GI295: Generating Passive Income from Community Solar with Dakota Malone

GI295: Generating Passive Income from Community Solar with Dakota Malone

Dakota Malone has been involved in the solar industry for over a decade, and his company, Community Solar Authority, partners with commercial real estate investors to increase their properties’ income. This includes leasing parts of their property for passive income or generating on-site power. His company has unlocked access to over $22 million in future electricity savings.

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Transcript:

Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host, Charles Carillo. Today, we have Dakota Malone. He has been involved in the solar industry for over a decade, and his company, Community Solar Authority, partners with commercial real estate investors to increase their properties’ income. This includes leasing parts of their property for passive income or generating on-site power. His company has unlocked access to over $22 million in future electricity savings. So thank you so much for coming on today, Dakota

Dakota:
Charles, thank you for having me.

Charles:
So please give us a little background on yourself prior to getting involved, what you’re doing now over the last decade in the in the solar industry.

Dakota:
Sure. Yeah, I’m happy to give you the quick rundown. My life’s really interesting in a way that my work is directly related to things I went through in my childhood. So I’m someone who is thriving post five heart surgeries, and after facing debt a few times in childhood, it made me ultimately realize the importance of sustainability. And it was interesting because I was really into things like high performance and personal development kind of in my young twenties. And I was self-employed, you know, since my twenties. I think I’ve had one W2 job my entire life. So I’ve always been, you know, in the world of sales. But it was really interesting for me how I ended up as a sustainability entrepreneur because I cared so much about, you know, my own personal health and, you know, things I had to overcome as a, as a kid. And so, you know, just real quick, I first got my start in door to door sales, so I was in the energy space gas and electricity. So, but this was a little bit before solar, but still in the energy space.

Charles:
Is this the, I’m sorry, is this the deregulation? Not to cut you off, this is one that all deregulated. Okay. I remember that many, many decades ago when people, yeah, yeah, go on. Sorry, <laugh>. No,

Dakota:
That’s okay. So I started in the deregulation space and for me it was about 2017. I actually took a sabbatical from the work I was doing as a kind of regional manager running multiple teams and offices moved to Europe and I was obsessed with understanding and learning about remote work at the time, I guess before it was cool. And so that was really the transition for me to go from, you know, energy kind of sales guy to entrepreneur and really seeing the writing on the wall with the renewable energy industry. You could look at the charge and see that solar was growing year over year. And so for me, I was like, all right, job security. I can work for my laptop, I can figure out how to turn this into a business. And that’s what really molded, you know, what we do now at Community Solar Authority and, and what we’ve been doing for the last seven years.

Charles:
Awesome. What were you doing for work when you were in Europe and where in Europe were you? I had

Dakota:
A lot of money saved up from door to door sales. My best friend was actually in the Air Force as a canine officer and he called me up one day and he is like, Dakota, you should just quit your job and come to Italy. And I was like, if you double talk dare me, I will. And so, you know, he was in northern Italy, but I got to see 13 countries that year. And so I kind of used his house as a home base and, you know, buses, trains, planes to all around Europe. So that was really fun. So I had a bunch of money. I was also investing in crypto at that time. And so I bought Bitcoin again before it was cool, I guess at probably $4,000. And I was day trading it, so I was making a lot of money selling crypto and again, just had a, a really large savings account from door to door sales. So there was really not a lot of pressure for me to actually do any work. And again, I really was treating it as, of course in between travel and fun and adventure, really treating it as a learning experience and saying, alright, I’m not going home until I understand how I can work off my laptop and actually, you know, build a business from it. And so that was, that was kind of my European stint in 2017. Very

Charles:
Cool. Awesome. So kind of coming where we are now, can you explain a little bit about what your company does and I mean, how you partner with property owners? Because this is, as I understand it, a little different than your typical solar provider types company.

