The Sunly Story
Like so many others that start their own business our story starts from our team having experience in the industry, identifying opportunities to make it better and having the drive to push the idea into a reality.
What was our crazy idea?
Our team had all originally worked in the Ontario solar industry for a long time. We went through ups and downs and proved it was possible to make over 400 sales per month by a single company. But what we learned was that it is incredibly challenging to manage such a large territory.
In Ontario there are 2.8M single detached houses, 60 electricity providers and each city can have it's own processes when applying for permits. To manage all of that and keep a high level of customer service in a single entity is almost impossible. As the projects built up so to did the inefficiencies because of so many third party providers we had to have knowledge on.
So how do you fix that problem?
You find passionate people like yourself to take a truly grassroots approach and find motivated people like yourself to become experts in their specific area.
The Pilot
A partner company provided us with an opportunity to sell and install in PEI while they would provide the inventory and financing for our clients. This was a way for us to start out small and prove the concept of grassroots.
PEI has 1 main electricity provider and only 41,000 single detached houses. This was a perfect market to test the local approach.
In our first year of operating in 2019 we were outperforming our success in Ontario by 1.75X. As of today in January 2022 we are outperforming our success in Ontario by 7.5X as it relates to monthly sales compared to potential available houses.
7.5 X more successful when focusing locally
Our first day on the job
While we do have 4 partners that started Sunly not all of us were required at first. Everyone had input on how we developed our business but Scott and Shamor's valuable experience and skillsets in engineering, installing and process design didn't require as much time commitment at the very start (but believe me, they are working really hard now)!
Jason, as the CEO, spent his time relationship building, learning the PEI market and doing just about anything it took to get the train rolling. At the start Jason acted as our call centre (booking meetings with home owners) and solar advisor (selling the product), all while building our relationships in PEI.
I, Tyson, spent my time building out our CRM, website and generating leads through multiple marketing campaigns in facebook. I was consumed with keeping the volume of leads high and testing out imagery, content to keep the lead cost low.
Yes we started this simply just with Facebook advertising. When you join our team, we will give you a developed strategy years in the making that combines traditional and digital platforms way more advanced than our early days of simply Facebook ads.
3 months in
At our 3 month point it was clear we needed to add in a Solar Advisor. This was someone that could dedicate themselves to all of our leads that wanted in home appointments. Jason needed more time on his hands for growing the business and he will admit he's not really a sales person at heart.
Meet Brian our first Solar Advisor! He was the nicest, friendliest guy we had ever met. He understood as a starting business there would be hiccups and speed bumps but was always willing to help where needed. We couldn't have asked for a better Solar Advisor.
While Brian started, Shamor was also able to become more involved. Both himself and Jason ended up splitting the duties of lead follow up to book Brian sales meetings. Everyone was doing things a little out of their scope but always learning and doing whatever it took.
I was the wizard behind the scenes taking all the feedback I was getting and making the tech and marketing what you see today.
8 months in
It was time to put our experience to the test. In a cold March of 2020, our first installation crew finished a batch of 8 installations. This was intended to combine the previous experiences of the team members with the way things worked in the PEI area.
Scott was now getting his hands dirty and spending long, cold days on rooftops installing with his team. We were fully up and running with a team that could support our growth.
Have a look at this testimonials from one of our first installations:
Where are we today in PEI
So its been 4 years since we started our business in PEI and we have accomplished a lot in that short time. We have completed over 1,800 installs, hired 5 full installation crews, expanded to 5 Solar advisors, hired a great administrative team to keep the train powering along, and we have been nominated for the Emerging Business Excellence award from the Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce.