How to Find and Keep Solar Subbies Who Are Worth Keeping

Every installer who uses subbies has a story about the one who cost them a customer. Not because the job was unsafe and not because the licence was dodgy. The paperwork was clean. The system worked. The subbie just left a mess on the roof gutter, parked across the neighbour’s drive, didn’t sweep up the offcuts, and treated the customer’s home like a worksite instead of someone’s house. The customer never rang to complain. They just quietly decided they would not be recommending you to anyone.

That is the part of subbie management nobody hands you a checklist for. The accreditation checks are the easy bit. The hard bit is working out, before you put a crew on someone’s roof with your name on the quote, whether this person is going to represent you the way you would represent yourself.

I have spent twenty years around this trade, a good chunk of it managing and coordinating crews rather than swinging panels myself, and the same lesson keeps landing. The thing that separates a subbie relationship that builds your business from one that slowly bleeds it has almost nothing to do with whether they can physically do the install. Most of them can. It has everything to do with how they work when you are not standing there watching.

Accreditation is the floor, not the ceiling

Let me get the obvious out of the way, because it still has to be said.

Solar Accreditation Australia (SAA) accreditation, a current electrical licence for the licensed work, and the right insurances are not negotiable. In Australia the installation and supervision has to be done by an accredited installer for the system to be eligible to create Small-scale Technology Certificates, the tradeable certificates that get assigned to you or the retailer and surrendered to the Clean Energy Regulator under the Renewable Energy Target (Clean Energy Regulator, n.d.). Get the accreditation wrong and you do not just have a quality problem, you have a compliance and an STC problem. So yes, verify it. Every time. Check it is current, check it covers the work, and keep a copy on file.

But here is the thing every operator learns the hard way. Accreditation tells you a subbie is legally allowed to do the work. It tells you precisely nothing about how they do it. A licence is a minimum standard set by a regulator. It is not a character reference, and it is not a quality guarantee. You can be fully accredited, fully insured, and still be the bloke who leaves a customer fuming.

So treat the licence checks as the entry gate, not the decision. The real vetting starts after they pass it.

The questions that actually tell you something

When I am sizing up a new subbie, the accreditation conversation takes five minutes. The questions that matter take longer, and they are not the ones most people ask. Here is what I want to know.

How do you leave a site at the end of an install? Listen to how they answer. Someone who has thought about this will talk about cleanup as part of the job, not an afterthought. Someone who hasn’t will look at you like it is a strange question. That look is your answer. If you need a written cleanup policy and a follow-up call just to get a site left tidy, you have found a subbie who needs managing, not one you can trust.

When something unexpected comes up on the roof, do you ring me before or after you make the call? This one is gold. The site never matches the quote perfectly. There is always a surprise: the switchboard is full, the roof is a different pitch, the cable run is longer than planned. The question is what they do in that moment. A good subbie rings you before they improvise. A risky one installs whatever seems easiest and you find out later, usually from the customer.

Have you ever turned down a job because the conditions weren’t right? A subbie who has never said no to a job has either never struck a situation they couldn’t safely manage, which is unlikely over a real career, or they have managed those situations badly by pushing on regardless. The ability to walk away from a job that is not right is a sign of judgement, and judgement is the thing you are actually buying.

When you spot a defect or something you are not happy with, do you flag it or install and move on? This is the most important question on the list, and I will come back to it, because it is the one that decides whether you keep working with someone.

Can I reach you on the day of an install if something comes up? Sounds basic. It is not. A subbie who goes dark on install day, who you cannot raise when a customer is standing in their driveway asking a question, is a liability no matter how clean their work is.

Run a trial job before you commit volume

You would not give a new staff member the keys to the business on day one. Do not give a new subbie a week of your jobs on the strength of a good chat.

Before you commit any real volume, run a controlled trial. Pick a straightforward job, ideally one where you or your install manager can inspect the work the same day. Nothing exotic, nothing that is going to throw curveballs. You are not testing whether they can handle a hard install. You are setting a standard and seeing whether they meet it.

This is not about distrust. It is about calibration. You want to see, on a job you can actually inspect, what their definition of “finished” looks like next to yours. If the gap is small, you have found someone worth investing in. If the gap is large on an easy job, it is only going to get larger when the jobs get hard and the day gets long.

The first call after, every single time

Here is a habit that will save you more customer relationships than any vetting question: build a same-day or next-day post-install check-in into your sales flow for every job, and absolutely for every job with a new subbie.

It is two questions. Was the team professional? Did they leave the site clean and tidy? That is it.

The reason this matters is that most unhappy customers do not complain. They go quiet. The customer who was annoyed by the mess or the attitude will not ring you to tell you. They will just never refer anyone, and you will never know why your referral rate from that area dried up. A quick check-in call surfaces the problem while you can still fix it, before the customer has filed you away as not worth recommending. It is also, conveniently, the same call that earns you the referral when the job went well, which is its own reason to make it a standing part of your process (see how to get referrals from solar customers).

If you are using a subbie for the first time, that call is not optional. It is the only way you find out fast whether the trial actually went the way you think it did.

Ask for the references that mean something

Everyone asks “who have you worked for?” It is a useless question. Of course they have worked for people. The useful version is sharper.

