HomeTech.fm - Episode 322 - Growing the Right Way with Justin Worley of Audio Concepts

Episode Date: October 9, 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, October 9th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, what's going on? You know, I'm living the dream here, Seth. I can't complain. Fall is in the air. We've got a great show this week. Everything's good. Yeah. How about you?

So far, I'm so good. You know, it's still summer here. There's no fall in the air. There's a hurricane out in the Gulf of Mexico that's going to pound Louisiana again. Sorry for you guys over there. Awful. Yeah.

But that said, hopefully coming the end of our crazy storm season and into the nice weather world of what we call winter, which is basically a high of, I don't know, 79, 75, somewhere in there. In the lows, down in the 50s, I guess. Coming out of storm season into a nice, calm, soothing election season. Oh, right. Oh, that reminds me. The adults are talking tonight.

So I can't wait to tune into that. Yeah. No doubt. Anyways, like I said, we got a great show here this week. We're really excited. We had Justin Worley on. He's the owner of Audio Concepts and Desert Valley Audio Video. So he owns two different integration companies, Desert Valley being in Arizona and Audio Concepts being a newer

company to him. Anyways, it's a company that's been around for a while. He purchased it recently and was really fun to talk to Justin. I've been wanting to get more integrators on the show. We've had tons of guests over the years, but mostly from the vendor side and the manufacturing side of the industry. And so it was great to chat with Justin and learn a lot about the ways that he's grown and by all accounts been very successful in the industry of building his business and not getting trapped in that cycle that I think so many people in the industry do of constantly working in the business instead of being able to sort of step back and grow and

scale companies in this industry. That's not an easy thing to do. So really, really enjoyed learning more about his approach. Yeah, it was a good chat, one that we don't have too often on here. So can't wait to play that for everyone. Yeah, absolutely. So be sure to stay tuned for that. In the meantime, Seth, before we jump into some home tech headlines, I've got a hot new fashion tip for you. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Slack shoes. Slack shoes. Okay. Explain, explain. slack shoes slack shoes okay explain explain well i have to explain i mean when i think instant messaging platform i definitely think sneakers yeah you don't you don't that's interesting no i don't i don't i see these and uh you sent these over earlier and i can't figure out what like do they do they do they tap they tap you or do they make a little slack sound when you get a notification or do they turn colors or are they just in the slack colors?

That's what I was wondering. I was like, is there some sort of at least tie in to these that make them. Doesn't look like it. Sort of like, I don't know some relevant i guess uh but no they appear to just be cole hahn shoes i mean they're not bad looking sneakers i guess not really my style but like you know they don't look bad but they just kind of slapped a slack logo on there and there you have it i guess mission accomplished it got it got people talking that's for sure right maybe we should have some home tech shoes because there you go when i think

of home technology i think of tennis shoes as well absolutely yeah i love where your head's at see what we can do so for me they would just be flip-flops i don't know yeah that's perfect right up my alley you got it all right what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Well, Jason, the numbers are in for the first ever CD Expo Virtual, and the numbers are notable. The online experience drew 7,600 trade professionals who made a startling 161,000 visits to 110 virtual exhibitors. Meanwhile, there were 14,000 visits to the 80 CE Pro education courses, which is awesome, and 18 Tech Talk panel discussions and four keynotes over the three days.

So, yeah. I mean, when we talk Cedia, we talk in the 20-ish thousand range. This is not that. No, it is not it is not i went back and looked cdia 2019 said nearly 20,500 exhibitors so no notable numbers i guess but not notable meaning comparable with the in-person events, 161,000 visits. I mean, there's no way to quantify what that would translate to in the in-person event, right? Like how many booths did individual people walk up to? So I don't really know what to make of that number.

But I think the biggest one for me is 110 virtual exhibitors versus 500 at the in-person event. Yeah, yeah. virtual exhibitors versus 500 at the in-person event yeah yeah so you've got about about a third of the attendees and about one-fifth of of the exhibitors at this at this virtual event well by that metric it's not so bad right but i don't know it 2020 is just going to be in we're going to talk that to an off year like we're it's forgivable so yeah no doubt a couple a couple other interesting numbers here though uh one that jumped out of me 49 of registrants had not attended cdia expo in the past three years so it does appear to have attracted some people who didn't go when required travel is what i i took away from that like they did get some new eyeballs there. So I suppose that's a good thing. But yeah, generally a lot lower.

Not shocked at that. And I'm sure that Emerald and everybody else in the event industry is ready for a vaccine and ready to get back to in-person events. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, me too. Moving on from there, Bloomberg reported late this Monday of this week that Apple is dropping Sonos and other non-Apple branded products from their stores. The news of Sonos losing such a major customer caused their stock to derail and after hours trading down almost 7% in value at one point. On Tuesday, the price closed down 3.2% as Wall Street digested the news.

Not just Bloomberg. This was Mark Gur. Not just Bloomberg. This was Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg. So noted Apple, I don't know, what were they, rumor monger? I don't know. But he's the one that gets all the tips and figures things out pretty early. Yeah.

But yeah, this is wild. We know that there's an Apple event coming up just next week on October 13th that was announced this week. So Jason, should we take bets on are we going to see a HomePod Mini? I'm going with no. I'm going with no. No HomePod Mini?

No. I'm going to go with yes. Are you? I'm all in. Interesting. My little HomePod's right here. It doesn't work very well. It's on my desk.

All right. So you're going long on that bet, huh? I don't know. The story does say that, according to Bloomberg anyways, that Apple is about to launch an expanded line of Apple and Beats-branded audio products. So I may be wrong. I may be wrong on this, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this was more something under and Beats branded audio products. So I may be wrong. I may be wrong on this, but I also wouldn't be surprised

if this was more something under the Beats brand, maybe. I'm not sure. They did pull a bunch of headphones out of their stores as well. So maybe that's what the Beats thing is. I don't know. You may be right on this one, Seth, but I'm taking no.

