Every solar business sounds identical in the pitch. Clean install, good gear, panels in by smoko, happy customers waving from the driveway. If you read the brochures side by side you could not pick one from another.
None of that is the part that matters. The part that matters never makes it into the brochure, because no business wants to talk about it: what do you actually do when something goes wrong?
A leaking roof. A metre the network will not swap. An install that is not quite right. Those are the moments that tell a customer who they are really dealing with. Anyone can be brilliant on a job where nothing breaks. The character of a business shows up on the job that goes sideways.
I learned this on my first proper residential sale, and it shaped how I ran every customer relationship for the twenty years that followed.
The job that taught me
It was the early 2000s. My first 5 kW residential system, which back then was a serious bit of kit and a serious price. As I recall it came in around $27,000, which was a lot of money for the homeowner and a lot of money for a business at the stage mine was at. You do not forget your first one at that size.
The install went in clean. Everyone was pleased. Then a few days later, on the first decent rainy day, the phone rang. Water was coming through the kitchen ceiling.
I rang the installer, Aaron, to get him out there. His first words told me everything I needed to know: “I knew I should have fixed that tile.”
Sit with that sentence for a second, because it is a whole lesson on its own. He knew. On the day, up on the roof, he saw a cracked or lifted tile and made a quiet decision to leave it. No note, no flag, no mention to me. The problem did not start with the rain. It started with a small choice on the roof to not deal with something that needed dealing with, and to say nothing about it.
That is the failure I have watched repeat across hundreds of businesses since. Not the cracked tile. The silence about the cracked tile.
What we did about it
I sent Aaron straight back out with a tarp to stop the water that day. You do not leave a customer sitting under a dripping ceiling while you work out whose fault it is. The first job is to stop the bleeding, then sort the rest.
Once the weather cleared I waited for the roof and the plaster to properly dry out, because patching or painting damp plaster just buys you a second callback. Then I sent a painter in to do a spot fix on the stained section of the kitchen ceiling.
By the book, that should have been the end of it. Tile fixed, leak stopped, ceiling patched. But I rang the customer a few days later to check in, and the tone on the phone told me the spot fix had not actually landed. They were polite about it. They were not happy. A patched square on a ceiling does not match the rest, and every time they walked into that kitchen they would see the reminder of the day their new solar system flooded the house.
So I said the thing I have repeated to every person who has ever worked for me since: “If you are not satisfied, let me know. It is not a problem. We should leave the place better than we found it.”
Because of the way the house was laid out, the kitchen ceiling ran straight into the living room with nothing to break the line. A spot repaint would have looked worse than the stain. So we painted the whole kitchen ceiling and the living room ceiling to match. That was not cheap, and on a job that was already eating into the margin, it stung. I paid it anyway and did not argue the toss about whose tile it was.
Then the metre
The roof was only half the saga. The other half was the smart metre.
If you have done residential solar you know exactly where this is going. The system is on the roof, signed off, ready to go, and it cannot export a single kilowatt until the network distributor swaps the metre. And the distributor reschedules. And reschedules again. The customer rings you, frustrated, because from where they sit you sold them a system that is not doing the thing they paid for, and the delay has nothing to do with you and everything to do with a network operator they cannot get a straight answer out of.
I could have told the customer that the metre is the distributor’s job, not mine, and technically I would have been correct. Instead I made it my problem. I spent months chasing the distributor on their behalf, sitting in the same phone queues, copping the same runaround, so the homeowner did not have to. It was not my obligation. It was the right thing to do, and the customer could see I was on their side of the fence rather than hiding behind the contract.
What it produced
Here is the part that matters for your business.
That customer, the one whose ceiling leaked and whose metre took months, ended up happy to be a named reference. Not a five-star Google review left in thirty seconds. A real person, with a real phone number, who agreed that prospective customers could ring them and ask whether they should go with us.
Think about what that person was actually offering to do. They were offering to tell a stranger, in their own words, about a job where nearly everything went wrong, and how the business responded when it did. That is worth more than a hundred reviews from jobs that went perfectly, because the prospect on the other end of that call is not stupid. They know things go wrong. What they are really trying to work out is what you will do when it does.
A reference like that is the closest thing to proof you can offer. If you want more on turning finished jobs into that kind of advocacy, I wrote separately about how to get referrals from solar customers, but the foundation underneath all of it is the same: you earn the referral on the bad day, not the good one.
