HomeTech.fm - Episode 307 - Mastering the Business of Home Technology with Randy Stearns from D-Tools

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 12. I'm Seth Johnson from Sarasota, Florida. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How you doing, Seth? Good, Jason. Today, big, big, huge day. I got my little Sonos S2 app to update to my system. Okay. Have you updated already didn't go well not boy well it first of all first of all I've got to say the Sonos s2 app let's let's talk about the color choice on that one I'm not a fan of what they've done with the, with the, the icon. Like I want to change the icon. So, um, it's kind of gross. Um, yeah, it's like

not mustard yellow. It's like a darker, if you even have to qualify that it's not mustard yellow, then it was probably a bad color choice. It's a bad choice. It's like bad choice it's like a it's like a putty yellow but close to mustard i don't know it's very gross let's see i haven't seen it yet let's see if i can find it it's not the prettiest icon oh i see yeah i think i see clay i would call it clay clay okay that that would work it would work so the the. So the old Sonos icon has gone to a much better looking icon. It says Sonos has little and tiny letters below it. S1, it's gray, which is perfect.

And unfortunately, they've named it Sonos S1 controller. I can't read it because in iOS it goes dot dot dot after so many characters. So now that I can't use that at all because that's just going to get deleted now because it has this giant name underneath it. I don't know why. They could have just called it Sonos S1. Done.

But they had to go crazy with the name. I guess that was to force me over to the Clay app. That's right. It was all pre-planned. All pre-planned. I got in there, did the update, had to remember a password from 2014. Thank you, 1Password, because I had no idea I even set up a Sonos account. And yeah, I got in there and updated my system, went over to the S2 app and said it says hey seth uh you have products in your system that aren't compatible which is not what i wanted to hear

but i couldn't figure out what the product was because everything i have in my house is fairly modern and new get this jason i i have one of those um do you remember the old sonos bridge device like the little of course yeah yeah you put that in at the head end and and i guess i i have one of those i forgot it's been sitting in there just doing its thing for i don't know you had to kind of take it out and like blow the dust off and i i mean i can all i have to do now is hardware one of the speakers in and and i'm or i mean i like the hardware one one of them and i could i could do them on wi-fi but i just have to remove that from the system and then i guess i can update but um they're not they're not enticing me with this uh

clay app as we'll we'll call it yeah all right well so you got through the update though it's working now not yet no no i haven't i to go remove. I couldn't figure out what it was. I have to go remove the bridge from the project, I suppose. Oh, got it. And then I think it'll let you update to S2. Sorry. I was a little distracted. I've got to respond in the live chat here to a diehard reference. Yeah. The places we go. Well, let's jump in, Seth. We've got a great show here. We had Randy Stearns on, DTools CEO, and a great guy. I've had the opportunity to get to know Randy a little bit over the years, and we'll talk a little bit more about his background right before we jump into the

interview. But suffice it to say, really deep pedigree in the world of professional home technology, a strong leadership business background, and really enjoyed chatting with him, not just about DTools and a lot of the things that they have going on there, which was really interesting, but also getting Randy's perspectives on sort of business and leadership in the industry I thought was really, really valuable. So be sure to stay tuned for that. Some real-time follow-up in the chat room. Greg's saying they called it sandstone in the webinar.

And I don't, I think it's, I think it's clay. I'm going to go with clay. You know, sandstone, clay, like they're both um what's the word i'm looking for dirty and ugly looking unattractive we'll go with that all right well what do you say we we jump into some home tech headlines here let's do it cox communications is lowering internet speeds in entire neighborhoods. I should be more precise, lowering internet upload speeds. See, I think they tried to trick me on purpose with the headline. They're lowering upload speeds

in entire neighborhoods to stop what they consider, what Cox considers excessive usage in a decision that punishes both heavy users and their neighbors alike. Cox has been sending notices to some heavy internet users, warning them to use less data and notifying them of neighborhood-wide speed decreases. In one case, a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using, get this, 8 to 12 terabytes of data a month. That's an insane amount of data. Cox responded by lowering the upload speeds on the gigabit download reads Cox slows internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users, which of course gets you to click. And look, don't get me wrong.

I think this is really a bummer for the neighbors, but it is only upload speeds. And so I, you know, I don't know how much that's going to affect your average user. And number two, you know, it looks like they're just trying to get things stabilized. Cause if you go on and read the story, they've confirmed, let's see, they said identified a small number of neighborhoods where performance can be improved for all customers by temporarily increasing or maintaining download speeds and changing upload speeds for some of the service tiers. So I don't know, you get somebody using eight to 12 terabytes of data. I suppose that could have a negative overall performance effect on a neighborhood. Maybe they're just trying to mitigate that. I'm not sure. I wouldn't

want to be one of those neighbors though. He's got to be serving 4K movies to a wide audience there's no way you're using that much data i mean i i i shared my story where i backed up what um six five six terabytes of data i think is what it was and that was an accident um i just can't imagine like consistently using eight terabytes of data that's that was uh my entire movie library ended up getting going up to the cloud to be backed up and uh from from some software that got confused and uh that that bill was not fifty dollars extra i can tell you that bill was like closer to three hundred dollars extra which was not nice yeah yeah so um yeah there's got to be some serious uh piracy going on here or he's, or he's just backing up his NAS drive consistently.

