Kevin Borland had enough time on the way down to know he was in trouble.

He hit the water hard, the fall longer than it should have been, and by the time the shock wore off, something in his head had already changed. It was two months after he came home from the Middle East, where he spent 2017 and 2018 with the US Fifth Fleet in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. Back stateside, making a direct deployment jump from an MH-60R to stay current on his qualifications, the crew released him to jump from too high an altitude. He fell farther than a body is built to fall, and the impact left him with a traumatic brain injury that would end, within weeks, the only career he had ever planned on having.

He had spent six years, from 2014 to 2020, as an AIRR aircrewman operating out of the Navy’s Seahawk helicopters, a job whose training pipeline alone runs more than two grueling years, if you make it to the end. The injury disqualified him instead. A flight surgeon delivered the verdict in three words: “I’m grounding you.” That meant only one thing. He was done.

Retired Chief Petty Officer Tim Thomas, who led Borland as a helicopter rescue swimmer out of Coronado and who jokingly called his entrepreneurial streak a “side quest,” says, “In over twenty years of military service, I have never been more proud of a Sailor than I am of Kevin.” What stays with Thomas most, though, is smaller than that. It has been more than eight years since the two served together, and Borland is still the one who reaches out. “That level of loyalty, humility, and genuine care for others is rare,” Thomas says.

Suicidal Thoughts and Recovery

There wasn’t time to grieve it properly. Borland had a baby on the way, a mortgage in San Diego, a wife to support, and a hard-earned career that had just ended. What came next was a long, disorienting stretch of memory care and speech therapy, months he still describes as a blur, his eyes so affected by the injury that even using the muscles behind them made him sick.

There is a part of this he insists on including, even though it’s the hardest thing here to say plainly. The traumatic brain injury didn’t just take his career. For a stretch afterward, it took his sense of control over his own mind. He became, in his words, massively suicidal, with no clear reason he could point to, just thoughts he couldn’t shut off. At first he tried to push through it quietly and keep doing his job. He didn’t want to lose it. It was McKinzie who told him it was time to fess up to what he was dealing with. She wasn’t willing to let him hide an injury like that. He talks about it now because he thinks it matters more than almost anything else in his story. “I say this because people need to hear me: don’t hide. Speak up.”

If there’s a reason he got through it, he’ll tell you it wasn’t only him. It was McKinzie. She had already been the reason he made it through the AIRR pipeline in the first place, two years of some of the hardest instruction the military runs. “Making her proud was the only reason I excelled,” he says. “If she didn’t believe in me, I would not be here today. She is literally the reason behind everything great that I have done and will continue to do.”

Finding His Path

The usual outcome for someone in a Navy special program who washes out is reassignment to a ship. Borland asked his commanding officer and the leadership around him for something else: to stay at his unit and stand the night watch alone, for months, until the end of his contract. “I appreciate their grace so much in letting me remain at the command,” he says. It was there, in the quiet, while he could have spent that time watching movies, that he studied for his real estate license and made new life plans instead.

That decision turned out to matter more than he could have known. He moved his young family back to Utah and built a career out of nothing but momentum. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he says, “but I had always heard that if you just keep working, something great would happen.” What he built, alongside partner Steven O’Donnell, was Sonder Real Estate Group, a deliberately small team of just six agents. “When people hear Sonder, they know they’re getting the best, and they know they can trust their representation,” he says. “There is no agent in the state who can outwork our agents.” The two built a culture where agents could easily go out on their own and succeed, but stay instead, because of the family they’d built inside it. Most years, the majority of the team ranks in the top one percent in Utah for volume.

Real estate gave him capital. What he did with it revealed the shape of his ambition. He started angel investing in early-stage startups, chasing, by his own admission, something like the risk he used to get in the military. “The risk was probably filling the void of the risk I was taking in the military, to be honest,” he says. Once he was fully healed, he also began funding and personally taking part in humanitarian work overseas: medical training for missionaries in combat zones, matters tied to foreign military and terrorism concerns, and assistance for enslaved and internally displaced children, none of it run through any Utah-based organization. “Those are some of my favorite places and people on the planet,” he says. “I think about them every day.”

For The Love of Business

Somewhere in the middle of all that, he fell in love with business itself. “I had my successful real estate company, my amazing family, and this incredible life,” he says, “but I knew I could help so many more people if I could just create something incredible and highly valuable.” His thinking is straightforward. A company that reaches a multi-hundred-million or even billion-dollar exit can help millions of people live better lives. “I’m happy wherever I’m at. I’m happier if I can help millions of people along the way. Yes, I said millions.”

That something arrived, unglamorously, as a text message.

In June 2024, Robert, a software founder Borland had once backed as an angel investor and who had since become one of his closest friends, sent him a screenshot of a hemp-derived drink. Borland ignored it. The following day he texted Robert an invite instead, to the birthday party for his then four-year-old. Another text followed, this one from Borland: “Nah, let’s make our own. We can call it Sunny Daze or something.” It was a play on words he landed on fast and walked back just as quickly. He didn’t want anything close to Dazed and Confused anywhere near the name, not for a product built for professionals. He settled on Sunny Dayz instead, leaving the stigma out of it.

Sunny Dayz

Sunny Dayz went to market in January 2025. Robert, Borland says, is the reason the operation hasn’t buckled under its own growth. “He’s a logistics and operations wizard. Without him, this machine would have broken long ago.” Robert’s knowledge of just about everything runs so deep it still baffles him. “It never ceases to amaze me how that man’s brain works.”

