HomeTech.fm - Episode 310 - "Process Therapy" with Portal's Kirk Chisholm

Episode Date: July 3, 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, July 3rd. From Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, happy Canada Day. Happy Canada Day. That's right. We're recording on Wednesday, July 1st, and it's Canada Day. So to all of our brethren north of the border, happy birthday, I guess. I put the little funny cartoon there in the hub about Americans not knowing what Canada Day is. Guess what day it is? It's three days until my birthday.

That's right. That's right. That's right. Well, speaking of Canada Day, actually, Seth, we got a great interview this week. We had Kirk Chisholm. He's the founder and CEO of Portal. And he came on the show and really fun conversation. We got into Kirk's background, which is a really interesting background. I won't spoil it, but he's got a really sort of deep and winding kind of history in the industry with some really interesting facets to it. So we spent a good deal of time sort of talking about his background and general perspectives on the industry. And then we got into this, what they're calling this ultimate dealer study. And this is a really cool project that they've kicked off there at Portal. They're a very sort Portal. It'll all make sense when you listen

to the interview, what the tie-in there is with Portal and the company and why they're doing this survey. But generally speaking, it's a really in-depth dive into what they've identified as kind of the 16 steps or 16 elements of process that it takes to run a successful integration company. And they're doing this really deep dive and looking to share all of these insights and data that they're finding back with the industry. So it's a really neat project and enjoyed chatting with him about it. If you're a home tech pro in the audience, you'll definitely enjoy hearing more about it. Yep. Really fun conversation and a lot of interesting tidbits and really, really good

stories Kirk had there. Very, very entertaining to hear him talk about his early days. So check that out. But Jason, what do you say first? We jump into some home tech headlines. Let's do it. CD Expo Virtual will take place September 15th through 17th. According to a save-to-date email sent out from Emerald Expositions, the producer of the event, attendees will now enjoy high-impact inspirational sessions covering the industry's hottest topics, have face-to-face meetings with brands,

discover products, and most importantly, stay connected with the community. So, Jason, Cedia, not happening live and in person, but virtually, September 15th and 16th. Save the date. Yeah. Yeah. And no major shock here.

We all kind of knew this was coming when they announced the in-person event was officially going to be canceled. They had mentioned plans on a virtual event. So it's good to see them moving forward with it. We've got save the dates now so we can all get that on our calendar. It says the 15th and the 16th will virtually host its education conference. So look forward to that. And then it says following the three-day live event, the Expo virtual platform will be available on demand through the end of 2020. So I think that's great as well. It gives people an opportunity.

One of the things we talked about is you don't have to travel now, so maybe this even opens it up to more people than could have gone before, and also having that on demand so people can go back and watch it after the fact. Pretty neat. So I think this is good. There was kind of a stream over the last couple of weeks about these virtual events. You've got SnapAV doing their, let's see, what are they calling it? Their SnapPro Live has been announced, and they've got that scheduled, I believe. Let me look up the dates here while I'm doing that. Also, Google announced that they're going to have one. July 8th for Google. July 8th for Google. Yeah, gosh, they made the dates a little bit hard to find on here.

So I apologize for that. But anyway, SnapAV, we'll have a link to that in the show notes. That one's coming up. Google, again, has theirs. And Crestron as well, looking to host or get one of these on the schedule. Yeah, Crestron's September 15th and 16th as well. So if you're competing a little bit with the, the, uh, really, I, I don't know what to tell you, but there, there you go. They're not, they're still not part of the event. They are

the event. So there you go. Yeah. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. So this will be the new thing. I mean, again, I think we talked about it before and ultimately I think the key to these virtual events will be to look at them in their own right and avoid the temptation to compare them to in person events, right? Like look at the virtual event, um, for what it is. And, and I think it'll be really interesting to see what big organizations like Cedia and big companies like SnapAV are able to do with these. So be on the lookout for more on that. All right, moving on from there. House Democrats yesterday, this week, unveiled a $100 billion broadband plan that's gaining quick support from consumer advocates.

Quote, the House has a universal fiber broadband plan we should get behind, Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Legislative Council Ernesto Falcon wrote in a blog post. The House Majority Whip James Clyburn announced the Accessible Affordable Internet for All Act, saying it has more than 30 co-sponsors and invests $100 billion to build high-speed internet broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved communities to ensure the resulting internet service is affordable. Fiber everywhere.

I think this is a great idea. This is something that, some of these things in here, I just couldn't believe believe don't already exist. Not only does it develop the underserved areas where you have download and upload speeds maxing out at 25 megabits per second, and somehow that's considered high-speed internet. No, get fiber out there to those homes. Equalize everything. But also I noticed that it, part of this bill and that they were, they were, there would be a law that would be, this would be part

of the law that passed. Like if you build a road or a highway or something like you go ahead and put the conduit in for the fiber at the same time. Like, yeah, yeah, that makes, that makes a whole lot of sense. I saw that too. It's like, oh, that makes sense. Why didn't anyone think of that before? We should have been doing this for years. We've been building all these dumb roads and the roads can't do anything except move our product back and forth.

But you still can't have high-speed internet out in rural areas because we weren't thinking. It comes down to cost, i guess yeah at this point yeah they call it like the dig once act or something like that uh is an element of this but anyways this has a ways to go it's it's just a bill um it's got to get through our wonderfully unified uh legislative system right now so you know don't don't hold your breath. This thing probably has a lot of twists and turns to go before it gets there, if it ever does. But I generally think it's a great idea. We're behind here in the country, I think, I feel like in terms of infrastructure.

And we've clearly seen the need for that moving forward to make sure that everybody is able to get online and have access to high-speed internet. So there are cost elements and politics, of course, involved with all of this, but I think it's good to see these efforts being made. Just put the conduit in. Just put the conduit in. Just put the conduit in at least, right? Come on. Learn a lesson from integrators here. Right, exactly.