Like that's, that's what he's doing. Wow. Uh, crazy. Feel bad for the neighbors. Yeah. I don't think most people would notice that 10 down. Probably not. Yeah.

Yeah. Several older Roku devices will lose access to the latest Hulu app on June 24th, 2020. The subscription-based streaming service has announced with an update to its support pages. Users of the affected devices will see messages like, Hulu is no longer supported on this device, or simply, your user session has expired. Very helpful. Super helpful. Yeah.

Yeah. We saw this first, I think, it reminds me, I know we've seen this a number of times, like on the Apple TV side, like the old Apple, I think this affected you, the old Apple TV side where you couldn't run the HBO Now app or something like that. And I guess it's this is kind of one of those things. It's that's going to come up like older devices. They they don't have the the guts inside of them to to keep moving in a modern world in 2020. So they've got to get updated or you lose features. Yeah, unfortunate reality. This does date back to devices introduced in 2012 and earlier.

So we're talking a pretty long time, eight years or so, eight years or more, I should say. So yeah, nothing inherently wrong here. Just a good thing to be aware of if you're a Roku user or if you're a home tech pro, you know, who may have folks out there using Hulu on one of these older devices, maybe good to get out in front of, but time to upgrade. And these things are really cheap and ubiquitous at this point as we've talked about before so right i think i picked one up for 30 at an office max yeah in like next to the candy bars they had uh steaming sticks that's right yeah they've moved to the impulse buy category now exactly yeah pack of gum and a roku that's funny all right lutron electronics has announced the addition of smart wood blinds to the triathlon and serena serena window coverings family in addition to

their timeless aesthetic smart wood blinds can be customized using the new natural light optimization feature of the lutron app to automatically adjust throughout the day allowing the optimal amount of daylight into a space and providing maximum comfort day after day. Uh, I like this. I don't know where you come down on wood blinds, Seth. I kind of like them. I agree. They're sort of a timeless look and we've got some of these in our house and, um, I think it would be nice. It would be nice to have these automated. Um, so I like seeing this from Lutron. Yeah, we have, um um these type like two inch wood blinds in our in our in our house most in most places most of the rooms not in the garage

the garage i have like a blackout roller thing that i pull down a blanket yeah it's actually it's actually a roller shade with a blackout i'm looking at it okay um just the way ahead of me um i i put it up when we first moved into the house so you couldn't see in the garage where we were doing all the construction and we had like our our entire whole new all our new appliances like came first and we were doing all the construction and stuff so like i i put that up where you couldn't see in the garage but it stayed and kind of keeps it nice and dark in here during the day um but, but yeah, I, I love the, the way the blinds look. I, what is really, what is really nice are the, the integrations that you can get off of this, um, you know,

through Serena or the triathlon, uh, through radio rod too. And that kind of thing. Pretty cool. They start at 699 for a three by five foot triathlon shade or 599 for a three by five Serena shade. Um, not bad. I I'm,'m thinking, like I have one window in the house that I would actually do this on, which is our front window, because like we never really open it. Like you have to kind of like go up there and dig behind the curtains and pull the little thing open. And it would be nice to put it there. But I think I need to replace the window first. Like it's a window from 1969. And if I put like an expensive shade in there or, you know, blind in this window, I'm going to regret that, I think, if I don't replace the window first. For sure.

Cart before the horse. Yeah, exactly. Cool. Good stuff. Well, quick news section here. All the links and topics we've discussed in this week's episode can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 307. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great stuff going on here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 307. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesdays, starting sometime between 7, 730 p.m. Eastern. We're a little bit later tonight, but you can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. All right, well, let's shift into our interview. But before we do that, just really quickly, we kind of jumped right in in this conversation with Randy. And so I want to set up a couple of just very quick context here.

In case anyone's not familiar, we didn't start the interview talking about what DTools really is. And, you know, very robust, well-established, known mostly for proposal and system design in the industry. But they've got a lot more functionality built in than just that. Really amounts to a pretty robust business management, business automation platform for home technology professionals. Also about a year and a half ago, they introduced their cloud offering, which is a second platform. They're supporting both what's called their SI and cloud platforms. And again, we sort of dove right in in the interview and started talking and wanted to make sure everybody had a little bit of context about what DTools is before we jump in. With that said, we'll transition in here. Randy,

as I mentioned earlier in the show, has a really deep background in the industry. He was a founder and CEO of Engineered Environments for about 20 years. And that was a very, very successful company in the Bay Area, became part of VIA, which many listeners to the show may be familiar with VIA and how that all played out. And we get into some of that in our interview with Randy, some of the takeaways from the VIA experiment, I'll call it. And then he moved into being CEO of DTools in 2015. Got a deep background in business and really enjoyed chatting with him. So with that, by way of rather long preamble, Seth, let's go ahead and jump right into our conversation with Randy. Hey, Randy, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm great, Jason. Thanks.

How are you? I'm doing great. I know you've got an exceptionally busy time in your life going on right now with work and lots of things going on in your personal life. We really appreciate you spending some time to come on the show with us. We're going to jump in and talk a lot about DTools and some of the latest developments there, but also, Randy, you and I have had a chance to get to know each other, and I think you bring a lot of really valuable perspectives from a business perspective, which I know is something that in the industry is really needed and valued. So we look forward to getting into some of those more business and leadership-focused topics as well on this conversation. But before we do that, let's kind of just talk about your personal role.

