repeats itself. How close am I, or what have I missed?

Aaron Nichols  31:25

You're very close, and once again, for all who are listening, I dare you. You're not

Nico Johnson  31:31

do it. So, if we layer on marketing tactics like ads, what's worked, and what what do people again over and under index on.

Aaron Nichols  31:42

Yeah, I'll be totally honest. We're very new to succeeding at ads, and like many solar companies that we've seen, we previously like put together a highlight reel, and we were like, "These are all the things that are great about our company, and then ran it as an ad, and it didn't convert very well, and then we were like, okay, well, maybe we need an agency, and then we worked with a couple different agencies that we were just not excited about, and then like just over time, just tested more and more, and eventually we're like, okay, we have to bring this in house,

Nico Johnson  32:15

right?

Aaron Nichols  32:15

And we're just now starting to see some major success with ads, and it really has just come down to like bring it in house, get better at it, make ads, see which ones bring in leads, take the winners, put them into a folder that you can train an AI on, figure out why those ones work, make more like those. And by the way, Meta, I forget what it's called, Meta Ads, the Meta Ads platform, like

Nico Johnson  32:41

the content library, yeah, Meta library.

Aaron Nichols  32:43

You are so welcome to just go look at the stuff we're putting out, and it's not as hard as you think. It's like I so

Nico Johnson  32:51

Meta is where you run in most of the ads.

Aaron Nichols  32:53

Yes, yeah, we run we run on Meta. We run in some other places, but we've seen some good success on Meta. But the yeah,

Aaron Nichols  33:00

like you're welcome to go look at them, and I promise you, it's not as hard as you think. Under is worked under

Nico Johnson  33:05

appreciated resource.

Aaron Nichols  33:06

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  33:07

underappreciated resource is that you can steal the ads that are working from any competitor that is running ads on Facebook.

Aaron Nichols  33:16

Well, and you won't know exactly which ones are working. Like you're not going to see which ones performed the best when you go look at that, but you'll see the ads that we're running, and you know, like you're probably thinking that advertising might need to be complicated. We might need to rent a studio. Like, figure out what is interesting. Read Alex Hormozzi's value equation because it is magic. It works so well. Boil down what you offer to that, and then get it to like 45 to 30 seconds, and just talk at the camera. And if you go, if you go look at the ads we're running, which again, public resource, you're welcome to do. It's just me talking to the camera, and one of our top performing ones is me making a smoothie while I'm doing

Nico Johnson  34:01

it, why does the smoothie work?

Aaron Nichols  34:03

I don't know. I don't know, man. I've seen on

Nico Johnson  34:06

so many different verticals.

Aaron Nichols  34:08

There's something about like there. There's something about user-generated content, just like someone filming themselves, that works really well in 2026. But there's also just something about like someone doing something. Like there's you see all those videos of like women doing, you know, they're they're talking about a product while they're putting makeup on. It's, I don't know, maybe it's less intense. Is

Nico Johnson  34:28

there anything sort of the way I started talking about that flywheel is like customer becomes a project. Is there anything that precedes the customer becomes a project that fits between like content attracts better customers. That could be ads, or is there like is there a capture tool? Is there a legion process or tool that we're missing that folks that that like used used to work and now doesn't didn't work before now does? I'm not sure. I

Aaron Nichols  35:00

don't. I don't know if I know how to answer that. Have you guys

Nico Johnson  35:02

tested a bunch of lead gen stuff?

Aaron Nichols  35:04

What do you mean by lead gen stuff?

Nico Johnson  35:06

Yeah, like Energy Sage and other platforms. Yes,

Aaron Nichols  35:08

yes, yes, yes. Okay, so this this was part of the this was part of the process of ending up bringing ads in house, and I will tell you that with the exception of Energy Sage, and by the way, like we had to format our sales process in Energy Sage in a very specific way, and now it works really well for us. I'm not going to talk about that on here, but with the exception of Energy Sage, all bad.

Nico Johnson  35:35

None of the other ones worked for you. None

Aaron Nichols  35:37

of them, and we tried all of them. I'm not going to name them. Like you probably know who they are if you're in the solar industry, but if you want to scale with an ad budget, bring it in house. Like maybe hire an agency in the beginning to show you how it works. Make sure that you own all of the content, that you own all of the data, that they're not going to pull everything down. That's a mistake we made early on.