That's what I was just thinking. It's every conversation I've ever had. Who's your friend. I'll just put the conduit in. We'll make the decision later. That's right. All right. Well, big news coming from Microsoft. They announced that all their physical Microsoft stores will be closing. Change is part of a strategic change, and we'll see Microsoft push more effort and money into digital storefronts. Microsoft announced in the change this past week. This was pretty big shocking news, I suppose, that all the Microsoft stores,

that if I go to the mall and see our Microsoft store that we have here that has fives and sixes of employees. I've never seen anybody actually in there buying anything. Um, sometimes I see kids playing games on the Xbox that they have out front, but otherwise literally everybody's down the street, down across the way at the Apple store. Like it's, it's almost embarrassing to kind of like have those stores almost right by each other and see like who is not in the Microsoftrosoft store and then who is at the apple store yeah it's really interesting because you know you see them and like other than obvious stuff the logo and look and generally of the store it's like an identical model to apple and it's not like a small difference in terms of the foot traffic that you see

like you said they're often close together We've got a couple of those here, at least one of those here in Colorado. I feel like I might be thinking of Los Angeles when I used to live there, but yeah, I've seen that. I've seen them like close together and you walk by Apple and it's like just packed and then you go by the Microsoft store and it's like cricket.

So I don't know, for whatever reason, that just didn't work out. And I think they're branding this as a strategic change, probably a euphemism there, but good for them. Make the hard decision, cut your losses and go with a model that works for you. Yeah, and it's not like Microsoft doesn't have great products.

They do have, they have good software. They have good, the Xbox is very popular among gamers who play that kind of stuff. The peripherals are great like uh we kind of had a long conversation in the hub about what microsoft actually sold that was good uh there's there's a number of things out there that that they they do well um but having a retail store i mean having a restore retorse a retail store today in in in in wake of COVID-19, like when literally everything's been shut down and that Apple store down the but I can't say I'm, you know, not surprised that it happened, but I can't say that I'm not surprised that, like, it happened now either. Right, right. In a bit of good news here, it says reports are that all employees from Microsoft

stores will have a chance to stay with the company, according to a spokesperson. So that's good news. Yeah. By the way, Seth, a spokesperson. So that's good news. Yeah. By the way, Seth, real quickly, before I shift to the next headline, I couldn't leave this loop open. I finally found it. Snap AV's event, they've announced plans.

They have not announced dates yet. That's why I couldn't find them. Gotcha. So they've got plans to have a virtual event, but dates are forthcoming. Shifting to our last headline here in a filing this week, connected speaker maker Sonos noted plans to cut 12% of its workforce in addition to closing some of its smaller offices and its garish showroom, according to this story, in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood. The move follows a letter to shareholders sent last month that acknowledged

struggles stemming from a combination of closed retail storefronts and broader lowering of demand for its luxury audio products. Yep. Yep. Kind of in the same vein, uh, retail taking a hit and these kinds of specialty stores being kind of at the top of the list. I, I just, I never understood this concept with Sonos. Um, I mean, I guess they had to have a flagship store, but it was definitely an expensive property, uh, to, to, to, to have open, uh, there in New York, in, in New York city. And now I'm sure like not being able to open it, not to be able to have traffic come through and look at the product. And, and, and then in kind of like everybody's laid off in general like this is

not a good time to be selling a luxury product um i wonder what this means for the rest of our industry like is this a one of those like signs or is this something that's like a one-off type of thing yeah i mean hard to say obviously but i clearly what you're seeing here is fallout from COVID, even if maybe the writing was on the wall for like, we talked about Microsoft and Sonos was having some tough times even before COVID. But it does make you wonder, you know, I don't see this as an existential problem to either of these companies. And I point that out specifically because I think that will be the case also for companies of all shapes and sizes. Like this, this will be an existential problem to some companies, of course, but probably for the majority of companies, you know, the fat part of the bell curve, this whole thing is going to be a tighten your belts, uh, figure out where you can cut. Um, I can tell you where I wouldn't want to be right now is in

commercial real estate, like a commercial real estate holder. Uh, I think you're going to see office buildings. Is that what? Yeah. I think you're going to see a lot of companies go, wow, we were able to really make this work without, uh, you know, needing that office. Do we really need to be spending that kind of money? Um. So anyways, I think that Sonos and Microsoft are, they're going to be just fine as are most companies coming through this with, you know, obviously many exceptions. I'm not dismissing the gravity of COVID,

but ultimately I think you're going to see a lot of those companies just reprioritizing in the wake of this. And I feel like, I mean, 2009 wasn't that far long ago, right? Like 2008, 2009. Right. What they used to call the Great Recession. I feel like that that's still in at least my recent memory.

And I feel like most of the guys that I work with and have talked to, um, still kind of remember how business was done, or we're still kind of like almost working the same way with the same, like procedures and policies. Like, I don't think that they would have a hard time adjusting. Right. Like, and I think that's what we've seen. Um, I just, you know, wonder about, I wonder about the rest of the world, you know, There's clearly a domino effect when you start laying off 12% of a workforce. Those people are without jobs. Then you start laying off retail stores and office buildings start closing. There's a domino effect there. You have to keep your ear to the ground, I suppose, and know what's coming. Yeah. And speaking of the people, I don't want to gloss over that. That's an important part of the story. Small consolation here, I'm sure, to some of these folks, but it does say that the company will be offering severance, healthcare, and career coaching for those impacted by the decision. So that's good. Companies have to make hard decisions like this sometimes.

And it's for the greater good so that, you know, the folks who are left at the company can continue to work in hopefully a thriving business. But anytime a company can at least offer some help with that transition, obviously a very good thing. Yep. All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found at our show notes at hometech.fm slash 310. And while you're there, don't forget to sign up for our newsletter, which includes even further analysis, as well as other industry news that may not have made the show.

Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 310. Absolutely. And don't forget, you can join us live in the chat room on Wednesdays, but typically start around 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live. With that, Seth, what do you say, without delay, let's jump straight into our interview here with Kirk from Portal. We hope you enjoy. Hey, Kirk, welcome to the show. How are you? I am great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, we appreciate it. Fresh off the water, I understand, celebrating Canada Day up there in Nova Scotia. That's right. It is warm enough to go outside in Canada right now. Awesome. Well, enjoy that. And we appreciate you coming on the show. We're looking forward to jumping into... You guys have this really cool dealer survey that we're going to spend a bunch of time talking about, getting into process and many facets of this topic that are near and dear to my heart. So I'm looking forward to that. But before we do that, let's start with a little bit of background and introduction. So first, you personally, Kirk, for any of our listeners

who aren't familiar with you and your work, why don't you give us just a quick introduction and talk a little bit about your background in the industry. Sure. So I'm the founder and CEO of Portal. And that's what I do now. But I've been in the industry for, geez, almost over 20 years now, which is weird when you stop and add it up. You're like, wow, that much time? Is this supposed to be an industry where you get in, you make a little money and you leave, but then you end up like you're in there for decades. So I started back in about 2000. I worked in retail. So I worked for the Canadian Best Buy, Future Shop for anyone who knows. Actually, Best Buy ended up buying them years later, and then now they're out of business. So I worked for Future Shop, and I was the guy that would go to people's houses and hook things up back when integrators weren't really a thing.

