Luz Solar case study: commercial rooftop leads with the decision maker in the room

Word for word from the recording of the whole interview call, with filler words such as “um” left out. The video above is an edit of this call, so a few parts here are not in the video.

How's it going? There we go. Got you there, but you're just on mute. There we go. Sweet. So thanks for jumping on. Just basically wanted to ask some questions about your experience working with us. And then we have a quick chat after if you want. sure. Perfect. So Stephen, would you like to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about Luz Solar?

obviously my name's Stephen James, I've been involved in the renewable sector since 2010, going back in the good old days, when we had feed-in tariffs. Luz Solar started as a developer for domestic sites, we developed and actually built out for an investment company, just short of a thousand properties back in the days, moved into large scale commercial businesses, rooftops, we actually did the largest back in 2012, which was just short of a megawatt. In Oldham, so that was a milestone for the UK and for us, and that sort of propelled the business into some pretty large portfolios of PPA. And paid for systems. We built a team up to 30 staff, moved into the large scale sector, which was ground mount solar. Our first solar site was down in Cornwall, which was a 10 megawatt site, and we developed about 220 give or take commercial solar projects in the UK.

We did a lot of work abroad as well with partners.

Worked in Egypt, South Africa, Pakistan, not so nice. so I mean, obviously then the market crashed in the UK, so the original company was shut down due to just massive losses. developed huge pipelines and became... Work's overnight, so I went working abroad, I worked in Brazil for two and a half years, came back to the UK and then started all over again, so we're now developing life-scale solar, battery storage, and just started to really start again with the commercial rooftops, hence our sort of ability to talk today about TNW, so. Brilliant.

And you mentioned before that you were at a much more sort of lean model this time.

back in the days we used to develop in-house, and I looked at companies and I wasn't sure what I wanted to get back involved in doing that, which sort of brought me into what you guys do, which is pretty much exactly the way that we used to develop, and try and sort of... Get quality leads and speak to the, you know, the top business owners, the directors or the FDs, and you do all of that work now, so it saves me a massive headache, and obviously a lot of time and efforts, trying to find the right client to match us. keeps you nice and clean. absolutely. I don't want to be sacking 30 people again and saying, I'm sorry, there's no work for you anymore. So we do, we keep it lean. We've got an engineer, electrical engineer, designer, we've got technical designers, and we've got a good team of installers that have worked over the years with us that have huge sort of experience in actually putting the right projects and doing it properly. So everything's outsourced pretty much.

And in terms of our service, which part has been the most valuable to you?

I think just the quality, the quality of actually speaking to the decision makers. I think that's the most important thing. You're never going to get a good hit rate, a massive hit rate in dealing with these commercial sites because they always tend to come up with excuses that they're not ready or it's more expensive. I think the climate at the moment is people are sort of holding on to the purse strings just in case it gets worse rather than better, you know. So, you know, it's, I think just simply it's the quality of the lead that comes in. You know you're speaking to the right people. That decision obviously is down to the actual business and the business owners and, you know, ultimately nobody can force a guy to put solar on the roof. Because it doesn't matter how good an opportunity and a savings they make, it comes down to purse strings and cash flow. So not one of the leads has been a waste, to be honest. They also tried to sort of evolve into actually installing. So we were at two of the leads now that we've had. We've only had, I think, five or four that we've actually done site visits on. You know, that's 50% is pretty good. Okay, brilliant.

That's great to hear.

And have you worked with other lead generation agencies before? I have. Smiling.

Not for this company.

When I came back from overseas, working with some big companies, Trina Solar, the one of the partners, we had some heavy hitters. And, you know, in Brazil, particularly. I came We did very well. When I came back, for personal reasons, I started to look at getting back involved. I went working actually for a company, which was the first time in God knows how many years, working for somebody else. They wanted to get involved in the commercial sector. And the stuff that I did came well, but the stuff we were trying to buy lead-wise, it wasn't a good experience, to be honest. They were shelled out to three or four other companies. They weren't particularly good in meeting the correct person, i.e. the decision makers. And, you know, they're not cheap, but it was just shelled out. You know, you're in competition, you paid for a lead, and suddenly you've got four other companies being sold that same lead.

So, it wasn't a good experience.

Okay.