Dakota:
Yes, exactly. So we operate in a niche space in the commercial solar market, and it’s called community solar. So community solar, essentially state level legislation that helps support state’s renewable energy commitments, you know, so states like New York and Illinois and many more are coming online essentially saying, Hey, we’re gonna be a hundred percent renewable in the next X amount of time and you know, you can’t go and just throw solar panels on top of everybody’s property and assume that that’s going to be the winning strategy. And it will never be for many reasons, shade money, et cetera. And so community solar is this idea of building community solar farms. And so this can go on land, this can go on commercial rooftops. And the idea is that you can have many subscribers essentially not buy in from an ownership perspective, but actually subscribe to the power that’s being generated on these assets.

Dakota:
And in exchange for helping clean the energy grid, they receive these bill credits that are designed to lower electricity costs. So there are two real big plays that we work with in the community solar space. One is a value add passive income strategy using in monetizing roof space or available land where the, you know, commercial property owner doesn’t need to take on any power. They don’t need to make any sort of capital investment. And in exchange for leasing their roof, you know, typically 50,000 plus square feet, you know, the bigger the better for us. In exchange for leasing their roof, they receive, you know, guaranteed income across the lifecycle of the project, which is typically 25 ish years. And so, you know, there’s a really big opportunity. We do the same thing with landowners and farmers. You know, the amount of farmers that we’ve been able to retire has been a really fun kind of side quests to the work that we’re doing because that wasn’t our original plan.

Dakota:
But as we got involved, you know, there are a lot of older farmers that are ready to retire. They can’t stop working and being able to lease their land, especially when maybe they’ll lease it out for things like hay for example, which does not pay nearly as much as something like solar does. They’re really able to become a part of the trillion dollar clean energy economy, generate passive income for decades to come without necessarily needing to sell their land or sell their property. So that’s really the big way that we help commercial real estate owners. And then the second piece here, Charles, is that people can participate in community solar. And so again, let’s say that there is no asset on the roof. You know, we work with large multi-site portfolio commercial properties where we take all of their utility bills across all of their locations and we enroll them into these community solar assets. It doesn’t cost them anything. They don’t need to install solar on site and in exchange for, again, helping clean the energy grid, they receive lower electricity costs for years to come. So it’s a really unique way we work with municipalities, investors, corporations to improve their ROI across their commercial portfolio without actually using CapEx or having to really make any changes to the property. So I hope that kind of covers the landscape

Charles:
For you. Yeah, no, it makes sense because it different, this is a different product, but there is there’s other industries that have similar kinda leasing with those timeframes. My dad years back was involved with billboards and you would lease land for 25 years or whatever it is, the billboard goes up, they get paid income on it, you know, and it’s that thing. They also do, I guess with cell towers as well, it’s a similar kind of business where you have people with commercial properties zoned a specific way for both of those uses that are able to add this onto it. But going onto shopping any type of large mall, whatever it might be is a great idea because it’s just kind of sitting there, you know what I mean? And it’s a great way of monetizing end when, when this is done and now there’s, there’s one part of here. ’cause If you, if you, if I put it on my house as I understand this, I would, I’m gonna sell it back to the grid or whatever.

Dakota:
But

Charles:
I mean, how do you do it where, ’cause there’s a second part of your business because you don’t make that much money, is that correct when you’re selling it back to the grid? Or how does that work? Yeah,

Dakota:
So community solar is monetized in a totally different way. And so we have a development side to our company where we will actually develop these projects ourselves. But ultimately, a long-term owner is essentially monetizing the project in a few different ways. They are, you know, making a share off of selling the energy back into the grid. And so again, in community solar where you have all of these subscribers, that clean energy is not coming back into their building, right? So it’s not a environmental sustainability play for those subscribers. It’s more of a business sustainability play and opex reduction. But the developer is actually selling the power back into the grid. They are selling what are called solar wrecks or renewable energy credits from those projects. And they’re also benefiting for, from rapid depreciation, just like in commercial real estate investing, there are essentially debt structures and tax equity plays that go into the first few years of solar development.

