All right, everybody. Good morning. Our next presenting company is ZEO Energy Corp, which is traded on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ZEO. ZEO Energy Corp is a Florida-based regional provider of residential solar, distributed energy, and energy efficiency solutions focused on high-growth markets with limited competitive saturation. Here to tell you a little bit more about the company is ZEO Energy Corp's CEO, Tim Bridgewater. Tim?
Thanks, Matt. So thanks for coming in today. A little bit about our company: we're kind of a boring, plain vanilla company. We sell and install residential solar systems in 6 states. We're a cash flow positive company. We just recently went through a SPAC process, and basically the market has been down. There's been several bankruptcies recently with SunPower, Titan, and Lumio that were recently announced, and the industry is reconfiguring itself, and we think we're poised to be a platform for consolidation and the opportunity to grow out of the slump of the solar industry. As interest rates go down, our industry tends to thrive, and so we expect to see that in 2025 coming back. So there are a lot of market trends that are favorable to our industry.
I'll just pop through these real quickly. Costs have been coming down, for equipment and, pricing around the solar industry. It used to be you'd pay a premium for renewable energy. Now, it's, you're able to save money against your power bill for residential solar and a lot of other, green energy, solutions. Utility pricing continues to grow because the utilities have a broken model where they have to spend money to stay in business, and they have to grow, and they have to raise costs. Residential solar also, gives people a comfort level. In California and Texas, there's been outages, blackouts. People are concerned about the grid, and this allows the power to be produced closest to the consumer, right on the home. Backup systems with batteries are also of interest to some of our customers.
The regulatory environment is very favorable, both from a federal and a state level. States have policies and credits themselves in some cases, but the federal government tax incentive is called the Inflation Reduction Act, and it drives tax credits from 30%-50% for the investment in green energy, renewable energy, and solar in particular. That act, it looks to be in place for the next 10 years, and it's part of the catalyst for the growth of the industry. Whether a Republican or a Democratic administration is elected in the fall, it looks to continue to stay largely intact, with maybe some adjustments, depending on who wins the election. Finally, the customers, and even especially younger generations, they're looking for green energy solutions. They wanna have zero carbon footprint.
They want homes that are energy efficient, and that plays into an opportunity for us to grow over the long term, and finally, it's a fragmented market. As I mentioned, there's been several shakeouts of big companies in the industry recently. We are creative, looking for acquisitions and opportunities to grow our business and consolidate in the fragmented market. I won't go too quickly on these. I'll try and leave as much time as possible at the end, but basically, solar is growing. It's, we're riding a wave of our business. Solar is continuing to grow. Costs are continuing to come down for modules and batteries, and it looks like those economics will continue into the future. Utility price increases and CapEx spending continues to go up.
The utilities are our best friends, even though they don't know it, 'cause they continue to create savings for their customers if they come on board a residential solar solution. Those installations continue to grow across the country. The U.S. has a really low TAM right now. There's 95 million homes, + or -, in the U.S. Only about 4%-5% of those homes have residential solar on them now, and the disruption in the grid has also caused people to rethink their energy strategy for their home, even if they don't want green energy. As I mentioned, the Inflation Reduction Act is the primary driver. It's pushed more capital into the market for leases and loans. People who buy the system get a tax credit on their personal tax returns.
If you're in a TPO or a third-party-owned system, where you lease the system to the consumer, then that TPO can get tax investment tax credits and depreciation as a non-cash benefit. So there's a lot of capital coming in from big banks trying to set up more and more leasing and power purchase opportunities. The tailwinds, we think, are timing-wise, as we're growing out of a high interest rate environment. I mean, the Inflation Reduction Act came in, really boosted the industry for a time, and then interest rates kind of took their toll as a headwind. That's now mitigating, and we feel like 2025 is going to be a great year.