The product itself is a hemp-derived THC and CBG seltzer, non-alcoholic, sweetened with agave and monk fruit, ten calories a can. It comes in two strengths, 4mg and 8mg THC, both paired with 4mg of CBG specifically to curb the anxious, heady edge THC can carry for some users. Three flavors, lime, blood orange, and grapefruit, with both cannabinoids entirely flavorless. Effects land within fifteen minutes on average, rarely longer than thirty, which Borland says is deliberate, a fast enough onset that a customer can gauge their own intake and stay in control, whether they’re easing into a social evening or winding down for sleep. It sells today primarily across the Southeast and in multiple states nationally, on shelves at chains including Total Wine & More and Apotheca, a large multi-state cannabis dispensary chain. The hope, longer term, is to help shape the kind of legislation that lets a product like this sell in big-box, mainstream stores nationwide.

The Four Rules of Sunny Dayz

The product was built on four rules: branding sharp enough that customers choose it on sight, a clean label, a flavor good enough to earn repeat purchases, and effects that are functional rather than overwhelming, built around presence rather than escape. Behind it sits what Borland calls full transparency, a traceable, multi-hundred-page chain of custody from the U.S. farms where the hemp is grown to the finished can.

Borland is, by his own account, a proud consumer of his own product. “I have yet to meet somebody who doesn’t love it.” He’s especially proud of the flavor. “It’s not like drinking a soda, and it isn’t like drinking a sparkling water. The flavor is so fantastic. It’s such a refreshing experience on the palate. We’re very proud of it. It truly is unmatched.” To this day he still lives with physical impairments from his injuries, and a strict lifestyle plus his own product, he says, help curb the pain. “Not a medical claim, by the way,” he adds with a grin.

None of it comes from a place of casual interest in the category. “I spent my entire life watching the people I love most experience the pain and suffering caused by alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction,” he says. “I committed as a young boy that I would never drink alcohol. Still true. I never will.” What he wanted to build wasn’t an escape from modern life, but a brief return to presence within it. “It’s dinner time and you’re at the end of the dining room table responding to a text message or email as if somebody is going to die if you don’t. It simply isn’t true. Watch your kids eat their mac and cheese, talk to them. We’re suffering. We need to be present.” He’s quick to add the obvious caveat. “Obviously we all have responsibilities outside of the home, but we don’t get that time with our loved ones back, especially those of us with children. I’ve been told time and time again, it goes fast. Yeah. It sure does.” Some people bristle at the idea of needing something to help them slow down. “They’re not my customer. And that’s okay.”

Let’s Do It Right, Says Borland

He’s characteristically blunt about where he thinks the broader hemp beverage industry has gone wrong. Since the 2018 Farm Bill opened a regulatory gray area, most of the category has treated that gap as a business strategy rather than a problem worth fixing, in his view. “They’ve seen this loophole as a quick way to make money and operate in the gray. I find that completely unacceptable.” His asks are specific: a real federal framework, hemp sourced exclusively within the U.S., hard limits that keep the products out of the hands of minors, enforced and mandatory third-party testing, transparent labeling, and licensing that separates real manufacturers from loophole artists. And taxes. “Yep. Taxes,” he says. “There are a couple of us wanting this done right, and the rest are easily compared to Shaggy and Scooby-Doo running businesses that deal in THC.”

Sunny Dayz does play a role in the current legislative conversation, Borland confirms. He’s just not ready to say what that role is, not yet.

He’s more direct about where the company itself is headed. Sunny Dayz is currently in a private funding round, and Borland doesn’t rule out an eventual sale, since most successful beverage brands get acquired eventually. Or the company keeps operating privately, if that ends up making the most sense. Either way, the mission right now stays the same. “My main job right now is to no longer allow the hemp beverage industry to be painted with a stoner brush, and to show it for what it really is,” he says. “Products consumed by high-income-earning professionals and parents who want a healthier beverage.”

A Proud Customer and Consumer Base

The range runs wider than people expect, all the way up to elderly customers who’ve folded it into their daily routine. “I receive emails from people in their seventies asking why we’re out of stock and how unhappy they are that they don’t have their Sunny’s,” Borland says. He’s called a few of them directly, including one woman in her seventies who just wanted to chat and tell him how much she loves the product. “It makes me so happy.”

The same instinct shows up in smaller ways too. One of the ways he spends his extra time, and tries to give back, is volunteer coaching the soccer team at Pleasant Grove High School, the same varsity program that kept him busy and out of trouble as a teenager, working alongside Chris Ecalono, a man he credits for much of who he became. It isn’t a resume line for him. It’s a chance, he says, at even a small part in shaping the next generation.

Everyone, he’ll tell you, faces the same test eventually: adversity, doubters, people talking behind your back. His answer is simple, and he doesn’t dress it up. “Move past them. Keep going. It really doesn’t matter what anyone has to say, especially if they want you to fail.” Telling the difference between that noise and the people actually in your corner, he says, isn’t hard. “Don’t confuse those people with the ones who want you to succeed. There’s a difference.”

Ask him what actually comes first, ahead of the company, the industry fight, all of it, and the answer doesn’t take long. Borland is a father of three, two girls and a boy, and a husband before anything else. “Those will always come ahead of everything else,” he says. “I will do anything for my children and wife. If they don’t feel loved and cherished, I have failed.”

Learn more about Sunny Dayz at DrinkSunnyDayz.com. Follow along on Instagram @drinksunnydayz and Kevin @kevin_borland.

Image Credit: Kevin Borland