Starting a solar company: the checklist.

Everything below assumes you can already specify a system. If you cannot, do that first — selling systems you are unable to design goes badly, and it goes badly in public. Credentials first →

Decision one, before anything else: who holds the electrical scope

A grid-tied PV installation connects to a building's electrical service. In Ontario that work must be performed by appropriately certified people and filed by a licensed electrical contractor. So there are exactly three honest structures:

1. You hold the trade certification and the contractor licence yourself. Cleanest, slowest to arrive at.
2. You employ or partner with someone who does, under a real contract with real obligations and real money in it.
3. You subcontract the electrical scope to a licensed contractor on every job.

What is not a structure is hoping it does not come up. It comes up on the first job, at the point of filing, and the discovery is expensive. Decide this before you spend money on a logo.

The business machinery

• Incorporate or register. Talk to an accountant about which; the answer depends on your own circumstances and we are not the right source for it.
• Insurance. Commercial general liability at a level your customers' contracts will actually accept — commercial and institutional work often specifies minimums far above what a new business instinctively buys. Plus whatever workers' compensation coverage your province requires.
• Electrical contractor licence, through whichever route you chose above.
• Supplier accounts. The hard part is not opening them, it is the credit terms. Expect to pay up front until you have a trading history, and plan your cash flow for that rather than discovering it on a deposit.
• Safety programme. Not a binder. A real one, because a serious site asks for it and because roofs are where people get hurt.

Quoting, and the mistake nearly everyone makes

Price against consumption, not against roof area. The question is not how many modules fit; it is how much electricity the customer actually uses, when, and on what tariff. For commercial customers, demand charges may matter more than energy charges, and a proposal that ignores them is answering the wrong question.

And be honest in the yield estimate. An optimistic figure wins the job and creates a customer who feels misled a year later, in a market small enough that it matters. The loss assumptions are not where to find competitiveness.

Filing and interconnection

The permit or notification path, and the net metering or interconnection application to the local distribution company. The LDC sets its own requirements and timelines, they are not the same everywhere, and they change. Build the waiting into your schedule and tell the customer about it up front — "two days of work inside two months of process" is an honest sentence and it prevents most complaints.

Where the work actually comes from

Residential referral, which is slow and compounds. Commercial direct, which is a longer sale with better margin. And public procurement — school boards, municipalities, institutions, larger companies — which is tendered, and where being able to install is maybe half the job. The other half is prequalification: insurance thresholds, bonding, financial statements, demonstrated experience. A great many small contractors never bid because nobody told them how, and the barrier is paperwork rather than capability.

Where we can help and where we cannot

The six-session Start Your Own Solar Company programme covers licensing, insurance, the filing path, quoting against consumption, supplier accounts, and finding and responding to procurement opportunities. What we do not do: sell you leads, sell you a territory, sell you a licence to use our name, or act as your accountant or lawyer. Nothing in the programme is contingent on buying anything else, and if anybody contacts you claiming to sell our leads, it is not us.

The programme → · Ask about it →

Common questions