About

A lighting company that happens to hold an electrical license.

San Diego Specialty Lighting, Inc. was founded on a narrow bet: that the hardest lighting jobs in this city would keep going to whoever could do the trade work and the technology, and that almost nobody was doing both. That is still the whole business — we are exclusively a specialty lighting contractor, not a general electrical contractor with a lighting page.

The company

Small on purpose.

SDSL is an owner-operated California C-10 electrical contractor based in San Diego, licensed under CSLB 1139780 with our CCO as the qualifying individual. The people who bid your job are the people who show up to it — not as a figure of speech. On our Petco Park contract, both owners performed the work.

We are signatory to IBEW Local 569, so when a project needs crew beyond the two of us, the journeymen and apprentices who show up have been through a real apprenticeship rather than a two-week orientation.

We deliberately stayed specialized. There are plenty of good general electrical contractors in San Diego, and we're happy to work alongside them. What we do is the scope they'd rather not own: exposed RGBW systems, custom mounting on structures that were never designed to carry a luminaire, work sequenced around an active MLB game schedule, and controls integration that has to survive a decade of sunsets.

Because we work with value-added partners rather than a chain of middlemen, we can price fixtures and controls without stacked markups — and we take on the risk of knowing the product and executing it. We keep the addressing scheme consistent from procurement through commissioning.

Leadership

Two owners. Both in the field.

Between them, our principals have worked every side of a lighting project — the manufacturer that builds the luminaire, the rep agency that specifies it, and the crew that installs it. Very little surprises us on a submittal review.

Principal

Brendan McCartney

Chief Executive Officer

Twelve years in dynamic lighting, from all three sides of the table: he started at Philips Lighting North America as a district sales representative, moved to the rep side as the first employee at The Lighting Element — where he personally commissioned and programmed every Color Kinetics project the agency sold — and then crossed over to the contracting side.

On the contracting side he founded and ran an architectural dynamic lighting division as Director of Specialty Lighting, building it into a profitable practice in its first year, before stepping up to Vice President of Preconstruction. He founded SDSL with April to build that work under their own shingle.

He runs the office and preconstruction side — bids, contracts and scheduling — and still does design assist, controls programming and commissioning himself. BA Economics and BA Comparative Literature, Rutgers University.

brendan@sd-sl.com · 858-539-3857

Principal

April Hatton

Chief Commercial Officer

Chief Commercial Officer, and the qualifying individual on the company’s C-10 license. April came up through the trade the long way: a U.S. Navy veteran who served in Combat Camera doing ground and aerial reconnaissance, she completed the Inside Wire apprenticeship at the Electrical Training Institute and worked her way through Dynalectric, HMT, Neal Electric and Baker Electric before spending four years as a foreman running specialty lighting crews.

She owns execution, project delivery and compliance — including prevailing wage administration and certified payroll across our public works and municipal work. When she reviews a schedule, she's reviewing it as someone who has run the crew that has to hit it — and on our current ballpark contract, as someone on the lift.

april@sd-sl.com

Licensing & compliance

Everything an agency will ask for.

California C-10 Electrical Contractor — CSLB License #1139780
DIR registered — public works contractor registration #2000013156
IBEW Local 569 signatory — union labor agreement in place
Certified payroll — weekly reporting, eCPR filing, fringe benefit compliance
Code compliance — NEC and City of San Diego code compliant
Apprenticeship compliance — DAS-140 and DAS-142 filings on public works
Insured — commercial general liability, commercial auto, and umbrella coverage; certificate of insurance available on request
Prequalification packages — available for agency and district bidder lists

Certificates of insurance, W-9, license verification, and safety program documentation are available on request for prequalification.

Safety

The work is at height, over water, and after dark.

Specialty lighting puts people on lifts, roofs, parapets, and structures over traffic and water, usually at night. Our safety program is built around that reality rather than around a generic office-building install — and it is written by the people who are up there.

OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 trained personnel
Aerial lift, boom, and scissor certification
Fall protection program and competent-person oversight
Job hazard analysis on every site, with daily safety equipment checks
Confined space and energized-work procedures

Next step

Add us to your bidder list.

We'll send prequalification documents the same day.

Get in touch Call 858-539-3857