Nico Johnson  35:59

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  36:00

and so make sure you own everything. Make sure they'll turn it over to you when you're ready. You can even ask if they'll train your team so that you can do it in house. But your ultimate goal, especially if you're going to go to where you want and you're going to grow the way you want to, is you need to be doing it in house with your team, with people who care. Because if someone, especially when someone is creating content for you, like there were, we worked with so many agencies, and there's no one quite got it, and we're very specific about our brand, and we really want what goes out in the world to represent us well, and no one could really do it the way we wanted to.

Nico Johnson  36:37

Yeah, you know, you're on LinkedIn, Substack, YouTube, you've got podcasts. I'm curious where you're seeing the biggest return and why. I'm also curious the decision by Doug to have you be effectively the face of Exact in the internet world and not another leader in the company. Can you talk about those two things? Like maybe in reverse order,

Aaron Nichols  36:56

yeah,

Nico Johnson  36:56

you've become essentially the face of Exact Solar, including like being quoted in places as far afield as Europe, and that was hilarious. And what channels are working for you

Aaron Nichols  37:06

in terms of advertising and organic content? Facebook is working quite well. LinkedIn serves a different purpose. With me, me being a thought leader on LinkedIn has just kind of boosted our profile in AI search, as has this week in Solar. So we really think of this week in Solar and my LinkedIn as just like an ever-present top of funnel. But my LinkedIn presence has attracted some very high-quality commercial leads, which has been really cool.

Nico Johnson  37:37

Interesting.

Aaron Nichols  37:38

But there's not as many residential people hanging out there, whereas like Facebook, there's a lot more people who are local. And to be honest, we don't do as much as we want to on these platforms. We want to do a lot more. We're still not fully taking advantage of Nextdoor. We haven't really started exploring Reddit. Like there's there's so much that we're doing and so much more that we want to do, but I would. So I think the thing that has made this week in solar work really well, and the thing that is now putting that on its own organic growth curve that we just get to send all the attention at exact is that I realized that the written content had like could exist under its own merit, and there's there's platforms for written content, and so I realized that the show notes and the transcripts could just go on Substack as written content, and they could go on Medium, and they could go on LinkedIn as articles, and then I could link to the video channels where I wanted people to watch, and then I could put ads for exact in all of them. Yeah. So, so this week in Solar now goes live in like eight places, in different media formats, so people can consume it however they want.

Nico Johnson  38:45

One thing you mentioned earlier, and that keeps coming up in our conversations, Aaron and I have become good friends, and I've created a group chat for a lot of different creators in the industry. And Aaron is extremely opinionated, which I love about him. He's also an extremely good writer. Not everyone is. One area that we don't completely agree is AI in the creative process. You see it primarily, as you mentioned before, as an internal tool. I tend to think that it gives creators leverage by making iteration dramatically faster. A good example of that is I was listening to a conversation where the head of marketing for Adobe pointed out that most of the folks inside of Adobe who know how to use layers don't. They use AI to move faster. They use AI to sort of initiate and spark the creative process. So, and and to get a lot of the tedium and sort of the the mediocre processes that would otherwise take time out of the way. For for me, for example, I've always been a better editor. For those who don't know, Aaron was a writer for us about a year and a half ago when he was just starting at Exact. And one of the reasons that I paid for years writers to write drafts for me is because I'm not good at starting drafts. I'm good at editing. And improving them, and AI for me has been magic in that way. Where do you think AI right now genuinely creates leverage, and where do you think it starts taking away?

Aaron Nichols  40:11

So I definitely don't want to come across as anti AI. I think AI is incredible, but I don't believe it's the first step. And my reason for that is because it's not your creation, and this is something that I went back and forth on in my own personal writing, and I even like I used a little bit of it just for you know like I write a little Substack called the Modern Mythmaker that I update every couple weeks or months, and I did use AI a bit in the beginning, and then I was just like, "This isn't mine. Not

Nico Johnson  40:43

me. I

Aaron Nichols  40:44

cannot lie about this and say this is mine. Now, when you're thinking of content as a product and you need speed, of course AI is amazing. But I think that when you're talking about creation and you're talking about a foundation of something, yes, a foundation of something that's really good, like creativity is going to be such a moat because everyone is going to be recycling everything that everyone else is doing with AI, and so if you have original thoughts and you're able to write them down in your own words, like everything starts with good writing and then can be expanded from there, and then can be repurposed, and then can be redone, and then can be chopped up into content to put everywhere. But if it doesn't start with you, then it's not yours, and that means that it's recycled.