Dakota:
And so you can essentially capture rapid depreciation off of these solar assets, which is how they’re able to scale. It’s what gets, you know, these private investors and solar developers really interested in community solar and community-based solar models is for those, you know, tax benefits and rapid depreciation benefits. So those are the few ways that people monetize it. And of course, you know, it depends on the structure that we’re doing. If we’re talking about a lease, that is typically what it looks like if they want to do, meaning the commercial property owner is looking to take on the, the power, they would do what’s called the power purchase agreement, where they’re actually buying the power at a discount from that solar asset on the roof. So there are different ways to monetize, but the, the former is, is pretty typical in my space. One is

Charles:
When you print one of those 25 year leases, I mean, what does that look like? Obviously we know the timeframe, we understand that they can be modeled a few different ways. If the you know, the, the owner to the proprietor can take some of that power or they can sell it all back how do those leases look like for the property owners? You said there was some sort of guarantee with them. So kind of how does that process work where you’re determining what a lease might kind of be outlined like? Sure,

Dakota:
Yeah. And you know, it’s essentially insane whether we’re talking about land or rooftop because what’s really happening, Charles, is, you know, the first thing we’ll have property owners come to us and they’ll say, Hey, I want to, I wanna lease my land for solar, or I wanna lease my rooftop for solar. And the first thing my team will do, you know, we have a GIS team where we’ll go in, we’ll look at the nearest substation, we’ll look at the capacity, and we’ll essentially run a checklist, which people can grab on our website@communitysolarauthority.com. It’s just a quick checklist of what we’re actually looking for to determine if the property’s a good fit in the first place. Once it passes those initial checks, again based on what we’re looking at we will then go ahead and bring it to our developer network. And so again, we’re co-developing alongside some of the largest solar developers in the country.

Dakota:
And so based on where the property is and what we’re talking about, whether it’s a greenfield or a brownfield or a rooftop, we’ll kind of determine who we start to talk to because we work with experts that are kind of siloed in each of those spaces. And then from there, you know, they’ll go ahead and we’ll move as long as it looks good to them as well, we’ll move to get the lease under some sort of contract. So saying like, Hey, essentially we’re going to do a lot of utility studies and environmental studies and make sure that this is a good fit for solar, which is typically a 12 to 18 month period. So it is essentially an option to lease where we need to go and do these studies. We can’t find out if it’s actually a good fit or not until these studies are done.

Dakota:
So we may do a utility study and 12 months later it comes back and it says, oops, you need a $20 million upgrade at the substation. And so therefore this project is, you know, no good at the moment. So we’ll typically do some sort of option payments during that time because again, during this time, the actual asset is still not guaranteed. We need to make sure it’s a good fit, but we also understand the fairness where if a commercial property owner saying, Hey, I’ll entertain this, go ahead and do your studies, they’re accepting and expecting some form of payment, which we do, again, based on market, where we’re at and what we’re talking about. So once those studies are over with, we’ll actually go and move through the development phase, bringing it to what’s called NTP or Notice to Proceed. And that’s getting all of the permits, making sure the construction’s ready to go, getting everything ready to actually build the asset.

Dakota:
Sometimes based on the types of solar developers we’re working with, they will either build that asset through to completion and hold onto it long term, or they will sell, essentially the contract to NTP to an actual builder owner financier to then have that asset built and held for, you know, a long term asset. So in between there is when the lease actually starts, and so that’s when the 25 year lease starts is when this thing gets constructed and energized. And you know, for us, what’s pretty typical in the space is just some form of annual lease payment based on either the amount of megawatts procured on that roof. So community solar are typically five megawatt assets. Let’s just say it’s a $10,000 per megawatt lease. And so that’d be a $50,000 a year asset in passive income for that specific property owner. And so that’s kind of the timeline for what construction and, and lease payments and what the deal actually looks like for somebody considering solar leasing.

Charles:
Interesting. What type of maintenance is it required for solar installations? And I assume that your company or is handling

Dakota:
That. Yeah, so there’s actually mural on behalf, if we’re talking about solar leasing, the only time o and m would become relevant is if somebody actually owned their own system and it’s actually very light. You know, it depends on where you’re at. I’m originally from upstate New York, we’re getting hammered with Lake Effect snow right now, and New York’s a really large community solar state, so there is different technology, you know, whether it’s sliding panels where the snow will just slide right off the glass or you know, we’re talking about lawn mowing, or sometimes people will bring in sheep to do, you know, grazing. So there’s a bunch of different o and m involved, but you know, for our industry it’s all the developer taking care of that they have their own o and m teams and strategies. So it’s really a, a, a maintenance free experience for someone who’s actually getting into leasing.