“Can I contact two customers who had your crew on-site in the last six months?”

That is a different request entirely. Customer references carry more weight than trade referrals because they are recent, specific, and reflect a real end-user experience rather than a peer endorsement. A subbie who rattles off two recent client contacts without prompting is telling you they stand behind their work and their customers are willing to say so. That confidence also tells you a lot about how seriously they take the way they leave a job. A subbie who cannot is either genuinely new, which is fine if you go in eyes open, or they have something they would rather you did not hear about. Either way, you have learned something worth knowing.

The subbies worth keeping get kept

The single biggest factor in subbie quality over time is not vetting at all. It is the relationship.

The subbies who do consistent work for you, who are part of your regular flow, perform consistently because the relationship has value to both of you. They know more work is coming if they do this one well. The subbie who only ever gets your overflow, the jobs you throw out when you are slammed, has no reason to be invested in your brand. They are not building anything with you, so they treat your jobs accordingly.

So if you find someone good, prioritise them. Give them the steady run rather than the scraps. It is not charity, it is self-interest. A subbie with skin in the relationship will protect your reputation because protecting yours protects theirs. This is also why how you treat them on payment, on lead time, on respect, comes straight back to you in install quality. The relationship is the quality control.

It is worth being clear here that “subbie” means an independent contractor, not an employee, and the distinction carries real obligations around how you engage and pay them (Fair Work Ombudsman, n.d.; Australian Taxation Office, n.d.). Get that wrong and a cleanup problem becomes a much more expensive problem. Treat the contracting relationship as properly as you treat the install standard.

Know your exit point before you need it

Finally, know when to stop using someone, and decide it in advance so you are not making the call emotionally on a bad day.

A one-off mistake is an operations issue. Everyone has a bad install in them somewhere, and a good subbie who stuffs one up and tells you about it is still a good subbie. That is normal. You manage it and move on.

The exit point is different. It is the subbie who produces a substandard install and does not bring it to you. The pattern of finding out about problems from the customer instead of from the installer is not a skills gap you can train out. It is a culture problem, and it will cost you customers for as long as you tolerate it. Site safety and the duty to do work without creating risk is not something you get to be relaxed about either (Safe Work Australia, n.d.). When someone hides a defect rather than flagging it, the trust that the whole subbie relationship runs on is gone, and no amount of clean work elsewhere buys it back.

That is the line. Not the mistake. The hiding of it.

Where the system has to hold this together

None of this works if it lives in your head. The trial-job inspection, the same-day check-in call, the record of which subbie did which job and how it went, the references on file: that is all process, and process is exactly what falls over first when you get busy. The jobs you most need the check-in call on are the ones during the flat-out weeks when nobody has time to make it.

That gap is the reason I am building CurrentFlow. The idea is to keep the job, the assigned subbie, and the post-install follow-up in one place, so the check-in call is a prompt that fires automatically rather than a good intention you forget on a busy Friday. It is not built yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the principle stands whether you use a tool or a whiteboard: vet on behaviour, set the standard with a trial, follow up every job, and keep the subbies who tell you the truth.

References

Australian Taxation Office. (n.d.). Employee or independent contractor. Australian Taxation Office.

Clean Energy Regulator. (n.d.). Small-scale Technology Certificates. Australian Government.

Fair Work Ombudsman. (n.d.). Independent contractors. Australian Government.

Safe Work Australia. (n.d.). Work health and safety duties. Safe Work Australia.

Solar Accreditation Australia. (n.d.). Installer and designer accreditation. Solar Accreditation Australia.

FAQ

Is checking CEC accreditation enough to vet a solar subcontractor?

No. Accreditation, a current electrical licence and the right insurances are mandatory, and you should verify all of them every time. But they only confirm a subbie is legally allowed to do the work. They tell you nothing about how they treat a customer’s home, whether they clean up, or whether they flag problems instead of hiding them. The behavioural vetting is separate, and it is where the real risk lives.

How do I trial a new solar subbie before giving them regular work?

Give them one straightforward job, ideally one you or your install manager can inspect the same day. You are not testing whether they can handle a hard install, you are seeing whether their definition of “finished” matches yours on an easy one. If the gap is large on a simple job, it will only get worse when the work gets hard.

What should I ask in a post-install customer check-in?

Keep it to two questions: was the team professional, and did they leave the site clean and tidy? Make the call same-day or next-day, every job, and especially when you have used a subbie for the first time. Most unhappy customers go quiet rather than complain, so the call is often the only way you find out there was a problem while you can still fix it.

When should I stop using a solar subcontractor?

When they produce a substandard install and do not tell you about it. A one-off mistake that they disclose is an operations issue you can manage. A pattern of hiding defects, so you only hear about problems from the customer, is a culture problem that will keep costing you referrals. That is the exit point, not the occasional bad job.

Are my regular subbies really better than my overflow crews?

Usually, yes, and it is structural rather than personal. Subbies who get consistent work from you have a reason to protect your reputation, because protecting yours protects their ongoing income. Overflow-only subbies have no stake in your brand and tend to treat the jobs that way. If you find someone good, give them the steady run rather than the scraps.