The incentive that carried residential solar has gone. The growth plan has to be rebuilt.

Four areas and a plan. The offer, meaning price per watt, realised margin and how cash, loan and third-party ownership options are presented; the funnel, measured at every stage from lead to installed rather than at the ends; the backlog, meaning cancellation rate by stage and reason plus cycle times; and revenue per customer, meaning storage attachment, service and adjacent work. The output is a written plan with owners, a marketing brief your vendors can be held to, and a monthly scorecard your team maintains.

No. We are not tax advisors, lawyers, securities professionals or project finance arrangers, and nothing here is advice in any of those areas. Incentives appear in our work only as market context, because they change demand and pricing, and your own tax, legal and finance advisors own every question about eligibility, structures and filings. If a finding depends on an incentive assumption, we label it as an assumption and tell you who should confirm it.

It is the condition the work is built for. Wood Mackenzie expects residential solar to contract 21% in 2026 after the Section 25D credit expired, with recovery expected in 2027. In a contracting market the companies that survive are the ones that know their real cost per installed contract, cut the sources and markets that never paid, and hold margin instead of chasing volume. That is a measurement and decision problem, not an advertising one.

An agency is paid to buy media and generate appointments. This engagement is paid to find out where the company actually loses money, and in solar that is usually qualification, pricing, cancellations or install throughput rather than reach. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan can conclude that you should spend less and fix the sat-to-signed rate. If you want execution afterwards it is scoped separately, and the brief is written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it.

No, the useful part is the decomposition. Cancellations are recorded as one number and caused by at least five different things: credit decline, price shock when the loan terms are read, design or shading changes after site survey, permit and interconnection delay, and simple buyer's remorse from an over-promised sales conversation. Each has a different owner and a different fix, so the plan names them separately with a target and a responsible person for each.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of markets in scope, whether commercial work is included and the state of your CRM and project data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

No, and reconciling them is part of the value. We work with what exists, match contracts against installs and invoices, and state plainly which findings are solid and which are directional. 62% of organizations report losing revenue directly because of poor data quality, and only 41% have a dedicated data governance owner, so this is the norm rather than an embarrassment. The plan includes the small set of field and process changes that make next year's analysis reliable, or marketing operations consulting if the rebuild is larger.

Usually yes, but for margin and resilience rather than as a slogan, and only where the crews and the utility rules support it. National battery attachment fell from 41% to 38% during the incentive rush, with California dropping from 79% to 71% and Texas from 61% to 53%, so attachment is volatile and market-specific. We measure your attachment by market and by closer, then say whether the gap is pricing, presentation or capability, because the remedy differs for each.

Sometimes, and only where the data supports it. The more frequent finding is that pricing is uneven and poorly explained rather than simply low: the same system is quoted differently by closer, financing options are presented in a way that hides the real monthly cost, and discounts rescue conversations better presentation would have won. With the spread between the highest and lowest average quoted prices widening 24% to $0.72 per watt, knowing where you sit matters more than moving the number.

Yes, with a different emphasis. Commercial and small utility work is a pipeline and relationship business, so the analysis moves to opportunity sourcing, proposal win rate by segment, sales cycle length, referral and developer relationships, and how project timing affects cash. Companies running both usually discover that the two lines compete for the same senior sales attention, and the plan makes that allocation explicit instead of leaving it to whoever shouts loudest.

We analyse them and recommend, and your operations leadership decides and delivers. We are not an operations consultancy, we do not restructure your install teams and we do not recruit crews. What the plan does is name the throughput ceiling, sequence hiring and subcontracting against the growth target, and flag where a sales or marketing recommendation would break if install and permitting capacity are not ready for it.

The founder or general manager, whoever owns sales, a working closer, operations and permitting, and the person who owns the numbers. Expect a kickoff, a data pull, several short interviews, one decision session with leadership and a final review. We take read-only access through your own accounts and work around the install schedule rather than through it.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: it covers the offer, the whole funnel through to interconnection, the backlog and revenue per customer, which is where solar growth is decided, and it ends in a plan rather than findings. Companies that want positioning work rather than commercial mechanics should look at marketing strategy consulting instead.

Yes. The mechanics are close enough that the same engagement runs for adjacent home-services trades, with the mix categories and seasonality changed. The parent version is growth advisory, and there are sibling pages for HVAC growth consulting, roofing growth consulting and plumbing growth consulting, where membership and replacement work dominate the analysis instead of financing and interconnection.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many companies book a review at ninety days to re-measure sat-to-signed rate, cancellation rate and installed margin, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing marketing leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO or scorecard advisory is the next engagement, quoted separately.