You're obviously the CEO there at DTools and share a little bit about what your day-to-day looks like there. Sure, I'd be happy to. In my role, at a high level, I guess I set the vision and direction and goals and provide leadership. But historically, what I've liked to do within the organizations that I've led is jump into the parts of the business that requires a little more attention. And I kind of jump in with both feet and really focus on that. And that's changed. I've been with the company for four and a half years now, and it's changed considerably over, you know, kind of through those years. When I started out, it was more, I don't know what to call it other than corporate hygiene was kind of what I focused on. There wasn't a board of directors. There was no corporate structure. I just set that up. I brought on some advisors. We looked at the org chart and restructured the org chart

a bit, set up metrics for the business. The option plan had expired. Things like that. Employment agreements weren't current. So, there's just a lot of cleanup that needed to be done. And so, that's kind of where I focused my time originally. And then I moved into a capital raising phase. We had ambitious goals of where we wanted to go in terms of going out and building a product with teams associated with that. And so raising capital and then, you know, jumped into the sales organization and restructured and led the sales team for a while. And then, and now I'm more focused on our customer success team and like making sure our customers are getting the most out of our product and having success with the product. And, you know,

the other thing I'd say is I've always been involved in, um, product design, product development, um, direction, I would say at some level. Um, and that's kind of gone throughout. So, but yeah, a bunch of different duties. Um, but I've enjoyed them all. Awesome. It reminds me of, um, uh, theory of constraints is, is an idea that I've heard of where, where as a leader in your business, you're always kind of trying to identify where the biggest constraint or bottleneck is.

Uh, and you're jumping in and working on that and getting that tuned up. And then you move to the next one and it's kind of usually drawn as a circle. Cause by the time you get through most of them, then the first one you started with, uh, needs some more attention again. Um, so there's kind of that idea of, of, uh, really focusing on, on where the business has needs at that current moment. Uh, appreciate you sharing that with us. Talk a little bit about your experience coming into DTools,

because I know that was a very well-established team that had been around for quite a while when you came in as a CEO, and you obviously came in with quite a pedigree in terms of your background in history in the industry, but I'm sure there were still some challenges involved with coming in to sort of lead an already really well-established team. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Well, I, you know, it came to me interestingly, Adam Stone, who's the founder of Facebook, um, reached out to me on Facebook and I never looked at Facebook. So it wasn't like

two months until I probably got back to him. And anyway, so we connected and he saw that I was advising a couple of other industry software products like portal and sleep plan, and probably interested in software and reached out. What the situation I was faced with when we spoke and talked about his vision and if my plans played into that, was faced with when we spoke and talked about his vision and My plans played into that was that the executive team which were four members had been together for ten years

And that Just struck me as a difficult situation to walk into so I posed Consulting role initially where I come in and just kind of get a better idea of the team and the culture and the opportunity. And that led to a strategic planning session that I led, which, you know, we developed together a pretty exciting and aggressive plan. And then it was interesting to watch that team after I'd been working with them for two months, kind of all look at each other and then all look at me kind of as, okay, but we need someone to lead us, you know, in this plan.

And they just asked me right there on the spot if I would be willing to take the role. So, yeah, it was, it just all came together very nicely. And the team works together exceedingly well. And I couldn't be happier but it was a bit of a concern going in for sure it's interesting yeah yeah i noticed i've been out of the integrator slash sales slash design role for a little while here mostly doing like software development product product management that kind of of thing for a distributor. But DTools is known very well over my tenure as an integrator. And I've only been gone like six years or so

from having day-to-day interaction with these types of products. It looks like it's changed a lot. And I see that there's like two different platforms, the SI platform and now cloud platform. It may have been that you had those six years ago and I just wasn't paying enough attention, but, um, it sounds like that that's a pretty challenging thing to do to have both like a hard product that you load up onto the computer, like with servers and that kind of thing. And then a cloud platform, uh, what kind

of challenges do you have managing those two things at the same time? So first of all, no, you weren't missing anything. DTools Cloud is a newer product. It's been on the market for about a year and a half now. And introducing a second product line is tricky. Now, there are obviously a lot of companies out there that have dozens and hundreds of product lines, but this is our second one. It requires not just additional resources like additional employees and capital, but there's a risk of cannibalization, which we've had to manage very actively. Fortunately for us, our system integrator had kind of outgrown the residential market.

It became a little unwieldy. It's designed more for like an enterprise size organization now. And we focused more on the commercial AV and commercial security sector with that product. And of course, there's the 5% of residential system generators that are larger, and it's a great product for them. But that opened the door to enable us to target this market that we've historically dominated with our new solution, with our cloud solution.

So that's what we've done. But think of it this way. There's two times the amount of work and cost associated with running two product lines from a marketing standpoint, different sales teams, different product management teams, different development teams,

different support teams. So it's a costly undertaking until we get those revenues up to a point where it's self-sustaining. Right. So we've had to, yeah, we've had to work through that. But anticipating those costs is why it was what led us to the capital raise, you know, in my early, in my first year with the company.

