Franchisee Stories - Gus's Solar

Franchisee Success Stories

We don’t hand our name to just anyone. The owners who thrive with Gus’s Solar are the ones who already had a reputation in their town before they ever hung a sign. A retired lineman. A firefighter’s wife who ran the books for a roofing outfit. The guy who ran the local hardware store. People who understand that in a small town, your name is either your best asset or your biggest liability. That’s who these stories are about. No Wall Street money. No absentee landlords. Just local people who decided to sell solar the way it should have been sold all along.

Call (877) 550-6892

Meet Our Owners

Oscar R. - Rancho Cordova, CA

Oscar spent 22 years working for Sacramento Municipal Utility District as a lineman before he ever thought about solar. He watched rate changes come and go, saw which systems held up after a decade and which ones leaked, and he got tired of recommending companies he didn’t fully trust. When he met Gus, the thing that stuck with him wasn’t a pitch deck. It was Gus showing him a repair job on a house three streets over and saying the owner’s name and what was wrong with the inverter. Oscar signed on because he wanted to sell something that didn’t require him to dodge questions at the grocery store. Seven years in, his crew runs four trucks, and his favorite part is still sitting at a kitchen table with someone’s bill in front of him, doing the math out loud. He says the 90-Day Done Right Promise isn’t a marketing line for him. It’s the same standard he had on poles and lines: if it’s not right, you go back.

Kevin C. - Oakdale, CA

Kevin ran a small commercial electrical outfit in the Central Valley for fifteen years. He did plenty of service work, got calls for solar tie-ins, and turned most of them down because he didn’t want to be the guy who touched a roof and then disappeared. A friend who worked with Gus kept telling him to call. Kevin finally did, expecting a sales conversation, and got twenty minutes about flashing details and torque specs before anyone mentioned money. He joined because the technical bar was higher than what he saw from the national brands sending kids with tablets to his town. Today he splits his time between installs and training his crew on the details that matter: proper penetration flashing, torque on the rail clamps, monitoring set up correctly day one. He’ll tell you the best feeling in this business is when a customer calls back two years later because they want batteries, not because something broke. And if something did break, he says, he’d rather hear about it at 8pm from the customer than at 8am from his bookkeeper.

Adriana H. - Rocklin, CA

Adriana was running the office for a plumbing company when she started noticing the volume of solar complaints in local Facebook groups. Wrong system size. Leaks after install. Phone calls that went to a call center in another time zone. She didn’t have a technical background, and she’ll be the first to admit it. What she had was a memory for every customer she’d ever spoken to and a county full of people who trusted her because she’d sent her kids to their schools. She called Gus and asked the blunt question: can someone who isn’t an electrician run a solar business? Gus told her she’d have to learn the basics, but that the owner’s job is honesty and follow-through, not climbing on a roof. She’s been running her territory for five years now. Her install crews are background-checked and uniformed, and she personally answers every call she can. The first winter she ran the business, a storm knocked out power in her area for three days. She drove batteries to two customers herself. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, she says, but it shows up the next time a neighbor asks who did her solar.

Sarah A. - Grass Valley, CA

Sarah spent a decade as a project manager for a commercial builder in Nevada County. She’d managed million-dollar jobs, so when she started researching solar franchises, she thought she knew what to expect from the business side. What surprised her was how little the national brands seemed to care about the actual install. Sales teams separate from install teams. Subcontractors picked by the lowest bid. She told Gus she wasn’t interested if the crews weren’t going to be hers. He agreed, which is why she liked the model: own the crew, own the install, own the problem if there is one. Sarah’s market covers a lot of ridge lines and gravel driveways and customers who’ve been burned before. She keeps a printed copy of her license number in her truck because she’s been asked for it more than once. Her closing line to hesitant customers is usually some version of what Gus told her: take two weeks, think about it, the price will be the same. She says it disarms people. And then they call back.

Your Story Starts Here

If you’re reading this and thinking, “that sounds like me,” then we should probably talk. We’re looking for local owners, not sales territories. Call (877) 550-6892 and ask for the franchise info kit. A live person answers. That’s the whole point.

Written by Gus Petrakis, Owner at Gus’s Solar, serving local communities since 2011.