Solgen Power LLC - Entrepreneur of the Year

Company: Solgen Power LLC
Company Description: Solgen Power is a national solar installer. We focus on residential, although we do dabble in commercial. Solgen is vertically integrated in several areas. Solgen Power handles everything during the solar process from sales and financing to final install. We also source our inventory from overseas, and have begun distribution to the Solgen markets across the nation.
Nomination Category: Entrepreneur Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Entrepreneur of the Year - Materials & Construction

Nomination Title: Chris Lee

Chris Lee is the CEO and founder of Solgen Power. Chris is willing to doit all for his company. He has been involved with every aspect and department, including:sales, creating marketing content for the brand, revolutionizing operations processes to improve the customer experience, travelling to china to negotiate the best prices on the best products, and bringing on in-house financing.

When the company was founded in 2017, Chris was one of the only employees and was thehighest producing sales representative. He kept driving the sales for thebusiness with a small team through early 2019. In early 2019, most of the door to door sales were done by solar enegery consultants that Chris trained and deployed. He still continues to impact the team by holding closer trainings for the Inside sales team, and travelling to the different market locations to hold sales trainings.

Chris is the face of Solgen Power. Although the marketing startegy continues to evolve, Chris remains a constant force behind the brand and creating riveting, knowledgable content.He can be found on internal marketing podcasts, customer education videos, and facebook ads.

In 2020, Chris dove into our Operations departments to improve the efficiency and accuracy from sale to install. He was able to revolutionize theindustry by developing a way to predict the system design, and what products would be required for a job at time of sale, rather than waiting for each job to pass through the engineering department. Thisallowed Solgen to start submitting permitting and interconnection documents much sooner, with only minor tweaks needed after the engineering process was complete. This has had a huge impact on our speed to installation, and of course, customer satisfaction.

In 2019 and 2020 Chris travelled to China to meet with solar panel and microinverter manufacturers to truly understand which products were the top of the line. During his time in China he developed relationships with these manufacturers and was able to start purchasing products directly from the source, rather than buying products at inflated prices from retailers.

Finally, one of themost impactful areas Chris has developed in the business is in-house financing. Chris partnered with a bank to ensure that we control all aspects of the business from sale to install. Partnering with the bank allows Solgen to have more say in what the dealer fees, interest rates, and loan approvals will be. This in turn allows Solgen to set better expectations for our sales teams, and customers.

Chris is truly inspirational to every team member at Solgen Power. He starts each day by interacting with every employee individually. He leads from the front, and sets a fantastic example for all of his employees.

-Ernst &Young Entreprenuer of the year fianlist 2019
-2 comma club X award from Click Funnels ($10M in revenue through Sales & Marketing Platform)
-2 comma club XC award Click Funnels ($100 M in revenue through Sales & Marketing Platform)
-Featured in Entrepreneur.com
-Featured in Forbes.com
-Established and Fulfilled on several Charitable Events for his local community
-Generated over $50M in revenue since 2019
-Grew company's revenue substantially during the COVID-19 Pandemic without layoffs
-Created and Pioneered online marketing strategies unique to the Solar Installation industry
-International Speaker at several entrepenuer and business owner events