Mr. Sunshine boosts solar business sales

Jerry Wenger vividly remembers the day when Sunshine came into his life. That's right, Sunshine with a capital "S."

It was March 2009, and Wenger,  a consultant for a new solar-installation company, was manning a booth at the Go Green Expo at the Convention Center. A stranger approached.

The visitor complimented Wenger's fledgling Aztec Solar Power L.L.C. and expressed an interest in getting into the business.

"I said, 'What's your name?' " Wenger recalled last week from company headquarters in Wayne.

The man replied: "Barry Sunshine."

"I said, 'Wow. What a great ticket to success that is.' "

Wenger thought the guy was messing with him. But when Sunshine insisted, Wenger asked to see his driver's license - and doubted no more.

Aztec Solar's director of business development today? One Barry Sunshine.

"A number of people have mentioned to me this must have been my destiny," Sunshine said from behind his desk on what was, as coincidence would have it, a sun-drenched day.

His first job at Aztec Solar was as director of operations - to help the young company get some formal structure or, as Sunshine put it, "making order out of chaos." That included finding vendors, establishing a purchasing process, getting certification from the state Department of Environmental Protection, changing law firms, and applying for trademark protection of the company name.

The firm now has 28 employees locally, and recently opened sales branches in Florida, from which it plans to develop business in South America. Total sales have reached $3 million, with another $10 million under contract, Sunshine said, adding: "We've got big plans."

"His sun shines on us every day," Wenger said, only half-joking.

Sunshine, now 66, said his childhood loathing of his name has long evaporated.

"Kids are rough," he said. "For a long time, I wanted to change my name to Smith."

Not that life as an adult with such a perky moniker has always been a barrel of laughs - not for Sunshine anyway. From the witty wannabes among us, he has heard:

"You must have changed your name in the '60s. You must have been a hippie." And: "You are my sunshine." And, perhaps the most insulting reference, at least to a man: "Little Mary Sunshine."

Plus, dinner reservations have been canceled by restaurant staff who concluded that reservations for "Sunshine" had to be a prank.

No wonder the father of five from Elkins Park doesn't find smiling easy. As he endured a photo session last week, clutching a photovoltaic panel as if it were a security blanket, Sunshine griped: "It's hard doing this. My mouth naturally curves down."

His earlier years would have been easier, he said, if only he had been able to establish that "Sunshine" was a mangling by intake officers at Ellis Island. That the family name actually was something less whimsical.

But research established that when his grandfather Abraham Jacob arrived from Russia as an 8-year-old, his surname was, indeed, "Sunshine."

And so he is nagged to this day by a memory of his years at Pennsylvania State University more than four decades ago. The scene: the first day of a sociology class in a lecture hall on campus filled with 250 students. The professor decides he wants to make a seating chart, thus proceeding with an exercise that left Sunshine cringing in his seat. One by one, the professor called out the name of each student.

"There's a low murmur, people are chatting," Sunshine recalled. "All of a sudden, he says, 'Sunshine.' Dead silence. Everybody is looking around to see who is going to own up to being called Sunshine. That has stayed with me all these years."

He would later run Sunshine Instruments, a Northeast Philadelphia company started by his father specializing in electronic test equipment.

There, he said, customers would marvel when they met him and learned there was actually someone in the company named Sunshine. Sunshine, in turn, marveled at their surprise.

"Why would you name a company Sunshine Instruments if that wasn't your name?" he asked.

Sunshine sold the business in 2002 with a plan "to relax and decompress." By last year, life had gotten "kind of boring," he said.

That's why he was roaming around the Go Green Expo.

Wenger is glad he was. You won't hear any complaints about Sunshine's name from him. He contends the name has helped his business-development director "open up doors" to potential customers and sources of funding.

Sunshine says he finds that, at least on the East Coast, solar remains largely a mystery, especially to two groups vital to the industry's growth: banks and municipalities. The key to turning that around, he said, is education.

So he's always looking for opportunities to do that, though he's plenty busy. He moved into the business-development job two months ago. That has him helping to create a business plan and finding investors willing to help Aztec realize that plan.

The goal at Aztec is to get big enough to go public in a year or so, establish a manufacturing or assembly plant in Pennsylvania and, in the process, build a brand, Sunshine said.

"This is a fragmented market. No one has brand recognition. I think we can build a brand."

If his name helps accomplish that, so be it, he said, shrugging.

"As I've gotten older," Sunshine said, "it's become a more positive thing."