Chris Lee • Solgen Power

I'm a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years in sales and marketing. My background was in the door-to-door marketing world – I did quite a few years of that — and throughout that time, dabbled in internet marketing and different types of things. 

I launched a search engine optimization company 2011 and built that up then sold it off. So I've owned seven or eight different businesses. 

I've been in the solar industry for the last seven years. My company Solgen has been in business just over three years. We do the majority of our business through internet marketing, so we generate online leads through Facebook, Google, and YouTube. We have an in internal sales team that handle sales calls via Zoom and then we do the fulfillment. Ultimately, we do everything but manufacturer the panels.

This last year, we eclipsed just over $50 million and over our lifetime, in three years, we've done over $100 million in business — a lot of a lot of that through sales funnels online. We have a little external presence and some door-to-door, but the 90% majority of our business is done online.

My business superpower would definitely be culture and building teams, including the ability to recruit and bring in good talent. We have 220 employees. Building the structure, the executive team, and being able to drive the vision to get people behind it is my number one focus. 

When we launched, we did it out of my garage. In fact, we were in my garage for two years and by the time we moved out, we'd already had 53 employees and done over $50 million in business — so from day one, it was all about getting everyone behind the vision of what we were going to become. 

That's the one thing that I know how to create: good culture — good core values, a mission statement, and the big idea that people can get behind. With that, it's important to know that people get compensated by more than just money — it's also value, energy, happiness and their enjoyment of the work.

Where a lot of internet marketers look at their clients as being the people who buy their product, I look at my clients as my team, so I'm constantly marketing to my team and building something that they can buy into.

I've got way too many favourite books to count! I'm an avid reader, I try to read 40 - 50 books a year. 

I think one of the things that really drives me is having the ability to invest. I love to invest so I've always looked at that for a reason to work — not necessarily to make money, but to take that money and to grow it. So books such as Rich Dad, Poor Dad (Robert Kiyosaki) or The Richest Man in Babylon (George Clason) are definitely what drive a lot of my personal foundation. 

From a leadership standpoint, Above the Line by Urban Meyer is absolutely incredible. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (John C. Maxwell) is another.

We do a book club within our organization that I host on a weekly basis, every Thursday at lunch. Not everyone participates, probably only 10% of my staff, but those that are really interested in self-development show up. We're currently reading The Millionaire Next Door, basically teaching people that even on a salary of $40k - $100,000k per year, you still can become a millionaire if you can be disciplined.

From a mindset standpoint, David Goggins' You Can’t Hurt Me — that's an incredible book for my sales team, along with some of Grant Cardone's sales books.

With conferences, Funnel Hacking Live is always a great one — I think there's always good value there.

That said, I personally prefer more small-level masterminds. I've been to Trey Llewellyn's house — there was 10 of us there at that. I hosted Russell Brunson and a few other guys up to my lake house this last summer. 

Baby Bathwater is probably the coolest, most exclusive mastermind that pretty much anybody can get into. It's $7,500 bucks for a couple days. I met some absolutely remarkable human beings and got introductions into some very high-level crowds. It's probably the most value for the dollar spent by far.

I launched a business in 2008 — a home security company — and I went and raised money. Of course, when you're young and dumb, what better place to raise money than your own family!?

So, I went to my father-in-law, who was a pretty successful farmer and I got him to invest $1M into our business. Then my dad, who was a school teacher. 

I grew up fairly poor. My dad was a school teacher, my mom didn't work, and there were seven kids in our household, so we learned to work from a very young age. After the age of 12, anything besides underwear and food on the table was provided by ourselves, so I had my first job when I was nine years old. 

My dad, even though he was only making $50k - $60k a year, had been able to put away some money. He invested $100k in my business and put a pretty big vote of confidence in us.

2008 was probably the worst year you could launch business. The banks started shrinking up their lending power and a variety of different things began to happen. At that point, our business model was to sell alarm contracts to monitoring companies. We needed 120 contracts to break even each month and they (the alarm company) suddenly started limiting us to 100 contracts per month. Add to that, we also had a UCC-1 filing on us, which was a lien against our business — that meant we couldn’t sell those contracts to any other monitoring company. 

Poor partnerships and overly confident decisions ultimately led to me filing bankruptcy for $2.2 million and having to go to my father-in-law to tell him that I'd lost everything. I had to go to my dad and tell him I lost over half of his retirement money. I had my Mercedes repo’d out of my driveway and had less than $1,000 in my bank account. I had to sell assets to cover things. 

That's where I found myself exactly 10 years ago from today. January 26, 2011 was when my bankruptcy officially filed. 

So, from there I had to pick myself up off the floor and figure out what I wanted to do with life — either go back to school to get a real job like everybody was telling me to do or take the lessons that I had learned and grow from it. Luckily, I chose the latter and built a few different businesses that I did okay with.

Eventually I went and worked for some large competitors and looked at it as a paid education for a period of four years, where all I did was study the growth techniques of some rapidly growing businesses from the inside. My business partner and I both did this — we kept our nose down thinking this is paid education, this is this is why we're here - we're here to learn and grow. We looked at it from a completely different angle than most employees do, who are there to get a paycheck and be done. We were there to dissect and really understand the science of a rapidly growing businesses. 

One of the companies we'd worked for did their first private equity deal for $50 million in 2007. By 2012, they had grown it from $50 Million to $2 Billion and today they're sitting around a $12 billion valuation, so we were a part of that growth for a couple years. 

Sitting down with the CEO and seeing what he was doing and all the inner workings of the business, that's where we got a lot of our philosophies around building culture. Put culture first, before anything else: above strategy, above product, above service.

We learned to build a good culture and you'll naturally be able to pivot during times when most people panic. This last year was a prime example. It could have been an easy time to just tuck our tail between our legs and run but we decided to pivot into some different methodologies and the way we ran our business and it's paid off really well.

So that's how I've used failure and struggle to really grow. It's also helped me make much wiser decisions. We've bootstrapped Solgen from the ground up and haven't done things to impress other people. A lot of my mistakes in my earlier years was because everything I did was to appear successful. It had to appear to the customer that we were offering the best price. It had to appear to the sales rep that we were paying them the most. It had to appear to other people that I was a great business owner, driving the nicest car and doing all these things — versus making decisions based off of what's best for the business and best for the culture.

Those are those are the strategies that we that we've used to grow and it's working so far.

We're working on a on a private equity deal so it excites me to take our business to the next level. Money doesn't motivate me. The thing that motivates me most is growth and inspiring that within others — that really gets me jacked and gets me out of bed. 

Also, just falling in love with the process, not the fruit. Finding out what bears fruit — the inputs of the equation — and falling in love with those things: falling in love with eating right, falling in love with showing up to the gym every morning, falling in love with doing the work, falling in love with being the first person in the office, falling in love with the late-night grind, falling in love with spending time with my wife, falling in love with spending time with my kids… 

Those are those are things that really get me excited, rather than looking for the someday… like someday if I do this, I will get this. I don't really care what comes out on the on the back end, as long as I fall in love with the process.