The principle, stated plainly
Any business can hand you a stack of stories where everything went right. That is not signal. That is just the absence of a disaster, and you cannot tell a careful operator from a lucky one by looking at their wins.
What separates one solar business from the next is what they do when it does not go right, and whether they own the outcome even when the fault is shared. Aaron’s tile. The distributor’s metre. Neither of those was strictly my doing. The customer did not care whose name was on the failure, and they were right not to. They bought the system from me. The buck stopped with me.
Customers read this clearly even when they cannot put words to it. They feel the difference between a business that fixes the thing and a business that explains why the thing is not its responsibility. One of those gets referred. The other gets a review they would rather not have.
What this looks like in your business
The trouble is that “own the outcome” is easy to nod along to and hard to actually run, because the moment something goes wrong is the moment you are busiest and least inclined to chase it. Good intentions do not survive a flat-out week. Process does. So here is what it actually takes.
A post-install follow-up that is built into the workflow, not left to whoever remembers. The leak got caught because I rang. If that call depends on someone being in the right mood on the right day, it will not happen on the week you most need it to.
Explicit permission for your team to fix problems without waiting for sign-off. Aaron should have felt able to flag the tile on the day. The painter should not have needed three approvals to come back. Every approval gate you add is another place a small problem grows teeth.
A real standard, not a slogan. “Leave the place better than we found it” only means something if you back it with the repaint when the repaint is what it takes, even when it hurts the margin on that job.
And a willingness to eat the cost of a solution rather than argue about liability. The most cost-effective customer you’ll ever acquire is one who tells ten people the truth about working with you (Long, n.d.).
This is the part of the business I kept hitting a wall on for years: the follow-up, the callbacks, the “did we ever close that out” jobs that fall through the cracks the second things get busy. It is exactly why I am building CurrentFlow. The idea is a system where the post-install follow-up is part of the workflow rather than a sticky note, so the check-in call that catches the leaking ceiling actually gets made, every time, not just when someone remembers.
It is pre-launch and I am building it because I needed it myself. If that problem is yours too, you can join the waitlist.
References
This is a first-person account drawn from my own years in the Australian solar trade, so it does not lean on external research. Two genuine, publicly available bodies sit behind the general claims about a business’s obligations and the metreing process, and are worth knowing as the operator.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. (n.d.). Consumer guarantees. Under Australian Consumer Law, services come with a guarantee that they will be provided with due care and skill, which is the legal backbone of fixing a job that goes wrong.
Australian Energy Regulator. (n.d.). Metering and connection. Network distributors and retailers, not the installer, control metre installation and the export connection, which is why those delays are common and why the installer chasing them on the customer’s behalf is a goodwill act rather than an obligation.
FAQ
Should I admit fault to a customer when a subcontractor caused the problem?
The customer bought from you, so the responsibility is yours regardless of whose hands were on the job. You do not need a courtroom verdict on whose tile it was before you act. Stop the immediate problem, fix it properly, and sort out the internal accountability with your subbie afterwards, away from the customer.
How much should I spend fixing a problem that was not fully my fault?
There is no fixed number, but the right frame is not “what is the minimum I am liable for”, it is “what does it cost to leave this customer genuinely satisfied”. A repaint or a few months of chasing a distributor is often cheaper than the reputation damage of a half-fixed job, and far cheaper than the referrals you never find out you lost.
What is the smart metre delay and why does it land on the installer?
When a solar system is installed, the property usually needs a compliant metre before it can export to the grid, and swapping that meter is the network distributor’s job, arranged through the retailer. The installer has no control over the schedule, but the customer’s frustration lands on the installer because they are the face of the project. Chasing it on the customer’s behalf is one of the clearest ways to show whose side you are on.
Is a named customer reference better than online reviews?
They do different jobs. Online reviews build broad visibility, but a named contact a prospect can actually ring carries far more weight at the decision point, especially if that contact lived through a job that went wrong and watched you put it right. One honest conversation about a recovered disaster outsells a wall of five-star ratings.
How do I make sure post-install follow-up actually happens when we get busy?
Take it out of memory and put it into process. Build the follow-up call as a scheduled step in the job workflow so it triggers automatically a set number of days after handover, rather than relying on someone choosing to make it. The whole point is that the check-in still happens on the week you are too flat out to think of it, because that is exactly the week a problem is most likely to be sitting unspoken on a roof.