Ebony Sullivan’s entrepreneurial journey has been far from traditional. It began when she decided to leave her state agency job and pursue a career in real estate. Despite having no prior knowledge or experience in the field, she took the leap and enrolled in real estate school. This decision allowed her to enjoy the freedom of setting her own schedule. However, the housing market crash in 2008 forced her to reassess her plans and find alternative sources of income.
Undeterred by the challenges she faced, Ebony bought a restaurant with her family. Again, she entered an industry without prior knowledge or experience, but her entrepreneurial spirit pushed her forward. The restaurant, Hot Dog King, presented its own set of challenges, including a loss of customers and increased competition. Eventually, the rising costs of operating a hot dog business in downtown Greenville led to the closure of the restaurant in 2012.
Following the closure of the restaurant, Ebony found herself working as a receptionist for a small business. While initially feeling depressed and uncertain about her future, she gradually inserted herself into various roles within the company, gaining valuable experience in marketing, operations, IT, and onboarding. This opportunity allowed her to learn how to effectively run a small business from the back end.
The experience of working for a small business and her involvement with the Chamber of Commerce gave Ebony a deep understanding of the struggles faced by small businesses and the support they often lack. Armed with this knowledge, she decided to take the leap once again in 2020, this time to help her mother scale and grow her business, Cassy Electric.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your journey ― especially now stepping into Cassy?
The most rewarding part for me has been seeing my mother go into retirement. When I first came into this business, that was the whole purpose ― to scale the company, to get my mom off a ladder, and keep her from crawling underneath houses. And now, four years later, she is semi-retired. She works two days a week, and that's based on her availability. To be able to witness that and to be a part of that has been so rewarding to see her get her life back.
She was a solopreneur running this business for over 20 years and doing very well, but she couldn't take a vacation unless she was shutting down her business, so she couldn't go out and do things. Now she can, and that's really exciting to see.
So, Cassy Electric has been around for 20-plus years and was the only company with a female master electrician not just in the Greenville area, but statewide. Is that correct?
Yes, and we are still the only one.
We have talked to other people in construction and tradesmen-type businesses about what happens when they want to retire. The business just goes away. So, other than seeing your mom retire, what was the intention and plan when you stepped into the business?
The whole strategic plan was to scale the business, so she could retire. She had no 401K. She had no health insurance. She was just like every other handy person who has a really successful solopreneur business, but no plan for the future. And so, what I brought to the business was the strategic plan for how to successfully grow this business and put things in place like 401k and health insurance. We have those things now, and it was initially with the intention of helping my mom so that when she's no longer able to do these things, she could still afford to live the life that she needed to live. So,
that was my original purpose for scaling the business, but also to offer job security to the community and to teach our trades people so that they too can earn a living.
Can you share a breakthrough moment or a decision that had a significant impact on the growth of the business? Did you have an a-ha moment?
The a-ha moment for us was we were very niched and focused on one particular service offering. My mother founded this business on residential service work. And when I came in, that's all we did. One of the biggest decisions was one, to become certified, and two, to branch out into new markets and take on new projects that we never had before. We knew that diversification was essential to growing the business because if we had only tapped into this one market we had opportunities, but they were limited. In the residential space, our competitors are handymen, and we can't compete with handymen. They have no overhead ― it's just them and their truck. But we bring a higher value of service. We've got great customer service. We communicate frequently. We do what we say we're going to do. And in order to do these things, we had to diversify and get out into other markets to show who we were.
What was the most significant challenge you faced, and how did you overcome it? Your big, oh shit moment?
My big oh shit moment was we need money. Growing is great, but you’ve got to have money to do that. When we saw that we were growing, it got to a point where we didn't have any more capital. We had tapped out all of our savings and maxed out all of our personal credit cards just to grow the business. We needed cash, we needed some infusion of resources to help us get to the next level. So, we were pitching the banks and looking for funding to help us get a line of credit, and we successfully got that. But had we not had that, we probably would never have grown.
Was there a fear that you had to overcome to make pitches to the banks? Was that a new experience for you? Or was that something that you have experienced through the Chamber and with previous positions?
I had some experience. I'm not afraid to do public speaking, but the pitch is not about the public speaking fear aspect. It's more about knowing your business enough to talk about it.
At the time, I had no acumen for the electrical industry. I didn't necessarily know the terminology for electrical, but I knew business, and so I just doubled down on what I knew. I focused on how to make this into a story for somebody to understand and resonate with them.
We've already proven our success in our past track history and at this point, you know that your investment in our business is going to be greatly taken advantage of in a good way. We’re going to be good stewards of these dollars. We’re going to make sure that we use it for what we said we were going to use it for.
So, just getting over the fear of not knowing electrical was what I had to overcome. And then really lean into my business skill set and figure out how I could tie the two together.
You've got some uniqueness as a business. You're minority-owned and woman-owned. You're also in a generational tradesman-type business. Talk about those three aspects and challenges or things that were easy.
Internally, we had to battle with the family and the generational trade changes. That was a big, big challenge for us. We had to get coaching. We were going to therapy. It was a big thing for my mom to let go.
Externally, our biggest challenge that we still constantly fight is, that we're in a male-dominated, particularly white male-dominated industry. When we walk into the room, we automatically look different, we sound different. And that's an intimidation and a fear that I don't fully understand. But it made it even harder for folks to engage with us. I'm very well-versed in business, so I was not coming in timid and shy about who we were and what we were doing. I was very prepared for that. It made folks feel like, who are these people? Where did they come from? And we're still experiencing that.