There's been a shakeout, a lot of players out of business, and we believe that we can position our company to grow dramatically in the 2025 year. The Inflation Reduction Act, I won't bore you with details, but if you look in the middle here, section that says, "Residential energy improvements," $22 billion is about what is coming into the residential solar industry as subsidies to help consumers buy, and investors invest in residential solar and solar in general. And we expect that to continue on into the future. And finally, the consumer is really looking for ways to protect themselves and to have energy on demand as needed. Most of the homeowners that we work with are looking for both savings, they wanna go green-...
And if they can do both of those, then it's, it's an easy sell. Again, only 5% of the homeowners have residential solar on them now, but we look forward to a lot of growth in the future. A little bit about our company. We are in the mode of a sales machine that is built on the backs. If you've heard of Sunrun or Vivint Smart Home, or pest control companies that are out, we depend on a sales model that is summer sales, mostly returned LDS missionaries that have come home from their missions, where they've learned resilience and rejection for two years in a proselytizing situation. They're back for college. They want to go out and make money in the summer, and they are grinders.
I mean, they go out and knock 30 doors, get one person to agree to a meeting, and that kind of grit is the core of our engine, our sales machine. We've run a profitable business for the last 5- years, and this year's more of a break even as we've gone public, and the headwinds have hit pretty substantially, but we are ahead of the peers in growth. The average growth rate last year was about a break even to a 10%, and we grew at 25% last year over our peers. We've been careful not to be a national company and absorb a lot of costs. We're just methodically going into states where we feel like there's opportunity, where we can sell and compete in that market, and we have not taken on debt.
We've grown organically, so it's a funded business. I know that's boring 'cause a lot of you like to invest in companies that are losing a lot of money, but have a great story. We have a reasonably good story, but we're not losing money, so we have a vertically integrated offering, so we sell, we install, we maintain, and we help the customer find financing from some of our finance partners. We design the systems at scale, so this is a scalable construction company, if you can put it in that context, we try to get installation between 30 - 60 days after the sale, depending on the building department, then we service the systems, make sure there are warranties from the equipment manufacturers, from us as workmanship warranties, so that the system is working well.
We have a setter-closer model, so we send a bunch of setters out to set meetings. The closers then come in for a 90-minute appointment, where they'll pitch the customer about the savings, kind of educate them on solar, and then they close about one out of every two presentations that are made. So they're qualified, quite heavily filtered by these guys, and then they give quality appointments here. We believe that it's a high-octane model, if you will, or best in class in terms of low cost of customer acquisition. Everybody's a 1099. We don't have to incur costs if we don't get a sale.
So, the value proposition for the customer, basically, we're lowering their monthly payment by. In the case of current leases, $20-$30 a month less than they would have to pay on an average-sized deal. Loans, as they've gone up, some of those savings have evaporated. It used to be that you could save the same $20-$30 a month with a loan, but interest rates have hiked up, and that margin of savings has been squeezed. That's what slowed the industry. And now that rates are coming down, it will fuel the industry for a lot of growth into the future. The customer gets comfort because they have a system that's generating power at their house. If the grid goes down, they've got power generated during the daytime.
If they have batteries, then they have additional backup. Most of our customers put their excess power on the grid and get it back with net metering system. The ability to monetize that is through credits, power credits, and in the states that we're in, it's a one-to-one credit. Here in California, they changed that last year and decimated the industry here, but that's coming back now, I think, a little bit here in California, where batteries are making more sense for most of the installs. And finally, because we're a seamless, vertically integrated company, the customer can come to us for any problems. We're not passing them off to somebody else. So this guy sold them, this guy installed them, that guy's doing the maintenance. It's all us, and we have a better ability to work with the customers. We're an integrated provider.
We have good partners in our lending side, service, finance, GoodLeap, Mosaic, are some of the lending companies. LightReach, Sunnova, and others are lease companies that we work with. Our manufacturers, we're almost exclusively an Enphase shop for inverters and batteries right now. CED, we have a capital light business model, so the systems are drop shipped the day of installation at the customer's house. Our teams go in, and in 5- hours, they've installed everything, put the electrical in place, and they're ready to get utility approval to turn the system on at that point. So the scalable business is good. If you can do it in 5- hours, if you can drop ship, and that's what we're good at, is logistics, moving these processes forward without a lot of cost associated with that system.