I mean, they were like high-end AV shops, but custom installation as we know it now wasn't a thing. What happened was the Linksys router, wireless router, came out, the WRT54G, and it changed everything. There's people that probably remember that one. And when that thing came out, people needed help in their homes. Everyone needed help in their homes. So that was like, I traced that as like the catalyst that got me into this industry. So I started an integration company, I guess I didn't call it that then. But I just was like the guy that hooked stuff up,

people paid money to and I did it on the side and it got so busy. My retail store ended up telling me, look, you got to start your own thing. So I officially started a company and I was in business for myself. I'm 19 years old. Did that for a few years in Canada. I'm in Nova Scotia. And then I get this odd call out of the blue. There's a guy going to business school at Notre Dame. He's doing his thesis that home technology is going to be as big in homes or technology will be as big in homes as it is in businesses and that homes will need an IT guy like businesses do. And so in doing this research, he found my website. And at the time, I was one of very few companies that knew of Google and registered my website. And so he's in Chicago and he searches and finds me.

And we had a great talk about home technology and he's like, okay, well, I actually want to build a company. I don't want to do this. I know the business side. Um, and you clearly know the operational side. So why don't you just move to Chicago and we'll just do this and we'll become a home technology company across America. I'm like, at this time, I'm 23. I'm like, yeah, of course, you know, why not? So he comes up, I meet him and then I fly down and meet his family. And I decided, you know, I tell my parents I'm moving to Chicago. So I moved to Chicago and we started an integration company.

It was called Tech Connectors and our thesis or our approach to the industry was we don't want to just do like high-end audio video installs because that's for a small percentage of the population although we will do them we want more steady work and we saw the demand that was coming from the retail world for smaller installations and if you remember back around 2003 that's when i when i started it um that was around the time that best buy bought um geek squad robert stevens business and so geek squad was like this new thing and so we said okay uh Best Buy's got geek squad uh Circuit City doesn't really have anyone Sears doesn't really have anyone Costco doesn't have anyone and so I mean like like most of the things that I've started in my life we were so naive like had I known how hard these things were going to be

I don't know why we ever thought we could do them but that's generally how you're able to do things right you just you don't realize that you're not supposed to be able to do it and then you do so we decided we're going to go to Costco's headquarters and we're going to tell them that we want to be your installation brand and we want to help you compete against Geek Squad we're like you know at this time we're probably like six employees and they're like of course not and so like okay so we just we then we finally got circuit city and we started doing a lot of installs for them and then um sears headquarters was in chicago and we got the attention of sears and we got a meeting with

them and we helped them develop their go-to-market strategy for audio video, which was a super honor because Sears then was synonymous with service. And so we helped them build their end cap displays. If you went into any Sears and you saw this display of wires going through a wall and showing how complicated it was, that was my design alongside Sears. So that helped us get the attention of Costco. So we called Costco again. Costco finally says, we'll fly out and meet you. And so they send their guy out and we show them our operations and they're like, okay, we'll start you off with three states and a purchase order for this much product. Like, okay. so it was pretty amazing we developed this um

we took services and we developed it and turned it into a product so we actually packaged up install services so we had like a tv on a stand install and it had upc and skews and we registered the upcs then we had tv hung on a wall and then we had a surround sound system and we actually had shipped product to costco and they bought physical boxes and products and put them on pallets and sold them in their stores. That's so very Costco. Yeah. Well, I mean, because they're like, well, this is the only way we do business. So you need to make this a product. So we came up with a display. They gave us an end cap display in all their Costco stores in the Midwest. And there was our brand in Costco, work when business was low and then more work than we could handle when business was booming. We wanted to get out of this cyclical nature of custom.

So we thought that retail would be the way that we'd have a nice steady stream of installs consistently. And we built it up to a very nice stream of installs. So in our peak, our busiest month, we installed a thousand TVs. So we were in a thousand homes in one month. And the reason I tell this story this way is because this was the genesis and the reason for getting into the software business. It's nice to say, well, all AV companies need some sort of software to help them. But when you're in three states and you have 60 employees plus another 50 contractors, and you have multiple warehouses, and you doing a thousand jobs a month you cannot survive you can't even begin to think about how to run a business like that without software and of course at the time there was nothing that could do what we needed because

we had a very complex business we had to manage like uh shipments to costco and things like that. So I had built an internal software system. Now, I didn't build it myself. I'm not a coder, although I took computer science, but I never, I knew enough to know how it got done, but I didn't actually code it myself. A good friend of mine did it. I'm more the design and process guy, as you're going to be able to tell later on. So I sort of was the architect for this is what it needs to do. And we built a cloud-based system. We can call it cloud now. The term cloud didn't exist back in 2003.

And it did everything on the web. So to give you an idea, our guys would always work in teams of two they go to a job site um and we had the install system down pat like i mean the drop cloth gets laid down you put on the branded shoe covers you do the checklist you show the customer how it works you copy all the connections you know m know, Mrs. Johnson's DVD player was connected to video one on the Sony TV. The button on the remote was TV video to switch the inputs. And we recorded all of this information. And then the guys got in their trucks because what we realized was in Chicago traffic, you're wasting at least a half hour, 40 minutes getting between jobs. And when you're working on razor thin margins and doing jobs that start at $89,

you have to take advantage of that time. So the cloud system wasn't, we didn't build it to be, you know, fancy or cutting edge or cool. We had, it was out of necessity. We had to make sure that guys were utilized all the time. So they're driving between jobs. One guy's in the passenger seat. He's connecting the camera to the laptop, uploading all the photos of the job. He's entering all the inputs and how he connected the system.