Dakota:
I guess maybe the thing that we think about often as well is the age of the roof if we’re developing on a rooftop, because if we’re developing on a roof that’s older than 10 years old, which we don’t do and we don’t recommend doing, you’re essentially almost guaranteeing problems with the roof that need to be replaced. And if you have a solar installation on top of that, the solar developer actually doesn’t pay for the solar to come off for the roof to be fixed. So it’s really important that we look at the integrity of something like the roof, which, you know, in our opinion is the most important part of a commercial real estate asset being that it protects everything inside it and underneath it. And so that’s really the only consideration is, you know, we’re checking for good roofs and so maybe prem maintenance before we get into the project, whether that’s like spray foam or a roof replacement, et cetera. But other than that it’s a, it’s a maintenance free experience for the, for the leafy. Okay.

Charles:
Yeah, that was one of my questions about the roof life. I always realized, I wondered that fits well for residential because that was one thing that’s like a huge turning factor. I mean, it’s going on your roof and like you said, it’s one of the most important parts of your property.

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Charles:
So for let’s say for some important factors that property owners should take into consideration when they’re looking to lease their property to a, a solar company.

Dakota:
Yeah, so I would definitely be aware of who you’re working with. You know, again, we partner with some of the largest national solar developers who also own and operate these projects long term. One of the things that we’ve seen in the industry is essentially playing hot potato with the ownership of the asset. And if I were a commercial property owner, I wouldn’t want 10 different people owning the same asset across a 25 year period. And again, whether it’s for like the tax equity or the depreciation or for whatever other strategy they’re doing that, you know, we typically give property owners the peace of mind by saying, Hey, you know, the people that are actually developing this project, they also want to own it and they want keep it in their portfolio for 25 years. And you also wanna make sure that the vendor you’re choosing, just like vetting any other tenant for your commercial property, is going to be there for the long term.

Dakota:
And so again, when we realized that we were putting this kind of into our business model, Charles, we wanted to solve a lot of these problems on the front end instead of trying to do it on the back. And so that came down to the quality of vendors we were choosing to work with and vet and make sure that we wanted to do business with because we didn’t wanna make any recommendations and actually take part in something that wasn’t going to be a long-term solution for the client. So I would say, you know, that’s obviously a big consideration. The other is if they ever wanted to do onsite solar in the future as opposed to a lease, you know, if you already have a lease up there and all of a sudden you wanna get into solar, you can’t necessarily just tell ’em to pack up and go. So that’s a much, that’s a much smaller kind of consideration, you know, and, and again, just kind of part of our checklist that we do with our clients. But that aside, I mean, again, I think finding the right partner, just like any other construction vendor type relationship, you wanna make sure you’re working with the right people. And so that’s, that’s a big thing that we try to solve for.

Charles:
What are some of the projects? I mean, we talked about you, you mentioned firms before, which we can get back into, but talked a lot about commercial properties with their roofs and I imagine that’s commercial properties of all types. What type of you know, what, what other type of properties have you done, property types have you done that you’ve been successful with?

Dakota:
Yeah, I’ll tell you, you a fung one we’re working on right now that I think is going to really shine a light on possibilities especially, and this covers all things electrification and sustainability because beyond solar, you know, again, commercial solar is a really big industry. You look at another niche like ev charging for example, and just the entire idea that we need way more electricity generation in the future than where we’re at now with things like AI and commercialization and electrification. So, you know, we’re working with one of the largest private mall owners in the US right now on a couple different projects for them. So this is just commercial laws and we are looking at everything from ev charging for commercialization. We are looking at community solar for them to benefit from lower electricity costs on a $0 investment without installing solar.

