Sean Bourquin is the President and Founder of Full On Lighting, a premium lighting company specializing in high-performance mountain bike lights. With over two decades in the lighting industry, he previously founded First Light Technologies, a solar-powered outdoor lighting firm that became one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies. Full On Lighting blends Sean’s technical engineering expertise with his passion for cycling, while XLYNX Materials, another of his ventures, focuses on pioneering molecular bonding solutions for industrial applications.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:15] Sean Bourquin recalls his childhood fascination with taking apart electronics
- [5:12] How a chance internship led Sean into the solar lighting industry
- [8:14] What drove Sean to leave his job and start his first company?
- [12:49] Challenges of consulting work and pivoting quickly to manufacturing
- [18:57] Developing a scientific, systematized sales approach that fueled rapid growth
- [22:33] Lessons from scaling a company with 35%+ annual growth for seven years
- [26:09] How did Sean handle higher costs and pressure from low-priced competitors?
- [28:16] The dramatic fallout with his co-founder and ensuing multi-year legal battle
- [34:02] Launching Full On Lighting to solve night vision problems for mountain bikers
In this episode…
Many entrepreneurs face a moment when their secure, stable job no longer aligns with their deeper passions or curiosity. What happens when someone dares to leave that behind to pursue a vision no one else believes in?
Sean Bourquin, a Canadian entrepreneur and engineer, shares how he transitioned from a shipyard apprentice to a leader in solar-powered lighting. When his ideas were dismissed by corporate leadership, Sean leaped to build his own company, innovating in solar lighting through smart, efficient designs and bold engineering. Focusing on municipalities and refining the sales approach through direct outreach and feedback, he scaled First Light Technologies into one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies. He shares how identifying municipalities as his core customer base, designing adaptive lighting systems that required no external configuration, and staying agile in sales execution were key to long-term growth.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Sean Bourquin, President and Founder of Full On Lighting, about starting, growing, and ultimately moving on from a wildly successful solar lighting business. Sean discusses his engineering-led sales strategy, the founding of Full On Lighting, and lessons from navigating founder conflict, legal battles, and reinvention.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Sean Bourquin on LinkedIn
- Full On Lighting
- XLYNX Materials Inc.
- EO Vancouver Island
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “I just want to learn new stuff. I don’t want to get into boredom.”
- “If I’m not qualified as the product manager to make decisions, you should probably fire me.”
- “You’ve got to find the pointy end of the stick.”
- “No one cares more about what you’re doing than you do.”
- “We made the lights think for themselves because solar lighting will never scale unless it’s easy.”
Action Steps:
- Pursue clarity before pivoting: When consulting didn’t yield immediate results, Sean Bourquin and his team assessed quickly and shifted to product sales. It’s critical to monitor ROI early and adapt if the strategy isn’t working.
- Leverage engineering skills in sales: Sean built a repeatable sales system by treating it like an engineering problem — using data, structure, and iteration. Founders can often bridge technical and commercial success by applying systematic thinking to outreach.
- Solve a specific customer problem: Full On Lighting targeted mountain bikers needing reliable night visibility, addressing an underserved niche. Solving a well-defined pain point increases customer enthusiasm and product-market fit.
- Build smarter products, not just cheaper ones: Sean focused on embedding intelligence into solar lights to increase reliability and ease-of-use. In crowded markets, usability can be a stronger differentiator than price.
- Don’t underestimate the cost of unresolved partnership issues: A co-founder dispute led to years of legal delays. Establish clear agreements and open communication early to avoid long-term operational and emotional costs.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today, we’re talking about the story of a man who built North America’s largest solar lighting company and then had to rebuild it all when it all fell apart. We’re going to tell that story in a second. His name is Sean Bourquin. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
Intro: 00:17
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:34
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of this show. And you know, if you’ve listened before that every week we have great smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies. We’ve had Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard.
Check out the archives. Lots of great episodes for you. Before we get into this episode, it is brought to you by Rise25, our company where we help businesses to develop relationships with their best clients, referral partners, and strategic partners with done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. And if you want to learn more about how you can do that as well, you can go to our website, which is Rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. All right.