And he's swiping, well, he's either entering the credit card or he was swiping the credit card in his phone on the job site. So back then, 17 years ago, we were swiping credit cards in cradles on our Nextel two-way. You remember those like two-way walkie-talkie Nextel phones? That's what we had. And they had these cradles and we were swiping cards and, you know, taking payment. So it's funny because I tell this and it seems so cutting edge back then. And then you fast forward 17 years and you think, well, everyone must have something more sophisticated than that.

And it's like half of dealers still don't have that. Right. And so like it became my mission to figure out how to get the basics and solve the big problems for the entire industry. So in 2009, for anyone that was in the industry back then, they know that it was not a good time. The economy fell apart. And because we had so much of our business in retail, all the retail business completely dried up. So we had a custom division as well. Our retail business was like a feeder system for our custom. So whenever we got a nice custom job, we'd pull our best techs out of the retail work. They'd go do the big control four system. They'd come back and then they'd go back and they'd do the retail work. So we we got a nice custom job, we pull our best techs out of the retail work. They go do the big control four system. They come back and then they go back and they do the retail work.

So we've never had a problem with utilization. But 2009 hit. Costco contract ends because no one was buying, paying for services. Circuit City, well, you know how that ends. They didn't go out of business in 2009, but they eventually did. Sears, I mean, I don't know technically whether they're in business or not in business now, but they're basically gone. It was bad. And so I had a big decision to make. Was I going to spend another, say, 10 years to build up another service company?

Or was it time to go do something else? And when I evaluated everything that I had done, I realized we have this piece of software. We've sunk about a quarter million dollars into it over almost eight years. It's cloud-based, meaning that everyone could use it. That was my transition plan. I figured, let's just, how easy must it be to like, just charge dealers a hundred bucks a month and 10,000 dealers times a hundred dollars a month. I can retire in five years. This is, this is simple. I mean, who doesn't need this software? You know, no one's going to pay a quarter millions. They'll pay a hundred bucks. So I, uh, it's so funny. It's so naive.

Jason and I are both, both over here just cracking up laughing by that one. Yeah. Yeah. Hindsight's always 20. How hard can it be? Yeah. How hard can it be? It's already built. How hard can it be? It's just sales and marketing now, right? Turns out sales and marketing is the hardest part. So here's what I did. I had a lot of different friends in the industry that had integration companies. And so I got about 10 of them together across the country. I said, here's what I want to do. I want to launch this software product, but I want to make sure that we do it right. And I want you guys to all evaluate it and use it in your business. And you'll use it for free. Of course, you know, we're not going to pay. You're not going to, we're not going to charge you and tell me what you change. And so we gave it to 10 guys and they all started using

it. And I had calls and trained them all on it enough. And then after keeping in touch with them, sure enough, within a month or two, people aren't logging in, you know, and they're not using it as much. And so I called them, what's going on? They're like, well, it's amazing, man. It's so great. It does so much. It's like, it's everything we've ever needed. I'm like, yeah, but you're not using it.

Why? Well, our business doesn't really work that way. We don't really do inventory that way. We don't really do project management that way. We don't book jobs and schedule them exactly that way. And I was like, just change the way you do it then to match the software and they're like um no and so and so there's your there's your like uh that would be your computer science uh sass marketing 101 class is like do you do you build a product and try to get your your users to conform to the product or do you build a product that's has very simple simple low common denominator features and let that adapt to the way people want to do business and right so that was a really tough pill to swallow but it was the best thing that ever happened because what ended up happening was I said to them, okay, I want you guys to all tell me what your one favorite feature is. Like what's the one thing that you,

that this software does that you really do like and that, and, and it does help you. And every one of them said the exact same thing. They said, it's the catalog. The fact that when I enter the new control force queues in and the pricing that everyone else benefits. And then when the new price sheet comes out for whatever, and they entered into the system, I benefit. And we're basically like sharing all this data entry. And we have like one central repository on the web for all of our products that we would love. and we'll still use it.

And I'll still use my proposal software, but I can like refer to that to get all the data. And so I thought, okay, as tough as this is to hear that I'm going to essentially flush a quarter million dollars in the fully baked software down the drain, I need to listen to the users. Otherwise, you know, we're not going to get anywhere. And so I threw away the software basically and built a new one from scratch.

And it was called SupplyStream. And so if anyone remembers, we launched at Cedia in 2013. And that was two years after I decided to go full on into this, into this business. It was 2011 when I started building supply stream. And I thought I'm going to build this thing underground. I don't want anyone in the industry to know. I'm not going to take out an ad in a magazine saying this is the greatest thing. We're going to build it. We're going to revolutionize. I was sick and tired of people talking about how they were going to change the world and then they

never do it's like let's just build it launch it and then see what people think so we launched in 2013 um people came to our booth at cdia and they were like who the hell are you guys what is this um and then we had like three mac screens set up in the booth and we had this catalog just sitting there and people came up and they just started playing with it. And they're like, oh my God, what the hell? Wow. Everything is here. And I was like, yeah, everything, like literally everything in the show floor right now, every skew, every image, every description, it's all on this one catalog. And it just, it took off. Like it was, we solved the one problem I think that had been lacking in the industry was proposal software wasn't inherently difficult because proposals are hard

to build. It was difficult because you had to maintain it with all the software. Purchase order software wasn't that hard to build. I mean, it's just line items, email, send it off to someone. What's hard is the data. Right, so we figured we'll solve the data and that could potentially unlock the difficulty for so many people. And so that is how we started. It was supply stream was a catalog. It was $29 a month. You got access to all the pricing and then we just unlocked you. You basically said, I buy from this company. You sent us either your price sheet or you sent us a invoice for a recent purchase and then we unlocked all your pricing for you. So that's the long story of the genesis of it all. And that was SupplyStream was the first product. But then there's this sort of second chapter in the story, which is Cordal and all the different sort of iterations as we navigated through the CDO world to figure out exactly where we fit. Yeah. So, so talk about that quickly and just the evolution, because I love the

background story. I've, I've had many chances to get to know you, Kirk, and hear, hear your, this kind of winding tale before. And I think it's such an interesting background. Um, would love to hear a little bit about the transition from supply stream to portal. Uh, what did that look like? Uh, again, kind of the quick version. And then where are you guys at today? And we'll use that as a way to set up kind of what you guys are doing on this process side. I really want to make sure we dive into that because there's some really interesting stuff there. But talk about that evolution and get into a little bit about who you guys are today at Portal. Cool. Okay. Well, that's the second part of the story is a lot a lot shorter so

uh so here's what happened we started gaining users um but we started gaining more interest from distributors and manufacturers and i remember the first distributor came into our booth uh because they after the dealer started seeing, all the manufacturers and distributors started flooding into the booth. And some of them were like, what the hell is this? How do you have my pricing? Some of them were like, whoa, I can't believe someone actually did this. We've been talking about this for years. I mean, it was a matter of time.