We're in 6 states right now, although we're downsizing in Texas. Florida is our core market, Arkansas, Missouri. We went into Illinois and Ohio this year. Ohio will probably be our best market next year. We've had a lot of good success there and growth. Illinois is also a good market with some state credits. The business has grown over the last 5- years. When we started, exponentially, we were at over 100% growth when we were small, went to about 80% growth all the time, beating the industry averages. Last year, 25% growth with the high interest rates and the contraction in the industry. And this year has been kind of a break-even year that hit us all.
We think we're at the bottom of the trough and ready to expand and grow out of this system. We went public on March 2024 through a SPAC with Energy Spectrum, Dallas-Fort Worth private equity group. We've been operating as a public company now for two quarters. This industry is gonna grow, whether you invest in us, which I'd like you to do, but if you don't, this is a growth industry. The U.S. is going to have more and more residential solar long term, so there's going to be more capital, more efficiencies coming in. The TAM is really high, as I mentioned. The countries like Netherlands, Germany, Italy are in the much higher double-digit growth or penetrations.
The U.S. in 2022 was only 3%, now it's about 5%, 5%-6%, and trending up. But there's huge growth. I mean, just to get to 15%, it's gonna triple the amount of installs, and that will happen eventually, and probably during this time of the Inflation Reduction Act, when the incentives are the strongest. So we hope you'll look at solar generally, and us in particular, from that perspective. There are a lot of states, California is a leading state, but a lot of states are quite active in terms of where the business is currently concentrated. And California, Sunrun told the analyst that the market in California used to be 50% for them. It dropped to less than 30%, and now it's coming back.
So I think we're at the bottom of the trough and moving upwards, and that makes a great timing for an investment in the residential solar space. This is our unit economics. Basically, we sell roughly at about $3.33 a watt. That's after finance charges and after all of the structure has come out at the top, so we take that as our revenue. We have labor costs of about $0.34 a watt. Equipment costs are lower now than they were last year, about $1.13 a watt. Now, they're down under $1. $0.18 for other cost of goods sold, miscellaneous and adders that go in, water heaters and other things.
And then we pay a pretty high commission at $0.93 a watt, trying to get to about a 20% gross margin, typically from our business. Sunrun and Sunnova are the big players. They're really finance companies because they do leases and PPAs. We are an installer, making money on the profit margin from the install, and we continue to be able to scale and grow our business. As mentioned, we've historically had pretty good EBITDA for the last 5- years. Very positive last year, about $10 million of EBITDA. This year is a break even. The market really slowed because of these high interest rates.
People stopped buying 'cause the savings went evaporated, and we've been able to manage our business, cut costs, and still stay generally in the black as a business, and we think we're positioned now with the shakeout and the bankruptcies to take advantage of the market coming back next year, so this is our team. I'm the CEO. Cannon Holbrook, we just brought on recently, is our CFO. He was with Vivint early on in their history and has had some pest control experience in similar industries to ours. Luke Guy is one of the partners from the installation company. Kaitlyn Larsen is our Chief Operating Officer, Brandon is our Chief Sales Officer, and Sterling is our Legal Officer, who has come from a multibillion-dollar software company.
So we have good background and history among our sales team, so just a couple more things here, and then I'll open up for questions. Our company is, I think, poised in some good markets. We're not in California, which was a godsend when things cratered in California, took a lot of people out of business, but now we're poised to go back in there with other customers, opportunities, and sales reps because the market is recovering, so we're considering expanding into the California market, but right now we're just carefully growing where we think our guys can be successful in selling, and we can be successful installing. This is probably the last slide, and then I'll open up for questions. Our growth has been historically organic.
We've funded everything from cash flow, grown the business, paid out the owners with profits, and we continue to believe that organic will be our most driving growth opportunity as we recruit summer sales teams every year. We have an integrated roofing service that we're starting, and it's gone well. We're gonna probably expand that as well. Other adders, maybe HVAC could come into that category. And then here, because there's opportunities in the market right now, we are scouring for good acquisition targets that we think can be accretive to us. We don't have a big balance sheet. We don't have debt, really for the most part, it's a clean balance sheet.
