Dying company that treat its employees badly
Pros
Not much Pros about the company but its industry is hot - both solar and Fintech.
Cons
This is a dying company. It has seen better days. Spruce was formed through a takeover of CPF by Kilowatt Financial. Since the takeover in mid 2015, Kilowatt management cleaned out most of legacy CPF management. Kilowatt introduced solar and energy efficiency loans which seem to be having a moderate success. However the legacy solar PPA/lease business has suffered heavily. The company is currently going through an identity crisis not able to decide if it is a solar company or a finance company. The new management of Spruce is lost - they are unable to decide where the focus should be. While there's efforts being made to improve products there has been no effort to strengthen the channel partner relationship with the result the legacy PPA/Lease business is suffering heavily. Many of the partner accounts are doing only a fraction of the volume they used to do before the merger. Current management's focus is scattered on multiple things including growing the solar loans and energy efficiency loans, moving the office to Houston from San Francisco etc. The morale in the sales team is very low and is very likely that the company will completely pull out of the PPA/lease business if the volume continues in the same trajectory as now. The company cannot succeed unless they change their business model and go direct to consumers. There is a resistance to make that switch. Until that happens, I do not see much prospects for the company. Do not get me wrong, the company is not going to die tomorrow. It just will not grow in line with the industry and will continue to lose market share. It is likely to barely survive and stay on as a fringe player in the industry.