And that's helped us through. So you've seen a pretty good adoption come from the cloud, from like the smaller... Because when I worked as an integrator, we were a small shop, like you're saying. And we always had our eye there on using DTools. Like it was always there, ready to go. Like we were almost ready to pull the trigger at some point.

And then like something would come up and we'd have to focus all of our attention on that. And, and I knew in my heart of hearts, like this was the way to go, but we just never could quite get over that hump, that initial hump to like, uh, bring all of those solutions together that we had kind of like haphazardly arranged around the office, you know, work over there, a spreadsheet on my computer, but not over there on my bosses. So yeah, it was, it was kind of, kind of crazy going back and thinking about all of the, the things that we were trying to do when there was already a solution there right in front of us. But so, so the cloud, the cloud product sounds like it would have been perfect for an integrator in

my shoes. Yeah. Yeah, probably. And by the way, Seth, I love hearing you say that because I've always thought of details as an aspirational product. It's like what people hope to be able to implement someday. Again, when they have the money and the resources and the time to take on a full software implementation. But that's the beauty of cloud is that you literally just start using it. I mean, within minutes. And, you know, you're putting out a proposal in an hour.

Awesome. So you literally just step in and it's great from that standpoint. And I can, you know, when we get a little further on in the conversation today, I'll explain why, but. Yeah. Yeah. Let's actually jump, jump to that right now and talk about cloud, uh, specifically in some of the areas that you've, it's obviously a platform that you're continuing to develop and build out aggressively. Uh, but talk about some of the areas that you've targeted initially in this first, uh, year and a half, what are some of the specific use cases that you guys sort of prioritized as you, as you released this product? Sure. Well, I'll start off by saying that it uses the same product library as we use with system integrator, which is one of, you know,

that's just such a huge part of our product and our product lines. It's this massive product library that goes deep with all the engineering data and drawings and I should say, you know, Visio shapes and AutoCAD blocks and all that. It starts with that. We have a CRM component to D2L's cloud

to help lead tracking and to manage opportunities and do forecasts and that sort of thing. And then really strong estimating and proposal capabilities. The estimating kind of comes in two forms. You can use a visual quoting environment, which for those in the audience that were familiar with slate plan it's kind of it's kind of that feel you know more of a drag-and-drop sort of onto a set of plans or you can even create your own rooms and drag them in so you can design that way that's more

visual sense even on a photo for example like if you're looking at a room and you want to put a TV on a wall and you can drag and drop into a photo, for example, like if you're looking at a room and you want to put a TV on a wall, and you can drag and drop into a photo. And then, or obviously the more traditional way, which is more of a list view approach. And then, you know, we also, you can either design or you can do takeoffs. There are some times when you get a set of, you get a set of drawings and you're told to bid this from a consultant and asked to bid the job. And you can also do it that way.

You can drag the device onto a drawing that exists to get it into the billing materials. So quoting and takeoff capabilities, a multimedia proposal presentation. So it's not just a, think of a lot of people just think of a document like a PDF, but you can include videos. You can include cut sheets. You can include photographs and a gallery of photographs or interviews with the client or whatever you want as part of your proposal presentation, which is much more, you know,

present day than just a printed document. So that's a cool part of it. And then change orders are built in, purchasing is built in. And so what we're headed to next with the product is more along the project planning and project management capabilities, like item tracking.

After you do the purchasing, you need to track those items to see when they're received, when they're staged, when they go out to the job. Scheduling, work orders, timekeeping, those sorts of features are all on the immediate roadmap. And we'll be coming out later this year. Yeah. Awesome. And let's jump into those. Yeah, that segues perfectly into sort of the next conversation, which is, you know, in an extent, in a sense, I should say, a little bit more specific to SI these days. But I want to phrase the question more generally, because I know that you're a process-driven guy, Randy. You and I have had a chance to discuss that before.

And so talk about the importance of that. Again, feel free to highlight what's sort of included in SI today. But broadly speaking, why do you think these sorts of process tools and really business tools, SI is very much not just a design and proposal tool at this point. It's a pretty robust business automation or business management platform. So talk about the importance of that and highlight some of the uh the key examples um sure be happy to do that so you know si if you think about it it um starts with the beginning of the sales process um and takes a user through the estimating and proposal generating of drawings through its integration with Visio and AutoCAD, and then a full set of project management tools,

and then into the service management. So everything except accounting. And it creates this workflow for all the various users that might be in the project at a given time or from time to time, more likely. But the nice thing about that is we do have, you mentioned like with workflow rules that can, for example, auto assign a task when a certain thing is completed

or draw the attention of a manager. I'll just give you some examples. If a proposal gets to be over a certain size, let's just say $100,000, that could auto notify the general manager or business owner to take a look at that proposal. Or if the gross margin gets below a certain level, below 30% or 35%, that could trigger a review and lock the project down. So there's a lot of notifications and workflow rules that can be set like that.

And then, you know, just also how the project works through the, to your point, through the process from department to department and guides the users. So, anyway, there's a lot of capabilities built into the software. And I don't even know what I was talking about there. Well, I think I can kind of pick up a little bit here. SI is the one I'm most familiar with because, I mean, I did work for a few shops that did actually utilize DTools. And so I'm not completely blind to, you know, not seeing all the features and everything that go along with it.