We've also had a lot of conversations about how people want us to just be the best electrician. And we are. But we're also women, and we're also Black. So, we can't erase that out of the conversation. But guess what? We're the only one. We're the only woman-owned, minority-owned electrical contractor in the entire state. That in itself tells you how good we are rather than it being a bad thing. And I have to educate people on this anomaly and how it should be at the forefront of this conversation rather than an afterthought.
What resources did you tap into to help you either personally overcome fears or scale the business?
We participated in the Minority Business Accelerator Program through the Greenville Chamber. That was huge for us because it helped us to develop a strategic plan. You don't know what you don't know until you know it, right? And we didn't know how to write an SGAP or Strategic Growth Action Plan and understand the power of writing it down. It wasn’t magic. It was just writing down all those thoughts that were in our heads. That was huge.
We were also a part of an international group called Be Peace, and that helped me understand that there were other small entrepreneurs out there doing their thing in different areas of the world who all had the same struggles and that we were able to collectively come together to work on projects. The project that we chose for our company was to get a line of credit. That was my whole goal. How do I do this? What do we need to do? How do I present it? And they helped me create that pitch so that I felt comfortable presenting to banks for us to get a line of credit.
And then we are also engaged with the SBA, SBDC, all the local resources that are available to help small businesses, and SCP Tech. I meet with them occasionally to get a refresher on what the state agencies are offering, and how we can get involved with those municipalities and keep us fresh in SAM.
We only have a small team here. So, reaching out to these other folks and leveraging all of those resources was almost like an extension of our team.
Are there resources that you wish you had but weren’t available, and you feel like there is a gap?
Absolutely. I teach a program called Doing Business with Intention. And the reason I started this program is that it was something that I wished that I had. Especially as women, we need cheerleaders, right? We need to pump each other up. We need somebody to just tell us, you can do this. You can overcome these fears. It's going to be okay. Break this down for me in a simplified way.
I am fortunate enough that I have a degree in business. I've been gifted and talented since I was in the third grade, and I have a high IQ in that area, but I recognize that not everybody does. And so, I’m able to speak the business language, and then simplify it for someone who doesn't understand that.
Do you know how many times I’ve seen people walk out of a room, and they're confused and glazed over because they didn’t fully understand what happened? They took that information and stuck it on a shelf somewhere and never used it. They never implemented it. And I always wondered why. But then I realized that it's too complicated; too wordy. These are words that people don't know.
So, I developed Doing Business with Intention. We start by visualizing what our lives could be like. Let's do a vision board. Let's just dream a little bit. Let's take ourselves out of the day-to-day of what we think we can do. And let's just dream, because there's power in that dream. Then we talk about how we're going to get to that dream. Then we set goals and roadmap the dream. And then we talk about money. You’ve got this dream, but what are you going to do with the money when you get it? I help people understand that there is a plan behind all of this. You can't just be out here willy-nilly. You can't just show up to the party and be like, well, I'm here. There has to be some intentionality behind what you're doing if you want to see the results.
I wish somebody had told me that without me having to read a thousand books and figure it out on my own. But I offer that push to women and minority businesses to invest time in their mindset and how they think about things, and just be a good cheerleader for them.
This will be my third year teaching the class at the Women's Business Center. I developed the curriculum myself just based on the things that I thought were important. If we could find a way to build up this ecosystem of these small entrepreneurs, giving them easy-to-understand information about what these businesses need to know and focus on that group of people, I think we'll have a huge ecosystem of individuals who are prepared to scale and grow their businesses. But you can't scale when you don't know how.
Is there a high intimidation factor to overcome for women and minority business owners? Do you see those fears?
Absolutely. So many women say to me, ‘You're just so confident. You're just different from me.’ But I'm not. I have to work at it. That's the intentionality behind it. If you want to get better at something, you just have to keep doing it. You get better at it by doing it over and over again. I tell them to give themselves grace because we give grace to everybody else, but we beat up on ourselves.
So, give yourself some grace and understand that's going to take time. Be patient. It's not going to happen overnight, but if you diligently work on it every day, a little bit at a time, it gets easier. It gets better. And you get into the rhythm.
What's the best piece of advice you've received as a founder, and how has it influenced your own decision-making?
Every year I have a meeting with my banker, CPA, and tax accountant. And every year I pitch to them my game plan for the next year.
So, every year I've had a goal that I set for our company to meet, and it was double what we did the year before, and they would say, ‘Don’t outgrow your business, Ebony.’ And I listened to them to some extent, but also recognized that we did write it down, and we did have a plan, and we were just going to execute on that plan. And if that was the outcome, and the result was that we met that goal, then great. We crushed it. But if we didn't, that was okay. We worked really hard to get there. And every year we come back and meet with the banker, the CPA, and the tax accountant, who all say, ‘I can't believe you did that.’ Because we actually did.
I say all of that to say, never let anybody tell you what you can't do. I'm sure they're giving you that guidance because it’s the right thing to do. You don't want to outgrow your business. But you also don't want to be so afraid of the fear of outgrowing your business that you do nothing.
If you could hit rewind, is there anything that you would do differently?
I probably would have gotten involved in our business a lot sooner, realizing that my mom really needed help. I was helping her but very distantly, and there were a lot of things that we probably could have put in place and done a lot sooner. But it is what it is, and it happened when it was supposed to. But if I had the opportunity of a do-over, I probably would have stepped into the business a lot sooner.
If you had to sum up your entrepreneurial journey in one word, what would it be and why?
Mountainous. Yes, it’s been hilly and tough terrain, but when you get to the top, the view is beautiful. There have been a lot of ups and downs and challenges. Every year we face something new, whether it’s a personal or business challenge. But every year we also see the view. Once we make it to the next plateau on that mountain, we’re able to see the fruit of our labor and appreciate the hard work that it took for us to get there.