Nico Johnson  41:33

Here's where I would push back on that, and I don't disagree with you actually. Perhaps the lens that I look through is that I've created almost 1000 episodes. The AI that I use is trained on a voice that has been honed for 10 years in my LinkedIn writing, in my email and newsletter writing, in my you know the many many transcripts, hundreds of transcripts. And it's funny. Often, like I will get into these sort of conversations with ChatGPT where I'm just like, you know, I don't talk like that. Why are you saying it like that? That's a tough question.

Aaron Nichols  42:06

You just you just hit on a really important point, which is that you started this before AI.

Nico Johnson  42:11

Yeah, that's right. You

Aaron Nichols  42:12

had a foundation that was created without AI.

Nico Johnson  42:15

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  42:16

like that. Of course, it can amalgamate things once you've created a giant body of work, and it's very good at that. Yeah, but like,

Nico Johnson  42:23

I think that's what I was keying in on is that I probably take for granted that I did a lot of the original thought a decade plus, like over the course of the last decade. AI right now is iterating on the sort of the voice I've already established.

Aaron Nichols  42:38

Right,

Nico Johnson  42:38

I would agree with you that if someone started today, and we're like, I want to create a podcast that sort of competes with and looks and sounds like SunCast. AI is a useful tool to imitate, but not to create.

Aaron Nichols  42:51

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  42:52

AI is just going to give you something that other people go, well, you just copied SunCast,

Aaron Nichols  42:56

right?

Nico Johnson  42:56

Not competes with

Aaron Nichols  42:58

exactly, and this I think it's it's so important right now, like to use AI to streamline and get inefficient things that you hate out of your life.

Nico Johnson  43:09

Yeah,

Aaron Nichols  43:09

but I would-I actually am very wary of using AI personally. And when I write personally, I do it with a pen and a paper because it's still coming from me. It's still coming from my body of knowledge,

Nico Johnson  43:22

right?

Aaron Nichols  43:23

And there's something there that no one will be able to steal, that no one will be able to replicate. And the reason that we make fun of AI writing is because it's trained on all of the writing from the last 10 years, and 80% of that is trash, like it's corporate writing where people were like, "How many times can we use the word innovation? And like, if we don't say what we actually do, no one can sue us. Like, that's what AI is trained on. If you want intense, beautiful, original thought that like is going to lead you somewhere and take you in a direction, that has to come from you. And AI is not going to do that for you,

Nico Johnson  44:01

man. I'll tell you one of the things that we're starting to unpack, and for anybody that's been listening or into been reading, I'm going to start doing these, Aaron. I think you'll find this fascinating. I haven't talked about this on the podcast at all, but my buddy Adam Larner just texted me yesterday, and he literally texted me the title of the email that I sent, which is one of those things where you're just like, okay, something's working, something's working here. Like this is pretty freaking cool.

Aaron Nichols  44:24

Yeah.

Nico Johnson  44:24

What just happened? And I had spent like hours, Aaron. I mean, I spent hours writing and just thinking through and iterating. And he literally he texted me, and it just said flexibility beats precision. And the thing I had been thinking about is like, how would what would it look like if SunCast could model what Farnham Street does, but for energy operating systems? Right, like

Speaker 1  44:47

the

Nico Johnson  44:48

concept of a mental model is simply like what works universally as a way of thinking that either like contradicts what you do, but. Gives you a guiding principle, and that is more or less true no matter which sort of direction you point the arrow. It's what's really fascinating is I've been iterating on using AI like every episode. Like, is there an insight that could become like one more instructive tool in the toolkit towards an operating model that someone working in the energy ecosystem could apply, and I think it's not going to come from every single episode of This Week in Solar or SunCast or Energy Empire, any other episode. But if over time, like I've done 950 episodes, if over time, like the thing I value most about AI is it its ability to look at to do pattern matching at a scale that the human mind can't really achieve. It's amazing, most human minds. Yeah. Um. So it gives us super superpowers of pattern matching, and now we're able. We're we're now extracting these sort of operating principles from almost 1000 episodes, and those who subscribe to our Sunday newsletter, like they get these emails where I basically break down. Like, what's the one number that challenges the way you're thinking right now? What's the noise in the marketplace right now that would tell you we're going in one direction but really going the other? What's the signal that that that sort of gives you insight into an operating principle that you can apply to your business and like now look through that lens at your business this week and apply it. That for me has been just magic, and I would not been able. I don't think that I would have gotten there. I've told you many times, like I don't know what I want to write a book about. I do now, and it's because I've been able to use AI specifically to help me sort of separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. With that, Aaron, I got to. I'll let you comment, and I've got one more question. We got to run.

