'All About Amicus' with Brendan Smith, Sunlight Solar Energy
Partner Spotlight: Brendan Smith
By Liam Davidson, Associate
(Sunlight and Sunwealth partnered together to build the 96.39 kW solar installation on The Tyler, a mixed-income residential neighborhood in East Haven, CT. The developer was American Microgrid Solutions, and the project is expected to generate $87,539 in lifetime energy savings.)
Over the next several weeks, Sunwealth is rolling out a series of features we’re calling ‘All About Amicus.’ Each week, we’ll highlight our partners’ exciting and meaningful work and the ways in which membership in Amicus supports it.
Brendan Smith of Sunlight Solar joins us for an interview in the second installment of this series.
Liam: Brendan, thanks again for being here. Could you tell me a little about yourself—your personal background, how you got into the solar industry—that sort of thing?
Brendan: Before I started with Sunlight Solar in 2012, I came from a kind-of niche in the construction consulting industry-- a building envelope consulting firm focused on wind uplift and weather-proofing of commercial buildings. They started me on the West Coast, but eventually they moved me over to Connecticut. The overall mission didn’t really fit with my interests and what I wanted to do. Now it’s somewhat by happenstance that Sunlight Solar had an office in Connecticut, and I knew a lot about commercial roof construction. Today I’m a Design Manager there, so I act as a bridge between the sales folks and the design folks working to ensure that we’re able to best deliver to our customers. It’s awesome.
Liam: That’s great. I’m interested in when you say you found a company whose mission and values more closely match your own. Could you tell me more about Sunlight and what makes your model so attractive?
Brendan: Sunlight got started back in 1988— first on the West Coast. The owner of our company, Paul Israel, says his first sale was a 2-watt panel for an RV. Now we’re selling 400+ watt panels. So times have changed. By the late 1990s, Sunlight was doing more of traditional grid-tied systems, and in 2004, around the time Connecticut implemented its first residential incentives, we opened an office here. By now there are quite a few really large national companies, but what makes Sunlight unique is our ability to do more than just cookie-cutter installations. And that’s because we’re a well-managed, locally focused company where many of us get to wear a couple different hats. It allows us to dig into the details and try to figure out a way to make things work for our customers.
Liam: Awesome. Now digging in on the question of a customer-first focus, one of the things we hear frequently from the Amicus members we’ve worked with is that they really value that opportunity to do creative, high-quality work for their customers. Can you tell me a bit more about your personal experience with Amicus?
Brendan: Sure, yeah. There’s a community among Amicus members. For instance, say we get a referral lead in Texas from one of our Connecticut customers, we can reach out to Amicus and find out who’s doing good work in Texas. And even if we don’t already know the company, we can confidently refer them to the friends and family of our customers. That’s all largely because the installers and designers affiliated with Amicus care about quality and care about taking care of their customers.
Liam: That’s great to hear. Now, Sunwealth was proud to partner with your team to finance the Tyler Apartments project down in Connecticut. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Brendan: Yeah, so we had been working with Winn Companies and they were the owner and developer of that project site. We had been working with another financer at first. But it started to just drag to the point where we were having the same conversations over and over again. And it was actually then that we were introduced to Sunwealth. It was a pretty dramatic change at that point. You could tell it was a company that wanted to form a partnership and just had an attitude of getting things done.
Liam: This has been great. Brendan, thanks for the strong partnership you’ve built with us, and thanks for taking the time to speak with me today.
Liam Davidson is an Associate at Sunwealth, and is passionate about building a cleaner, more equitable future for all of us to share. Outside of the office, Liam enjoys getting out for a row or a bike ride.