HomeTech.fm - Episode 326 - Exploring Crestron's Residential Strategy with John Clancy

Episode Date: November 6, 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, November 7th from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. How you doing, Seth? Feeling inconclusive? Yeah. Well, I mean, by the time the show comes out, we should know something, right? Hopefully. Hopefully we'll know something. No idea.

Election, big election. I'm sure the world knows. I mean, the world knows what the United States does. I'm sure everybody listening to the podcast knows. There was a big election, and we ran it up to the line there's no like there's no there's no clear winner so to speak uh where where they can take the exit polls numbers or the computer tabulated numbers and figure out who won we we have this archaic system that you have to like add up the numbers you have to grind them up mix mix it in with some chemicals,

look at it through the light of a prism, and then that gives you the something. It's a really strange system that we have. And evidently we need 270-something to win, and that's what everybody says. And it's just a mess. It's just a mess. It is indeed.

Let's hope that their ability to count is better than my ability to keep track of days. Eddie in the chat room kindly points out Friday is the 6th, not the 7th. So ignore what I said there on the intro. Thanks for that, Eddie. In other anticipatory news, I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to use that word on the show. In other anticipatory news. I don't think I've ever had the opportunity to use that word on the show. In other anticipatory news, Seth, Josh AI teasing a major announcement November 10th, I believe, November 10th. They've been teasing this quite a bit. And I have no real idea what they're doing. I'm not sure sure i haven't really gotten any hints i um maybe let's throw something out there uh maybe they're gonna do uh a major announcement november i guess major would be maybe they expanded to another market like the uk or something i don't know yeah i so

no so it is november 10th 11 a.m. Pacific time. They've sent out save the dates. You can Google Josh AI event and it'll come right up if you're interested in more. I've got a theory here, Seth. Okay. You ready? So I think they give a big hint right here. They said, imagine what would be possible if you brought Josh AI's award-winning engineers and the world's most innovative architects and designers together to revolutionize the smart home again. I think that

the architects and designers is the key there. And my guess is that this is going to be some sort of a system for, and I have this pure speculation, but some sort of a system for integrating voice control into very high-end homes with like almost minimal or maybe zero like visible microphones. So moving away from the model where you've got like things on walls and devices on countertops, I've always thought this would be an interesting model where what if the voice control was just built right in to the structure of the home? So it was a little bit more invisible. Again, I have zero information to validate that speculation, but if I was forced to put some of my money down on what this is, I think that hint there in the

bringing the architects and designers into the fold, I suspect has something to do with making voice control a little bit more um seamlessly from a from a design or visual standpoint integrated into the home because the micro is already already a small device it's like a little hockey puck maybe a little bit bigger uh size piece of equipment that you would plug in and disappearing that that's going to be that's going to be a tall order. I don't know. That's a, that's an interesting one. That's a better, better one than I had. Although I think they, you know, it would be nice for our friends overseas to get their hands on some Josh AI, you know, but they speak with funny accents that American products don't understand.

So, right. Well, you think about, you think about origin had that thing come out i'm not sure how how it's going and if it's still around but it was like to take uh an echo device and put it up behind like a speaker grill in the ceiling right so it's not necessarily that you have to get the device down so small you got to come up with a way to hide it. I don't know. That's the best I can come up with. But it'll be interesting. They've been really pumping this in the industry. So I'll be curious to see what it is. But moving into our show here, really quickly, we're going to jump into some home tech headlines here momentarily. But before we do that, we did want to mention very quickly that we had John Clancy, the VP of Residential at Crestron on the show.

It was a fantastic conversation. I've been, well, Seth, we have been really talking about Crestron quite a bit since we started the show, but especially since 2015 when they made the decision to pull out of Cedia. That was a big decision that sent a lot of speculation and shockwaves through the industry in terms of, was Crestron committed to the residential channel? It was really fascinating to get John's perspective on that and how it actually, that decision incidentally led directly to John's taking over of residential there at Crestron. And the conversation really covers a wide gamut of the things that they've been working on and what they've been busy with at Crestron since he, since he took the helm of residential.

So really interesting conversation and be sure to stay tuned for that. Well, Jason, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. Netflix is raising the prices of its standard and premium plans. It's standard plan previous $13 a month is now a whopping 14 a month while the premium plan has been raised from 16 to 18 a month the price of the basic service is unchanged at nine dollars a month i don't know what to think about this it's not i mean they they it's like it's like the the what is that analogy the the frog in the the boiling water like they just keep turning up the heat we don't know frog in the boiling water, like they just keep turning up the heat. We don't know, frog in the firing pan. We just, we won't know. And we'll be cooked one day.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, there, there was a time when Netflix, I, I remember like Reed Hastings was very big on not raising prices. And, and now we've seen several of these from Netflix in, in recent memory. And I don't know, from one angle, I look at it and say, it's just a dollar, and I think I still get plenty of value. From the other angle, it's like, yeah, well, it just kind of keeps going. But ultimately, I think the most interesting thing about this, Seth, is imagine being in a position where you can raise your price to subscribers by such a small amount, by $1, and assuming zero churn, of course, there may be some, but assuming zero churn, and very, very rough math here, 73.08 million US subscribers, some of those are going to be on the plan that there is a plan that isn't changing but assume conservatively that i don't know you

raise your top line revenue by like 50 million dollars by raising prices on users for a dollar i mean the numbers are are kind of are kind of staggering they get big real quick um exactly yeah that netflix is like if you if you look into the actual business of them they made all these incredible investments into studios and originals earlier on they were they were well ahead of the game uh when it came to getting those those products out on their their streaming platform and that they're like just way over leveraged in debt so they've got to start kicking up subscriber numbers or increasing profits to start paying back uh for their larger catalog that they've been they've been shoveling out so it's all going to come to a head and one day we'll be playing 20

29 30 dollars for Netflix but I suspect by that point you probably have a lot of content that you can pick from but I it does feel like that that frog I think this what started back like 12 a month now it's up to 14 for the for the standard plan I don't remember what that frog. I think this started back like $12 a month. Now it's up to $14 for the standard plan. I don't remember what the premium was. I think that was kind of introduced to break off of the standard plan to kind of tease people away. You know, good, better, best type thing. So I don't really remember what that does. I want to say we're paying the $14.

