By Morgan M. Hurley | Editor

Saving the world, one photovoltaic cell at a time

Back in the early 2000s, young San Diego resident and journeyman electrician Daniel Sullivan said he’d grown frustrated and even angry with California’s energy crisis and the country’s “unwarranted drum beat” toward a second war in Iraq. The recent birth of his son had also made him realize that he could no longer stand by and be complacent; he wanted to actively make the world a better place and set himself on a path to do so.

Today he is the founder, president and CEO of Sullivan Solar Power, one of Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing private companies in America, and has installed over 5,000 solar energy systems throughout San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties.

A Downtown resident today, Sullivan graduated from Rancho Bernardo High School in 1995 and then embarked on a five-year electrical apprenticeship program, learning the trade, working with various contractors and gaining diverse experience in projects throughout San Diego County.

Not long after the completion of his apprenticeship training, he got his first introduction to solar — photovoltaic (photons/voltage) systems — which convert sunlight into electricity. Fascinated by the technology and recognizing the sun as an unlimited resource, he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t more widely used.

“Once I started studying solar power, a light went on,” Sullivan said. “It’s obvious we have an answer — but nobody was really doing anything about it. There were policies in the state of California that encouraged conservation and renewable energy but at that time there were only a handful of companies that actually did solar power and the people that were doing it weren’t really electricians by trade. They were people who believed in the technology but didn’t know how to deliver it.”

Sullivan made several attempts to convince his boss to expand into the solar business, to no avail; so he decided to do it himself.

He got certified, quit his job, picked up some freelance electrical work, moved into his client’s garage and with just $2,500 in his pocket, he jumped off the cliff.

“It was a miserable life coming out of the gate,” he said. “It was challenging psychologically and emotionally.”

In 2005, Sullivan had only one employee — his best friend from high school, who is still with him — and just two customers his first year, netting $60,000. To pay his bills, Sullivan landed an electrical service contract with the city of Santee. He then set out to educate the victims of the San Diego Cedar Fire on the advantages of renewable energy and the rebates that the government was offering them as a result of the fires.

“It was a difficult time,” he said. “These people had lost everything. They were trying to rebuild their lives while I was trying to build a business.”

His approach worked and soon business was brisk and steady, with customers throughout the Harbison Canyon and Alpine fire areas. Soon he had a stable base to branch out into retrofits. In five years, business grew hand over fist with Sullivan choosing to focus not only on residential, but commercial jobs, albeit small to medium due to financial constraints.

“Solar power, when you boil it down, is electrical technology,” he said. “You’re putting a generating system on your roof. So it really meshed together my passions: environmental, making the world a better place, and electricity.

“I saw that this was my calling, this was what I was supposed to do. I really didn’t have any real business background, but I was passionate about the concept and my belief at the time was that this was going to blow up, this was going to be the wave of the future. And as we’re seeing now, we are the No. 2 city in the country and we are going to be the first region to hit our cap in the state of California. My prediction was right.”

What Sullivan lacked in business acumen he made up for in work ethic, determination and his personal drive to prove himself. He is passionate about renewable energy and his goal is to turn everyone he meets into a solar advocate.

“It’s very rewarding to take someone who doesn’t believe and show them the future and then they come a part of it,” he said.

By 2010, Sullivan Solar Power had grown to nearly 30 employees and were at their second physical business address. In 2011, they opened an office in Irvine; in 2012, an office in Riverside.

Today, Sullivan has 160 employees across the three campuses with plans to expand further north, into Santa Clarita, in the near future. And though he’s won a plethora of awards and personal recognitions in his relatively short career as the owner of a burgeoning renewable energy business, it hasn’t always been easy.

“I went from being the guy that wore every hat to handing off responsibilities to new employees who I had trained,” he said. “When you do everything, you can’t build a business and when you transition to guiding and coaching people, that is a whole new skill set that I had to learn on the job. There was no shortage of mistakes in my learning how to approach people in a different way, where I am building a person up compared to building an electrical system up. That was foreign to me and it was very challenging but ultimately we’ve prevailed so far.”

