Show Notes:
Dara Bortman is a Returned Peace Corps Response Volunteer and former co-owner and Senior VP of Marketing & Sales at Exact Solar.
Over 15 years, she helped grow Exact Solar into one of the most respected solar installers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, building a company culture rooted in honesty and advocacy.
Here’s her LinkedIn.
Expect to learn:
* How Exact Solar grew from a single (almost accidental) pool heating project into a values-driven regional leader.
* Why honesty and education are the most effective sales tools for a solar company.
* How advocacy and community impact projects can become powerful marketing engines for any home service business.
You can listen to this episode here, or on:
* YouTube
* Spotify
Transcript:
Aaron Nichols:Hello everyone, and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I'm your host, Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
And today, as you can see, I'm across the table from someone. Someone not on Zoom, because I am in Boulder, Colorado for Solar 2025.
And we've got a very special guest. This is Dara Bortman, the one who started it all. One of the ones.
Dara Bortman:One of the ones who started it all. That's right.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah, you were part of a dynamic duo.
Dara Bortman:That's right. Yeah.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah.
Dara Bortman:Mark and I.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah. Yeah. Dara is one of the co-founders of Exact Solar, you know. And I have been doing this little interview series to talk to veterans in the industry about where we think solar is going to go, what's going to happen now that the Inflation Reduction Act's been repealed.
But I think a good place to start with this conversation would be to talk about the superhero origin story of Exact Solar.
Dara Bortman:Okay. We can do that. So, back in the olden days. I can't believe how long it's been. I guess it was back in 2005 or so.
Aaron Nichols:I was 12.
Dara Bortman:Oh my God, please. Yeah, yeah. I had children already. Anyway, so, Mark and I had always been interested in renewable energy, clean energy, and energy efficiency.
We actually took a class in Pennsylvania from Johnny Weiss.
Aaron Nichols:Okay. I've heard the name before. I've never, I never got to meet him.
Dara Bortman:Yeah. He was amazing. And he just passed away recently from cancer, unfortunately. Mark and I had always been interested in renewable energy, energy efficiency, but it was back pre-solar times.
So, American pre-solar times — meaning mostly that it was pre-tax incentives for solar.
Aaron Nichols:Right. So, both at the federal level and the state level, right?
Dara Bortman:Yeah, I think 2005 was the first one, if I remember right. It was around there, 2005 to 2008. In that area were the first East Coast state incentives, and also the federal tax credit, I think, started in ’08 or ’09.
Right. So, back in the early days, we actually took a class in Pennsylvania from the great Johnny Weiss about energy efficiency and renewable energy at the time, and we both took online classes, and we realized that, yeah, we weren't doing any work related to it, but it was something we'd always been interested in.
We decided at the time to pick up our family and move to Costa Rica.
Aaron Nichols:Amazing.
Dara Bortman:So, at the time we had a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old.
We'd never been to Costa Rica. Picked up the phone, we're like, okay, we're going to move there, on the map, and, you know—
Aaron Nichols:So, long before Costa Rica was cool.
Dara Bortman:Long before Costa Rica was cool, but it was a democratic country, it was safe, good medical.
Aaron Nichols:Right.
Dara Bortman:All that stuff. So, we decided we wanted our children to see that not everyone in the world got to live in a big house in suburban Pennsylvania like they did.
Aaron Nichols:Totally.
Dara Bortman:We wanted them to see that not everyone in the world speaks English, right?
Aaron Nichols:Yeah.
Dara Bortman:The type of things that we felt a child doesn't understand, really, unless they see it, right?
So, you can tell a kid that not everyone in the world speaks English, but I don't think they can conceptualize that until they're dumped into a place where everyone around them is speaking a different language.
Aaron Nichols:Oh, right? Yeah. Not everyone speaks my language. I don't know. Everyone's exactly like me. Not everyone looks like me, and not everyone lives in a big house like me.
Dara Bortman:So we at that time felt it was important to have a bit of an adventure with the kids, and we picked up and moved to Costa Rica for what was at the time six months and then it got extended to a year.
Not long after we moved there, Mark saw an ad in the local newspaper in Costa Rica advertising for Solar Costa Rica.
Aaron Nichols:A company down there that was installing solar on—
Dara Bortman:Right, on local homes.