But and I've set up more than enough CRM in my life to to over time um develop a product and and products at this point that specifically target an industry like the custom integrator for the custom integrator or system integrator channel um and and give them an extra tool in their tool belt so to speak uh to be able to have a successful business which which isn't exactly like an easy thing to do because you have all as a system integrator, you have like a ton of product that you people, people always ask me what I do. And it's like, I can't tell you. One day I'm working on a central vacuum cleaner. The next day I'm hanging a $7,000 TV. Like it could be anything in between. And I have no idea what it's going to be so it was

always tough to do uh that in the business and having tools like these d tools and and and being able to track product and multiple projects across town counties away that kind of thing uh is is a is a is a great thing for for any company in my opinion um it's just it is it's kind of one of those things when people ask me you know uh what what software I thought was, was the best to get involved with. I was, well, you know, DTools is great. There's, there's a couple of other ones out there. But the thing is, is like, you've got to put in your time to learn that new tool. You, you as an integrator, you have to figure out how your business fits in with this new tool and set up your process. Like Jason was talking about from a to b to cd and and how this is going to help your company move your pipeline along

let's talk a little bit about the the business of integrators and and how that it's kind of a tough business to stay profitable in you know like i said you're you're working on central vac one day with pvc back back pipe and repairing that kind of thing. Cause there's a, uh, something stuck in the pipe. And then the next day you're hanging one of those $7,000 TVs. Um, how, how do you stay profitable in a business like that? Having like different, uh, products that you put in, what, what do you, what suggestions do you have for the pros out there, uh, to, to keep their business in line? It's a good question. So I ran a system integration business for 20 years, and I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned is the things that eat up profits. And there's a handful that I

would point to that I think are just so critical for these business owners to keep a close eye on. The first is underestimating labor, and not just installation labor. I mean, project management labor, design labor, programming labor, delivery time. So, you know, there's labor, if you really track your labor costs, generally, I would say 95% of those in the industry are underestimating labor and not getting paid for their people's time. So that's something that is critically important. Design oversights is another one. They design systems and they miss, they miss stuff, you know, the, they have rack, there's rack parts that are missing and there's power supplies that are

missing. And there's, I mean, all kinds of things that are just, you know, that get missed. Um, so, and they don't have the, they don't feel like they can go back and charge for those items in a change order after the fact, cause it was their mistake. Right. And maybe they're right. But, um, you know, we want to avoid design oversight whenever possible. Um, and then not charging for change orders. Well, not tracking and not charging for change orders. Right. That happens all the time. There's, Hey, it was just, it was just one of these.

We just added this, we just threw this in, cause we had it on the truck or whatever. And those things get just thrown in all the time and not charged for. And then the other is labor efficiency or labor utilization. And I want to touch on that in a minute. But those first three, what I'm proud proud of with the tools is that it eliminates the possibility of underestimating labor it eliminates the possibility of design oversights and it eliminates the possibility of not charging for additional items and it does that by attaching labor of all types to um to each product that's added to the project if it's set up properly. The design oversights, if you're using the drawing and the bill of materials, if you add something to

the drawing, it adds it to the bill of materials and pegs it as a change order item. You can't get away from seeing that staring you in the face if there's a change to this project. And the same thing, if you take it off the drawing, it's out of the building material. So it tracks those changes for you. And so that's how it handles the change orders and the design oversight, it's kind of all in one process, which is one of the beauties of the software, I think. When it comes to labor

utilization, and I'll just share something that I did at Engineer Environments, and that is I got to a point where I think the guys are spending an average of five and a half, six hours a day working on a job, if I analyzed it. And I i knew that was a problem i knew it was you know that was just overhead that i was creating and so i um told them that they needed to go they had company vehicles they needed to go bring a home go directly to the job site they'd start the clock when they got to the job site and they stopped the clock when they left and the only time time that was overhead was PTO, holidays, training time. So we brought them in for trainings or we sent them to trainings. And then their biweekly safety meetings. And so they were like on average about 87% efficient or utilized, really utilized. And we and it just, we could, you know, we'd get the same work down to six people that used to require eight. And it was, um, it really led to a huge impact on the bottom line. So

those are, those are things I would look for, um, when you're looking to create, you know, better, a better bottom line. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, really valuable advice there. I think shifting gears here a little bit, but on a similar thread, this is a difficult industry. The home technology business in general is a challenging one in many ways. It's also a very fun one, but there are lots of difficulties and there's conversation happening in the industry at a slightly increased pace and seems to steadily increase about, okay, does this lead, is there going to be more consolidation? Are we going to see companies sort of come together and merge on a more frequent basis? And there are certainly some difficulties to scaling a business, and you've alluded to some of those already. Talk about your, your general viewpoint on the difficulties of scaling and the importance of sort of the,

these local presence and really close client relationships. Yeah. I, you know, scaling a business and we say scaling a business, I think of that as multiple locations, right. And through acquisition or consolidation or just expansion into new locations. But there are a lot of challenges. And I was involved in a consolidation and we did a lot of things right. But one of the things we failed to recognize

is the differences between markets. And when I talk lot of things right, but one of the things we failed to recognize is the differences between markets. And when I talk about differences between markets, I'm talking about market sophistication and average project size and talent levels that are available and things like that. And that leads to a difference in business models. And so a lot of times when you have multiple locations, the thinking is you want to standardize and just make them all the same. And so you have consistency from location to location. But that's where the rub is, is that they're different. And so if you standardize, you create new challenges. And so that's, I think, one of the issues that the industry sees when it ceased to, you know, expand into multiple locations. And the other is what you brought up, Jason, which is that local presence is so critical, personalities and relationships and it's kind of like who you know.

