Hellgrün is a Climate-Tech startup revolutionizing solar energy adoption for commercial real estate.
Founded in 2023 with offices in Cologne and Berlin, hellgrün connects private investors with commercial property owners to deploy solar power at scale—without requiring upfront capital from businesses.
By leasing rooftops, installing photovoltaic systems, and selling the generated electricity directly to tenants, hellgrün enables companies to reduce energy costs and meet sustainability goals while offering investors attractive returns. Backed by leading industry investors and strategic partners like Saxovent Smart Eco Investments, the company is on track to install 100 MW of solar capacity by 2027.
With a strong focus on innovation and scalability, hellgrün is making solar energy accessible, profitable, and a core component of the energy transition in Europe.
The Challenge
Take a second to imagine this situation:
You’re the founder of a rapidly scaling climate tech startup in Germany.
You’ve got a good thing going – property owners are interested, investors are ready to fund projects, and your solar installations are making a real impact.
But behind the scenes, things aren’t always as… sunny.
When we first met Roman and the hellgrün team, it was clear that managing their growing data across multiple spreadsheets and systems would soon become a major challenge.
While their core project management lived in Notion, critical business information was scattered across dozens of different Google Sheets.
Want to know the status of a solar installation? Check Notion.
Need the power output calculations for that same project? That’s in one spreadsheet.
Looking for the tenant’s energy consumption data? That’s in another sheet.
Want to create an investment briefing? Time to hunt through even more files.
This fragmented system was creating real headaches:
“It’s not a huge problem yet since we don’t have thousands of projects,” Roman explained during our first call. “But it’s definitely not ideal, and we can’t build any automation on top of this setup. We should be able to automatically generate contracts and marketing materials from this data – but right now, that’s impossible.“
The team knew they needed a change. They’d experimented with building their own solutions, but reached a point where they needed expertise to create something that could truly scale with their ambitions.
Most importantly, they needed a system that could:
- Unify project workflows and vital business data in one place
- Make it easy for team members to find and update information without jumping between tools
- Create a foundation for automations and customer-facing features
In short, the team needed a scalable system that supported their vision to revolutionise access to commercial solar energy in Germany.
Exactly our cup of tea.
How we structured the Notion Consulting Process
The way we work with clients is a bit different from what you might expect from a typical consulting project – for good reasons.
We are big believers that systems are something very personal and that every company needs their own approach to work to function perfectly (rather than a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all solution).
What’s more, you and your team know your business best.
So it’s our job to ask you the right questions, identify what’s currently stopping or frustrating you and then translating that into a scalable Notion setup.
This process can’t happen in isolation and it definitely can’t happen without you.
Picture the typical consulting experience:
- One big kick-off meeting at the start
- Three weeks of radio silence
- Only to then present you with something that clearly misses the mark
That’s not how we roll.
Instead, we’ve taken a page out of a proven playbook: agile software development.
Here’s how it looks in practice:
- You see the first results within days, not weeks – so you can start testing and giving feedback right away
- We meet regularly to go over your questions, clarify any open issues and make sure we’re always on the same page
- We talk to everyone involved in the process so we truly understand how you work (and what you need the tool to do)
- We keep an open Slack channel for instant communication – ask questions, raise issues, and get help within minutes, not days
Most importantly, we keep things flexible.
Fixed project scopes? Not our thing.
Why? Because they usually create lose-lose situations. Both sides spend ages trying to define exactly what they need and can deliver. But the second a big project starts, new issues inevitably pop up.
Now you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – either not getting what you actually need or blowing past the agreed scope.
That’s why we give you our full flexibility promise instead.
Week by week, we identify your biggest priority and tackle it until we have the perfect system for you.
No rigid plans. No scope creep headaches. Just continuous progress toward exactly what you need.
Implemented Solutions for hellgrün
Speaking of continuous progress – here are three key highlights from our work with hellgrün and how they impacted their daily operations:
1. One Source of Truth (Finally!)
Our core belief about work is simple.
Great teams know how to execute.
The job of a tool is to get out of the way and let them do exactly that.
But all too often, the opposite is the case.
If you have to check seven different spreadsheets to get the information you need to do your job, there are A LOT of things in your way – pretty much the situation hellgrün was facing at the beginning of our project.
We changed that by creating an interconnected system of databases in Notion (5 core ones plus 22 supporting ones, if you’re counting).
But the real magic wasn’t just moving spreadsheets into Notion – it was rethinking how the data should be structured in the first place.
We’ve worked with dozens of companies at this point and we noticed a clear pattern.
Every company has one central object that everything else revolves around.
For VCs, it’s deals.
For software companies, it’s features.
For hellgrün? It’s buildings.
Buildings that could host solar installations. Buildings that could generate clean energy. Buildings that could attract investors.
This often emerges naturally when we talk to a company and the stakeholders about their processes – but even though we can often clearly identify this object, the individual systems rarely reflect this.
So we built everything around that insight to make sure the tools work exactly the way the company runs.
Now, when you click on any building in their system, you’ll find everything you need to know on a single page:
- Technical specs for the solar installation
- Which construction companies are involved
- Who’s investing in the project
- Which banks are financing it
- Even who the building’s caretaker is (because yes, sometimes you just need to know who to call)
2. Making Project Lifecycles Actually Work
Here’s the thing about solar installations: they follow a pretty structured process, from first site visit to ongoing maintenance.
Hellgrün knew their process inside and out – they just didn’t have a good way to track it.
Now, recurring projects in Notion can be tricky. Sure, there are some built-in options, but when you’re scaling fast, you need something more robust.
That’s why we brought in Make.com to create some automation magic. Here’s what happens now:
- The moment a new building project is created, all the necessary tasks are automatically set up
- Each task gets assigned to the right team member
- Future invoice triggers are automatically scheduled
- Progress dashboards update in real-time
The result? The team always knows exactly where every project stands, what needs to happen next, and who’s responsible for making it happen.
3. Saying Goodbye to Invoice Headaches
Remember that pain point about manual invoicing we mentioned earlier? Here’s how we fixed it.
In hellgrün’s business model, solar installations get paid in installments as different construction steps are completed.
This is common practice in construction projects, but it also creates a ton of work. Someone always has to:
- Track completion of different stages
- Hunt down information across multiple tools
- Manually create each invoice
- Send it to the right person
- Track payment status
As hellgrün kept growing, this was getting more and more painful and eating up a significant junk of time for their small team.
Our solution? If you’ve got structured data, there’s no reason to do this manually. Now:
- When a payment milestone is reached, an invoice draft is automatically created
- The right team member gets notified to review it
- Once approved, the final invoice is generated using data that’s already in the system
But why stop there? We adapted the same process to automatically generate investment exposés too. Because if you’re going to automate one document, you might as well automate them all.
These three solutions are just a snapshot of what we built with Hellgrün.
But they showcase something important:
- when you combine the right tool (Notion)
- with the right structure (clean, connected data)
- and the right automation (goodbye manual work!),
you can get tools out of the way and let the amazing people on your team do their best work.
(instead of having to hunt down information across dozens of spreadsheets, day after day)