Dakota:
We’re looking at battery storage and leasing as well. So the same way you lease a solar asset with panels, you can lease batteries and batteries are becoming another huge piece to this electrification equation. And so we’re basically experimenting in this like, very large vertical integration of saying, okay, how do we turn this into, you know, a sustainable urban oasis is really the, the, the way that we look at it. Because as a retail customer driving into a commercial property like a mall, you drive in, it’s pretty common to see a few EV chargers, maybe Tesla, you know, these days at properties like this. But what would it look like to have the entire stack on a property like that? And again, you wouldn’t necessarily see the battery, you wouldn’t necessarily see the solar lease if it was on the roof, but you would be able to tell from the electrification, the amount of EVs potentially carports with solar.

Dakota:
That’s what we’re really looking at doing and, and definitely want to do more of in the future once we kind of have a case study for it. Because again, you know, solar leasing is fantastic and it can be paired with EV and battery and so many other things. And so I think a big focus of what we’re doing, especially in the world of commercial solar. And I, I guess another good, I or, or a good case study for this is, you know, CBRE for example, one of the largest, you know, real estate companies, they recently acquired NRG renewables last year, and I was just reading this case study where they essentially bought a renewable division of NRG one of the largest energy suppliers in the country because they wanted to figure this out for their own real estate clients. They wanna say, okay, sustainability is obviously becoming important.

Dakota:
So from solar to wind to hydro to all of these different opportunities, how do we essentially run that value add through our network of commercial properties and commercial real estate investors? So I think that it is coming online, these ideas are starting to become mainstream and I think it’s going to be a lot more of these types of, you know, examples in the future. Here again, as we continue to see year over year growth with community solar, as we continue to see more and more states open up for legislation. So there are technically 40 community solar projects in, or excuse me, 40 different community solar states with active legislation, but there are really only maybe let’s call it three to five with large scale development. So those states that already have the legislation are going to continue to grow. And, you know, at Community Solar Authority, we started this company to see through the nationwide adoption of community solar. So, you know, Charles, I only think these opportunities are going to continue to scale. Do

Charles:
You see municipalities in favor of this more than less, or, I mean, how do you see that going? Yeah, we

Dakota:
Just got a glowing review from, you know, again, I’m originally from upstate New York. We just finished up with the city of Fulton, New York. They are a clean energy community in the state of New York through nyserda I grew up 15 minutes down the road, we were able to deliver access to a community solar rollout for the city. So we took 80 plus municipal accounts and put them on a solar farm. They generated 90,000 plus dollars a year in savings on a $0 investment, and now they’re able to take those $90,000 a year in savings and invest into further sustainability. So municipalities love it, you know, it depends of course on where you’re at. I have also been laughed out of my fair share of board meetings based on, you know what people think about solar and really the predetermined ideas they have about it, whether it’s right or wrong.

Dakota:
So yeah, I mean, for the most part, municipalities are just like any other organization in a sense where they wanna be on the cutting edge. They wanna understand how to become more resilient and sustainable, and they are absolutely willing to look at all types of projects. And so, you know, after we saved the city 90 grand a year, and, you know, I just met with the mayor a couple weeks ago and he’s like, all right, what’s next? What can we do after this? What do these projects look like? Can we do carports and leasing and ev? And so yeah, I guess that’s another perfect example of, you know, how people are thinking about this as, you know, and consumers.

Charles:
Yeah, that makes I mean that makes perfect sense. One of the questions I had is, you know, you you, you use this a lot with vacant land, not just like with farms, but what other kind of case studies have you used where people just raw land that they’ve been able to utilize a community s community, solar type set up? Yeah, I

Dakota:
Mean, again, for us, we’re agnostic. So we don’t care if it’s a rock quarry or a sludge pit or a, you know waste site or a greenfield. To us, it’s all about is it possible to develop solar? And again, some places are better than others, meaning like if there is a perfect parcel, if there are two next to each other and one’s wooded and the other’s clear, you know, we’re not gonna go in deforest. So there are sustainability principles that we keep in mind when it comes to brownfield sites. You know, they make for the perfect opportunity to build solar because it’s the highest use case for it. You can’t rebuild on brownfield, you know, you can’t go and do really anything else other than build something like a renewable asset. And so it’s great in that instance. There’s another instance I’m thinking about over in Illinois.

