OUR STORY
I was not a salesperson.
I was a technical engineer. I worked on nuclear submarines. I understood systems, tolerances, how things fail under pressure, and how to find the one solution that holds. Selling was not on that list. Everything I know about a doorstep, I learned standing on one.
Aryen Wood, founder, Wood Consulting LLC. Brownville, New York.
01 //SPRING 2020
We lost everything. Literally.
COVID shut down the company I was working for in Colorado, and when the job went the house went with it. We sold whatever didn't fit in a 26-foot U-Haul, loaded the rest into that truck and a van, and drove 1,900 miles across the country with three kids, limited money, and a rental we found on the way.
We were starting over in Watertown, New York, the town I grew up in, not because it was the plan but because it was the only direction we had.
Making a living in Watertown
An operator resume doesn't do much for you in an area with more cows than people. Roughing in electrical, rebuilding bathrooms, cold calling for real estate. It kept us fed but not ahead.
Then a contact offered me a commission-only door-to-door solar job. No base. No guarantee. I said yes because rent was due and I was out of better ideas. No inspiring moment. No grand vision. Just a man with a family who needed things to work.
02 //THE DOORS
California. Las Vegas at Christmas. Arizona in dead summer heat.
I flew out for a week, knocked doors, came home, and waited on installs for the paycheck. Between trips I started selling virtually, before the industry accepted that a Zoom call closes as well as a kitchen table. When the virtual numbers passed the door numbers I stayed closer to home.
That gave me room to build something for the guys who still wanted the road. A culture. The kind of place I never had. Reps who came to us got a system, a standard, and someone who actually cared whether they made it. People who feel part of something real show up differently at the door, and the homeowner feels it.
03 //THE STANDARD
Not a ceiling on your income. A floor on your integrity.
I can't ethically get behind a version of this industry that takes money out of a homeowner's hands, promises them the moon, and disappears after the contract is signed. Those homeowners have families too. They have the same weight I was carrying when someone knocked my door. I knew what it felt like to be on the other side of that conversation. I never forgot it.
That's what the Protector Method is built on. You can make serious money in this industry doing it the right way. Serious enough that you don't need to inflate it, manufacture urgency around it, or pressure anyone into a decision they'll regret. If you're looking for the solar bro energy, I'm not your guy. If you want to build something real, keep reading.
04 //APRIL 2023
The floor came out, and it took a lot of good people with it.
By then I had done all three jobs in this industry. I have knocked the doors, I have run the teams, and I have sold virtually. I have also sold for companies that are not in business anymore, which is a thing you only learn the weight of once it happens to you.
Before 2023 I had built a remote sales organization out of Watertown: thirteen reps spread across the country, selling into California, none of us in the same state. We became the top non-installing SunPower dealer in the Santa Rosa market, and their people called every month asking what we were doing differently.
What took it down
On April 15, 2023, California's NEM 3.0 took effect and the math on every deal in that state changed overnight. SunPower filed Chapter 11 the following August and its dealer network was sold. We were left holding $2.1 million in receivables that were never paid. In April of 2026, Freedom Forever, the second largest residential solar installer in the country, filed Chapter 11 as well.
Who actually pays for it
Reps lived that, not just companies. A rep who sold an honest deal in 2022 watched the company behind it fail and it was the rep the homeowner called, not the installer. That is where the doubt in this industry came from.
What we changed because of it
It is also why I will not place a deal anywhere but with the strongest installers I can reach, and why a WC rep sees the pay math before the sale and on every payday after.
Wood Consulting started as a need for a job. It turned into a way to help a homeowner, and then into a place built by someone who knows what the field actually needs.
The part nobody writes about is what that does to a person. You work a deal for weeks, reach the finish line, and your legs go out from under you. I had paid my own way out there, counting on that income to clear bills already past due. So what do you do? Double down? Trust another installer? Another bank? Put your family back in that spot?
I know the shape of it because I was in it.
Freedom Forever was not the first and it will not be the last. This is the industry a rep is asked to trust.
Two of those are banks, not installers. When a lender goes, the paperwork behind a finished system goes with it.
So the question was never only who installs it. It is who installs it, who finances it, and whether either will answer the phone in year three. That is why our lenders are named on this site instead of hidden behind the word "financing".
The yard · 2023–2026
Plots still available.
- 2023oneVision SolarChapter 7
- 2024fourSunworksChapter 7
- 2024Titan SolarChapter 7
- 2024SunPowerChapter 11
- 2024LumioChapter 11
- 2025threeSunnovaLender · Chapter 11
- 2025Solar MosaicLender · Chapter 11
- 2025PurelightDissolved
- 2026oneFreedom ForeverChapter 11
Too many to list.
Grave goods: a Rolex, a leased Lambo, a hoverboard, and "six figures your first year."
Nine in three years. Every one was somebody's paycheck.
Every one of these had customers on the day it closed.That is the whole reason WC answers its own phone.
05 //JULY 2025
Why this exists.
In July of 2025 I had a mini stroke. I don't lead with that for sympathy. Fifteen years of knowing exactly what to do in front of a person, and suddenly I couldn't make myself walk to a door.
I may not knock the way I used to right now. But I can train, and I have always been better at that. I'd rather put the field years into reps who give a damn than watch another family get sold by someone who stopped caring the second the ink dried.
That's the whole why. That's always been the whole why.