Aaron Nichols:Okay.
Dara Bortman:So, he contacted the owner. He ended up coincidentally being an American who had just moved down to Costa Rica after being in the solar industry in California and Arizona for like 20 or 30 years.
Dara Bortman:So, people had been doing solar in America, but not PV. Solar hot water was his specialty. And he had retired down to Costa Rica.
Mark picked up the phone, called him up and said, “Can I just shadow you on some jobs? Can I just follow you around and, you know, like mind-meld with you and learn what you know?”
Bruce was amazing. This great guy — he would leave his glasses behind or his briefcase behind or his wallet. But he really was wonderful. He took Mark under his wing and taught him basically everything he knew about solar water heating down in Costa Rica.
So, while we were there for that year, Mark learned a lot.
Aaron Nichols:So to preface — solar wasn't even on your radar before Costa Rica?
Dara Bortman:Not as a business.
Aaron Nichols:Okay.
Dara Bortman:Like, entrepreneurial… there’s no entrepreneurs in either of our families.
Aaron Nichols:Okay.
Dara Bortman:So, being a business — a small business owner — wasn’t something on our radar. We both worked for corporate America. Mark worked for a company that was owned by a family, but it was basically corporate America. So that was never something that we thought about — like, “Oh, let's start a solar business.” It wasn’t on our radar.
But when we moved back to America, Mark reconnected with some nonprofits in the Philadelphia area that had been dabbling in solar.
Aaron Nichols:Okay.
Dara Bortman:You know, early solar water heating mostly.
Aaron Nichols:Who was it back then? Was there, like, a Solarize Philly back then?
Dara Bortman:No, there was none of that. It was actually the ECA.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah, they’re great.
Dara Bortman:They're awesome. And maybe one or two others. But when we got back, Mark reached out to them and said, “I learned a lot in the last year. Maybe I can help you out. What are you doing with solar now?”
And they were like, “We’re not doing anything with solar. It’s not happening. We're not doing anything.”
But one of them said, “Oh, but this lady just called us the other day and she was interested in solar pool heating. Why don't you give her a call and see what she wants?”
So he did.
Aaron Nichols:Oh, wow.
Dara Bortman:She ended up living in Yardley. He went, spoke with this very nice woman, told her about solar pool heating, how it worked, gave her a price… actually, I don’t think he even gave her a price. She just said, “I'll take it.”
Aaron Nichols:That's amazing.
Dara Bortman:She didn’t ask for references. She didn’t ask for insurance. She didn’t ask for anything. She just said, “That sounds great. I'll take it.”
So he calls the guy up that gave him the lead and said, “She’ll take it. When will you come out to install it?”
And the guy said, “No, no. You don't understand. We don't do it. It's all you, dude.”
So Mark came home that afternoon and said, “I think we’re in business.”
Aaron Nichols:Oh my god.
Dara Bortman:And that was the start of Exact Solar.
Aaron Nichols:As a sidebar, I love that every entrepreneurial journey begins with low-maintenance people.
Dara Bortman:Yeah, exactly.
Aaron Nichols:Like, “Sure, put it on my house. I don’t care.”
Dara Bortman:That was the first one. She didn’t even ask for the name of the company. She just wanted the pool heating.
So that’s how Exact Solar started. There wasn’t really a solar photovoltaic industry in New Jersey or Pennsylvania yet. There were some early adopters in New Jersey, but nothing in Pennsylvania at that point. But there were solar water heating and solar pool heating people, and we became huge fans of that technology.
It’s so efficient, there are no moving parts, and it lasts forever.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah.
Dara Bortman:We ended up servicing systems for people whose systems had been installed when Jimmy Carter was president. When he put those panels on the White House, some people said, “I could do that for my house.”
They installed systems in the ’70s and ’80s, and when we started Exact Solar in 2005–2006, people would say, “I think my system needs a tune-up.” And those systems were still working just fine — heating pools or the water in their homes.
Aaron Nichols:It’s crazy that in America when people think of solar, they never really think of water heating.
Dara Bortman:Yeah, it’s not really a thing anymore.
Aaron Nichols:What happened?
Dara Bortman:Well, part of the problem was that solar water heating requires copper tubing. It’s basically a big, well-insulated metal box — the collector — that sits on your roof, or evacuated tubes, which is another kind of advanced thing. Once it’s up there, it’s there forever.