Dakota:
I’m in St. Louis, so just across the river we’re working with a logistics company and they have a roof, but it’s really mostly a giant truck lot to park trucks, and there is a massive amount of space to put solar just on a ground mount. So we’re considering putting some on the roof, but mostly just layering a part of the parking lot with solar panels, and it’s going to sit just like a ground mount, just like it does in a, a field or a farm. So again, we’re really agnostic to it. It’s all about what can we make work? And especially as we continue to scale solar in states like New York and Illinois, part of the problem is becoming running into utility upgrades and transmission issues. So it really comes down to where the substation is, is, you know, can you even install solar on this particular spot or substation? And so for us, whether it’s a brownfield or a greenfield or anything in between, as long as it works, we’re, you know, looking to develop on it. So you, you

Charles:
Previously gave some little bit of advice on what people should look for being in this for almost a decade plus. I mean, what are common mistakes you see, let’s say real estate investors, property owners when adding solar to their property that they make?

Dakota:
Yeah, I think even backing up one step further, Charles, what comes up, because I do a lot of podcasting, like I mentioned, and so I was, I was doing a podcast on this the other day. I think the one thing that so many people met in commercial real estate and just in business in general is this business sustainability piece. So before you even consider installing solar in some mistakes, a massive mistake is assuming that CapEx is the only way to improve your building conditions or grow your business. And what we teach our clients is that we can essentially take the energy you’re already using. And again, community solar is a great example. We take the electricity you’re already spending, we get you involved into a sustainability project, and in exchange for basically leveraging your utility account, you receive essentially a coupon for your electricity costs.

Dakota:
And so the opportunity to cut costs, to lean out your business, to take the work that you’re already using and the funds that you already have inside your accounts find ways, whether through audits or sustainability initiatives or other opportunities to cut costs and use that to reinvest into a more sustainable infrastructure is a massively underutilized strategy that I don’t understand why people miss. And so that’s been a really big piece of our education is how do we take what you’re already using? Because in a world where organizations, especially corporations, fight over, okay, do we spend our CapEx to grow the business or do we spend it on ESG and sustainability? And you really get into a stalemate in that conversation. And so we’ve been trying to reinvent the wheel for clients and saying, Hey, you know what, if you’re spending half a million dollars a year on, on overspending, what if we can find those, you know, actual dollars and turn them into real investments for you to then go and look at things like solar or leasing, et cetera.

Dakota:
So that’s the first thing that comes up. And then, you know, big mistakes that we see in the commercial real estate space, you know, again, we tell and encourage people not to necessarily work with developers directly. And the reason why, and I’ll, I’ll use a municipality as an example, there are only so many resources of, of actual human capital, a municipality or commercial real estate investor might have. They don’t always have a giant sustainability team or experts. And so if you’re trying to find that right vendor, you’re opening yourself up to a hundred different conversations with a hundred different vendors. And so for us, that’s why we not only co-develop, but really consult alongside our clients. For us, we choose not to charge because we make our money up of the actual development of solar assets. So we’re really tied to performance, which goes back into, you know, my original sales kind of career path where, you know, we only get paid if we make things happen.

Dakota:
And I just personally like to live like that. It makes it easy for the clients because we essentially get to become their bolt on experts and say, okay, here’s how this works. Use our playbook, use our systems, use way less of your internal resources and actually maximize your effectiveness. So that’s the one thing that we encourage with our clients is like, Hey, you know, at least have a conversation with us or some other consultant where you can get these results turnkey, because it is much easier to do that than waste a bunch of time energy and, you know, obviously capital resources, trying to figure it out yourself. What

Charles:
Do you see for like the next few years of the solar industry and what you’re doing? Yeah, I

