College basketball star takes family awnings firm to new heights

At 32, Mara Falahee is young to already be the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. 

But that’s not how she sees it, because she’s reluctant to vaunt the CEO title at all. The three Falahee sisters are at the helm of SPF Screens & Awnings, the retail side of the business their parents incorporated in 2010 to manufacture and market motorized retractable awnings and sun shades to a mass audience. While Falahee has the top role in a traditional sense, her oldest sister is in charge of technology and her youngest sister handles sales. Falahee sees the trio as a united front. 

Photo by Mark Wemple

That was by the family’s design, as Falahee’s parents, Bob and Val, in a way handed over the retail side of the company to their daughters to give them the opportunity to construct something of their own. In 2019, when Falahee came on board, the company was just in west Florida, with under $3 million in annual revenue and between 8 to 12 employees. Now, seven years later, the company is in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and just recently expanded into southern California. It has around 215 employees and revenue has increased some 15-fold since Falahee joined the company.

“When my parents asked me to come back and work at the family business, I sat around the table at SPF with eight or 10 of us, and I realized, this could maybe be my team again,” Falahee says. 

As a former college basketball player at the Claremont Colleges in California — she was captain of the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Athenas and a three-year starter — being part of a high-achieving team felt familiar. And now, as the company moves into other parts of California, she feels the full circle sensation of working in the same territories in which she attended college. 

As CEO, what she’s had to learn is balancing the ups with the downs. The business has had growth-fueled inflection points, namely the pandemic and post-2024 hurricane season, when external factors led to heavy demand. Not all periods, of course, come with that immense growth.

To handle the fluctuations, Falahee leans into the counsel of her mentor, her cousin Jasen Falahee, whom she considers one of her best friends. The advice: stay calm and levelheaded no matter the situation. 

“There are moments where it seems like our pace is skyrocketing — we’ve had waves. A lot of times, there’s luck mixed with opportunity,” Falahee says. “But then we get more into moments where we have to go out there and grit out the demand.”