When Thomas Hudgins met Mike Sardo during the summer of 2019, his company was struggling.
Hudgins founded San Antonio-based Texas Solar in 2006. The company was in "dire straits" and he was looking for somebody to buy a majority stake and revamp the company, Sardo said.
Sardo, a native San Antonian, along with his unnamed business partner, bought the company in September 2019. Sardo became the company's president and CEO, while Hudgins stepped down as owner and took a back seat as an equity investor.
The company's Chief Financial Officer Jim Drought III also has equity in the company, Sardo said.
In less than 24 months, Sardo turned Texas Solar around, helping it garner the No. 11 spot on Inc. magazine's list of the 5,000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America based on 2020 revenue. The company, which designs, develops and installs residential solar energy systems, grew its revenue by 22,381% between 2017 and 2020, according to Inc.'s data.
Sardo and his team "really tried to pay attention to what customers wanted, and what the marketplace is asking for and hit the nail on the head," particularly as the Covid-19 pandemic led to more people working from home and using more electricity, he said.
"It just makes financial sense for a lot of people because you take out a 0% down loan to put solar on your house, and your monthly payment is going to be pretty close to what you used to pay for the electricity that your solar system is now producing. But with the cost of energy expected to rise and many utility districts across the state doing things to encourage conservation, [with residential solar], you don't get brownouts or temporary shutdowns ... a functioning solar energy system can have a big impact over decades, financially," Sardo said.
Sardo anticipates the company will make twice the revenue this year compared to 2020 as more residential customers express interest in solar power. The company is also looking to expand into some commercial projects, Sardo said.
When Sardo acquired Texas Solar, it had five employees. Now 124 employees are working across San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley, El Paso, Dallas and Houston. Approximately 90 of the employees are local.
To accommodate its growth, the company is renovating an 11,000-square-foot space for its new headquarters at 5631 University Heights, which is three times larger than its current space across the parking lot.
This isn't the first time Sardo has started or helped turn a company around
After earning a bachelor's degree from San Marcos-based Southwest Texas State, now Texas State University, he started a cheerleading instruction business that he grew quickly and sold about four years later, he said.
"[Throughout the selling process,] I quickly learned a lot about business valuations and how they're derived and that fascinated me," he said.
Sardo continued buying, growing and selling businesses, including a tree removal and landscape maintenance company as well as a company that offered automated teller machine transaction processing.
"I've spent the last 26 years of my life understanding what to do and not to do when something is growing quickly, on a smaller scale with a smaller company and industry that doesn't have this kind of explosive growth potential," he said. But nonetheless, growth is growth is growth, so I think I was able to take some of those life lessons... and pivot to keep operations running at full speed."
