The best jobs are those that start as temporary and then become permanent careers — as Nicole Sullivan discovered when she joined Anderson Propane in 2005 as an assistant to the chief financial officer. What started as a temporary role while she finished grad school turned into a 19-years-and-counting career, where she’s served in roles of increasing seniority all the way to senior vice president of Anderson Propane, and now, upon the company being acquired, the fuel operations director of Tiger Fuel Company.
Throughout her time with Anderson Propane, Sullivan has been instrumental in modernizing the company’s offerings and processes. One particularly impressive accomplishment was the work she did to implement an augmented reality (AR) app for fireplaces in the company’s showroom. After using an AR app for furniture shopping, she searched for a similar solution for fireplaces and couldn’t find anything that fit their needs.
“As I started to investigate the issue, I realized the technology really needs multidimensional images, which is not something most fireplace vendors provide. I eventually found a tech company that was able to create these images based on various fireplace specs,” she says. “From there, we created the app, which allows customers to drop in specific fireplaces and create a quality rendering based on other customer selections like surround, liners, mantels, etc. In short, it removes a lot of the guesswork and really helps customers visualize changes before implementing them.”
In addition to the app, Sullivan was heavily involved in how Anderson Propane used its showroom space. After speaking with a fireplace rep about the most successful showrooms he had seen, it became imperative to Sullivan and her team to rethink their setup and sharpen the focus onto their fireplace and hearth products both in the physical showroom and on the website.
And as far as Sullivan’s philosophy for brainstorming and testing ideas like the above, she says it’s about celebrating individuality and mitigating groupthink. Sullivan strives to foster an environment where people work on their own first, then come together to share and build upon ideas and problem-solve.
As a past president and still active member of the Virginia Propane Gas Association, as well as a current member of the National Propane Gas Association’s executive committee, Sullivan isn’t a stranger to problem-solving. Her involvement with these associations means working to “create constructive change,” as she puts it, and advocate for an industry that is navigating energy policy challenges. In addition to advocacy, Sullivan recognizes that innovative thinking is key to keeping the industry relevant.
“As an industry, we are facing some universal and relentless challenges. We can’t meet these challenges with secondhand principles or complacency and still expect to successfully be here in the long-term future,” Sullivan says. “The goal really is to create changes that yield better results, and we won’t achieve that by doing it the same way or by approaching it with the same mindset. New problems deserve new ideas and solutions if we want to remain a strong industry.”