Let’s launch into it. My guest today is Sean Bourquin. He’s the President and Founder of Full On Lighting. He’s a long time entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in the lighting industry. Full On Lighting. His most recent lighting company. They are focused on creating incredibly high quality mountain bike lights. These are not inexpensive, cheap bike lights you buy on Amazon, but they are really amazing bike lights. And prior to this, he was the CEO and Founder of First Light Technologies, which is a solar powered outdoor lighting company. I’ve got a number of solar powered lights outside of my house.
I think they’re so cool. So we’re gonna be talking about that. And it was one of Canada’s fastest growing companies for seven consecutive years, growing year after year. So we’re going to talk about some of those strategies. But Sean, such a pleasure to have you here today.
And I always like to get to know my guests a little bit, what they were like as a kid. And I guess you eventually became an engineer. So this makes sense. Your mom started calling you pickle because you like to pick things apart. Like just. I’m picturing you with, like, a radio or something, like taking apart and trying to figure out how it worked. Is that what it was like for you?
Sean Bourquin: 02:15
That’s exactly what it was like. Anything electrical or mechanical, I could smash or take apart, I would do it.
John Corcoran: 02:21
And you were raised to kind of like working class parents, kind of a blue collar upbringing. Never really thought about being an entrepreneur. As you got older, what was like the vision for you as a kid?
Sean Bourquin: 02:32
I think, you know, I had these really hard working parents, and then the vision was just go out, work hard, provide for your family, get a good union job with the pension and the benefits. And, you know, it was really a value of security, you know? And then I went and got that and it wasn’t really my path.
John Corcoran: 02:50
Yeah, my grandfather was a B-17 pilot in World War Two and then spent the rest of his career working either for the Air Force or after becoming a civilian working at the Pentagon. And he would like to invest like $100 in, like a US government bond that paid like $103 seven years later. That was the conservative kind of upbringing that I came from, you know, and it’s crazy to think like, what a different world it is now compared to what that world was like. But if you, you know, if you went through the Great Depression, you went through World War Two, you know, I think a lot of people from that generation just craved that stability.
Sean Bourquin: 03:31
Yeah, I agree. It was an interesting thing. I was working at a shipyard as an apprentice in electronics, and I had a guy say to me, you know, I’ve been here for 25 years. And he snaps his finger and he says, it went by just like that. And for me, that idea of spending 25 years doing that was horrifying.
Right. I just like change, I like I’m curious by nature and I just want to learn new stuff I don’t want to get into, you know, sort of boredom. So you.
John Corcoran: 04:01
So you’re working in a shipyard, working on Canadian warships in electronics, and eventually you end up getting an internship at, like, age 25. Talk. Talk to me a little about how that came about.
Sean Bourquin: 04:15
Yeah, I, you know, I went down that path of getting the GED. You know, a government job and doing that and figured out pretty quickly it wasn’t for me. So I realized in the same amount of time as I could finish my apprenticeship, I could get my engineering degree. So I went and did that and did an internship in California, as it turns out, and then did an internship at a startup solar lighting company here in Victoria. And it was early days for that company.
They were making all kinds of interesting solar LED lighting products. And I got a chance to meet the founder. And, you know, he immediately impressed me in a lot of different ways. and very quickly kind of became a mentor for me just just due to his nature and his personality.
John Corcoran: 05:04
What was it? Was it something about solar lighting in particular that drew you to that industry, or is it a little bit of a happenstance that you ended up in it?
Sean Bourquin: 05:12
Oh, a total, total happenstance. Like, I’d, you know, I’d worked in microwave communications in California and I’d worked in before working at the shipyard. I’d worked in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning controllers. So the solar lighting was just just a happenstance. And yeah, it was. I wouldn’t have known at the time that it would have been kind of an important moment for me.
John Corcoran: 05:36
Yeah. Now, I imagine you could give us a treatise on this, but I’ve noticed that solar lighting products have evolved dramatically over the last, I don’t know, ten, 15 years or so. There are so many more available, I, I didn’t even think twice about buying external lighting that would be hardwired in my front garden area because it’s so easy to get solar powered lights, and I love kind of the environmental aspect of it, that it’s not actually consuming any power, it’s just coming straight from the sun. So can you share with us, you know, why has there been such a, you know, evolution with that industry?
