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After President Donald Trump levied tariffs of 30% on solar panel components in 2018, Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of Canadian solar panel company Heliene, made a bet and moved his supply chain to the US.
The bet paid off—and not only through the remainder of Trump’s first term. In 2022, when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, it included a domestic content bonus credit. Pochtaruk said the incentive allowed Heliene clients to obtain a 10% discount for investing in domestically-produced renewable energy.
Currently, 13 out of 14 parts of a Heliene solar panel are manufactured in the US, in facilities in Georgia and Wisconsin. But the company is now getting hit by Trump’s tariffs due to the last, fourteenth part: a specially-designed glass manufactured in China, Turkey, Malaysia, and India that now, Pochtaruk told Revenue Brew, costs an estimated 40% more compared to December 2024. In an email, Heliene declined to share its annual revenue. The price increases have been passed on to clients, which has led to cancellations.
After talking with a couple of business owners about navigating tariffs, a few themes emerged: It’s hard, it’s complicated, and there’s little upside.
Speak your mind
Sara VanFleet, owner of DB Trucks, a commercial water truck dealer and repair company in Glendale, Arizona, is getting hit with tariffs for goods she cannot procure in the US. And she, too, is passing the costs on to customers. VanFleet says she has trouble translating to her buyers the reality of tariffs on items like spray nozzles, which mostly come from China, and debates how much transparency to employ.
“Sometimes I go, ‘I wonder if I should take a picture of my tariff and put it online like it really is true,’” VanFleet said. “Here it is! It’s 55%. We’re not kidding when we say we’re raising prices.”
Because sales cycles are often planned years in advance, operations and account management teams need to engage in a delicate dance with clients about market fluctuations. “We sell on costs, and we negotiate our margin. So we sell what is called ‘cost plus’. We make our costs fully transparent to our clients, so they see what the cost is, and if there’s a cost variation, then we need to negotiate,” Pochtaruk said, emphasizing that having a fixed price is not a consideration.
Go enterprise
Tariffs have priced out many of VanFleet’s local customers, who buy trucks for farms, so she had to look elsewhere for new sources of revenue. “We’ve definitely shifted more toward the corporate clients,” she said. One such corporate client is Arizona-based Willmeng Construction, which works on projects ranging from jets to new football stadiums to large utility plants. Additionally, the company started buying trucks and refurbishing the tanks to make them “water-worthy” again, then selling them for a profit.
For Pochtaruk, it’s frustrating to see supply chain costs spike because of a decision made in Washington.
“It is supply and demand, right? That’s how capitalism works,” he said. “The moment you restrict access to one origin, the rest of the origins will increase their price, because they know that you need them.”