But when copper became expensive, the prices stayed high. Unlike PV, where prices have dropped dramatically in the last 20 years, solar water heating didn’t change much. An average house in suburban Pennsylvania was maybe $9,000–$10,000 at that time, and I assume it’s similar now.
The payback depends on your home and what you’re using to heat your water.
Aaron Nichols:When did y’all start doing PV?
Dara Bortman:PV really started picking up when Pennsylvania and New Jersey added state incentives. That, plus the federal tax credits, all came in around 2009. I think our first PV system was in 2009 or 2010.
Pennsylvania had a bucket of money for both water heating and PV, but once it ran out, they never replenished it. That helped some early adopters, but really the PV industry picked up around 2010.
Aaron Nichols:How did y’all manage to build such a great company with such values? That’s one question I wanted to ask you — because we’re scaling such a beautiful reputation now, and there’s so much groundwork y’all did that makes it so much easier for us to sell what we’re doing.
Dara Bortman:That’s so great to hear. When we sold the business to Doug, we looked for someone who would continue our legacy — our prioritization of customer service and support of our employees. We really built a family at Exact Solar, not just an employee team.
How did we do it? I think from the beginning we grew slowly, which we were lucky to be able to do. We were also very lucky to find some great early team members who were eager to learn and do things the right way — the quality way, not the easy way — and have fun while doing it.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah.
Dara Bortman:And part of it is taking care of your employees the way you’d want to be taken care of. We didn’t have to build a corporate machine like the ones we had come from. I loved my jobs in corporate America, but I knew which parts of that I wanted to keep and which parts I didn’t.
Aaron Nichols:What were some of the things you didn’t want to keep? For anyone building a small business, what do you throw out to create a great culture?
Dara Bortman:Well… that’s a hard question. I think of it more as additive than subtractive.
What we added was more of that “female energy.” I was the mom at that company. Especially in a construction-type industry, that’s unique.
When we hired installers who came from other companies, they weren’t used to that energy — being open to people’s personal stories, listening, supporting them, and not throwing people away at the first sign of adversity.
Part of it is just listening to people and making sure you’re supporting them the way you’d want to be supported yourself. I always live by the golden rule — treat others the way you’d want to be treated. That’s the company I wanted to go to work for every day. Respect goes both ways.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah. It’s been wonderful to step into something like that. Even though I came in years after y’all sold the company, so many people from your time have stayed — like Don, Nick…
Dara Bortman:Yeah. Muzzy, Dima…
Aaron Nichols:I shadowed Dima’s crew when I was back in PA in May.
Dara Bortman:So yeah, we built a real family. And what came with that was caring about the triple bottom line — people, planet, and profit. We had the luxury to do that. Not every business does.
We didn’t just focus on maximizing profit. We’d spend more on employees, spend more time learning about policy that would benefit our employees and customers long-term. That long-term view is important when you’re building a company in perpetuity.
If you’re always looking at short-term profit, you might miss how policy being discussed now will affect your team two years or five years from now.
Aaron Nichols:Yeah. That’s where transitioning into the policy side of things — becoming active at the local, state, and federal level — has really helped us. I’ve been telling people, advocacy is marketing. Especially in solar.
Dara Bortman:Especially in an industry so new, where a large part of your marketing is education — of consumers, your sales team, your installers, politicians. Education takes time and patience.
Aaron Nichols:That’s something we’re reaping the rewards of now. Alyssa — our marketing manager — and I have talked about how funny it is that we’re both former teachers. Doug’s strategy is essentially education and advocacy, with a long-term view.
We went all-in on educational content two years ago, and now we have so much organic lead flow — not only from posting content but also from advocacy, like publicizing that we built a solar system powering a greenhouse in a Philadelphia food desert.
Dara Bortman:Exactly. Maybe that job wasn’t as profitable as a big suburban house job, but it was important. Those kids learned so much from that project, and will carry it forward in their lives.
Aaron Nichols:Not only that — we had our congressman speak at the ribbon cutting, and got free earned media that led to more jobs. We didn’t spend a dime on that — just highlighted our advocacy.
Dara Bortman:Right. That’s a great point. I never bought leads. Tried it once or twice — total waste of money. Leads are a waste. That whole lead-gen industry is poppycock.
