Hold Your Nerve, I think we are through the worse.

[confounded]

It is easy to get dishearten with the way the FIT has been administered and the lack of work out there at the moment, but after a better day than most recently I thought I would post a heartening thread to counter the negative ones.

As discussed on many threads it not all about price. We as a company are electing to maintain a reasonable margin when we quote and even though our install rate is disappointing compared to last year we are converting jobs at a higher rate than last year. We had a 40-50% conversion rate last year and since the cuts we have a 70% conversion rate.

Recent jobs and prices

1.6kWp £4995
3.92kWp £8295
3.92kWp £8245
3.0kWp £9750 (SunPower)

I see some of the prices banded about here and get terrified of where we are heading, however I feel we have been through the worst and things will pick up for the diligent and professional installers that frequent these boards.

Reasons for my optimism over and above our ability to win jobs without pricing ourselves out of a living are:

I spoke to the green energy team at EDF about a FIT application for one of our customers. I said we had concerns about the eligibility and that he might struggle to get the issue resolved prior to the August 1st deadline. She corrected me and said July 1st, I corrected her and she went of to her supervisors to get confirmation. She sounded mature and experienced in her role, not a trainee. Now if they don't know the cut is coming on a different date there is little hope for the general public to pick up on it. My point is the cuts are going to be smaller and they are not going to make headline news, this will mean the rushes will be smaller and the troughs equally smaller.

My second cheerful anecdote re pricing is I had a lengthy call from a guy 300 miles from us. We are SunPower partner and he was keen to source a SunPower system. I explained we are too far away from him to do the job and warned him that SunPower are significantly more expensive than conventional panels. He said he knew and he appreciated the benefits that the panel would offer with his restricted roof. He went on to tell me that he registered on an online system to receive 3 quotes and he said it was nearer 33 quotes, he had found the whole experience incredibly harrowing and was very grateful to receive some impartial advice. He said he had firms in a price war for his business and he had no intention to screw any of them down on price but they just kept on going. He was bemused by the whole experience so I explained him the state of the industry. This customer will go and find an installer like us in his area to deliver a SunPower system and discount the other muppets clambering for his business. There are customers out there willing to pay a fair price for a quality system and clear and professional service.

The last reason for us to be optimistic is we had two people sign up and a new enquiry, all today, that has not happened since last year, we are a small firm and that is a big deal for us, hang in there, I think we have have been through the worse.

 

[MorganPVI]

Could you post a brief explanation of how you became a sunpower installer - if possible. It's an avenue we would like to take but the terms we were quoted last year were very difficult, i'd be interested to hear your view.

 

[SRE]

Great to hear some good news Confounded. We're like you on pricing, I'd rather do one job for x profit than 2 for the same. Fingers crossed this will keep us in business in 6 months to carry on.

 

[Gavin A]

I just had a look, and every one of our installs since April has been for our mid priced options of the black framed or full black Hyundais. Bit lower priced than confounded's charging, but we'll have given a cheaper option on most of them and the customers have been opting to pay a little more for quality.

I'm pretty sure we lost a sanyo job recently because I went back and cut the price in a bit of a cackhanded attempt to get a quick installation.

Not sure how this is going to work after the next cut mind.

orders for panasonic have dropped off entirely though. I really don't think the name change helped at all there, on top of them not dropping the price enough to mean their systems make sense relative to others even on smaller roofs.

 

[SolarCity]

I'm heartened to hear that installers that are offering a good quality install are winning out over the ********s out there.

For us it is a struggle to convince the customer that we are any better than anyone else. We have installs that we can show them but all our recent jobs apart from one has been driven down on price. The sad thing is, we're no more qualified to install on a customer's house than the pratts that carried out westevew's install on the main forum. So how is he to know? I'll bet they get less N/C than we do simply because of their paperwork too.

 

[confounded]

Great to hear some good news Confounded. We're like you on pricing, I'd rather do one job for x profit than 2 for the same. Fingers crossed this will keep us in business in 6 months to carry on.

Absolutely, we see each of our system as a liability (5 year warranty) and there is only so low we are prepared to go to provide a living and honour our commitments.

Yes despite my optimism it is still going to be a tough run into next year, a real challenge for our business. We planned for this type of scenario and have held cash reserves to see us through a spell like this, I am hoping we will look back on this recent period as our darkest hour.

 

[confounded]

Could you post a brief explanation of how you became a sunpower installer - if possible. It's an avenue we would like to take but the terms we were quoted last year were very difficult, i'd be interested to hear your view.

​

We registered our interest in becoming a partner via their website. We then filled in a form and provided the information they required. We were then visited by the UK and regional SunPower managers and from there the partnership was initiated. There are no onerous terms, they are just looking to build a quality network of installers.

 

[confounded]

I just had a look, and every one of our installs since April has been for our mid priced options of the black framed or full black Hyundais. Bit lower priced than confounded's charging, but we'll have given a cheaper option on most of them and the customers have been opting to pay a little more for quality.

That is our favoured panel atm for all round value, as a company we are always switching panel type to continue to deliver the best value to the customer and our bigger achievable margin.

 

[Energetic]

My point is the cuts are going to be smaller and that are not going to make headline news,

Glad things are picking up, but the quote above is what stood out most to me, It's something i hadn't really considered. The media have almost sponsored Barkers nonsense over the last 8 months and are just as much to blame for whats happened.

The biggest mistake we have made is assuming people are generally intelligent enough to see through the bull**** and do their homework when making purchases of this size...

 

[SRE]

If you can get through the next few months financially I suspect there is light at the end of the tunnel. There seems to be a load of new products ready for launch at the end of the year that have the potential to create business once the Fit situation has settled down a bit.

Even 10 - 15% cuts after August won't be as bad as the hit we've taken since December. I can't see sales hitting the numbers needed for cuts any higher.

We're taking the view that this year is almost written off, there may be a few more jobs before August and one or two after but not much more than that and we're taking time to get on top of the new products that are coming in, working on clarifying our market and planning marketing campaigns to kick off in Feb next year. We can only do that because we've got fingers in other pies though.