It’s Aaron Colvin was doing tricep pushdowns at the gym when he saw a cartoonishly large bodybuilder across the mirrored room. The man coaches a woman through a set of cable rows, and 18-year-old Colvin stops to study their technique. When the bodybuilder caught him watching and kneeling, Colvin was worried. He thought he was about to be accused of looking at the guy’s girlfriend—one of the cardinal sins of gym culture.

But the bodybuilder just wanted to have a friendly chat, where he asked Colvin what he did for a living. At that point in August 2023, Colvin was about to start his freshman year at Niagara University, a small Catholic school near his hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. But he was lukewarm in college; he wants to dedicate himself to becoming an entrepreneur like Grant Cardone or Alex Hormozi, two of his personal heroes. At 13, Colvin vowed to follow in their footsteps so he could ease the financial pressure on his mother, a special education teacher who raised him with little help. As a very enthusiastic teenager, he launched a series of one-man businesses that were never finished: T-shirt seller, carpet cleaner, affiliate marketer, drop-shipper, Amazon arbitrageur. He currently works daily shifts at Chipotle and Pet Supplies Plus to save up $3,000 for a course on how to run a personal-training business.

Colvin’s kind new acquaintance wants to lead him to another opportunity: “What do you know about solar?” he asked. When he’s not competing on the amateur bodybuilding circuit, the person said, he works for Freedom Pros, the door-to-door sales arm of Freedom Forever, one of the country’s leading installers of solar-energy systems. The bodybuilder recently returned from a trip to Florida where he participated in a “blitz”—solar-industry slang for a sales event where packs of young men wearing a crisp polo and khaki shorts descend on a city, crash in a cheap hotel or Airbnb, and spend weeks knocking on as many doors as possible. He boasts that he’s made “crazy money”—as much as $20,000 a month—by convincing just a handful of homeowners to cover their roofs with solar panels.

Colvin, a burly former high-school wrestler whose round silver glasses gave him a scholarly mien, was intrigued. “I was like, holy shit,” he recalled. “Like, yeah, awesome, I’ll look into it.”

A few weeks ago, Colvin had a FaceTime call with the manager of the bodybuilder at Freedom Pros, an energetic 21-year-old named Will. Even though his college semester had just started, Colvin told Will that he was thinking of dropping out: As a man raised on adversity—he and his mother used to live above a Niagara Falls drugstore that was regularly burglarized by drug addicts—he had a hard time getting along with his classmates, most of whom came from better backgrounds than his. “I’m having a midlife crisis in my dorm room,” Colvin said. Will forces him to join his door-to-door sales crew, which he calls Seal Team Six. The job is a breeze, he said—it’s just a simple matter of letting homeowners know they can save thousands by installing solar panels and selling excess electricity back to the grid. As long as Colvin delivers that message while standing on strangers’ doorsteps, his sales commissions will dwarf his Chipotle wages. “Behind every door is $5,000” is the unofficial motto of Seal Team Six. (Freedom Forever claims its 2023 gross revenue will top $1 billion.)

After some thought, Colvin declined the offer. He worries that he will regret dropping out of school without it being a fair shake. But Will is a relentless recruiter. On a near-daily basis in the fall and winter, he’s showered Colvin with Instagram Reels created by “solar bros” that show off their six-figure commission checks, their penthouse apartments, their exotic cars . These influencers—tanned, sculpted, brimming with confidence—promote that anyone can reap such rewards if they have the courage to trade their mundane lives for a place in the front trenches of the green economy.