Personally closed $10M+ in dormant solar pipeline

Overview

Better Earth is a national residential solar installer operating across California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. When I joined at the end of 2021, Better Earth was on a rapid growth trajectory — reaching $149M in annual revenue by 2022 and an estimated $350M by 2023. The business was scaling fast. Better Earth had a massive internal 1099 sales team — door-to-door reps and inside sales — plus dealer partners with their own door-to-door operations. New deals came in daily from every state.

The volume was real. So was the fallout. Contracts signed and then canceled. Homeowners who got cold feet and stopped answering. Deals that made it all the way to install day before falling apart. Quotes that went nowhere. A meaningful percentage of every month’s pipeline was generated but never converted — and once it didn’t convert, it sat in the CRM untouched.

Better Earth had just stood up a small recovery team to start working on it, but the function was underperforming — individual reps were saving 1-3 deals per month against pipeline that could have produced significantly more. There were no SOPs, no playbook, no methodology. Just cold calling and texting leads at random, hoping something would convert.

I came in and built the operational playbook. Over three years, I personally recovered $10M+ in dormant pipeline revenue.

The Problem

Like most home service operators, Better Earth’s sales infrastructure was built for one motion: convert new leads to signed contracts. Between the 1099 door-to-door team, inside sales, and dealer partner network, every rep had the same singular focus — hunt and kill.

That motion ran well. New appointments got worked. Fresh leads got closed. The team hit their numbers on volume.

What that motion didn't do was work the pipeline that stalled. Homeowners who got a quote and went quiet. Financing fall-throughs that never got rescued. Deals homeowners signed but canceled before install. Aged leads sitting untouched for months or years.

Three categories of dormant pipeline were sitting in the CRM — stalled deals, canceled projects, and aged leads — each representing real money a homeowner had been close to spending. Most of it sitting there as dead data.

The math on this was significant. At $20-30K average ticket and the volume Better Earth was generating, even a single-digit recovery rate on dormant pipeline meant millions in recoverable revenue every quarter. But there was no infrastructure to work it. No operational playbook, no SOPs, no rhythm.

It was a goldmine sitting completely untouched.

The Approach

The department existed when I arrived but was producing minimal results. There was no operational playbook — just a small team trying to recover pipeline without a methodology that worked.

I was working seven days a week at first, going through the dormant pipeline one conversation at a time. I tested approaches on real homeowner conversations, kept what produced recoveries, and threw out what didn't. Within months, patterns started showing up clearly: certain cancellation reasons were more recoverable than others, certain talk tracks reopened conversations faster, specific financing workarounds brought more deals back to life. Once the patterns were visible, I built the operational system around them.

I also became Better Earth’s direct line of defense for same-day install cancellations. On peak days, 5-8 homeowners would cancel on install day across the four states we operated in — sometimes the morning of, sometimes hours before the crew arrived. Operations managers called me directly. I’d get on the phone with the homeowner, work through their concerns, and keep the install on schedule. Every save protected Better Earth from real losses — install crew time already scheduled, financing already in motion, and revenue that would have walked out the door.

The team that exists today scaled around my work. Reps were trained on the SOPs I’d written. Talk tracks I’d developed became the standard. The daily operational rhythm I’d built became how the department ran. I was on the calls myself — not delegating, not strategizing from a desk. The methodology I built came from the actual conversations I was having with homeowners.

What We Built

Over three years, I built specific operational assets that scaled the recovery function from a few deals a month to millions in recovered revenue:

A pipeline segmentation system that classified every dormant record into three categories — stalled deals where estimates went out and homeowners went quiet, canceled projects that got marked closed-lost, and aged leads that hadn’t been worked in 3+ months. Within each category, deals were sorted by how recent the fall-off was (fresh cancels vs. aged cancels) and what was in the notes. Reading the notes and working the deals surfaced patterns about which categories converted and which didn’t.

Reactivation SOPs and talk tracks specific to each major reason a homeowner walked away — pricing concerns, bad customer experience, lack of communication, slow permitting timeline, financing fall-through, household decision-maker change. The reality of solar is that a deal isn’t officially closed until the glass is on the roof. A homeowner can cancel at any point in that journey, and each cancellation reason needs its own approach.

Direct integration with Better Earth’s operations team — permitting, finance, install scheduling, activation — to handle the operational complexity of reactivating deals at different stages. Some deals were saved during the permitting phase and needed permits pulled. Some were ready for install and just needed to be put back on the schedule. Some were aged leads starting from the beginning of the operational flow. Every recovered deal required a different integration depending on where it had stopped.

The team that runs the recovery function today was trained on these systems — and the playbook that scaled that operation is the same methodology I’m bringing into Akemi. None of it is solar-specific. It applies anywhere homeowners with history get left in the CRM.

The Results

Over the three years I led the recovery department, the numbers tell the story. I personally closed $10M+ in revenue by reopening dormant pipeline — using direct customer outreach, strategy, and closing skills to bring deals back to life. I also collected $3M+ in outstanding milestone payments on installed projects — operational work that most recovery operations don’t even attempt.

At peak monthly performance, I was personally recovering 20-25 canceled solar projects per month, taking projects from “marked dead” back to “scheduled install” with updated financing and renewed customer commitment.

But the work didn’t end at the close. I stayed with every recovered project through to installation — coordinating with permitting, finance, activation, and install teams to make sure the operational flow ran smoothly. A recovered deal that hits a second hiccup is a homeowner who cancels for good. Seeing each project through to install was how I made sure that didn’t happen.

The department recovered significantly more than my personal numbers — but the $10M+ is specifically what I closed myself.

What This Proves

The Better Earth engagement is one operator at one scale in one vertical. But the framework that produced these results travels — solar, HVAC, roofing, insulation, windows, remodeling, anywhere homeowners with history get left in the CRM.

Every home service operator running meaningful pipeline volume has dormant records that can be recovered — stalled deals, canceled projects, aged leads — and almost none of them have the operational infrastructure to work it. The math at Better Earth is the math at any operator generating real pipeline volume.

The reason most home service operators don’t recover dormant pipeline isn’t because the revenue isn’t there. It is. They don’t recover it because they don’t have the operational infrastructure — segmentation, SOPs, talk tracks, integration with operations. Akemi exists to bring that infrastructure into businesses that need it. The revenue is already in your CRM. Someone just has to work it.