And that's, you know, at some level, I mean, these are small businesses. They're very personal in nature. And it really comes down to relationships in the end. So just, you know, creating a corporate environment where it doesn't feel like that exists anymore is, you know, I think is a formula for disaster and just something to be aware of. Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate you sharing that insight. And you alluded to VIA, which was obviously really a bold experiment. I was part of that out of the LA branch and really some very, very strong companies, some of the best companies in the industry came together.

And of course it didn't end the way any of us wanted it to. Are there any sort of big takeaways or key sort of lessons learned from that that you would think would be valuable maybe for anyone in the business of home technology to learn? Yeah. So many. I wouldn't even know where to start, but I'll give it a try. A whole nother episode, it sounds like. You know, I went into that adventure feeling pretty confident. I had been leading one of the largest system integration businesses in the country.

I had been CDA chairman. I was, I mean, had an Ivy League degree, had an MBA. I mean, I was a pretty smart guy, I felt like, for the industry. And I just, I thought I knew what it took. And I was wrong, because it introduced new challenges that I just hadn't been faced with before. Things like team dynamics. I mean, I talk about team and the importance of team. I can't under-emphasize, right? But at Engineer Environments, my team was all handpicked by me or my lieutenant who'd been

with me for 12, 15 years and knew me really well and knew the culture. So they're all handpicked as opposed to at VIA, they were handed to me. Hundreds of them. Right. And it's just like, that's the team dynamics are just so important. And we're so challenging. I can't even tell you, I mean, there was infighting, there was, I mean, you name it, there were different management styles that led to confusion and inefficiency. And so all that stuff has to do with team and team dynamics. So that was a big learning. Corporate politics, never heard of it. Never experienced it.

I never heard of it, right? Obviously, I've heard of it. But it never existed in my world. And all of a sudden, oh, my God, this guy's talking to this guy. This guy's talking to this guy. They're scheming. And I'm like, see, didn't even know what to do with that. That's not me at all. I mean, I'm so kind of anti that sort of, you know, approach to business.

And so that a whole new learning. And, you know, I wish at that time I was married to my current wife because she really understands that stuff and how to watch your back. And so that would have been really helpful. And then, you know, but other things like board management. I mean, I had a board at Engine Environments, but I ran it and I told them what was going on and I wasn't getting directives from the board. And so this is very, very different

and also requires some finesse in negotiation and things like that. So, you know, two other things. So those are more qualitative sort of things. Some, some things are a little more just nuts and bolts are, you know, debt, boy, debt is a ball and chain and a life sentence all at the same time. It just really burdened us and I'm glad I've been able to avoid it. I was

able to avoid it before that and been able to avoid it since then. But we took on a lot of debt. We took on $12 million in debt when we pulled those companies together and that was just a real challenge to work with. The other thing I learned in retrospect, and I wish I had realized it at the time, is to trust my gut. We had advisors in the business, we had a board, and I have to say that some of those folks led me astray and led me to make some bad decisions, some bad hiring decisions, some bad software software selection decisions even frankly even my own departure from the company guided was guided by advisors and I just you know in retrospect I just wish I had trusted my gut at every turn and I realized we would have been way better off so I

encourage those of you have been around for a while and, um, kind of think, you know, what you're doing, you probably do and just go, go with what you know. Yeah. Yeah. There, there's something to be said for, uh, in intuition and, you know, some, sometimes intuition can lead us astray, but typically if it's in an area that we've been working in for many, many years, uh, and we really know our stuff, then, then typically we're, we're well served to, uh, to follow that intuition. stuff, then, then typically we're, we're well-served to, uh, to follow that intuition. And so appreciate you sharing some of those insights. I think it's really valuable from a, you know, from a very much a bottom up sort of boots on the ground

perspective. I was a project manager, uh, at VIA in Los Angeles, and, uh, I, I wasn't, uh, exposed to any of the higher level stuff, uh, that you alluded to, but I know there were challenges involved just in generally with those team dynamics and what you alluded to a few minutes ago about really trying to standardize things and getting everybody using the same, even like accounting software and things that seem relatively straightforward or like they should be, it was really challenging. And I remember that that came all the way down through the whole organization. We felt some of the ripple effects of that. So it was a great learning experience for me personally. I was honored to be a part of it and was, of course, disappointed in how it all ended. But really, again, appreciate you sharing some of those insights and lessons learned from that. Cool stuff. So we're running up against our time a little bit here. But as we wrap up, I'd love to zoom out to that general topic of leadership. You've been in the business for quite a while. You've run some very successful companies and

continue to do so. Talk about any sort of tactics or leadership strategies that you personally have found effective that you think might be of value to others. I can talk about my style, which is what's most familiar to me. And my style is I set the vision and kind of strategic direction and goals for the company. I think it's really important to, and I do that, back up for a second, I do that in collaboration with my leadership team. I would never do it in an autocratic fashion and just expect people to follow. So it's important to get buy-in, especially by the leadership team, so that they're perpetuating those concepts and that vision. And then it's important to communicate that vision

and plan regularly across the organization. Kind of keep the eye on the prize, if you will, and stay focused. Team is so important to me. So trusting, investing in, and empowering others, I think is critical to my style and encouraged for those who are looking for nuggets to take away and bring into their businesses. And then monitor the results and not their activities. The activities are not so important. In other words, how they do it. But what gets done.

