The Pros And Cons Of Working With Third-Party Solar Consultants
Takeaway: Third-party consultants can offer a lot of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and specialized knowledge. However, you need to be willing to engage with them to truly receive all the benefits—it’s not set-and-forget.
Leveraging external workers in solar was once known as a fast but potentially lower-quality alternative to doing things in-house. That moniker has changed, as technology makes it much easier for work to be both quick and high-quality. Here are the pros and cons of working with external consultants so you can make an informed decision for your organization.
What Work Can Third-Party Consultants Do?
In short: anything you want.
Advances in technology have made it possible to work with third parties for any step in the solar project process.
The decision about what to outsource depends on the type of business you want to run and the in-house teams you want to hire and maintain. Beyond that generality, Scanifly research found that the most common three areas to work with third-party vendors are the survey, design, and maintenance steps.
Pros and Cons: Working With Consultants Overall
The idea of sending work to a third party and receiving a completed deliverable is potentially great—you save time and can scale up your business as needed. But there are some cons to be aware of as well.
Pros of working with third parties:
Talent flexibility: scale up your team on your terms, rather than hiring in-house.
Speed of turnaround time: for example, Scanifly Design Services delivers full plan sets within 48 hours.
Cost-effectiveness: only pay for what you need, when you need it.
Cons of working with third parties:
Potential for communication issues: if you don’t see consultants as extensions of your team, you could run into hurdles.
Chance of missing creative control: if you want set-and-forget outsourcing, you often have to follow the consultant’s workflow.
At a high level, consultants can provide significant value—and most of the cons are based on how you work with them rather than the principle of outsourcing vs. keeping things in-house.
Pros and Cons: Specific Functions
You might choose to only work with consultants for specific functions. Here are some pros and cons to consider for the biggest three use cases: surveying, design, and maintenance.
Surveying
When you don’t have an in-house survey team, you offload the liability of issues arising from the onsite survey. Similarly, if a third party is conducting the survey, you don’t need to keep a truck fleet for Surveyors to drive to sites.
The primary con of this step is that you are outsourcing the technical contact with your customer. If a third-party Surveyor shows up on-site, they may not know the answers to questions customers have. While this isn’t necessarily awful—you can just follow up after the fact—it can make some customers feel a bit weird about the working relationship.
Design
Design is one of the most important stages to get right in solar because it informs the rest of the project. With that in mind, a trusted third-party consultant can ensure you get the expertise you need, even on complex projects. This also streamlines the process of getting engineering stamps and can offer a predictable turnaround cadence, allowing you to focus on meeting new customers and conducting surveys.
From a con perspective, not all third-party design consultants have the expertise or professionalism you need. If you pick the wrong vendor, you might find lengthy delays in turnaround time or inaccuracies in your designs that flow downstream to your Procurement and Installation teams. This can ultimately lead to a poor customer experience if design issues result in delays.
Maintenance
Pushing maintenance work to a third party allows you to focus on growing the business rather than handling calls from customers after they’ve paid. This not only means you can prioritize growth work, like lead generation, but it also means lower overhead for maintenance team members and supplies.
On the flip side, you risk inconsistent maintenance. While not delivered by you, customers often assume it’s under your brand and will hold you accountable via bad word of mouth. Or, if customers understand that the work is outsourced, they might view you in a bad light—as a Contractor that doesn’t care about the long-term—which can damage your reputation.
Grow Your Business Without Increasing Your Fixed Overhead
You don’t have to work with third parties if you don’t want to; some Contractors pride themselves on owning the entire project process internally. But the thing to remember is that working with solar consultants is no longer the taboo it once was—it’s now a powerful tool that can help you scale up and down as needed, manage complexity, or grow on your terms.
The key to successfully working with a third-party consultant is knowing what outputs you need from them and giving them the right information so they can do their job. After that, it’s about treating them as an extension of your team, regularly communicating and leveraging technology to streamline the entire working process.
