Orphan Adoption
Pick up the customers your bankrupt competitors left behind.
A lot of installers didn't survive the last few years. Their customers still have arrays on the roof, warranties nobody will honour, and no one to call. Those households are pre-qualified: they own solar, they've already spent the money, and they have an unsolved problem.
Honest framing: unlike everything else in this pack, this isn't sitting in your database. It's net-new lead generation, and it takes real work to source. It's here because it's genuinely valuable — not because it's easy. Run the other eight first.
Stage 1 — Find the orphans
You are a lead-generation strategist working with a residential solar installer
who wants to reach homeowners whose original installer has gone out of business.
### MY SITUATION
Service area: [metro / counties]
State: [state]
What I can service: [brands, inverters, whether I'll take on others' warranty work]
### YOUR TASK
Give me every practical, legal route to identify these households in my area,
ranked by effort versus yield. For each: what it gives me, what it costs, how
long it takes, and its legal or ethical constraints.
Consider at minimum:
- building and electrical permit records, which are public in most
jurisdictions and typically name the installing contractor
- contractor licence board records showing revoked, lapsed, or surrendered
licences in my state
- bankruptcy filings and local trade press for installers that folded
- monitoring-platform and manufacturer channels for systems with no active
servicing installer
- community channels where these homeowners already complain: neighbourhood
groups, local forums, review sites on the defunct company's old listings
- geographic advertising against neighbourhoods with known clusters
For permit records specifically: tell me how to actually find and search them in
my state, what fields they typically expose, and what the request process looks
like.
### RULES
- Only routes that are legal and publicly available. If something sits in a grey
area, say so explicitly rather than including it quietly.
- Be honest about effort. If a route takes forty hours to yield twenty names,
tell me that.
- Flag anything that would require handling personal data in a way that carries
obligations.
### OUTPUT
Ranked table: route | what it yields | effort | cost | constraints | first stepStage 2 — The approach
Write outreach to homeowners whose solar installer has gone out of business.
### CONTEXT
Company: [name] Years in business: [n] Area: [region]
Defunct installer(s) I'm targeting: [names, if known]
What I'm offering: [system health check / warranty triage / service contract /
monitoring re-registration]
### THE DELICATE PART
These people have been let down and may have lost real money. The approach must
be useful first and commercial second, and it must never sound like circling a
carcass.
### WRITE
1. A first-touch message that leads with the specific problem they have —
no one to call — and offers something concrete before asking anything.
2. A version for someone who found me from a community post rather than
direct outreach.
3. Answers to: "can you honour my old warranty?" (usually no, and the answer
must be straight about that), "what will this cost me?", and "how do I know
you won't disappear too?"
### RULES
- Never disparage the failed company by name. It reads badly and some of their
people may now work for me or my competitors.
- Never imply I can honour a warranty I cannot. Manufacturer warranties on
equipment often survive the installer; workmanship warranties usually do not.
Explain that difference plainly — it is the single most useful thing I can
tell them, and most of them do not know it.
- No urgency, no discount theatre. These people have been sold to badly already.
- Bodies as single-line text with \n where line breaks go.
### OUTPUT
CSV: touch | channel | subject | body | notesWhat to do with it
The warranty distinction in Stage 2 — equipment warranties usually survive the installer, workmanship warranties usually don't — is worth publishing on your site as a standalone page. It's the exact thing these homeowners are searching for, nobody explains it clearly, and it'll bring them to you instead of the other way round.
Want this run for you instead of by you? That is the job.
adrian@atlasautomates.com
· atlas automates