Dakota:
Think we’re gonna continue to develop, you know, I think we’re going to continue to bring more projects online, especially in states like New York, Illinois, fingers crossed, we see some legislation in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, these are all states that have legislation for community solar, but it’s kind of a teetering on the implementation and what that looks like. So, you know, we’re hopeful that we’re going to continue to see more renewable growth. And for us, we’re also thinking about how do we provide more value to clients, you know, so again, after we just finished up with the municipality, the city of Fulton, he’s like, Hey, what’s next? What else can we do? And so for us beyond delivering turnkey access to community solar and generating value, add passive income for real estate investors, we want to continue to build our suite of sustainability strategies so people can continue to get educated on this, continue to think about how to become more resilient and really consider what the future of energy is going to look like, because the landscape is going to be drastically different again with data centers, ai, et cetera. And so we want our clients to be forward thinking and ultimately prepared for what the future is is going to unfold.

Charles:
Yeah, that is it’s true. The, the direction that we’re going in society is gonna be more and more electricity, more power demand, and yeah, it, it’s gonna be a very interesting few years here coming up. So as a kind of wrapping up here, can you know, you, you’ve involved in the solar for about a decade. You’ve been you were in sales before, you’ve never had W2. Can you gimme some of the factors that have really helped and contribute to your success over the years? Yeah.

Dakota:
Well, like I said, the dialogue, my life was changed at a very young age. So at 17 years old, I had my fifth and final open heart surgery a week after I graduated high school. And so for me, at a very young age, I just came to understand the importance of life. Compassion really flooded my life and ultimately lowered the importance of, you know, essentially being successful compared to just being alive and, and the gratitude that came from that Charles. And so for me, you know, I look back at my twenties and of course there was a lot of pressure to succeed, especially being in a competitive environment like sales. But for me, I would say it, it really came from a place of gratitude of wanting to explore, wanting to see more, recognizing my potential. So lots of the personal development that I wor the lots of the personal development work that I did as a, as a young man, I think really led into being an entrepreneur, having these sustainability principles that, you know, you can essentially ride the, what we call the solar coaster, the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Dakota:
And so, yeah, I mean, I think it’s just the basics that everyone preaches. It’s, it’s the patience, it’s the determination, it’s definitely the thick skin that came from being told no a a million times where no, that doesn’t bother me anymore. It, it, it just really rolls right off my back. And so I think those few unique kind of edges for my life have really shaped my career and entrepreneurship and I definitely try to pass down, you know, that, that wisdom to people either just getting into the space or, or you know, people younger than me. Yeah, a lot of great advice

Charles:
There. So Dakota, how can our listeners learn more about you and your business community solar authority? Yeah,

Dakota:
So I always encourage people to check out my LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/dakotaMalone. I put out a lot of content on YouTube as well. And of course our website, community solar authority.com. If you want to get any guides or reach out and book a complimentary strategy call, happy to talk about solar leasing or community solar or any of these topics we discussed today. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you so

Charles:
Much for coming on today and looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future.

Dakota:
Yeah, thank you for having me, Charles.

Charles:
Hi guys, it’s Charles from the Global Investors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you’re interested in getting involved with real estate, but you don’t know where to begin, set up a free 30 minute strategy call with me@schedulecharles.com. That’s schedulecharles.com. Thank you.

Speaker 5:
Nothing in this episode should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Any investment opportunities mentioned on this podcast are limited to accredited investors. Any investments will only be made with proper disclosure, subscription documentation, and are subject to all applicable laws. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of syndication Superstars, LLC exclusively.

Links and Contact Information Mentioned In The Episode:

About Dakota Malone

Dakota Malone was born and raised in central New York. A five-heart surgery survivor with a love for entrepreneurship, jumping into co-founding a sustainability company aligned perfectly. He believes in working on meaningful projects that help reshape the world into a more empowered place.
He co-founded Community Solar Authority, which helps Commercial Real Estate portfolios ROI from the trillion-dollar clean energy economy.
From value-add passive income with leasing to generating on-site power and even leveraging clean energy legislation to improve operating profit, his company has unlocked access to over $22M in future electricity savings.

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