But, we think that there's some really great bolt-on acquisition targets right now that we're exploring, both from the bankruptcy companies that are out there, as well as, other companies that have approached us for potential consolidation in the industry, so with that, I'll open it up for questions.
What's the pitch to the homeowner when you actually get in a competitive sales situation amongst some of the other big names there?
Yeah, what is the pitch to the homeowner, in a competitive sales situation? So, this is a kitchen table sale. Excuse me. This is a kitchen table sale, so you need to educate the customer, tell them about the solar credits, 'cause people don't understand that very easily. Most people aren't really familiar with how a tax credit works unless they've, you know, used one before. So, if you are installing a $50,000 project, you get $15,000 back against your taxes, 30% tax credit. So you go in and educate them, and it's really an emotional sale at the time. This is not something that most people will go into a Home Depot and buy and put it on their house. It's more of a system. You need a system of people to come in and do the permitting.
It's a lot of headaches to try and do this on your own, so we take the difficult parts out of that, and we explain that to the customer, what we'll be doing over the next 60-90 days, and then once the customer says, "Okay, if I wanna do this, how much does it cost? How does it compare to the power bill?" We pull out their power bill, say, "Here's what you're paying monthly in power. Here's what you could pay if you wanted to finance this and own it, or if you want to lease it, this is what you would pay, even less monthly. So your savings is $20-$30 a month," so they don't have to put out-of-pocket money upfront, which makes it easier to sell.
If people want to pay cash, they can. It's a better deal if you can pay cash, obviously, but most people want to finance this over the long term and compare it to their power bill, so we're typically on lease projects right now, saving $20-$30 a month for the customer versus their power bill for the same energy demand, and loans, as the loan rates come down, you're gonna see those savings start to come back as well, and that's what's gonna fuel the growth of the fourth quarter and through 2025, so the customer gets a good education. They decide if they want to do it or not. Usually, they're interested. That's why we're in the house.
They've invited us to come back, and, at the end of the day, if they qualify for the financing, you know, it's a 50% close rate, so.
So if you have some of the other big names that maybe are also knocking on doors in that street, it's just a question of getting in there first, having more selling person give the sales pitch, or is there anything specifically that you would say speaks to?
I mean, there's a lot of homes out there, so you know, it's hard to. We run across other people sometimes in saturated states, like now Florida. Once California shut down, a lot of people went to Florida, so we got more competition. So it's a little harder, because somebody can say, "Well, I can save you more than that company did," so you'll lose some sales. But by and large, the customer and the sales rep create a bond, and they are able to take them with good quality. And the fact that we're now a public company and transparent has helped us, so the customer say, "Oh, there's a company that I can trust." A lot of consumers have had warranties from companies that are no longer in business, even SunPower, right? And so now, who do you trust?
How do you make sure that your warranty is good? And we think we build a good rapport with the customer to that end. And, you know, some will cancel with other companies that come along. But by and large, you know, once they're sold, they like to stay with us. And the prospect, the design starts quickly, so.
Tim, is the competitive landscape very fragmented? Do you think it'll be... If so, is it consolidating as we move forward?
I believe it's consolidating now. It's very fragmented. I mean, you have the two big players that are public, that are integrated in many ways, but they're really not doing what we're doing. They're using subcontractors to install, and they're using sales dealers to sell for them, which is a little bit dicey because you don't have control over them. Our guys are in-house, 1099 guys, but they're our guys, by and large. And I think that the industry is going to try and get more efficient. Attorneys General are saying, "These people need to be part of your team instead of rogue sales groups going out." And I think what that's doing is forcing more people to, you know, look at how they can build a more vertically integrated business like ours. So hopefully, the consolidation will continue.
We see a lot of people talking to us now about coming on board our public platform, and we're trying to be careful and creative in terms of the acquisitions that we make. So it could be small companies that do things we don't do or large opportunities that are coming out of bankruptcy. We don't know yet, but there's lots of opportunity. Yes.