Sticking to my guns. One thing they can't replace very well from Sonos is the home theater space. So Sonos has those play bars and I can't forget the other one came out. They won't be able to replace that so easily unless they can. I mean, you would think a trillion dollar company can just do anything they wanted, but Apple seems to be, I don't know, more reserved in what they put together. So I don't know. Sorry, I misspoke, Jason. Two trillion dollar company now. I guess it's up another trillion. Mind boggling. Yeah, exactly. But I don't know. It would be nice to, I don't know, see an Apple line of home theater system.

But right now, if I connect these HomePods up to my Apple TV, they work-ish sometimes. Sometimes they're cranky. Sometimes they don't. But when they work, it's really nice. So if they can figure out the home theater thing, that'd be great. Cranky. We all love cranky technology. Yeah, these are not,

this is not a good Apple product. Yeah. Just going to put that down there. Just go on record with that one. After several years of waiting, it appears that Disney and Apple have reached a deal to make 4K versions of Disney films available through iTunes.

Wide selection of Disney movies is now showing as 4K in the itunes store with additional support for dolby vision and dolby atmos this is exciting this is exciting i can finally watch frozen in 4k i guess there you go that's all we ever watch finally finally i do remember i don't remember exactly how long ago it was, but there was a story we talked about where 4K little logos were popping up on some of these movies, but then they went away. These companies were still sort of duking it out, I guess. And so good news for users here, says users have been able to access 4K HDR versions of Disney and Marvel films on Apple TV through Vudu since 2018.

So if you're a Vudu subscriber, you've had this ability. But from the iTunes store, this is an update. So good news. Go watch Trolls and... Wait, Trolls? Is Trolls Disney?

No, it's Universal. No, Trolls is not. So you'll have to find that one elsewhere. But Frozen. We call Trolls New? No, it's Universal. No, Trolls is not. So you'll have to find that one elsewhere. But Frozen. We call Trolls New Poppy in my house. You have to understand that it's New Poppy, not Old Poppy. I love it. Why wouldn't you call it that?

Honestly, it's easier to say than World Tour, because I have a hard time with that one. So I can't imagine a three-year-old can say it. No doubt. All right. Well, as we round out our news section this week, I have a hard time with that one. So I can't imagine a three-year-old can say that. No doubt. All right. Well, as we round out our news section this week, Seth, a really busy day coming up. October 13th.

Mark that one on your calendar. That is, if you're listening to this the day it comes out, that's going to be next Tuesday, October 13th. We've got quite the stacked lineup. We've got an Apple event. We've got the Snap stacked lineup we've got an apple event we've got a the snap av pro live event and seth here's the big one prime day amazon garage sale time yeah uh i'm excited uh about two out of three of these uh yeah uh So Apple event is I don't have the time in front of me, but usually that's at 1 p.m. The true time zone, I think 10 a.m. is usually when they kick those off and they last for about two hours. But then Snappy V has a keynote starting up at two o'clock, so probably won't be able to tune in to the keynote until three, unless I do both of them at the same time. And, you know, double my productivity and not doing my work and watching live streams.

Right. Could be an interesting day. Yeah, I am. I'm definitely going to try and clear my calendar. I think I'm going to, if I have to pick, I'm going Snap, SnapAV Pro. The Apple stuff will be, you know, easy to find all sorts of analysis on that. But obviously, SnapAV Pro, a little bit more of a niche industry here. And I feel like that's one that would just be good to watch live.

Not only because I'm just curious what Snap is going to show, but we've had a lot of conversations about these virtual events and what companies can do to make them more engaging. And if anyone in the industry has the resources to pull off something, it would be a company like Snap. So part of me is just curious how they're going to structure the event. And it's not even one day. Like Snap Pro Life goes through the 50 is a three day event. So there's going to be things starting on 13th at 2 PM running to 6 PM. But then also cool. They're doing an office hours that, that I'm excited about that.

That'll be cool for them to sit down and do office hours, uh, five to 6 PM, just, uh, snap EV product team, ask the expert. So you get in there, you just have a question. Somebody is probably smart enough to answer that question that, you know, directly works on the product. So that'll be cool. And then, uh, yeah, uh, starting

up the 14th, 10 AM, uh, industry pro panel running, uh, running through the day through the office hours again. And then, uh, the 15th kind of does just about the same thing with a pro panel and some training as well. So it should be a really cool event. I am going to follow this one close closely because I think this is what our training slash industry events will should look like. I think you're going to see more of this and less of the big CD show type things in the future. This looks like the future to me. And they did, I like the colors they chose here. It's fun. You like that, huh?

I do, yeah. There you go. All right. Well, all the links and topics that we've discussed on our show this week can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm. 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. Don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. Absolutely. All right, Seth. Well, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump straight into our interview. Once again, we had Justin Worley on, integrator at Audio Concepts and Desert Valley Audio Video, the owner of both of those companies. And we hope you enjoy the conversation. Hey, Justin, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it, guys.

