Aaron Colvin was doing triceps push-ups at the gym when he saw a huge cartoon bodybuilder on the other side of the mirrored room. The guy was training the woman through a series of cables, and 18-year-old Colvin paused to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him staring and stumbled, Colvin became concerned. He thought he’d be accused of eyeing his girlfriend—one of the cardinal sins of gym culture.
But the bodybuilder just wanted to start a friendly conversation, during which he asked Colvin what he does for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to begin his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But in college he was lukewarm; he wanted to dedicate himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At age 13, Colvin vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher who raised him with little help. As a highly motivated teenager, he launched a series of one-man ventures that never quite panned out: T-shirt salesman, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, delivery man, Amazon arbitrage agent. He was currently working day shifts at both Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal training business.
Colvin’s strong new acquaintance wanted to steer him toward another opportunity: “What do you know about solar?” he asked. When he wasn’t competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the man said, he worked for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the nation’s leading installers of solar energy systems. The bodybuilder had just returned from a trip to Florida where he joined the solar industry’s “blitz”—slang for a sales event in which packs of young men in clean polo shirts and khaki shorts descend on the city, crash in a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spend for weeks knocking on as many doors as possible, boasting that he made “crazy money” – as much as $20,000 in one month – by convincing just a handful of homeowners to put solar panels on their roofs.
Colvin, a wiry former high school wrestler whose round silver glasses give him a scholarly face, was very intrigued. “I’m like, shit,” he recalls. “Like, yeah, cool, I’ll look into that.”
A few weeks later, Colvin had a FaceTime conversation with the bodybuilder manager at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Even though his semester of college had just begun, Colvin told Will he was thinking about dropping out: As someone shaped by adversity—he and his mother once lived above a Niagara Falls drugstore that was regularly broken into by drug addicts—he was having a hard time relating to to his classmates, most of whom came from more comfortable backgrounds than his. “I was having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin says. Will forced him to join his door-to-door sales team, which he called Seal Team Six. The job was easy, he said – just simply making homeowners aware that they could save thousands by installing solar panels and selling excess electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin delivered that message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions would be less than his Chipotle salary. “Behind every door is $5,000” was the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its gross revenue will exceed $1 billion in 2023.)
After some thought, Colvin declined the offer. He worried that she would regret leaving the school without giving it a fair shake. But Will was a ruthless recruiter. Almost daily that fall and winter, he peppered Colvin with Instagram Reels produced by the “solar brothers” showing off their six-figure commissions, their penthouse suites, their exotic cars. These influencers – tanned, chiseled, brimming with confidence – emphasized that anyone could reap such rewards if they had the courage to trade their everyday lives for a place in the advanced trenches of the green economy.