And basically what happened was the manufacturers said, what you've built, sure, it was a matter of time. And basically what happened was the manufacturer said, what you've built, sure, it has a lot of value for dealers, but we think it has actually way more economic value for manufacturers and distributors, specifically manufacturers, because what you've solved is in solving like the territory restrictions and the pricing for dealers and the different authorizations you've effectively automated all the rules that are the prerequisites to build a manufacturer website in a protected wholesale industry so they're like why can't we just use your website why can't we all just use this? Why can't we all just use this portal? Why can't our dealers do commerce on this?

I mean, my CEO has tasked me with building a new website, and I've been trying to do it for years, and you guys have basically solved the problem. So it was a really interesting idea because the big idea was, what if we could help manufacturers and distributors solve their technology problems help dealers get a better buying experience so all the websites are uniform and you know because even today a lot of the websites just still aren't great to buy from and then we'll let manufacturers pay the bill. And so now there's no monthly fee for dealers. Let them pay when they get orders. So manufacturers paying for the subscription is a heck of a lot cheaper

than sinking millions of dollars into websites to build their e-commerce platform. It seemed like just a complete no-brainer. It was a win-win-win for everyone. So then we tell the story to our investors, and they love it. I mean, it's just a perfect match. So we raised quite a bit of money and we built this marketplace that allowed dealers to make purchases. The problem is that's not what dealers really wanted. Dealers loved more than anything, the data and the proposal tool that we had built. And so we ran in this direction of building a marketplace for almost three years,

and it just didn't get the traction that it needed. We were really aggressive at building it because we figured once it gets traction, it will be the place that all commerce happens. So we made a really tough decision at the beginning of 2019. It was about a year ago, a little over a year ago now, to shut down this marketplace. And the shift that we made was back to our beginning. We went from a marketplace model back to becoming a SaaS product. And now we are purely a SaaS product again.

And we're focused on building the easiest proposal software for dealers. And so we became profitable naturally and got out from underneath our VC funding last year. And now we're on an accelerated rate of building the features that dealers have been asking us for, for years. And as a part of that, um, this new sort of, I call it a renaissance internally because where it's like, we're starting over, but we're starting from a place where, um, we really know who we are. Um, one of the, um, one of the projects we decided to do is to canvas our dealers and start calling them and really get to know their business and make sure that our roadmap was in alignment with theirs. And at the same time that that was happening, I was following these Facebook and other forums online.

And every week I'd see this question like, what is everyone using for software to solve this problem? And what's everyone using to solve their project management problems? What's everyone using for this problem? And there was something about it that was like, just rubbing me the wrong way. It's like, they're not asking the right question. What is it about this that doesn't work? Because people would chime in. They were like, I use, let's say, DTools, you know, and it's the best and I've used it for 20 years and there's nothing better, trust me. And it's like, okay, he's probably right because it works for his business. And then someone else would chime in, no, not DTools, use iPoint.

Or no, not iPoint, use this. Or no, use Portal. This is not the right way to answer this question. This is sort of like the state that the country's in right now where everyone wants a simple answer to really complex problems you know and um so i when i talked about it with some dealers and then internally what we boil it down to was is that the problem really that dealers have is they're asking questions about process underneath it is questions about process but on the surface they're thinking that their process. Underneath it is questions about process,

but on the surface, they're thinking that their solution is just give me a silver bullet piece of software to solve all my problems. And so we said, let's change this conversation a bit. Instead of making it about what software solves my problems, let's start with what problems do you have? And in order to answer the question, what problems do I have in my business? You have to break down your business into the different stages of your process, right? So that we can really hopped on calls with dealers and we said tell me how you

run your business from beginning to end in excruciating detail i'm talking when the phone call comes in where do you enter that contact do you enter it in your iphone do you enter it in quickbooks do you enter it in your software after you get the contact how do you go to the job what do you drive to the job in what What kind of van do you have? We went through everything. And we got through one deal of the interview and we said, okay, there's clearly eight steps to running a company. And then we did another interview and another one. Okay, there's clearly 10 steps to running an integration. Right? There can't be. And then after we got through about a dozen of them, we're like, all right, there's 16 steps.

There's 16 distinct process steps to running an AV integration company. So that after talking to these dealers, we realized, wow, this is a lot of fun and there is so much information in here that other dealers would love to hear. And so we decided to organize it and methodically build a survey that would allow us to scale this type of interview because we couldn't call an interview

every dealer in the industry. And we have it boiled down to 16 process steps. And we're calling it the great dealer study, or the ultimate dealer study, is what our blog says. Slash, it turned into, what dealers have coined it as, they call it process therapy.