Yeah, we're excited to have you. Definitely, we've been looking forward to getting more guests from the integration side of the business onto the show. And so we're excited to jump into the conversation with you and learn a lot about how you've grown and scaled your business and some of the lessons you've learned along the way. It's a lot of fun. Seth and I both as former integrators and longtime folks in the industry, again, are excited to jump in. But before we do that, we always like to start with a little bit of personal introduction and background. So why don't you introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little bit about your background. Sure. My name is Justin Worley. I actually live out here in Long Beach, California, and also in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I kind of travel back and forth between those two locations. I have an audio video, actually what I call it is home technology company in Scottsdale

named Desert Valley Audio Video. And I have a home technology company in Scottsdale named Desert Valley Audio Video. And I have a home technology company that I just purchased about a year and a half ago out here in California with the name Audio Concepts out here in Long Beach. Excellent. Tell us a little bit more about your companies. You mentioned the locations, but give us a little bit of context about the size of the companies and kind of the core areas that you guys specialize in. Sure. The company in Scottsdale, I actually started kind of from scratch in 2011. And we scaled from basically just myself to we were up a little bit over 30 employees right before the COVID hit. Now we're just a little bit below 30 employees out there. We do everything from lighting design, obviously audio, video and control systems, home automation systems, home audio distribution, Wi-Fi networks,

all the way to doing the actual contracted electrical work in homes too, which is kind of a new division for about a year and a half for us. Our company in California that we purchased has been around since 1975. Steve Working is the previous owner that I purchased the company from. And he sold the company to me because he's basically retiring since he did open it back in 1975. And started out kind of more of a retail hi-fi shop. And over the last four or five years, he's evolved into, as a lot of the hi-fi and retail shops have done, into a little bit more of a custom channel. So he was already doing a little bit of custom. And then I was able to come in and kind of revamp the showroom, make it a full custom outfit and, and turn it into kind of the same thing we're

doing in Arizona, but minus the electrical at this point. Sure. Thanks for that context. And, and I do want to jump in. You touched on a couple of things there that we're going to explore, namely acquiring the second business and some of your decisions there, as well as getting into the electrical work. But I want to go back and start at the beginning and talk about some of your lessons along the way of growing and scaling Desert Valley Audio Video. You're up right around that 30-person mark, which is big in our industry. There's not a ton of companies that get up to that size. And so talk about some of the challenges of growing your business to that size and share some of your perspectives as well that you've shared with me about the whole revenue versus profitability mix. Well, the first thing to say anytime, I imagine in just about any industry that you're

going to be growing a company, number one, it's all about the people. First lesson we learned was you can't grow any faster than you can find quality people. And sometimes you might find a quality person that's already trained in the industry. Sometimes you might find a quality person that you can train, but really it's kind of about what's inside the person, what makes them tick, you know, their, their level of morale, morale and morals. And you know, just kind of, you build around that team, the core team, and then you add people that compliment that. And it took a while to do that. There's, you know, points when you're growing so fast that you'll just basically hire anybody that

walks in the door. And we had to learn that lesson probably about 10 times before we finally said, you know, we really do need another guy, but let's wait. It's just going to hurt us, you know, in the long run. I feel like I never learned that lesson. So, and we still are sometimes. We're trying to scale up again right now. And, you know, it's, it's painful

sometimes when, you know, you're, we're booked out now through almost the end of the year. And, you know, there's jobs that we have to turn around, turn away sometimes. And if we just hired somebody, but, you know, you get a good culture, you get a good morale going and you don't want to mess that up. And I've seen one person, you know, kind of maybe, maybe a negative Nancy type person really do a number for everybody's attitude. And so we don't want to go down that route. So yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's kind of a challenge there. The other thing that you mentioned was kind of revenue versus profit. And I've seen just many different steps, I think, as we've grown from, you know, three people to eight then

eight people to maybe fourteen and then fourteen to twenty something you kind of see these steps where maybe you're you're doing more revenue but you're doing a whole lot less profit because you got to a next level and you're not organized yet you haven't got your act together and then you start to get organized and now you're doing better and then you grow again and there's there's a lot of these steps that you kind of want to make sure you have in place before you try growing too fast. And, uh, you know, right now we're, we're a little below 30 employees and, you know, somewhere in that, I think 22 to 28, uh, employees in our industry is,

is a really nice area where you can provide a very high quality service to your client. You're not subcontracting stuff out. You're able to have hands-on and you're able to have a little control over the end result, but you're not so big that, you know, things are getting missed left and right, you know. We're still cleaning up a little bit of that at that size right i imagine that there's a lot of uh um what's the best way herding cats i guess is probably uh that goes on in a company of that size i can i can only imagine we don't we had about we topped out around like six or seven and even then it was it was definitely a challenge if i can only imagine uh with scale becomes more uh more of that fun of uh just running things down and

project just management in general that's the whole whole idea yeah i do kind of oh sorry go ahead when you said herding cats my i've got a weird analogy but i've used it a bunch is you know like can you go bowling and you sometimes they've got those bumpers that are in the the gutters you know i just look at you know know, sometimes the manager, the manager's role starts to be like that bumper, just like the guys start to get a little, you know, go in a different direction than you want. You just got to get them back into the right lane, you know? So it's pretty good, a pretty good visualization to it. I do want to kind of loop back to one of the things you kind of brushed on initially, talking about finding the right person.