Aaron Nichols  46:50

Yeah, there's there's this video that I saw. This is very short. It's just a comedic sketch that I've been thinking a lot about. Where it's like on the screen, it flashed like the year 2050, and then it just showed like a caveman limping into a room with a big screen, and he was like, "Computer, do, and then you know he was like, "Wait, genius mode, and then it just came up with some pretty thing on the screen, and he was like, "I'm a genius, like that's that's what we're in danger of is deluding ourselves by thinking that this is our creative output. It is not.

Nico Johnson  47:26

Yeah, and that's why, honestly, in within the context of SunCast, over the last 1000 episodes that we've almost 1000 episodes we published, I've positioned myself more as a curator, like that of of docent in a museum, than the artist himself, and I don't mean that to be denigrating in any way of my ability to get smart talent and open doors. And I've had the pleasure and privilege of meeting folks like you who have genuinely insightful, unique thought. Of course, I do as well. But I feel like the greater value that I bring, and in some ways through this weekend solar, you bring as well is that we can pull the veil back and show folks like, hey, we're actually helping curate insights as well. And if you didn't get a chance to listen to that episode, if you don't listen to that trans, if you don't read that transcript, then it just gets lost in ether. So what I'm trying to do is leverage AI to help me sort of separate separate the noise,

Aaron Nichols  48:20

yeah,

Nico Johnson  48:21

and say, okay, you can't possibly listen to 1000 episodes. You aren't going to even read the articles I've written. Can I make this? Can I make this in some other way consumable so that it is valuable in a way so that I don't feel like I've wasted totally the that guest's time or that I find there's so much value in every single conversation. People just don't have the time to consume it, Aaron. I know we could talk for hours. I have one question left for you before we bail here. If if you were to get five minutes with every listener here who runs a business, and you wanted to give them an assignment, you could do that now as they're listening. Something they could be building over the next you know, week or so that would still pay dividends a year from now. What would that be?

Aaron Nichols  49:04

Find a project you've done that you think is interesting. Describe it to someone who does not work in the solar industry. Ask them what was interesting about

Nico Johnson  49:17

it. Then

Aaron Nichols  49:17

ask if you can interview the person you've done the project for, and focus it on what the person who was not in the solar industry said was interesting about the story. Then use that, make it video, audio, text, and work down your customer list until you find someone who agrees to let you do that, and then put it in as many places as you can, and then just keep doing that for you know forever.

Nico Johnson  49:46

I love it, Aaron. A lot of folks are not going to do that. I like you. I defy you to to take this assignment. If you do, email it to me, post it on LinkedIn, and tag. Us run an ad and and show us that it worked. Don't let this episode die with the the end of you know pressing the stop button. If folks want to get more time with you in their ear balls, Aaron, I know they can listen to this week in solar, how do you like to be found? How would they discover more of your work?

Aaron Nichols  50:24

You can find me on LinkedIn. You can DM me. I'm very friendly there. I'm getting to the point where I cannot just look stuff over. If people are just like, "Hey, can you look this over? I can't do that. But I would love to talk to you and just hang out for a bit. And yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, and you can listen to This Week in Solar on Substack, YouTube, or wherever podcasts are.

Nico Johnson  50:47

Search This Week in Solar. We'll link to, of course, in the show notes. Aaron Nichols is one of the marketing gurus over at Exact Solar, helping Exact achieve outsized returns in an undersized market. Aaron, thanks for all the wisdom that you always help bring to the SunCast audience. Look forward to next time.

Aaron Nichols  51:06

Thanks, Nico. I'll see you when I'm on for time number six.

Nico Johnson  51:09

Indeed. Twice weekly, we deliver conversations with founders and leaders on the front lines of the clean energy transition, and we're here bringing this content to you each and every week free of charge. Of course, it's not free. Our sponsors help pay the bills and keep the lights on, so that we can help you build your legacy in the clean energy transition. And so, if you'd like to say thank you to them, or learn more about what it is that they bring into the world, or perhaps see how you could reach 1000s of listeners twice a week, just like they do, check it out at Suncastmedia/sponsored. Remember, you are what you listen to. Thanks again for showing up, Solar Warrior. It's half the battle.

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