Our marketing was customer referrals — to neighbors, friends, coworkers, family. We didn’t have a huge marketing budget because our customers were our marketing base.
We always put honesty at the top of the list — with the sales team and with customers — even if it was bad news, like a utility delay. Honesty builds trust, and that’s what makes your customers say, “I trust Exact Solar.”
Aaron Nichols:Which has been wonderful for me, because we’re scaling a locally-based, values-based business that cares about the work we’re doing. Coming from education, Peace Corps, and nonprofits, it’s been amazing to step into this.
Dara Bortman:And each job you install, you’re saving the world one solar system at a time. When it’s a product you believe in and trust, it’s so much easier to sell.
Aaron Nichols:So how long were you operating before you sold?
Dara Bortman:We started in 2005–2006 and sold in 2021. So 15–16 years.
Aaron Nichols:Obviously there were many changes over that time — especially with incentives. How did you navigate that?
Dara Bortman:The “solar coaster.” We’ve been through it many times — losing or almost losing incentives. The key was honest communication with every prospective customer: “We’ll try to get your system in before the credit expires, but part of it’s out of our hands.”
We required honesty from salespeople, even when they might be incentivized not to. That way, there were no surprises.
We also found that customers who care about the environment still want to go solar, even if the numbers aren’t as good as before. Many feel, “I need to do something to make a difference.”
Aaron Nichols:There’s also the American thing of giving people something and then saying they can’t have it anymore.
Dara Bortman:Yes. And a lot of our customers after those “down” moments were people who just needed to feel like they were helping the future. Even if payback wasn’t as quick, it was still a good deal.
You’re not going to stop this train — only slow it.
Aaron Nichols:The way I describe it — it’s a trilogy. We’re in The Empire Strikes Back. The bad guys have won, we’ve lost a hand, we just found out Darth Vader’s our father. Now we have to move forward.
Dara Bortman:Right. There’s no stopping solar and wind — they require no fuel. Once the power plant is installed, there’s no additional fuel cost. It saves money, it saves the environment.
Aaron Nichols:Nico Johnson talks about how weird it’ll be to tell our grandkids we used to dig things up and burn them.
Dara Bortman:Right — and it made people sick and polluted our air and water. And some people were okay with living in a pile of trash as long as they made money.
Aaron Nichols:It’s stressful and depressing right now, but if you run a brand with integrity, you’ll make it through these down cycles.
Dara Bortman:Yes. It’ll go back up again.
Aaron Nichols:So as someone who ran a solar company for 15 years — what’s your advice to other owners navigating this?
Dara Bortman:Solar’s not going away. Be honest about the numbers. Utility rates are going up everywhere — like the PJM auction results that just came in higher than last year.
Stick it out. It’s stressful, but if you’re honest, your customers will be happy. Lean on honesty, brand, education, and advocacy.
Aaron Nichols:I love what you guys did — encouraging customers to contact representatives about bills. Our customers appreciated that, and became policy advocates themselves because we pointed out what was going on.
Dara Bortman:People often don’t know what’s happening with policy. They think they have no power, but they do. Every phone call matters.
Aaron Nichols:Even though we threw everything at the government this cycle and still had leaders let the industry down.
Dara Bortman:Yes. It’s disheartening when representatives you thought supported clean energy vote against it, despite huge pushes from constituents.
It’s hard to pick yourself up and make the next call, but you have to. Even if it doesn’t always work, doing nothing guarantees failure.
Aaron Nichols:To bring it home, I’ve been asking everyone a fun moonshot question: In 80 years, what do you think clean energy will look like?
Dara Bortman:Transportation will be completely different — maybe flying cars, self-driving vehicles that charge wirelessly as they move.
Solar paint, solar windows, solar roofs integrated into buildings. Wireless transmission of electricity. No more mining and burning fuel.
Electricity will be cheap because we’ll be overproducing with solar and wind. Excess will go into batteries or be let go — and that’s fine, because it costs nothing to produce from the sun or wind.
Aaron Nichols:Amazing.
Dara Bortman:Yeah. It’ll be a whole new dynamic.
Aaron Nichols:Dara, this has been so lovely — and I think you thought you didn’t have much to say when you sat down, but it turned out to be wonderful. Thank you so much for doing this.