What do you look for in a hiring candidate? How do you screen for those? I think you weren't really talking about a skill set earlier. You were talking about how people approach the job? How do you find a person who is passionate about the work that they're doing when they may be less, you know, certified or, you know, less dressed out on the skills? How do you find that person that is more passionate and who may not be great today, but tomorrow they're going to be, you know, part of the team? Yeah. You know, there's a couple of key things you kind of have to look at. Number one, I think, I think every company has different things that make the company tick. So everybody's going to be a little bit different,

I imagine. We're pretty high on, on, on our work ethic. First, we like guys that don't mind chipping in and not, not putting on this, like, this is the only hat I wear, you know, in a small company, even at our size, you know, this is the only hat I wear, um, you know, in a small company, even at our size, you know, that work ethic that kind of saying, Hey, you know, I don't mind staying an extra hour or two to, to help out so that, you know, we all get out of here a little bit earlier. We're built around that first. Um, and then you get into, you know, different things that I think every company should have. You know, when I mentioned morals and just kind of the

quality of who you are as a person being a really important thing that we look at, you know, because that covers so many bases. You know, when somebody really does have some empathy and the right morals and they're aligned with the, you know, you know, doing things the right way. It covers that they want to do the job the right way that they don't want to cut corners. It covers that they want the right thing for the client that they don't want to, you know, they're not in there just to make a quick buck and get out and it doesn't

matter if they put in some, you know, cheap adapter or something, you know, all these things matter. And it helps when you build a team around that, it helps hold everybody accountable because everybody one day might, might be in a position to say, Hey, you know, you know, it'll work. It'll be fine. Let's just move on. But then you got the whole team around you that says, no, that's not the way we operate. Um, so if you kind of do that, that that's a good place to start, but then you want to kind of judge on what their ceiling is going to be. You know, some people have high IQs. And in this industry, they can get into the doing the programming and the setup. And then some people have better skills with their hands. And there's a lot of places if somebody has the first two things i mentioned there's a lot of places they can fit to really bring a lot to the table for the for a company like what we do across the board do you do you have i do i do want to just

touch on the the employee thing one more time do you have that codified like written down is that like those ethics are those something that you guys practice and, and, and. Yeah, we've, and that, unfortunately it's, that's, you know, Stacy, my partner, she's, she, she handles about half of this and the HR side is her side, a hundred percent. And we have some amazing handbooks that we actually make our, our new employees go through and learn and read. And it really talks about, you know, a lot of how we operate as a business and all of that. So, and then we review that we do a monthly meeting that's got the whole team and we kind of review, especially maybe not every meeting, but if we feel like things aren't going the right direction, we kind of go back to that handbook and kind of remind people what we're about and that kind of

thing. That's great. Sure. I want to, we've got a lot of other things to cover, but this is such an important topic in the industry and workforce development and recruiting and retention are so critical. So I want to go back and zoom in a little bit on, you know, you talked about looking for those intangibles and the morality and good character and things like that. Can you share a little bit of what you've learned over the years? Get a little bit more tactical on that. What are some of the ways that you actually screen for that? For example, do you have favorite interview questions or interview techniques or places that you're going to source candidates? What are some of the methods that you've found effective in terms of attracting that right type of person, those intangibles to your company? Sure. Um, you know, we've got myself, first of all, we have, um, more than one person interview.

It's not just walk in, do 20 minute interview and go out. We've got myself, Stacy, and then our general manager kind of, whether, whether it's a general manager from California or Arizona. So they kind of go through three stages and I think we all have different styles on how we interview, which is a really big positive. To speak to my personal style, you know, interviewing is a lot like sales if you're a good salesperson, you know, and a good salesperson wants to kind of get to the bottom of what makes somebody tick so that you can find the right, you know, fit for them. So open-ended questions for me, you know, anything that can just kind of

get somebody rambling a little bit, it gives you the ability to kind of see into the way they tick, what they think, you know, maybe what their hobbies are, what they're, you know, not necessarily, you know, kind of family life or at least home life looks like, you know, not necessarily, you know, kind of family life or at least home life looks like, you know, obviously in our industry, sometimes we bring on some of the younger people that, you know, you know, early twenties, you know, to, to train and you kind of want to see, are, are they in party mode still? Are they people that are looking for their career, you know, and just everybody will tell you the first time exactly what you want to hear. But if you kind of follow up with another open-ended question, and then another open-ended question, you kind of get them to start talking and eventually they'll

feel comfortable enough with you and you'll hear the, you know, the guts of what they really are are about. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I've just in've just in the last few years been involved on the interviewing side of interviews for the first time. And I would agree that those open-ended questions and really being tuned in, fully present, reading between the lines in those answers and looking not just, of course, for the words that they're saying, but kind of the meaning behind it. It's not always obvious, but if you're really paying attention, I've found that it definitely helps you tune into some of those underlying themes and messages like you talked about. I want to shift gears here a little bit and talk about, you've alluded to it a few times now, you own a couple of different businesses. So first of all, talk

about your decision to buy a business as opposed to expanding your current one. What prompted you, first of all, to want to expand? And then again, elaborate on that decision of buying a business versus taking your existing brand and expanding that out into a new market? Sure. There's a lot of factors into why you might want to expand. At some point, you know, when I first started the company, I didn't have anybody that worked for me. And it really was, you really didn't think about other people as a business owner. You're kind of like, hey, how do I just make ends meet? And how do I make an income? And then once you start to get more and more employees, you start thinking a little bit differently. And there's a challenge, I think,

especially more so now than there has been a lot because there's so many corporate options out there and they're growing and you look at Amazon and what they're doing for hiring and stuff like that. So you really do have to do something to show some growth and provide some opportunity for the guys that work for you. And if you're just trying to keep it at five, you know, five, six guys, that might be fine. Some companies are fine. And some, some, some people like to stay with that size company, but we were kind of full of a lot of younger people that were

constantly want to say, Hey, what's the next step? What can we do better? How can we grow? And I wanted to kind of encourage that. And so that's that's one of the bigger reasons for looking to expand. And how do we get to the next level? Kind of it's what what our team wanted to do. And it's served us well. It's been a lot of hard work, but I've got my general manager in Arizona. He started with us probably six, seven years ago. He had some six, he had six, excuse me, he had six security experience, but he'd never had any experience in home technology or home automation. He'd never mounted a TV in his life. He'd never cut a speaker in

