Pros
A) Great Design and Quoting tools.....better than any other in the residential industry. Over the past 6 years in the solar industry I have used every major residential design tool and quoting tool. All were clumpy and were rarely updated in a manner that made them easier to use in the field. The Rive brothers have assembled a team that has developed and design tool that automatically drops data into a quoting tool that is easy to tweek and revise to your customers goals. Everything from credit check to esign signing docs link with the quoting tool, sold customer data is dropped into the Operational system. Easily saves me 5-10 hours a week. B) Sophisticated and Scalable Operational infrastructure. SolarCity Executive team knew they were going to be the industry leader and grow exponentially every year, so they spent the time and resources to develop (and to continue to devolop) operational infrastructure that can scale with their very rapid growth. A and B are why I made the move from a company that I was with for over 5.5 years....which is a hard decision to make when you need to let go of that kind of a referral customer base. My stress level is 1/3 what it was and I have more happy customer since install timelines are half as long and operational mistakes along the way are minimized greatly. C) Much smaller territory now...instead of a 150 mile radius I now have about a 45 mile radius. Saves me another 5-10 hours a week in drive time between appts. D) Marketing partnerships with The Home Depot and local malls. If I am low on leads I have different places that I am welcomed to come to lead gen.
Cons
A) Less commission than I am used to....significantly less. But I am still new and rebuilding my referral networks, I will need to update this in a year. Even still, I make about half what I made for a similar sized job at my old company. B) Rapid growing business is chaotic. Lots of time the managers don't even know what is going on next, and sometime when they let you know it has already changed again. When you are the industry leader and blazing an uncharted path forward some of this to be expected.