Because everybody has different styles and different ways of doing things that suit their personality. And they probably know how they're most effective and you may not, it may not be the way, you know, you achieve what you, um, set out here. So, um, anyway, that's a little bit about how I work with people. Um, and then, you know, more and more as I've, I don't know, I was going to say gotten older, but I'll say matured in this, you know, in this role of running a business, I,'t know if I was going to say gotten older, but I'll say matured in this, you know, in this role of running a business. I, you know, my job has become more, has become a little more of a coach and focusing on removing

barriers so my people can be successful. And, you know, and I love that part of, that part of the job. And I think the employees of Detailic really appreciate when I, you know, pull them aside and sit down with them and work through and do a role play or, you know, talk them through the different ways that that could have gone. It's just a really valuable conversation to have. And, you know, and last I would say, I've learned to be more curious or be curious longer, I think, and resist the temptation to give them the answer.

And that's probably a maturity thing as well. I mean, I just, you know, it's like, I might know what the answer is and I maybe often do, but it's important to hear how they come to it and then ask them questions about that and be more curious and inquisitive and help them develop their mind and their processes and their thinking around how they make decisions. And so, you know, it's just one of the other things I've learned along the way. And I'm sure there's a hundred others, but those are a few that come to mind right now. Cool. Very cool. Well, thank you for those, those nuggets of advice. It's all good stuff. I'm sitting here thinking about my day to day and like the curious thing.

I always like that because you can, you not only figure out how someone gets to from A to Z, but you see that they have taken a different path and as you see that you grow and you learn from exactly path that they've taken so you can adapt your ways as well so i i like that one uh well randy i do want to thank you for coming on the show tonight um and and sharing all this information and and topics with us but i do want to kind of bring it back to DTools here at the end of the show. I know that we don't have Cedia in September to get to.

And I know that typically that's the time that like we're all gearing up and we're going to come out and see you. But so what, what, what, what is exciting right now at DTools? What are you guys all excited about? Not necessarily what you're going to release at Cedia, but like, what are you guys excited about? And what's next on the horizon for the team over there at DTools? Well, I think there's a few things that I don't know how much time we have left. But, you know, with the cloud development is moving really nicely. And frankly, it's a sexy product.

It's just it's fun to work in. It's visually beautiful and just moving in all the right directions. And one of the things that we added recently for cloud and for SI is dealer specific pricing. So we have relationships, partnerships with hundreds of manufacturers and several of the industry distributors where we get dealer-specific pricing. So I'll give you an example. If the dealer puts in their account number and their zip code, and then they start working in our software, not only the the products but all of their pricing is fed through to them To start doing proposals like that's why I say with cloud. It's like you just start working you put you know You log into a few

So account information in and you've got all your parts and pricing right there and ready to assemble into a into a proposal so That you know that part of the business is fun and interesting. And it's even gone a step further with distributors like ADI and manufacturers like Savant. We have real-time live feeds from them of the latest pricing information. So electronically just read right in. So, you know, that part's pretty cool, those relationships. With SI, we are working hard to round out the remaining features, the feature gaps, let's say that, in that product, you have a full end to end solution.

We've added a service module recently with the ability to create service contracts and manage service relationships. We have coming out next month, a new dashboard capability. So when you turn on the software, you get a dashboard of relevant information for you. It's customizable on a per-user basis. We're adding some additional CRM capabilities.

We're adding Gantt charts. So for project planning, it was starting end dates and responsible parties and dependencies. That will be part of the July release, as well as custom checklists for things like punch lists. And a lot of products these days have like setup and configuration steps you need to go through and you can create custom checklists for this product, for that product. So a lot of cool things that can be done

with that checklist feature. And then the thing that I'm most excited about, cause I'm a business guy at heart and that's what I get excited about. Later this year, we are improving our timekeeping capability in system integrator, which in and of itself may not be that exciting, but what it gives us is the ability to do accurate job costing because we already track products that are purchased and their costs and sell and all that. So when we get better timekeeping capabilities, we can do accurate job costing, which leads to revenue recognition on a percentage of completion basis and leads to backlog reporting

and leads to labor utilization reporting. So those are four critical business reports, as far as I'm concerned, for any business owner that we haven't been able to deliver to them in the past. Awesome. Well, that's all great stuff. I'm really excited for you guys and wish you all the success with that. Randy, if anyone is listening and wanted to connect with you, ask a follow-up question, maybe learn a little bit more about DTools.