before. And now he's the general manager of a company that, I mean, is pretty large in Arizona, doing a good amount of all of those things. So it's nice to see the growth from somebody that really didn't even know what this industry was about into somebody that can manage a company in just a short amount of time. So some of that is really about helping those guys and everybody have some opportunity paths to grow with the company. The other thing is, I think I'm just kind of built that way where I do want to look at what the next step is going to be. We did get pretty organized in Arizona. We got to, we got our act together and it was like, okay, now what's next? And then looking at some of the shifts in our industry, there's kind of like a little bit of a lack of how big you want to grow, unless you're going to turn into a Vivint

or some of these companies that are doing more cookie cutter home automation systems and a little less custom, you kind of want to keep a small team and stay a little personable with each project. And so because of that, you got to look at different ways to grow. And the electrical side, adding that was a no brainer because it gave us the ability to kind of take

what we were doing and then just do more of it for the same client. And that we kind of had a saying more revenue per client. And that makes a lot of sense. And then we're also more in charge of these things that we were already being held responsible for anyways. You're talking lighting design, all these different things that everybody calls us anyways. I don't know how many calls I've gotten personally at 11 o'clock at night

because a smoke detector was going off that had nothing to do with our system whatsoever. Well, now it does have something to do with our system at least. We installed a smoke detector. Lots of people out there nodding their heads right now as they listen to this. So I want to drill in just a little bit more and again, talk about the decision to very specifically to buy a business and sort of how you went about doing that. And then a two part question here. Again, the decision to buy and walk us through that process a little bit. And then you've alluded to this idea a couple of times that it just sort of resonating with me almost as an idea of like

ratcheting up, right? You alluded to how in Arizona, it's like you, and earlier when you were talking about growth in general, you kind of hit these stages where you get to a certain place, then you're good for a while, then you got to get your act together again as you continue to grow and you're almost ratcheting up as you go. So again, talk about the decision to buy an existing business. And then what are some of the core sort of systems and lessons that you've learned from growing and scaling one business that you're now able to apply as you go in and try to start getting, getting traction and getting success in a second location? Um, yeah, it's, it's, uh, there's lots of challenges with everything you just mentioned. Um, there, there does seem to be kind of a sweet spot you want to get to. And I just felt in

Arizona, there was really, I didn't want to become a 60, 70 employee business out there. You don't see really any of those in our industry, you know, a handful of them. And so you kind of feel like, all right, I feel like I've got a good, healthy business in this market. And I have friends in this. A lot of the people in this market are my friends, the competitors in this market. And I don't want to start really, business is business, but I don't really want to be going out there and purposely

taking builders and contractors and stuff away from people that I share information. We try to learn from what we do. So I felt like we had a good, healthy business running and we were in a good place. And besides adding electrical, it did make sense to see what other markets are out there that maybe I don't know about. And is it always sunny in these markets? Is there an ocean close by? You know, that kind of thing. So that's, you know, one of the reasons we looked at maybe a different market. We have an absolute rockstar office staff, purchasing, service, our manager, our general manager out there has a handle on the business without me even setting foot in the door. And then our office manager, Jennifer, she's just, I mean, I don't know how she gets so much done in a day, but she's a rock star.

So I kind of felt like, how do we take this and maybe get to the next step with it? So the business that we bought in California was a little bit of opportunity. You know, I'd known Steve personally, and I knew he was getting close to wanting to retire. So it was kind of like right time, right place. We felt like we were in a good spot. He was looking to kind of keep the name and the business going, but not have to keep running all of that stuff. So it was just a good kind of fit for us.

And so that's a big reason why we moved into California and took over. And on paper, it made a whole lot of sense because our admin staff did have a little bit of bandwidth to take on a little bit more. And now we have a whole nother location. And right now we're about half the revenue of our Scottsdale location, but that's a good bump to our bottom line of the two businesses. We'd kind of hoped originally to be able to have to turn them into one business, but you know, California, they have some stuff that goes on differently business-wise than Arizona. So right now we're still kind of keeping them as two separate entities that share some

common staff and common, you know, teams and, and purchasing power too. Right. So there's, there's some purchasing power that comes along with that too. California had, it was a much smaller company and focused on hi-fi and I say California audio concepts, focused on hi-fi and focused on a little bit more retail. So some of the different systems that we carry, they really weren't like preferred vendors or preferred dealers for those vendors and once we came in we were able to kind of work that to where we shot up and were one of the more preferred dealers in those areas which was nice so do you still have in retail location as well yeah yeah we've got the same retail that steve opened our shop up the one we're in right now in 1989

um and if you go on and like Google audio concepts, Long Beach, it's you can see for some reason, Google will not take down the pictures from before I took over, but it's kind of cool. Now it's, you can see like what it looked like a year ago, which basically nothing against Steve still looked like it was opened up in 1989. And then we totally revamped it and, you know, made it a more modern showroom with all the home technology. But we kept the Hi-Fi. He has a really, really nice Hi-Fi room. You know, we do some things that a lot of people don't, that still come in and upgrade you know and trade in their vandersteen speakers and stuff like that and we didn't want to get rid of that right so we do that too oh very cool um so so you you kind of um so so bringing in electrical i i you you mentioned this before i want to loop back to this bringing the electrical work in-house that is uh when i was a integrator was kind of like a dream of mine to do is to bring in electrical because as you said we're always responsible for the dimmers

that go in the wall we're supplying them usually or we're specifying them and someone else is playing but at the end of the day when the light doesn't turn on somehow it's your fault uh when when they didn't wire it up um What was the biggest challenge on bringing in what is absolutely a different trade? I mean, it seems like it's the same, but it's a completely different mindset and trade. What was the biggest challenge bringing that in-house into a low voltage company? You know, the first thing I would say is I, I, I would be probably just like a lot of AV guys who have said this, I will never say it again, but I've said, oh, it's electrical. It's a red, red, black, and white wire. How hard can it be? You know, we,

