A representative sample of operating engagements from the leadership of Memorable Green Advisory, across residential solar, specialty retail, branded consumer goods, channel launch, franchise systems, and venue operations.
"No one person has contributed more to this organization in my time here than Chris Garner."
Former Senior VP of Sales · national enterprise
Identities are withheld for privacy. Recommendations and figures reflect actual engagements and results.
A privately-held residential solar installer operating across the US Northeast, strong technical reputation, growing pipeline, but with a sales and operating infrastructure built for a smaller version of itself. The market was inflecting fast. Competitors were either professionalizing or being acquired. The owners needed to scale revenue and headcount aggressively without sacrificing service quality or culture.
Joined as a District Manager and built the playbook for repeatable, geography-by-geography market entry, sales process, manager scorecards, recruiting funnel, compensation architecture, CRM discipline, and the daily operating cadence that turned a regional team into a national one. Six successive promotions over eight years reflected the layering of responsibility: District → Regional → Divisional → Corporate Vice President in 2022.
The core insight was structural rather than tactical. The company didn't need better closers, it needed the organizational scaffolding that let good people do their best work without burning out. We installed it, then scaled it.
During the pandemic, the operating environment shifted overnight. The decision was made to lay off 350 people, one of the hardest operating moves of the career, executed with the dignity the team deserved. As demand returned, the team was rebuilt organically from the ground up to 550+ people, stronger than before the contraction. That cycle, collapse, hold the culture, rebuild, became the proof point for the operating system itself.
In 2024, took on a second Corporate VP role to launch a new business unit: a roofing pilot program inside the parent solar enterprise. The team built and led during that pilot achieved two notable outcomes, leading the company in self-generated roofing sales, and delivering an average sale price more than 200% of the company average. The pilot validated both the channel economics and the operating playbook for adjacent-category expansion.
An entrepreneurial bet on a regional residential market underserved by reliable, design-led contracting. Most local competitors operated as one- or two-person shops with no formal sales process, no service-level commitments, and no brand presence beyond a yard sign. The opportunity was to professionalize an entire category, installing the systems homeowners actually want from any other service business.
Built a design-build firm around the discipline of consistent, repeatable customer experience: standardized intake, transparent pricing, written timelines, and post-job follow-up. Marketing investment routed through digital channels years before competitors caught on. Sales process owned and run by the founder until the team was strong enough to inherit it intact.
Service-quality ratings became the engine. As reviews accumulated, lead acquisition cost dropped while close rate climbed. By year three, the firm was operating on a referral-and-review flywheel rather than paid advertising, the most defensible position in residential services.
A specialty home-services category, a small, fragmented market where every operator was effectively a sole proprietor running on word-of-mouth. No brand existed at the regional level. No franchise template existed at all. The thesis: package the work into a repeatable, brandable, franchisable system, then prove it in a single market before expanding.
Built two parallel pieces. First, a standardized service delivery system, pricing, scheduling, technician training, and quality control. Second, the franchise pilot architecture, operating manuals, brand guidelines, territory mapping, and the unit economics that would make a prospective franchisee say yes.
The customer-facing brand was deliberately designed to look bigger than the operation behind it. Lead generation ran through digital channels with category-specific positioning that competitors had ignored entirely.
A regional solar firm was selected to launch Dow Powerhouse, Dow Chemical's integrated solar shingle product, in the Massachusetts market. The manufacturer had global reach, but the launch depended on a regional channel partner capable of building installer awareness, contractor training, and end-customer demand from a standing start.
Engaged as the sales leader for the launch. Built the field motion across three constituencies: roofers (who needed to be trained on a new shingle category), solar installers (who needed to understand the integrated product economics), and homeowners (who needed to be educated on what they were buying).
The launch playbook required cross-functional coordination, manufacturer marketing, contractor training, certified-installer onboarding, and consumer-facing demand generation, running in parallel rather than in sequence.
A historic regional ski venue with strong brand equity but declining event programming. The skiway had hosted notable events over its multi-decade history, but attendance and revenue had been on a slow downward trajectory. Leadership needed someone who could operate at programming speed, not committee speed.
In the second week of the engagement, identified an opportunity to assemble and deliver a large-format event the venue had not attempted in its modern history. Coordinated sponsorship, programming, logistics, marketing, and on-site operations on a compressed timeline, by treating it as a single integrated operating problem rather than a coordination exercise across departments.
A specialty tobacco operator entering a national growth phase during the late-1990s cigar boom. The business had a quality product and an established regional footprint, but no systems infrastructure to support multi-state operations and no media presence beyond word-of-mouth.
Took on a senior operating role at nineteen years old, the youngest executive in the industry. Three things ran in parallel:
i. The technology. Designed and built a custom single-stack inventory and operations database in 1997, when most competitors were still running on spreadsheets and paper. The system let the business scale across state lines without losing visibility into what was selling, where, and at what margin.
ii. The media play. Negotiated approximately $75,000 in advertising in Playboy magazine via a quid-pro-quo marketing deal, securing premium consumer-market reach for a fraction of book rate. Became a regular industry editorialist and published voice in the trade press, building category authority while still under twenty.
iii. The expansion. Took the brand from a regional footprint into thirteen states and doubled sales in eighteen months, then handed off the system and departed for university.
Each of these started as a conversation. Tell us what you're working on, and we'll tell you honestly whether the Memorable Green network is the right fit to help.