I'm sure there's probably a lot of red tape, but is there a world in which, you know, you can partner with a home builder down the line, and, and houses are just built with solar panels stock versus aftermarket?
Yeah, great question. In California, they mandate new construction has to have solar on it, so you're seeing that start to trickle through the rest of the country. California homebuilder partners, SunPower just went out of business, but they had the best home builder contract structure in place, and that's now up for auction right now as one of the bank- the assets in bankruptcy, and so I think that by and large, there are ways to get in with home builders generally and offer them, but it's not mandated in other states. Some municipalities in Colorado and New Mexico are looking at mandating it for their homes to be more energy efficient as a community and meet their goals for zero carbon, or carbon reduction.
And, so we think that's good because it's, again, a tailwind, adding to what we're doing. So there will be other states that consider what California has done over time.
Got it.
Yes.
Do you know the interest rates? Or...
Yeah, we do see that. We're a summer sales model, so our guys just got back, so the interest rate cuts haven't hit yet. But if you look at the stock price of Sunrun and Sunnova, the market's already priced in the lower interest rates, and they're moving up because of that. And so we expect that to translate into more sales, more profitability next year for us. Yes.
Sorry, go ahead.
Now, why did you guys decide to go to the street?
Great question. I think we had five owners. Business was going well. We were making good money. We were approached by some private equity groups and SPAC groups. Seemed like it was an opportunity to become more transparent. This is a sloppy industry. Transparency is helpful to the industry, and there are not a lot of publicly traded companies in it. So we felt like we could step our game up by being public, being more transparent, being able to put our customer care out there so people could see it more easily, and then the consolidation.
We think that to grow the business, there's room for, you know, two or three more publicly traded residential solar companies just because of the growth, and we wanted to be one of those and bring in other parties that would join with us to build a larger enterprise. So, and capital, because we've grown organically, we haven't needed capital for growth, but long term, as we get out as a more robust traded company next year, getting capital to grow the markets is, you know, one of the things that we hope to accomplish by being a public company. So.
Can you just elaborate on the M&A front a little bit, and then talk about potentially diversifying into distributed gen as well?
I'm out of time. Can I answer that question or-
Sure.
Okay. So I think that M&A, accretive acquisitions, high on our list of how we wanna grow the business. There are companies that we could have been in conversation with and just do a stock deal. There are companies that say, "We need a little cash and stock," and there are others that are just, you know, on the chopping block right now in the bankruptcies for sale. So we are constricted 'cause we don't have a lot of cash, so we need partners. We need debt equity partners to be able to pull off some larger acquisitions, and that's one of our objectives over time, is to make sure that we're poised to grow out of the trough here, you know, out of the bottom of the market, with good capital partners.
So we're looking for people that, maybe can even help us fund some of the acquisitions, that we're looking at. Again, Titan, Lumio, and SunPower all are going through bankruptcy this year. We've picked up some installers. We've picked up some assets already, and we expect to be able to look at and possibly acquire more. In terms of the DERs question, distributed energy resources, I think utilities are getting, they're uncomfortable partnering or letting giving access to the grid. But long term, virtual power plants can be built for the utilities, utilizing energy storage in consumers' homes that are oftentimes just a wasted asset.
They can manage the grid better, more efficiently over time, and I think the forward-looking utilities will actually do more of that and may even partner with companies like ours to pull that off in the future. With the wildfires here in California, you all know that getting power generated closer to the consumption point is really a priority for states, for communities, and ultimately, the utilities have to adapt to that, I believe. So did that answer the question enough?
It does.
Okay.
I'll circle back with you soon.
Yeah.
Thank you.
All right. Thanks for your time. Appreciate you coming in and sharing a little bit of time today.
Great. Thank you very much.
ZEO is our ticker symbol, if you want. We think you can make more money long term by investing in ZEO now versus any of the bigger players, 'cause we have a lot of upside to go now. So thanks.