we've all made jokes about like, oh, there, you know, it's hard. It's, it really is. It's a different, like you just said, it's a different trade. Um, there's a lot to it that I didn't know. And I, I, I'm glad we did it. Um, there was a month three or four into it that I wish we hadn't. And it took getting over some pretty major humps to get to where I'm, I'm really happy that we, we pushed through it all. You know, the first project we got, you know, it was a big project. We did the lighting design for it, which I felt really comfortable with. And then we ended up getting the electrical portion of that job. And it's a 12,000-square-foot home with, I don't know with nine different sub panels, solar backup generator, you know,

the house, basically the power dies, the house just keeps working. Nobody knows about it. The power going off and all of these things, there was an engineer involved that just basically really wasn't paying attention to all of these things or asking the right questions. So, you know, just like in AV, all these things got dumped on the electrical to figure out on site. And it was a lot of work. And, you know, as I started, I didn't have all the right personnel to be able to take on that job. So two or three months into it, one of my very good friends in the industry was starting to get excited. We'd been talking, he's an electrician and he was excited about what we were doing.

And he decided to kind of close up his shop and come on board to desert Valley and take over running it. And, uh, you know, if he wouldn't have, we wouldn't have probably made it through the first hump of getting over things. Right. So my advice to anybody that decides to go out and do that, just like with AV, it's about having the right people. And if you've done AV for 20 years, you have not done electrical and you can't replace that experience. So having somebody on your team that really does have that experience that works well with your AV team that sees the big picture is kind of key, I think,

into trying to add that to what you're doing. Yeah, absolutely. We talked a little bit about the idea of, we've all sort of heard the saying, one throat to choke. And we've talked a little bit about that idea from the business perspective of, hey, I'm going to be receiving the phone calls anyways, so I might as well own it and get paid for the work that goes into it. Talk a little bit about the importance of one throat to choke from the client's perspective. You obviously operate in a luxury market, and how has bringing the electrical work in-house served you as a sort of a competitive differentiator in a crowded market? Yeah. Uh, you know, I'm just going to use the project we just wrapped up, which was a huge, uh, tunable lighting project where every light in the entire home was 10,000

square foot plus home. Every light in the entire home was tunable, meaning the color temperature changed throughout the day to help keep your you know your body in sync with the circadian rhythm um we had to accommodate this project we had to go with two different manufacturers for light for tunable lighting so there was not one standard system. You know, obviously there's a control system that's on top of it that, that to an end user, all they know is they hit a button and the lights turn on, but there's so much going on between the electrical, the low voltage lighting to make all this work that I've done home technology for, for a long long time i don't see a scenario where a company that doesn't do

all of this in-house would successfully pull off um that level of a project with partnering with an electrician especially not unless that electrician has a lot of experience and possibly a home technology guy on their staff as well. I mean, there's just too much overlap every day. My lead project manager on the AV side and my general manager for the electrical division, I mean, every day those guys were hands-on, talking through things, how are we going to integrate this, what part of it are you going to do, what part of it are we going to do,

and it really did flow. At the end of the day, the guys liked each other more than before we started, which says a lot. And it turned out to be a good end result for the client because it worked. It turned into a system that was designed well. It worked. They're in the home. It's all functioning. I think going forward, the more of that kind of thing we can do, where we start with, we're designing the lighting design, then we're doing the electrical, we're doing the AV, we're doing the technology. It's just one point of contact for a client, one point of contact for the builder. No finger pointing. There were definitely things along this project that, you know, we said, Oh, that's not going to work the way we had planned. But we worked it out. And

the builder, the client never heard about it, because it was both of us, there was not, hey, you know, they said they were going to do it this way. And we said, we're going to do it this way. And there was none of this, like, all right, let's get a mediator in here and figure this out. We had to figure it out before we even, you know you know most most things they never even knew we had to work you know a little bug out or something on turf battles can just be so frustrating it's like it doesn't make any sense at the end of the day you're you're gonna have to fix whatever problem was there so why why cause the problem along the way just so you can say that you didn't have anything to do with it i don't know i agree it it was so great to work with with guys you know electricians i've

worked with some larger projects it was so great to have them proactively come up to you and say hey this thing you think about your you think you're gonna do it's probably not gonna work let's go let's go over there and take a look at it and i mean i those guys saved me so many times and in turn i saved saved them too. You know, if I saw one of their wires running, you know, where it shouldn't have been, I'd point something out. So it's just a better working relationship overall. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Justin. I was just saying, we're, we're definitely, I mean, seeing that it's, you know, sometimes you kind of look at something, you say, this is why we're going to do this.

And then it doesn't pan out. But I would tell you that communication between the home technology side and the electrical side, assuming your company has the right team players, it really is a difference maker. Yeah. Yeah, I can definitely see that having a lot of experience in my past of working, especially on those bigger, more complex projects, there is absolutely no way that you're going to get the same effect working across two different companies that you are when you have people from the same company who can literally come in the office every morning and sit down at the conference table over a cup of coffee and really just hash things out day after day on those complex projects.

