Here's the uncomfortable structure of a solar dealership: you sell the system, and somebody else builds it.
The homeowner doesn't see it that way. They met one person, and it was your rep. When the install slips three weeks, when the crew leaves conduit across the front of the house, when the company that did the work stops answering the phone in year two, the name they remember is yours.
Your installer is your reputation. Most dealers pick one the way they'd pick a lunch spot: somebody they know said it was fine.
Why this got more serious
The last two years were hard on companies that build solar. As we laid out in an earlier post, SunPower, Titan Solar Power, Sunnova and Freedom Forever all went under inside twenty-four months, and Freedom Forever was the second-largest residential installer in the country when it filed.
Every one of those companies had dealers selling for it the week before. Those dealers had deals in the pipeline, commissions pending, and customers mid-install. Size wasn't protection. The lesson isn't "pick a big installer." It's "know what you're standing on."
The five things to check
This is the list we run on every partner in the GRID network. You can run it yourself on anyone.
1. Licensing. In California, that's an active contractor license with the right classification, checkable on the CSLB's public lookup in under a minute. Look at the status, the bond, and any complaint disclosures. A license that belongs to somebody's cousin is not a license.
2. Financials. This is the one dealers skip because it feels rude to ask. Ask anyway. An installer that's floating payroll on next month's funding will pay your commissions late, and then one day not at all. You don't need audited statements to learn a lot. How long do they take to pay dealers after funding? Do their suppliers ship to them on terms or on cash?
3. Crew size. An installer's sales pitch is its capacity on its best month. What matters is how many crews it actually runs against how many jobs it's taking. When those two numbers drift apart, your install dates are where the difference shows up.
4. References. Not the three names they hand you. Find a dealer who stopped sending them deals and ask why.
5. Past volume. A track record of builds, in the utility territories you sell in. Interconnection with one utility doesn't teach you another one, and you don't want to be the deal they learn on.
Then do the thing no checklist replaces: meet them. Walk the warehouse. You learn more about an install company from its yard than from its deck.
What a small org is up against
Run that list honestly and you hit the real problem. A three-rep org can do all the diligence in the world and still not get the installer it wants, because good installers are picky about dealers too. They want volume, clean paperwork, and deals that don't cancel. A new org has none of that to show yet.
So small orgs take whoever will take them. That's how good reps end up attached to bad installs.
What we did about it
GRID started as a dealership. We ran this checklist for ourselves first, because we had to, and then we brought our installers with us when we built the platform.
Every dealer on GRID gets access to that network. The partners are 5-star rated. Licensing, financials, crew size, references and past volume are checked on every one of them, and we've met all of them in person. The standard isn't a one-time gate: a partner that misses it leaves the network.
Pricing is negotiated on the network's pooled volume, so a small org isn't quoted the worst rate on the menu for being small. And the installer lanes are wired into your deals in the platform, so you see what you're pricing against before you submit anything.
Two plain facts about scope. California is the primary focus today, with expansion to 31 states planned by Q4 2026. And partners are disclosed after a master-dealer agreement is signed, which includes a non-circumvention clause. That protects the relationships we spent years building, and it protects the dealers who rely on them.
Access to the network costs what the rest of the platform costs: $0. GRID is paid on the install side, only when a deal funds. That means we earn nothing on a deal that never gets built, which is the best reason we can give you for why we're strict about who's in.
The bottom line
Software can be copied. A canvassing app is a canvassing app. What can't be copied quickly is a set of installers who've been checked, met, and held to a standard over real volume.
If you're choosing an install partner this quarter, run the five checks. If you'd rather start with a network where they've already been run, that's a 20-minute call.
Sources: pv magazine USA on Freedom Forever's Chapter 11 filing (April 15, 2026); California Contractors State License Board. GRID is a dealer operating platform and does not sell solar to homeowners. This is not legal or financial advice; licensing requirements vary by state.
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