What would be the best way for them to do that? For learning more about DTools, obviously our website is the best resource at d-tools.com. But I'll be honest, I love talking to people in the industry. And if anybody just wants to, you know, email me and have a conversation, I will almost always make time for that. So my email address is randys at d-tools.com. And yeah, I hope to hear from some people and look forward to those conversations. That's great. And I'll just close on that by saying,

again, Randy, you and I have had a chance to get to know each other a little bit. And to anyone listening, Randy's a wealth of information. So if you've got questions about business, especially, I would encourage you to take Randy up on that offer. Great, appreciate you throwing that out there. take Randy up on that offer. Great.

Appreciate you throwing that out there. So Randy, thanks so much. Really appreciate you coming on. Learned a lot. And again, wish you all the best moving forward. Thanks, you guys. Jason, Seth, take care. It's good talking to you.

All right. Well, that'll do it for our interview with Randy. Again, really enjoyed that. He mentioned, Seth, something there at the end that we didn't spend any time diving into during the interview, but he talked about the new service module that they have. And I think this is a pretty cool feature. They've got a bunch of functionality built in where you can kind of manage ongoing client relationships and recurring revenue contracts and things like that. And even just little things that I think the industry has been needing for quite a while, like the ability to, when you run a project proposal, if you want to put in recurring items,

you can do that now. So whereas before, if you had like service plans that you were trying to sell at maybe $35 a month, it was really kind of clunky to try and insert those into your project proposals. You now have the ability to treat those as sort of separate items and they display separately on your proposal report. So you can have all of your one-time project costs, you know, labor, equipment, all of that displayed in one area

and then below it separately, sort of your $50 a month service plan or whatever the case may be. Cool. So that's kind of cool stuff for us at OneVision and our partners. We're certainly excited about that new functionality. Yeah, definitely. It's always good to get new toys to play with, whether it's software or new tools for the tool belt. It's always nice to have

something come in. Yeah, absolutely. Coming down the home stretch here, you got a pick of the week. Well, speaking of new tools, yeah i found this uh weird crazy little uh i don't even know what this works i have no idea if this works but it's a little wire stripper and crimper twisting wire stripping and twisting tool i've never seen this before i thought it was clever and i was like well the video is fun enough to watch it's going to be our pick of the week. So there you go. This is like a little, I don't know how to describe this,

like a little adapter that you put onto the end of your drill. It's like a drill bit, I guess. And you insert wires just so into the front end of this. And then when you turn the drill on, it strips the wires and crimps them together in a nice, tidy coil. That is crazy. It's kind of fun to watch, right? Yeah, that's...

If it works anything like that, then I'd say, hey, that's... I have no idea if this works. This could be just like voodoo magic that they're showing. Smoke and mirrors. And they're just editing the video together creatively, but it certainly looks fun. Well, there you go. And a father's father's day promotion to boot 50% off. Yeah. I see that it's ending soon. I may just, uh, buy that for myself right now. And, uh,

there you go. Yeah. Excellent. But yeah, it's, uh $35, or I guess it's $14, $29 for the electric version, and then they have a manual version. I don't know why you would get the manual version, Jason. I don't either. I think you have to have the one that goes on the drill. Yeah. I can just see the old school electricians scoffing at this. We're saying it's genius.

I had no idea. I don't. Fair. This is, well, you know what reminds me of like, I used to, this may be kind of cool for if you need, if it works and you can do it fast and it stays sharp and that kind of thing. But they have those little, and I can't think of the names of them, but they're like these little like orange, just not the wire nuts, but it's like little orange things you stab the wires into

and it connects them all together and uh i think that's a great little um product you're getting some feedback in the uh in the chat greg it doesn't work for cat5 so it may be used for you the verdict is in from the chat room here looks like uh rashid is saying that um ideal has a similar one spin twist wire connector socket amazon nine dollars and fifty cents yep that's what it looks like um and greg is uh saying wago which i think is the name of the connectors i'm thinking of uh i i grabbed a bucket of those uh to replace the twist-on caps that I get. And it's very helpful to have those because then you just stab the wires in, and then if you need to pull them out, you kind of wiggle them and pull them out one at a time

rather than having to undo an entire branch circuit of neutrals. You just pull one out that you need. There you go. All right. Cool. Well, good, good pick of the week. Uh, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We would love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at home tech.fm or visit home tech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. We want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page. If you don't know about our Patreon

page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for the inside baseball conversations about useless tools, useless tools. Yeah. And there was, there was a couple of, uh, I think we were talking a little bit of unify later on in the day and there was some other fun things that we were talking about. Cool. Yeah. If you're looking for other ways to support the show, uh, we would really appreciate a positive review on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show.

And we're all about kind of building this community and audience. So if you get entertainment or value or hopefully both out of the Home Tech podcast, we would really appreciate if you took a few minutes to go leave us a review. Absolutely. Well, Jason, that wraps up this week's show. Pretty good one. I like getting into the business management side of things. I don't get to play in that area as much as you do anymore.

Sitting back and doing database migrations. Yeah, it was fun. I like mixing it up a little bit. And certainly Randy has a lot of really valuable experience and perspectives on those topics. So glad to hear you enjoyed it as well. I hope you have a great weekend, Seth. We'll look forward to connecting with you next week. All right.

Sounds good. Have a good weekend, Jason. Thanks everybody for tuning in tonight. All right. Take care.