The communication flow is just, it's everything when you get to that level of complexity. So that makes a lot of sense. And I love the idea, to go back to how you framed it earlier, of looking for growth, not necessarily by going out there and banging your head against a wall in the market, trying to get more and more and more clients, but rather looking at clients and trying to expand the wallet share that you're getting from each individual one of those clients. And it seems like if you can get through that initial hump, you talked about those challenges initially, and if you can push through that, it sounds like it's a really great way to grow a business. So we are bumping up against our time. And speaking of

growing a business, I'd love to ask you one or maybe two more questions about that growth and talk a little bit about you personally and getting out of owner-operator mode. There's a lot of small and medium-sized businesses and business owners in this industry. And I know many of them who I've gotten to know over the years and worked with are really trying to think about the future and how do I get to that proverbial place of working less in my business and more on my business? What high level advice would you give to anybody out there who's grappling with that challenge? Oh, well, you know, I was fully out of owner-operator mode at the end of 2018. I took three months off, completely off the grid before we bought our company in California, just to make sure our company was really operating at a level

without me. And that was nice. You know, sometimes you think back and you say, why did I go back from that? And then I bought the California company and we're, you know, started with six people and it was like starting all over. Um, so I'm kind of going through all those steps that I saw in Arizona to try to get yourself where you're not in the middle of every decision again, a little bit in California. Um, mainly because California we're still developing a few system designers and salespeople. So I'm kind of back into that role right now in California. The best advice, you know, just because I've watched friends, you know, in the industries or just other companies,

and I've watched myself do it, and I still do it sometimes is you can't do everything. Nobody's going to do anything the way you would do it. Sometimes they may do it better and you might be surprised. Sometimes they may only do something at 80% of the level of what you would have done it at, but you got to be willing to take all that because at the end of the day, there's only so much time you can put into any task. And so you've got to let, you've got to let your team, you got to trust them. You got to teach them the way you'd like the end result to look at minimal. You know, you don't necessarily have to teach them all the steps because everybody works in different ways.

And if you have really good people on your team, they're going to figure things out. But just kind of let people make a few mistakes here and there. Let people, let, let your team learn from those, you know, just guide them. But, you know, don't, don't set your expectations for anybody to be doing things the way you do it or at the level you would, or even unfortunately, sometimes what they carry you would, you know, you know, we, as owners, we go home and we, we think about this business till we go to sleep and then have a dream about it. If your employees are doing that, then you're not running a very good company. You know, it's not a healthy company for your employees to work at, you know. And that's something I've

been working at. I have a general manager that's, you know, basically in Arizona that, you know, does the role of an owner. And I'm really trying to keep an eye on what he's doing because he does take a lot home with him. And I, you know know I'm saying we've got to figure out ways to make sure you you're disconnecting you know um so kind of watch your guys watch watch how much effort they're putting in acknowledge it and and you know be be grateful for everything they're doing because all these guys are putting in work for you know your company and and to build your name a lot of times. So, you know, it's, that's a pretty rewarding thing when you see a lot of people out there that are willing to do that for you as an owner. Yep. Absolutely. Great advice. Well, Justin, as Jason said, we're running up on our time and

do want to say thank you for your time for joining us here on the show and kind of talking about talking some shop business shop a little bit here it's a fun conversation that we had um if anybody wanted to reach out to you and say hi uh what's the best way they could do that you know emails best um i have two emails justin at audio concepts inc.com which is californ is California and Justin at desert valley, av.com, which is Arizona. Um, so, you know, I'm pretty responsive. If somebody has questions, if, especially if you have any listeners that are kind of in a similar place and they want to just talk about, you know, what their growth looks like or have questions on what we did, or, you know, I'm probably learned something from

them, you know, just as well. Awesome. Well, Justin, I'll echo what Seth said. This was a really fun conversation. We, we appreciate you coming on the show. Take care. Yeah. Thank you guys. Have a good one. So it was a great conversation with Justin over at Audio Concepts and Desert Valley. I, I, Jason, I, um, like I said, during the interview, uh, picking up electrical was always a dream of mine because I could, I could always like think of all the things that I wouldn't have to do. But as he pointed out, it's probably more things that I'm not thinking about that I have to do, like riser diagrams and all this fun stuff that I never had to think about before.

But if I was an electrician, I would. But also, it would be nice to just not have to worry about that aspect of the, of the project though. Like, yeah, I'm thinking, I'm thinking the next big thing he should do is, uh, maybe like purchase a cable company or something that seems to be the next problem child in the, in the list. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. No, I think it's great. I think that it's one of those things that definitely pros and cons, not, not a panacea, but if you can get over the hump like he talked about and bring that in-house, then it's going to probably prevent a lot of headaches. And even of the headaches that you still end up having to deal with, at least you're getting paid for it. Right, right. That's a good point. So that's an important point to think about.

But yeah, just generally really, really enjoyed. Justin, very clearly, very thoughtful, comes across very humble guy, but successful. And I think that we can all, no matter what line of the home technology business that you're in or any business for that matter, I think there some good nuggets in there that we can all learn from well jason uh pick of the week this week i think that you you're my pick of the week this week this is a this is a story by you what an honor this is this is indeed this is going back uh see what you got here this is going back a couple of months this one was up in residential systems, but evergreen, evergreen. Time flies right now. This is 2020, baby. I can do whatever I want. It does. No, this one is a piece I did for residential systems on productivity, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. And I've gotten a fair amount of feedback,

people reaching out still, coming across this piece and a fun one to put together. Just kind of jumped into three different tools. I've been, as I've alluded to on the show, Seth moved into a different role at One Vision back in the spring. And as a result, the general nature and sort of tenor of my day-to-day work has changed significantly. And this has, of course, happened to me as it does to all of us several times over my career. And every time I go through one of these major transitions, it becomes a catalyst for taking a fresh look at the tools that I'm using and how I'm sort of structuring my work and trying to keep a grip on things.

