This is a company that has good ideas and a great product, but conducts itself backwards in regards to its employees. You have your advisers who are set up in retail environments (read mall kiosks) or in partnership with Home Depot who qualify potential customers and set up appointments for field consultants. The consultants go out to the houses in question and try to close the deal by preparing an individualized plan for the customer. Above them are managers, their managers, VP's, etc. Here's the backwards part: the people responsible for kicking all of this off (the retail energy advisers, or REA's) get the least amount of reward. They are tossed into a mall setting where people have no inclination to buy solar power. They have to rope them in, get their information, qualify their homes online, and set up appointments. For this they get a yearly salary of $20-25k and a small commission (half of which gets taxed away by the federal government). The company rewards from the top down, not the bottom up. The workers on the bottom rung of the ladder really get it in the pants from both a workload and rewards aspect.
There is also no way to get ahead. In a retail environment, your only chance is to get "promoted" out to a Home Depot partnership, where your quota will raise significantly. From there, if you exceed that quota for three months straight (odds are you won't), you might get a chance at being promoted to a field energy consultant (FEC'S) position. This position is that carrot dangled over all REA's --and you will never see it. Especially since they seem to hire directly for the FEC spots, as opposed to promoting them from the lower ranks.
Last year, in my territory, they shut down the entire retail section. We were told that we were going to be hired onto the Home Depot partnership, as they were short-handed and we were already trained. Instead we were all laid off with so much as a thank you from the company --something that they appeared to do across the country to many retail spots. They didn't even inform our local FEC group, as one of them called me to thank me for a lead that closed the same day. I won't even harp on the $300 of owed commission I was cheated out of.
This is a company that is constantly in a state of reorganization, and it seems to only drastically reorganize in the lower ranks --by pruning them. Read the other reviews and realize that most of them are from FEC's, techs, or other operations personnel vs the amount reviews listed by REA's or even FEA's. Also look at reviews within the last year and notice the upswing in negatives compared to before. This should tell you something.
