Mark Morganstein looks upward for his salvation and sings Hoshana to low-e glass. He saw the light early in life.
Born in Washington, D.C., he grew up near Silver Spring, MD, where he became a bar mitzvah at Har Tzeon, a Conservative congregation. Traditional Jewish values such as acquiring a good education, hard work and self-motivation have always been significant to him. “I come from a middle-class family that was very close, and my mother ingrained in me at an early age to go to college. … I was always motivated to achieve,” he says.
After earning a degree in economics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, he went into the solar heating and cooling industry with certification in active and passive solar energy from George Washington University. It was 1979 and Earth Day was only a few years old. People were looking a bit more closely at their energy bills and not laughing at those tiny foreign cars that got great gas mileage.
“I had a change in life plan back in 1977,” he says. “Rising energy costs were in the news, and there were long lines at the gas pumps. I wanted to make a career in something a little more hands on than economics, and I saw the energy business as a growth industry.”
In 1982 he was recruited by a Phoenix-based solar energy manufacturer, Ramada Energy Systems (Temtech), to coordinate its national solar water heater sales. Relocating to the Valley, he purchased a home in Tempe, and his family attended Temple Emanuel. He and his wife of 22 years, Kathleen, have two girls and two boys.
He opened his Sky Design Concepts, a full-service daylighting company in early 1985. Located at 4656 S 33rd St., Phoenix, Sky Design has been designing and supplying skylights for commercial projects and custom luxury homes throughout the Southwest for almost three decades. Now with five employees, Sky Design Concepts provides high- performance glazing for both rooftop skylight applications and translucent glazing for walls.
The biggest difference between skylights is the glazing, he explains. Plastic glazing, typically made with acrylic and polycarbonate, is used in residential and low-cost commercial applications.
For customers interested in high performance and longevity, polymers, special coatings and dual-pane, low-e glass are the better choices, albeit at higher prices.
At first as Sky Design Concepts, Morganstein sold products and personalized service and subcontracted the installation. His first large job, in fact, was the glass dome at the Mirage in Las Vegas.
Then all the components came together. On a Thursday night in 1986, a year after he opened, he received a call from his installer subcontractor saying he was “hung up on a job” and couldn’t receive a shipment scheduled for the following Monday. But the load was already in transit, and the job had to be done.
“Who walks into my office the following morning but two installers from my biggest competitor looking for work,” he recalls. “I hired them on the spot, and they became my first in-house installation crew.” In managing Sky Designs to success through fat years and lean, he has always been careful to control growth and spending and to save his money “for rainy days,” as his Depression-bred parents taught him. “I always saw Sky Design as a service company that just so happens to sell skylights,” Morganstein says.
skydesignconcepts.com | 602-276-5001
David Brown (azwriter.com) is a Valley-based freelancer.