So this was an opportunity for me to sit down and gather my own thoughts as well and just talk about some of the tools that I've really adopted. I've continued down the road with Notion. Talked about that several months ago on the show as I had just started to get into that. And I'm almost not using Trello at all these days, which is crazy. Gasp. Exactly. Do use it for this show and a couple other personal things, but generally moved over to Notion. So I talk a little bit about that. And then another app that I've, I've really started to embrace more, which is Todoist. I think Notion

does a lot of things really well. One of the things it doesn't do particularly well, in my opinion, is function as just a reminder system and sort of what I call micro tasks. Like if I just need a place to park a little thing that needs to be done, and it's not necessarily a big project that I want to track a whole bunch of information on, but just smaller things that I need to remember, Todoist really become my my go-to for that what separates this from something like maybe omni focus or i don't know if you try things like this one it's it's right there in in the same vein genre i would say not much probably so all a matter of of preference i i gravitated toward todoist for some reason years ago and i had the free version forever sitting on my phone and i i just upgraded to premium to try it out and kind of never looked back so i think any of

those apps like todoist or things just having some app like that in your in your arsenal so to speak for again managing to me i mean there's much more you could do with with todoist than i'm using it for i i use use it very lightly but ultimately just something to have little little quick small tasks and and reminders right i really like it cool and then the underrated, underappreciated art of managing a calendar. I get into that as well. Totally not sexy, not a fun topic to think about. But I'm really just a big believer in sort of time blocking and keeping a grip on your calendar to me has been a big one. Many have tried, many have tried

and many have failed, including me. Yeah. Often. I don't, I don't think there's a good way to do calendars. I really don't. Like there's no one way, obviously there's no one right way, but calendars are just, I don't know. They just don't seem to work, uh, for, for me. They've never worked for me, I i should say but i don't know like they they you have it's kind of like trello right like a calendar is kind of just like a generic space and you can put something at a specific time or and on a day um hey look i made your calendar in this picture um did you you got the home tech podcast in there I did there you go yeah Seth off is my phone oh funny I was out yeah but like that's an example like it's it's a it's an all-day event

in a calendar like you have to wedge that reminder in into that all-day event and I don't know something about that that kind of thing those little hacks you have to do the color codes and everything just doesn't work in my mind. I say that still not having found a good way to use a calendar, although I have been using it a little bit better recently. So calendars. I think it really depends. Right. Like I didn't use a calendar at all until a few years ago.

I mean, I shouldn't say at all. I used one lightly, but I certainly wasn't a mainstay in my productivity stack until a few years ago. And it's just, that's when the nature of my work changed. And I I'm just, I'm, I'm in tons of meetings now and I have have, my work has shifted much more over the years from being kind of a, I guess, a production resource, like actually building things to more being kind of leading teams and managing teams that are building things. And so I'm in a lot of meetings and just have to really keep tabs on where I'm supposed to be and when. So for me, I'm almost forced into using a calendar. And as such, I've really adopted

it for time blocking and making sure that if I need a couple hours on a Tuesday to focus on a big project, I need to protect that time. Otherwise, you know, it will get it will get booked. Sure. No, that makes sense. So Robert in the chat room calendars work best for actual physical events, like client meetings that must truly happen at a specific time. Totally agree with that. I'm generally not, not a fan at all of using a calendar as a reminder system. Although I will admit I break that rule occasionally if I've got a very time sensitive thing, like, Hey, I need to check in on this particular thing because it's going to launch that day. And so I just, I really need to make sure I check in on Tuesday morning and that we're

all good, ready to go. Like I'll put that at 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning because it really, truly is time sensitive, but I generally try to avoid using the calendar as a, as a, as a reminder system. Yeah. Well, uh, unfortunately we have the, the, the, uh, the, the shared calendar in my family. And, uh, I don't know if you have a family shared calendar as well, but, um, other, other people may not agree with the way that you run your calendar. So it's, it's like their events will start polluting your calendar. And then all of a sudden you have things popping up like you have to do and they're just not they're not there for you to do you should be somewhere but you're not and yeah that's that's what generally happens it sounds like there's some some history behind this well that's why i just don't like i just don't believe in the

like something needs to exist in the calendar space that works like the calendar does but is in a calendar i guess i don't know something is missing here maybe i i because because i have to i can't convince my wife to use uh todoist that's just not going to happen so i need to i need a calendar apple that does reminders essentially i think we'll be all right, if you ever figure out that family calendar thing, let me know. Yeah, yeah. Doesn't work here either, if it makes you feel any better. We've got three events for this podcast, by the way. Just letting you know, three events for the one podcast.

Got to groom that calendar, Seth. They're not all mine. Oh, that's funny. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, pics of the week, calendar tips for Seth,

ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Again, that is feedback at hometech.fm. And we want to give a big thank you

to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able 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 home tech.fm support to learn how you can support home tech for as little as one dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout on the show but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slack chat the hub where you and other av you and every other supporter of the show can gather every day for the inside baseball conversations about what's going on in home

technology. Absolutely. And if you're looking for other ways to support the show, we'd really appreciate a positive review on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you enjoy what we do here on Home Tech, please take a minute to go do that. Oh man, October 13th. It's like, it should be a Friday, it feels like, because it's just going to be so much going on. Seth, go mark it on your calendar. It's already on my calendar, Jason.

Now I have three events. Good. There you go. That's progress. That's progress. It's, yeah, yeah, I guess so um i don't know i'll have uh i'll have the apple event and if that gets too boring then i'll and and i have to stop watching it then i'll swing over to the uh snap av and watch that too because i think that's going

to be entertaining we we'd know that snapAV and Control4 did not really show up or do very much for Cedia, so they kept their powder dry, as you say, and we'll be doing their big announcements there on what's new in each platform. So we'll be interested to see what they come up with. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely looking forward to that. All right, Seth. Well, have a great weekend.

You too, Jason. Thanks everybody for popping in and chatting with us tonight. And we'll talk to you next week. All right. Take care, Seth.