And were they, like, doing book-to-point moments, or is

No, it was just a very poor, poor companies, and ultimately we ended up claiming a lot of the money back because it's just a waste of time. You're wasting my time and you're wasting the client's time. know, it's suddenly you're getting leads through and they're not really being qualified properly. You know, this person might be interested is not a proper bona fide lead. You know, the clients I've spoken to with your company, they are very interested. Whether it's the right time is irrelevant. They are interested and you do get the right information to hand for us to actually put a proper proposal together for them. But I've not seen too many lead generators because, like I said, back in the day we used to do our own stuff. Okay. Like Sonya, in a similar way, but internally. Nice, and I think you covered a couple of those points, but in terms of the actual service provided, was there any sort of like key differences that you noticed from previous experiences with other leadership agencies or agencies or any example of that? the main one is actually speaking to a business owner that's actually really interested in looking at the solar opportunity to reduce their energy bills and go a little bit greener with regards to where the energy is coming from. And also, there's not a massive competition, you know, rightly so, the MDs or the FDs will want to go out to tender and then see if they're, you know, they're being given the right price structure and the right designs, which I don't mind because, you know, if we do our job properly and we sell it properly and give them the right information, you know, it's up to us to sell that. The Client, rather than it being sort of in the mix from day one or four or five people going in the same auction, so. that makes sense.

And in terms of the sort of average deal size that we've sort of giving to you guys at the moment, what are we sort of looking at? 100kW, a bath, where are supposed to say it?

again, I can explain why I've gone for 50 up to 400 maybe. Past experience has shown me that when you're looking at the megawatt size systems, you are, it doesn't matter what knowledge and experience you have, and clearly we, you know, the team that I've got around me have massive amounts of knowledge and experience in putting the right stuff together. But when it comes down to... The size of that, you know, that sort of thing, the megawatt size, you are, it comes down to the size of the bank balance and companies that have been trading for 30, 40 years in this industry, when you're talking about shelling out millions of pounds, tend to get the tenders and tend to get the actual job. So you tend to be wasting your time, getting to a point where you're in the last three and suddenly, you know, your accountants are looking, their accountants are looking at bank balance sheets and, you know, security, which is fair enough. It's just for us, as a company, our size, and they say, we haven't grown because we don't want to grow, and makes a big difference in the projects that we look at in size-wise, so 50 to 400. It's a good sweet spot for us. Perfect, think with those bigger projects as well, you're recommending DNO approval, all of that. Well, planning, I mean, yes, I think it's quite nice now that you're getting government support in a planning application as permitted developmental tour. think it's up to a megawatt, isn't.

Okay.

And in terms of the volume of leads that we've been sort of like presenting with you guys, what was that like as well as that song? I think it gave us plenty to look at. We made the commercial decision to get, I think, the first few across the line just to make any decisions to take more and more and more of. You know, there's a lot of work that goes into it, unless you've got 50 staff, or 30 staff, working on individual projects. For example, one of the sites that we've got on the go at the moment required an asbestos survey, it required a structural survey, and obviously the DNO is not an issue, we could deal with those all day every day, but when you're talking about these sorts of structural surveys it takes time and effort to get these things done before you can actually install, so I'm not saying they're all like that. But certainly, one of the sites we have in Birmingham has gone through that process where we've had to do structural, we've had to do asbestos, you know, to actually get the region some form of shape to actually installs that I'm wrong, so not the ideal scenario when you've got asbestos brews, to be honest, that's typically saying it's a 1950, 60, 70 building that's not structurally sound, to be honest. Okay, that means...

So any advice? Don't take those ones on.. I mean, I guess the benefit of you can ask is that you have the option to see what information there is beforehand and then you can sort of decide what you to ask for. absolutely.

And, you know, knowing how much work and effort it is for building regulations and asbestos and overclad quotations and such, like, it's not something that we'd probably go near again. Well, I'll make a note on the system for that..

what were you going to say?

No, no, it's, no, I'm just, that's not something, you know, I could take them all on but it would take, you know, months per try to get to a stage where the decision was made on a, once they've served us done.

mean, clearly they'd be… You

The business owner was very keen to get this thing done because he wouldn't have taken it so far and, you know, and spent all of his time as well taking on site surveys and stuff like that. 100% and in terms of the customer service, how is that for people wanting? I have no doubts that I'd be using your company and I'd recommend it to other companies, I would. It makes life a lot easier, so, you know, you've got a staff there that are constantly on the phone if I need them, just to go through what they find at once and if any questions, it's always, so it's been a very good service. Brilliant, I really appreciate that and that's exactly what we're trying to achieve, trying to make sure that, you know, everyone's always available if you need us.

Still to answer my next question, which is, you would you recommend us? The typical answer I get there is, you know, I don't want to endorse my composition.

No, listen, for a company our size, I mean, like to say, we reduced our size because it's a very, I don't know trying to a word, it's an unknown, this industry. You know, I developed huge, huge numbers of sites, whether it be commercial or large scale, mainly large scale, that, you know, just a turn in a policy can change the whole thing overnight, so try and keep it simple is the best way. And we can, you know, we can only take on so much work at this stage, so, you know, I won't be taking all of your leads because, you know, they come through thick and thick. They're fast don't they, you know, I wouldn't be taking them all on, so I'm sure there's plenty of installers out there, we'd appreciate a quality lead, which I believe yours are, as I say, how I used to do them ourselves internally, so. Brilliant. Well that, thank you very much.