Sean Bourquin: 06:17
Yeah, it’s an interesting nexus of a few different technologies. You know, you’ve obviously got solar solar power. So the big change there over the years has been, you know, scale and cost reductions and some performance improvements. So, you know, getting more economically viable over the years for sure. The LED technology I think most of us know has been, you know, transformational in the world of lighting just from an energy efficiency perspective.
So that’s been a huge enabler. And then now especially there’s been step changes in battery technology. You know, in the early days of Descartes, or lead acid batteries and the commercial side of solar lighting. You know, it was situationally sensible to do it. But through the improvements in those things and, you know, the thing that we did especially well at first light was the control technology that ties everything together, making that smarter, more adaptive.
You know, you put those things all together, and now you’ve got a product in the world of solar lighting that in the commercial context that I was working in, you know, most of the time it was by far the most economical thing that anyone could do. If you’re lighting a parking lot, a park, a path, or a street, it will become the de facto way of doing most outdoor lighting.
John Corcoran: 07:44
Yeah. You ended up having a moment where you were working for a company and you were a product manager managing their outdoor lighting projects, and you had a vision of some product that you wanted to develop and they turned it down. This is kind of a classic story of how so many companies start, right? Kind of like the budding entrepreneur doesn’t realize they’re an entrepreneur. They just got kind of pissed off and they’re like, forget it, I’m going to go do this myself. So tell us that story.
Sean Bourquin: 08:14
Yeah, it was an interesting one. We had worked with a company out of the Bay area on industrial design for a new family of these solar lights. You know, as the product manager, we didn’t even need to do that. We kind of knew what we needed to do, but the company wanted to spend a lot of money and try to make really good decisions. So all right, fine.
We do all this work and we come down to a choice between this and that. And, you know, I had done the work with my market manager, the engineering team, and we were very clear that this one is the way to go. And then there were some other people within the company that wanted to go this way. And I was told as product manager that I was not qualified to make the decision. And so I’m thinking to myself.
John Corcoran: 08:53
Oh, no.
Sean Bourquin: 08:54
Yeah. It’s like if I’m not qualified as product manager to make decisions, you probably should fire me. Yeah. You know, that was my inner voice. Of course. So. But instead I said, well, all right, well, who is qualified? They’re like, well, the CEO and the market manager can make the decision. All right, fair enough. There’s no way the CEO is going to go against the team. And so, you know, I’d gone around saying like, well, if this guy if this guy picks this other thing like, I am out of here. Like I just started it.
John Corcoran: 09:20
In retrospect now, was it a dramatically different technology? What what? Without getting too deep on it, why did you feel so passionately about this?
Sean Bourquin: 09:28
You know, honestly, it was really an aesthetic choice along with some technical factors. You know, where this option was better, you know, like our audience at the time and solar lighting. Solar was new. LEDs were pretty new. You know, so a part of the messaging was, okay, like you need to be reassuring with your design.
And the other design was very bold, you know, and it had some of the design language for me was superfluous, and the brand of that company was not very purposeful, very, you know, form follows function kind of thinking. And it was just so out of step, you know, in hindsight, would it have mattered that much like the product failed, as it turned out?
John Corcoran: 10:09
So it must feel gratifying, I guess.
Sean Bourquin: 10:12
Yeah, but I’ll never know if the one that I wanted to do would have done any better. I think it would have. It would have been easier to make, would have been less expensive, like a few other things would have been better. But anyways, I lost that battle. But you know, and so I got overruled.
The CEO went against the team and chose the bold design. And so it’s like, you know what? Like I think I have some better ideas of what solar lighting could be and I’d like to find out. So I very quickly started making a plan to go to it myself.
John Corcoran: 10:43
And what was the plan? You’re at this point, your mentor Dave has moved on, I believe, right?
Sean Bourquin: 10:50
Yeah, he was a shareholder, but he was out of the day to day of the company. And so I talked to him, as it turned out, like I had an idea of a particular product I wanted to make that had not been done well, ever. So I went to Dave, and then I had a fellow product manager who ended up jumping with me, who became my co-founder. And so I talked to Dave like, Hey Dave, I want to make a solar bollard, you know? And bollard was not a word I knew in terms of lighting until I started working with them.