Chris Lee shares how he built Solgen Power from his garage into a company with $233 million in annual revenue. He discusses sales, culture, profitability, and how he now sources home service businesses through NLP Holdings.
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About the guest
Chris Lee. Chris Lee is founder and chairman of NLP Holdings and host of the Next Level Pros podcast. He founded Solgen Power in 2017 and scaled it to $233 million in annual revenue before a nine-figure private equity exit.
Key takeaways
- Lee says four principles guided Solgen Power, including prioritizing the company, then the team, then the customer. He connects that order to serving customers well.
- He prioritized profitability through premium pricing and sales. Cash flow funded most of Solgen Power's growth, with a short bridge loan from friends and family when the company began sourcing products from Asia.
- Solgen Power used a 300-person sales floor to sell solar and roofing systems over the phone, with separate installation hubs. The company also processed its own loans, and Lee said 96% of sales used financing.
- Lee called the company's online lead generation "digital door knocking." Its internal marketing team used educational funnels on YouTube and Facebook to generate about 1,100 leads a day.
- He argues that culture, leadership development, vision, and direction can matter more than having a perfect product. He said people will support a company when they can see the opportunity and roadmap.
- Lee described employee development as including physical, economic, social, and spiritual growth. He said that approach can help people find more purpose at work than a paycheck alone.
- He uses five-year growth goals to shape planning and recruitment. At Solgen Power's exit, he said 12 other people became multimillionaires through the transaction.
- Lee shared that experiencing bankruptcy and having less than $1,000 in his bank account changed his attitude toward risk. He tells his team that their imagined worst-case scenario may be less bad than they think.
- Through NLP Holdings, Lee said the team uses education and consulting to find home service businesses to partner with, often negotiating 50% to 60% equity without money out of pocket.
- Lee recommends applying the 80/20 model by repeatedly focusing on the 20% of work that moves the needle, while delegating or using AI for the rest.
Best quotes
"I've been an entrepreneur since I was 24 and had a lot of failures before the exits. I think it's important to note."
"So we scaled it in 4 and 1/2 years, completely bootstrapped. No no outside capital."
"So like principle number one is like prioritization, putting the company first, the team second, and the customer third is what allows us to serve the customer."
"So building teams through culture, leadership development. So one of the things that we scaled in that company, we had a 300 man sales floor where we virtually would sell these uh these systems over the phone."
"And so I coined the term digital door knocking where we were one of the first to actually generate leads online through alternative methods than just Google search, right?"
"And so, people that were interested in getting quotes for their home."
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