4 Reasons Why Extra PV Design Resources Are Worth It

Takeaway: If you want to scale with flexibility, have peaks and valleys in your work, need specialized support, or are growing a niche solar business, working with third-party design consultants can add huge value and scalability to your business. 

The world took 70 years to install the first TerraWatt of solar, which officially occurred in mid-2022. The “second TerraWatt” will take just three more years. 

Solar projects are also getting more nuanced: utility-scale, commercial, residential, community solar, carports, building integrated, projects on top of reservoirs, and so on. To make matters even tougher, there are over 43,000 Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs) that need to be considered for permitting, interconnection, and a host of other rules.

In this changing landscape, maintaining resources, especially in engineering, is tough. While remote work culture expanded considerably during the pandemic, finding reliable, detail-oriented designers, CAD drafters and engineers is really difficult. This issue is compounded by the fact that talented individuals see a mixed future for their careers in solar, and that concern is showing; the total number of solar professionals in the US alone, for example, has remained roughly flat since 2016. 

One solution has been subcontracting out design work, yet this has been taboo for years as Solar Contractors want to do everything in-house to control their workflows. However, the reality is changing as more Contractors are realizing that working with a tech-enabled design partner–as an extension of your team–can accelerate your business in a few key ways:

1. You Want to Scale with Flexibility

You don’t want to hire more full-time employees but you want to scale up your business. This could be for a few reasons:

• Your business is new and you don’t want to run up your fixed costs. 

• You’re expanding in a new region and want to test the waters first. 

• You like having a close-knit, smaller team and don’t want to lose that culture. 

Regardless, it’s all about one thing: flexibility. You want to build an extension of your team in a way that works for your business.

2. Your Work Volume has Peaks and Valleys

If your business is seasonal, you might be reluctant to hire everyone you need for the busy times. Yet not having that team capacity could mean missed opportunities. 

A peaks-and-valleys business can scale with third-party design partners in one of two ways: 

• Keep staff to maintain the valleys and sub-out to scale up for the peaks.

• Outsource all of one function (e.g. Design), flexing up and down as your business requires it. 

In either case, your design partner might be with you for a while—years, even. It’s not about getting a quick job done, but building a decentralized team so you can grow your business on your terms. 

3. You Need Specialized Support

If you’ve built up expertise in one area, you might want to keep an in-house staff so you can control the whole experience. Expanding into other use cases is a different story. 

Scanifly customers routinely share that they often do all the work related to one use case, but outsource for other needs such as: 

• Designing car-port solar panels. 

• Adapting to certain AHJ requirements outside their usual geographic areas. 

• Moving from one type of survey to another (e.g. you do residential, but have the opportunity to take on a small commercial project).

• Surveying and design for battery systems. 

• Designing systems for home and electric car use. 

This strategy allows you to focus your hiring and build a strong in-house team for your core business while still capturing all the inbound demand that comes your way. 

4. You Have a Niche Solar Business

Sometimes, your reason for working with an external team is that you don’t want to hire that specialty to begin with (e.g. not wanting any in-house Design or Survey team).

This type of business usually started as a freelancer or a couple of business partners doing one thing (e.g. Surveying) whose customers asked for more. Rather than staffing up and hiring Designers, Installers, and Warehouse Managers, you can simply choose to outsource any (or all) of those function(s) and retain overall project management skills in-house. 

Outsourcing whole parts of the team–particularly design–can also be attractive to all-remote companies. If you don’t have a physical office footprint, it will be harder to build a team that needs a central place to work. Of course, you can still staff up a team like this and offer home-office stipends, but outsourcing becomes an increasingly cost-effective option. 

Technology Enables Collaboration Across Teams

Leveraging external designers historically was fraught with errors, mainly due to the manual capturing of onsite data (e.g. ladders, tape measures, and SunEyes) and the prominence of utilizing remote imagery to fill in the gaps of data collection. Furthermore, many Designers didn’t directly communicate with Contractors, resulting in a lot of guesswork.

Technology and collaboration tools have enabled significant improvements in quality and speed. Because of platforms like Scanifly that utilize drones, a mobile capture app and automated design tools, Contractors can now utilize a full-time design partner without sacrificing quality. Scanifly’s Design Services turns full plan sets around in 48 hours that rarely, if ever, need revisions. You can also add electrical or structural stamps in all 50 US states. 

When you work with your own design teams, like Scanifly offers, you get a full plan set with everything from panel placements, to bill of materials, all the way down to a placard for the project.