They call it process therapy because they're like, man, after getting through this interview with you guys, or after filling out just your survey on my own, I cannot believe how much I learned about my own business. Interesting. And yeah, it's not what we expected. And so I called Jason and Joey and I'm like, guys, here's what we're working on. And this is what happened. And this is how dealers are reacting to it. What do you think of it? Of course, Jason, Joey, you're both like, oh, we're process people. This is pretty cool. I said,

let's, we should do a podcast on this because I think dealers, we should get more as many dealers as possible filling out this survey because we're going to organize all this information and we're going to get it back to the industry in an organized way. So dealers can sort of look at kind of a roadmap of what are the best practices and how could i like tweak my business and what software are people really using and it turns out they're using a lot of pieces of software yeah yeah i mean and that makes sense too because if you think about how a company organically springs to life, right? Like, um, go back to your example, you know,

you were just, Hey, can you do this? Yes, I can. And, and here you are now I've got to figure out how to do my finances. Now I've got to figure out how to track, um, other a thousand jobs coming in, you know, like organically, uh, you have made a company that works for you, but it doesn't work for the next guy sitting in the next seat over at Cedia. So it's a very difficult... That's kind of the thing that I've always looked at when those Facebook-type questions have come up, is that how do you homogenize this process

to the point where you can have these types of conversations? Because everybody is different. And guess what? Everybody's right. Like there's no wrong answers because you're still in business. You must have been successful. So you can't be wrong about how you're doing this. So I've definitely found this conversation to be interesting to actually see how you've started your business. I had a couple of them here, and how you've taken feedback and iterated on them, at least from the dealer space, and, and created software or solutions to help them. So it's a, something that I'm, I'm definitely love keeping up with. So I'm, I'm definitely loving this conversation. What are, what are some of the areas like either software or, you know,

processes where you, where you see the most, like people coming together on like or concentration consensus yeah consensus yeah because it's not yeah consensus is the best word for that and i think yeah i yeah consensus commonality that so we call this a study and not a survey because we're not just going to ask a bunch of questions and just dump the results we're really going to chop it up and do it like a proper scientific study, because if I'm a company that's 20 employees, the way I run my company is not how we would suggest that a company that's three employees should run their company.

And so we look at it through that lens. Those are the three buckets. So like we slice up dealers into one to three, four to 10 employees, and then 11 plus and i think i even have a breakdown so far we've got a little over 100 results um on the survey and it breaks down right now to 32 percent of the respondents are one to three staff 55 percent are four to ten and 13 or 11 plus. And so when we give this information back, we want to do it in those buckets so that it's relevant. So to answer your question, I'll give you the response that kept coming up over and over that is the most

common across everyone. And then there's a few that are common across different segments. So the one, well, I'm going to let you guess. Okay. What do you, what do you think, Seth? What do you think is the most commonly used piece of software in the audio video industry? QuickBooks. Yeah, there's two. It's like, it's a tie between the most common. Do you mean like the most like AV centric one or like, or the one that's, I would say Excel or word, one of those like office products now. You're good. That's exactly. It's Excel. It's Excel and QuickBooks. Yeah. There you go.

Right. Excel and QuickBooks, two pieces of software custom built for the AV industry. And they're the most popular, but it makes sense, you know, like, and it is really neat to hear how creative guys are getting with Excel and not to get more specific. It's Google sheets. The Google suite of services is by far the most popular. Everyone uses a Google service. I say everyone, that's not a scientific response, more or less, you know, the lion's share of people use Google in some way, shape or form. And, you know, they're like, as soon as we win a job, we start a drive folder with the customer's name. And then we start a sheet and then there's a checklist. And then we,

and I couldn't believe how many of these interviews describe this. And I was just loving it because there's two ways to look at it. It's like, I could fight you and say, you're doing it the wrong way. You should be using this software. But it's like, tell me how you do this. And what you're listening for is what they're really trying to solve and not how they're solving it. What are you, why are you really using the Excel sheet? Why is that easier? It's like, because I can change this column and I can put it in this order and it feels better. And, you know, so, so that's, I would say that's the answer to the commonality is Excel and QuickBooks. I'll give you a funny story.

When I was attending CDO one year, I was talking to somebody and we were lamenting how much we didn't like Visio and using it to do our drawings. And somebody next to me said, I'll never forget this. It's like I use numbers like numbers. What do you what are you talking about? Like on on a Mac? Like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Numbers like you can really get in there and you can really like shade the cells and do all sorts of stuff and i mean he had some very like you can put shapes on a numbers page and and and and have the the data that is there that is like structured like a spreadsheet but you can also do all these other drawing things and he did his entire uh drawing set there in numbers and it looked it looked like it did with vizio like the same symbols and everything around there. It was quite impressive. Um, but a little bit more work that I would want to put into something. So sure. But it's like, it's amazing to see how creative people get, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I want to jump in here on some of these specific, um, areas, you know, you have the 16 steps and, uh, really quickly, I'll just, I'll go ahead and just rattle these off.

So leads, CRM, site survey, proposals, invoicing, inventory, ordering, design and documentation, scheduling, project management, communication, change orders, time tracking, payroll, accounting and service. And I got to say, first of all, when I read those 16 steps, I just, I love it. It was such a great, I think sometimes just those simple frameworks of saying like, here, look at your business in these 16 parts. And if you're being thoughtful about all 16 of these, then you're probably in a good place. And there's no right or wrong answer like we've talked about. And I can imagine that's why you're hearing from dealers who are like, wow, this was kind of therapeutic

because, you know, we like having frameworks and we like being able to put structure to complex problems. And so I love that you came up with those. We obviously don't have time to jump into each one of those, but a couple of them, as I went through the survey, which was kind of fun for me to go through as a former integrator, one or two questions specifically jumped out at me that I thought might be fun to pick apart. So I'm a little biased as a former longtime project manager. That was certainly one that I was curious about. So maybe tell us a little bit about that one specifically. What are you seeing as sort of patterns or anything noteworthy? I know you had one question asking people, what would you cite as great about your current approach or tools to project management? So what are people finding

success with there? Yeah. So the nice thing about talking to people conversationally and doing the interviews is they give you the answers in real human layperson terms. And so when I ask someone, what do you have to do to run your business? They're like, well, got to win a job. All right, then how do you win? Then I got to get paid. Well, then what do you do? Well, I got to get the list of tasks. And then I got to send that list to my installers. And they got to prove to me that they got to show me that they're checking things off the list. Just real simple, like simple like yeah it is really simple when you kind of think of it that way so my answer to the project management one is guys just want a list and they want to be able to check things off the list and they want to be able to check in every day and make sure that things got checked off the list

that's like the most basic thing that they want and and we i always look at things in like the lowest common denominator simplest thing that we can solve now not all the bells and whistles so when we ask dealers about project management like what do you use i fully expected people to talk about the different project management software tailored for our industry because there's some pretty amazing things that I can do. And it wasn't the case. It was like Excel, of course, was there, but the common project management solutions were Trello, right? Seth is throwing his hands because there's no video. He's throwing his hands in the air and he's saying Trello for the win because what an amazing piece of software. And if you looked at Trello, because some dealers were like, what's Trello?