Throughout it all, Sullivan has remained humble, his personal philosophies on changing the world have never faltered, and he has no plans to take the company public — for the same reasons he fights the state’s investor-run public utilities — he wants to retain control and not answer to shareholders.

He also works hard to make sure all 160 employees are in lock-step with his vision for helping eliminate the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

“If the passion and drive is there, the rest of it can be addressed through training,” he said. “I can teach somebody how solar photovoltaic systems work and what the value proposition is, I can’t get someone to believe that this is the way of the future by myself, they have to come that way. There are plenty that still don’t believe, but fossil fuels are limited resources.

“If we run out of sunshine, we’ve got a lot bigger things to be worrying about,” he said.

One thing he is proud of, Sullivan mused, is that his employees leave the office at the end of each day knowing they’ve contributed to the greater good.

“They’ve put more renewable energy on the grid, they’ve reduced people’s operating expenses for their home or their business and they’ve kept more money in our local economy,” he said. “That’s a win.”

To keep up with the growth and ensure his vision remains intact, Sullivan now has lunch with every new-hire, to help them understand what exactly drove him to launch the business in the first place.

“When you connect the dots that it helps the environment and it also helps us as a society, you get very excited about that,” he said.

The solar advocate and young entrepreneur, who last year received San Diego Business Journal’s “Most Admired CEO” and the Union Tribune’s “Top Places to Work,” wants to make sure every employee knows that Sullivan Solar Power is not “merely putting squares on roofs to make money.” He is in business to advocate and affect change, every day.

“We have to continue to work on the policy side to make sure that this growth continues because the investor-owned utilities are not going to want to see this happen. It has become my life passion and it feels good to see the growth that we’ve seen.”

Another way he instills his philosophy is through the company’s core values.

“Last year we implemented a more rigorous hiring process to ensure we are hiring people that are like-minded with the same vision and match our core values,” said Tara Kelly, director of community development for Sullivan. “I think that has helped us maintain the culture, passion and dedication as well as our reputation.”

The tenets of Sullivan’s core values are: embrace challenges with drive and passion; live honestly and be humble; set standards and then exceed them; be in a perpetual state of improvement; be part of the solution; be one with your Sullivan family; and get on the boat!

“Each new-hire gets a Core Values Book, and the [tenets] are painted on the wall of the offices in an Irish font,” Kelly continued. “We keep the core values alive by sharing our core value stories and striving to achieve them.”

The Sullivan family Irish crest is not only the company’s logo, but it is also engrained in the core values booklet. “The shield represents whom we are as a company and family in this journey we share together in leading the solar energy revolution,” said a phrase in the book.

In addition to investing in alternative energy and saving the world, which is quite a lofty goal on its own, Sullivan invests in his employees as well.

“We would not be where we are if it were not for the people that make this machine run,” he said. “So I have believed since the beginning when the company succeeds the people within the company need to succeed and be rewarded as well.”

Kelly — who joined the company five years ago right out of San Diego State after stewarding the campus’ own march toward renewable energy as its “Green Commissioner” — said Sullivan keeps the motivating culture alive.

“We all work very hard but Daniel rewards all of us very well and it keeps a good atmosphere,” she said. “We are a very close knit community and we do a lot of outside activities to bond us together and celebrate our successes.”

With the net metering cap in San Diego region just having been hit, Sullivan and his team have been performing detailed analysis on the productivity of their existing solar systems. As a result, they are confident they’ll be able to optimize systems for many of SDG&E customers who will be transitioned to the new “time of rate” structure, which will make the value proposition nearly as good as it was before the cap.

In 2015, the 10-year-old company generated $50 million in revenue and despite the upcoming net metering cap, are targeting $70 million in 2016. That’s a long way from life in that garage.

“I think a lot of my motivation came from the people who said that it couldn’t be done and that I couldn’t succeed,” he said. “So I set out to prove them all wrong and I’m not done yet. There’s a lot of people who are still naysayers about solar and renewable energy; about whether or not we could really change this region, this state, this country and ultimately, globally; and our dependence on the fossil fuel industry.

“I’m gonna go to my grave trying to prove that it can.”

—Reach Morgan M. Hurley at [email protected].