How Chris Lee Bounced Back From Bankruptcy at 24 to a $200M Solar Exit

Most of the operators I bring on the podcast have at least one moment where the wheels came off. Chris Lee's came at 24, when he filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy in February 2011 and lost everything. Six years later, he started Solgen out of his garage. Six years after that, he sold it to private equity for $180 million and then ran a follow-on transaction that put the total above $340 million.

I drove four hours from Seattle to the Next Level Pros headquarters in Pasco, Washington to ask Chris exactly what changed between the version of him that went bankrupt and the version that scaled a 1,100-employee solar company from $16 million to $233 million in revenue in four years. The short answer: he stopped operating from "old Chris" and started making decisions as the version of himself the future business already required.

If you are running a home service or trades business and feel like the lid is on, that single shift is the whole episode. Everything else, the eight pillars of growth, the equity structure, the talent acquisition funnel, all of it builds from there.

What actually broke the first time

Chris was direct about the first failure. Ego-led pricing. Underpaid himself. Bad partnerships. Spent on things that signaled success instead of producing it. He launched a few smaller businesses after the bankruptcy and they all stalled, so he went back to work for someone else and spent four and a half years studying three different CEOs at close range. He was not there to climb a ladder. He was there to figure out how operators who could actually scale ran their days.

In fall 2017, he launched Solgen out of his garage with what he told me was an exact playbook for a 5-year run to 500 employees and $100 million. The actual trajectory beat the plan. $16M year one. Then $32M, $34M, $89M, and $233M. Inc. 5000 ranked Solgen the 12th fastest-growing company in America in 2021. By the time he sold, Solgen had 1,100 employees, all bootstrapped.

The single biggest unseen risk during that run was cash flow. Solgen switched from buying equipment through US distributors (where they had 30-60 days to pay after install) to ordering directly from manufacturers in Asia (where they were paying six months before install). That flipped 8 months of cash flow at once and nearly buried the business even though they were profitable on paper.

The three real growth levers

Chris built the Next Level Pros framework, which he calls the eight pillars of growth, on top of his Solgen experience and the patterns he saw across the three CEOs he studied. He told me that when he strips the eight pillars down to the levers that actually compound, only three matter: marketing, coaching, and talent. Every dollar he has ever spent on those three has produced a return. Most of the dollars he spent on appearing successful did not.

Talent is the one most home service owners hear about and still get wrong. Chris kept two funnels open at all times: lead generation and talent acquisition. Talent went on a "bench" with active conversations months before he needed the seat filled. The reason that worked, he said, is that no top operator joins a company with a small vision. If you are a $4 million operator trying to recruit a salesperson who can produce $10 million a year, you are essentially asking that person to cap their own income at half their potential. They will never come, and you will not understand why.

This was the moment in the conversation that lined up with what I am running into at NaiL right now. I have started writing job descriptions around the company I want to be in 24 months, not the company I am today.

"Future Chris" vs old Chris

The single sharpest line in the conversation came when I asked Chris how he kept making decisions at the edge of his experience. He said most business owners operate from who they used to be instead of who they want to become. The 5-year roadmap is not just a planning artifact. It is the persona he uses to make compensation, hiring, and strategic decisions today.

I asked him directly. The friend I had recently brought on at NaiL to lead engineering required compensation that, looking through old George's eyes, was uncomfortable. Looking through future George's eyes (the version of NaiL with 50+ engineers shipping voice AI to thousands of franchisees), it was a bargain. Chris's framework gave me language for a decision I had already half-made.

He extended the same logic to the law of the lid. The organization can never grow past the leader. So the leader's job is to consciously hire to their weaknesses, not their strengths. He told me he is "100% convinced his way is the right way, with a complete willingness to be wrong." That balance, he said, is what separates real operators from sales-driven CEOs who collapse the moment the market shifts.

Why Chris keeps writing handwritten notes at 1,100 employees

Chris is a fan of what I like to call "unscalable activities." At Solgen, every new customer received a literal video card in the mail with a small embedded TV that played a welcome video from the CEO (my friend Jeff Lopez used to do the same thing for prospecting ++). The technician then dropped off a custom box with a handwritten letter, a Solgen blanket, and a thermos. None of that scales. All of it compounded into a customer experience competitors could not copy.

Chris frames it through what Airbnb calls the North Star experience: design the most outrageously delightful customer journey you can imagine (Airbnb's example is a private jet, a limo, and Elon Musk meeting you at a rocket), then ask what is missing between today and that. The point is not the rocket. It is the gap.

The other piece of the customer playbook he uses is the "plus one experience" from the book Raving Fans. Three controllable expectations delivered every time, plus one above. Most service businesses run eight expectations and miss one. Customers remember the miss. Three plus one feels like a gift.

David Bitan from Bumble Roofing told me something almost identical when I had him on the podcast. The little things, answering the phone, cleaning the job site, sending the proposal the day of the visit, are what put a brand on the map.

Equity is the most underutilized lever a founder owns

When I asked Chris how he thought about equity at Solgen, he framed it the way I needed to hear it. Equity is the cheapest currency a founder has when revenue is small, and the most expensive when revenue is large. Use it early. He brought a senior leader onto Solgen in the early days for $40,000 a year cash plus an equity slice. By the time Solgen sold, that leader was a multimillionaire. Eleven other shareholders at Solgen walked out of the exit as multimillionaires alongside Chris and his business partner Daryl.

He pointed me to the Elon Musk PayPal story, which I keep coming back to. Elon owned 11.2% of PayPal at the eBay acquisition. That 11.2% was worth $165 million. A small slice of a very large pie beats a full slice of a tiny one. Chris said most founders get burned not because they share equity, but because they structure it without protections. That is exactly the kind of detail you only learn from operators who have been through it twice.

What "winning" looks like after the exit

Chris attempted retirement after Solgen. Six weeks of golf, books, and unstructured time. He hated it. He told me winning today does not look like a number on a bank statement. It looks like waking up early without a phone in his hand, getting a workout in, building the kind of relationship with his wife she is proud of, and influencing his kids by example.

The framework underneath that is what he calls the four P's: physical, economic, association, spiritual. He treats them like a wheel. If one is flat, the whole thing rolls badly. He hits something in each one every single day, and he was clear that the most deadly weapon any of us has is consistency. Most of us are consistent at the wrong things.

What I am taking back to NaiL

Three things from this conversation are reshaping how I run NaiL this quarter.

First, I am running my hiring decisions through "future George" instead of "current George." If a candidate would be a stretch hire for the company I am building 24 months from now, I am still passing. If they would be the obvious choice at that company, I am hiring even if it stretches today.

Second, I am moving every customer touchpoint up one notch on Chris's "plus one" framework. We were already running clean onboarding. We were not running anything that felt like the Solgen welcome box. That changes this month.

Third, I am taking equity more seriously as a recruiting tool earlier in our growth than I planned to. Watching Chris make 11 people into multimillionaires through a single exit, and knowing they took below-market salaries to get there, is a clearer argument for shared upside than any compensation theory I had read.

If you want the full conversation, watch the episode on the Nail It. Podcast and subscribe so you do not miss the next operator breakdown. If you run a home service brand and want to see how voice AI fills the gap when your team can not pick up the phone fast enough, book a Nail demo and I will walk you through it personally.

— George