Go look at it and be thoroughly unimpressed with how sophisticated it isn't. Okay. And then start using it and realize how incredible it is. Right. It's a classic Kanban system that worked for Toyota decades ago. When I'm done something, I move it from one column to the next, right? So Trello was a really popular one. Asana was another popular one. And then Zoho is one that's starting to get, dealers are starting to hear about, and the word is starting to spread about Zoho and they're trying to figure out if they can integrate it,

but that's sort of like a full, a full suite, but, um, yeah, basic, uh, uh, task management. That was got it. Well, you've got two big, uh, Trello fans here. I'm still a fan of Trello, although as listeners to the show will know, I'm starting to migrate into a, uh, a tool called notion. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. Uh popular, I think, and has a lot of elements of Trello, but some different approaches about it that I think make it a little more flexible and powerful. So for any integrators out there listening, curious to go check out new tools, I think Trello or Notion are great. I've had a lot of success with both of those. Trello was my go-to for many, many years as a project manager in the industry. So great piece of software.

I didn't even hear about Notion. And that's like a new one for me. That never even came up. It's relatively new. It's relatively new. And I think very popular with like tech companies, like sort of the Silicon Valley scene and all that. But as far as in our industry, I haven't heard a lot of people talking about it. We've adopted it at OneVision and I could totally geek out and talk about it right now, but I'm going to avoid the temptation, but go check it out. It's a really powerful, flexible piece of software. I think Trello is one you can pick up and start using much quicker in my experience. Notion took me a little bit longer to really grasp,

but yeah, it's a really neat tool. I'm going to cherry pick a little bit here and go to another one that I was particularly curious about. Communications. I know that when I was an integrator, we were really still using text and email almost exclusively. We had started to dabble with Slack. How much were you seeing in terms of adoption with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams versus just using sort of email and text and things of that nature for communication?

This one really surprised me. I was sure that we were going to see at least half or a third of dealers using Slack. Because I can't imagine running my business without Slack. I cannot imagine it. And again, it's sort of like Trello when you explain it to someone. They're like, I don't get it. Is it like chat rooms?

It's so simple. It doesn't seem game-changing until you use it. I'm going to say that almost no dealers use Slack. It blew my mind. And the answer was for communication, text and email. And some dealers, though, the ones that were a little more sophisticated with communication used email management systems where they would, you know, sort of capture the email and let you reply to multiple through multiple

inboxes. And it would share the responses out to different other inboxes. So like full transparency for shared inboxes, I forget there's a, there's a popular one that does that. But that was an outlier, right? Like it was the old fashioned way. And, you know, like when a lead comes in, what do you do with it? What do you mean what I do with it? What do you do with it? Like, how would you enter it?

In my phone. Okay. It was the phone. And when your techs need help on site, like how do they communicate back to the project manager or whatever? And they would stare at us like, what do you mean? They call me, or they text me, right? Or service. This is one that you might really like. You definitely will like to hear this one, Jason. For service,

particularly when we ask people about service, we said, how do you manage your service? Almost everyone said text. They're like, we just, the customer, they get my, my, they get my number and they just text me when they need service. I was like, wow, that is an area broke don't fix it you know it works um or maybe there's um we're thinking about how we evolve communication with portal so that it it uses the momentum of how dealers want to interact via text and email but allows them to do it through portal in a way that doesn't force them to change their habit but gives them all the same benefits of how to aggregate all that information so everyone can see it. So it got us thinking about that. I think that's going to be tough to get people.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting, interesting stuff. And I appreciate you bringing up service. I, we're running up against our time a little bit, but I did want to talk about that one specifically, obviously another topic that's near and dear to my heart, given my work at One Vision. What other interesting takeaways did you find in the service category? You talked about communication there and lots of reliance on text, and that's certainly a topic that I could dive into and speak about. Very common. I know when I was an integrator, I had lots of clients texting me.

Lots of challenges there in terms of scaling it up and growing the company and just your own sanity and all of that. But what else? What did you guys see specifically in that category of service

maybe that surprised you? I think the most common response, and I'm going to sum it up in one word, when we ever brought up service, and I'm going to summon up in one word, whenever we brought up service, and this is going to be, I don't know, shame. Shame is the word that comes up. Everyone would answer it this way. Uh, yeah, I know we, we, we should be doing better. You know, we could be, we're leaving, we're leaving an opportunity out there. You know, we could be, we're leaving, we're leaving an opportunity out there. You know, we looked at the different pieces of services that are out there now,

but just haven't gotten around to it. I know it would help me. And man, I'm glad you brought it up. And we need to look, I'm writing that one down. We need to look back into that one. And I was like, if nothing else, if this conversation highlighted all the things that you've been ignoring that you feel bad about, then this is worth it. But with service, 70% weren't. And the 70 that weren't, like I said, they felt bad about it. And that's kind of good because it tells us that they're aware that there are solutions out there, but they just haven't gotten around to figuring out how to do it. Right. And did you get any sense for, I can't remember, I know I took the survey, but you said 30% are offering it. That is actually a bit higher than I figured, but how many of them are having,

did they indicate significant success with it? Because obviously offering it and getting traction with it are two different things. Did you get a sense for that in the study, or were you just focused on whether or not they're even attempting? Yeah. And when we say offering or attempting, it's more, do you have a plan that you're trying to sell to customers? You know, whether, we didn't really get into like what their average ticket was and how much, whether they were successful. It was more, are you offering a monthly service?

Cool. Well, I love it. We're going to transition to wrap up here, but again, just a big fan of what you guys are doing with this. And I think it's a really neat survey. I would really encourage all the integrators in the audience to go take a look at it. I went through it myself and enjoyed the process. And what I love the most about it is that you guys are really digging deep into this and really seeking to understand the pulse of the industry when it comes to process. And you're looking to share that back out with the industry. I think it's a really unique approach that you guys are doing and I'm

a big fan of it. So I wish you the best of luck with it. I appreciate that. Yeah. The more dealers, the better, you know, I, my, my dream is that one day on the forums, when someone says, what software are you using for this? The answer is essentially a sticky, which is a link to the study results that we want to leave as a living, breathing thing. Like we're thinking that we'll continue to do this perpetually and always have updated results. So if you're a five man shop, you can go look and you'll see a full list of all the different pieces of software that are most widely adopted. Very cool. Very cool. Well, I guess one thing we need to do is get people filling out that survey. So we're going to go ahead and put a link to that in the show notes.

Kirk, if anybody wanted to reach out and touch base with you directly, what's the best way they can do that? Email is probably the best. KirkKirk at portal.io. Kirk at portal.io. Excellent. And, Kirk, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down and chat with us about all of this. This has been a very fun conversation. Jason and I have been here smiling and agreeing.

This is the most nodding heads that we've had of any show that we've ever had. A lot of good stuff here. I wish we had more time. We could talk for the whole day, but yeah, we've got to probably got to end it somewhere. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks Kirk. Uh, definitely keep us posted and we'll look forward to, uh, seeing when you guys are able to share this back out. Uh, maybe we'll, we'll talk about it a bit more, uh, on the show once you guys are able to do that. So thanks again for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

All right. Well, that'll do it for our interview with Kirk. And again, really enjoyed it. I'm a process guy at heart, and there was so many elements of both that conversation. And like I mentioned in the interview, I went and took the survey myself and have watched some of the video clips that they have of talking with dealers that he alluded to. And it's all great stuff. I think anything that can be done to sort of raise awareness around tactics and principles

that you can use to run a better company is great. As we alluded to in the interview, there are no right or wrong answers, but it'll be really exciting to see them be able to share this information back out with the industry and hopefully everybody can be better for it. All right, Seth. Well, pick of the week this week is yours. Well, I'm going full Canada mode and picking for the pick of the week Hamilton the Musical, which will be on Disney Plus on July 3rd. There you go. Nothing at all related to Canada in this case.

But by the time the show comes out on Friday, you should be able to go to Disney Plus and stream a really good musical. And from the original cast, like towards the end of when they were actually on Broadway there, there was rumors that were going around and flying around that they recorded the original cast doing the entire musical. And, of course, Disney snatched up the rights to that. And I think they were planning on waiting for much longer of a time to release this. But with COVID-19 coming along, I guess they decided to bump it up. And as Broadway's kind of shut down, this is one good way that you can, I guess, get a fix on your musicals if you like musicals. I happen to like this musical. This one's a really well done one.

And lots of fun music in it. The entire thing's musical. What about you, Jason? You like musicals? Yeah. You know, I'm not huge on musicals. I've heard a couple of songs from this one and have liked them. So I'm intrigued.

This is one that I may watch, expand my palate a little bit. It's actually a good one. It's got history. History's in there, some wild times. Exactly, yeah. I'm a history geek, so it's got that element to it. Yeah, I mean, I'm excited to see this. Like I said, I've heard a couple of the songs and enjoy it. I don't, I don't, I'm not very cultured when it comes to musicals, but this one is just, I mean, it's crazy. The amount of hype and people just are nuts about this musical. So I feel like i have to watch it yeah this one had a lot of like you said hype uh and and i mean just kind of um i don't know there was there was a lot of like that organically grew out of it just because of the the cast that was the original cast that was put together is really where the magic happened i think i mean it was very well written

but the the original cast did such a great job. It started producing all these talk about it and people selling out the theater every week. And then they just did a good job of keeping it in the zeitgeist, I suppose, for so long. And now it's, I think, now that Broadway shut down, it's not. But now there's shows in just about every major city, London, San Francisco. I'm sure there's many, many others. You can't go there to see it, but now you can hop on your TV and watch it if you're a Disney Plus subscriber for free, which is great.

There you go. Well, Seth, this is ad hoc here here but i got a show tip for you one we just finished go all right have you seen uh defending jacob no no defending it's on apple yes i haven't watched it but i put it up there on the list yeah it's uh it's based on a book i haven't read the book but my wife has um and it was really good. It's kind of a dark sort of crime mystery drama and really enjoyed it. So I won't belabor it, but I know we like sharing show tips every now and then. So we just finished that one and highly recommend. J.K. Simmons, I will watch. He's in it. So yeah, I don't know what Roley plays, but I'm a fan of that actor so yeah it was really good i

really enjoyed it all right well if you have any feedback questions comments pics of the week a show that i or seth uh should check out uh seth or i should check out yes yes our great ideas for a show topic or guest give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who 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 $5 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 and talk about microsoft microsoft that's right and mice and and word all kinds of all kinds of good stuff there and if you're looking for other ways to support the show and you enjoy what we do here at the podcast we would really appreciate if you would take a few minutes to leave us a positive review on itunes in your podcast app of choice. Those positive reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you could please take a minute to do that, we would really appreciate it. Yep. Yep. Jason, we have, we definitely have a cultured crowd in the Home Tech Live chat tonight. We have Greg suggesting that we should watch the blues brothers which is which is a good musical uh and then of course south park the movie which uh is is definitely definitely a

musical they they have a lot of music in it um plenty plenty of good songs come from that movie yeah no doubt no doubt i uh is the book of m, is that a musical? Would you call that a musical? Oh yeah. No, no. It's Broadway show. I, I. Yeah. That, that one, which I'm just showing how uncultured I am, but that one I did see, uh, on Broadway and that was a really fun show. I saw that one here in Sarasota and, uh, sitting next, I somehow, you know, I ended up on like one of the first few aisles, uh, rows of the, of that show. And, um, I don't know, you know, I ended up on like one of the first few aisles rows of that show. And I don't know if you know anything about Sarasota, Jason, but it's there's a lot of retired people here.

People in their 80s. No. And they were there. And there's some songs right at the beginning that were just kind of like, oh, this is what we're in for. And oh, yeah. And and I don't know if they were expecting that, but it was quite funny. It pulls no punches, right? Not at all. All right, cool. Well, that'll do it for our show this week.

I had a lot of fun, Seth. Thanks for covering while I was out last week. Had a nice quick trip with the family and um hope you and everybody listening have a great uh fourth of july you got any big plans i'm just gonna hang around the house i mean i don't know i'm gonna hang around the house i'm gonna go buy a bunch of fireworks and then try to uh set the backyard on fire because that's go blow some stuff up that's the american way um that's right that's right cool all right well have a great uh great holiday great weekend stay safe and thanks for listening everyone all right you too take care