I can't say that we're paying any more than that. Still feels like a great value to me. I'm certainly not going anywhere but no i'm not netflix is one of the like the staples in the house and uh netflix uh the disney channel which which you know thanks to that deal you and i found that we we have for the next like 10 years or whatever and then uh my daughter's gonna be like six and it's like yeah with the disney channel you've got to start paying for it now. Yeah, no kidding. And I think that's really all that we're watching right now.

Netflix has some pretty good shows on it. House of the Haunting of Bly Manor or something like that is what we're watching. It's a pretty good one. Pretty good? Yeah. I'll have to check it out. I've been hearing a lot of good things about The Queen's Gambit lately. I heard somebody mention that today that was good as well. good to be the one getting all the buzz now yeah and of course uh on apple tv plus i

will plug this one it's the antidote for 2020 make sure that you uh go check out uh ted lasso that is that is the uh it will cure 2020 for of anything it is it's a great show i just can't recommend that highly enough good stuff greg says queen's gamut is absolutely awesome so i have to check that out is the queen in it what's that i don't know what it's about is the queen in it it's like it's uh i watched a trailer it looks like it's about chess there's a a female lead and um i't know. It's hard to describe. Go watch the trailer. It looks good. Not the band, not, not Elizabeth, but maybe a chess piece. No, no. All right. Let's keep moving. Uh, the next time you visit your local Walmart, you could find a Comcast X1 powered TV among the endless variety of sets from LG,

Samsung, and TCL. According to the Wall Street Journal, the telecommunications company is in early talks with Walmart about a potential pact that could see the retailer sell TV sets that run Comcast software similar to its Flex set-top box. Interesting. Race to input. It's at input zero. Yeah. Yep.

That's right. Continuing here, it says part of the deal, Walmart would reportedly get a slice of recurring revenue from Comcast. So that makes sense. And for Walmart, meanwhile, the deal would also mean more value price TVs to put on the shelves with Comcast providing support and software. I think this is where this industry had needed to be headed for the past decade. It just made sense to me that with all the streaming stuff that's going on, and now streaming platforms have certainly matured in the past, I would say, three to four years, more than they were prior to that. And now it seems like, I know it's incredibly hard to do the streaming stuff properly with all the licensing and whatnot.

But you have a company like Comcast that can get on this and put their, they're basically just running the software on a little cable box in your house. Now they don't need that cable box. Now they don't need a technician to come out and put it in. You just hang the TV on your wall, get it on Wi-Fi, and you've got comcast cable you're done there's there's nothing else to do that makes a lot more sense than than running all of these horrible cable boxes around yeah yeah it's not going to be fun to integrate but you know it will i can tell you that right now details yeah details the latest nest thermostat isn't the only model that can tell you if something's wrong with your hvac system even older models will get the capability now

that google-owned brand has rolled out hvac monitoring to all nest thermostats across the u.s and parts of canada according to the software engineers from nest they started working on hvac monitoring feature two years ago as a side project the company started testing it earlier this year and sending sending users who sign up for the nest home report alerts if the system detects something wrong with their heating and ventilation or ac always good to get uh extra features added into a product an older product that you may have bought. And, you know, with the push of a button, there you go.

Yeah. New capability. And I like this. We've talked about this sort of functionality on the show before. I don't remember if it was specific to Nest or what it was, but generally the idea of devices getting smarter and giving us more actionable information. And hopefully it doesn't happen often for you, but you know, I, I did have my Ecobee thermostat a while back, give us an alert that, Hey, we've

noticed that the heat we've been calling for heat for quite a while. And in the house is not warming up. You might want to check things out. And, and I don't remember what it was, but indeed it had pointed out a problem to us that we had to have checked out and it was a relatively inexpensive thing to have fixed. But I just thought that was kind of cool. So again, not something necessarily that you hope to use often, but I really look forward to devices getting more of this, getting more of that intelligence that can help make us aware of issues around the house, I think is an exciting trend. You can almost say that it makes your house smarter. Almost. We're going to get there. We are going to get there.

All the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 326. Wow. We're up there. Uh, while you're there, don't forget to find, while you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes even further analysis as well as industry news that may not have made the show. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 326. Also, don't forget you can join us live in our chat room on Wednesday evenings, typically starting around 7, 7.30 p.m. Eastern. Find out more at hometech.fm slash live, or another great way to do that is to follow us over on Twitter at Hometech Podcast. We'll usually shoot out a tweet

five or 10 minutes before we get started. We've got a few folks hanging out with us in the chat room tonight, and we always appreciate that. All right, Seth. Well, without further ado, let's go ahead and get into our conversation. Once again, we had John Clancy, the VP of residential over at Crestron, and we really hope you enjoy it. Hey, John, welcome to the show. How are you? Hey, Jason. I'm good. How are you?

Doing great. Doing great. We're excited to have you on, and we're really looking forward to jumping in and catching up with you. It's been following the Crestron journey has been something we've been talking a lot about here on the show for the last several years, and we're excited to finally have you on. So looking forward to that. But before we jump into the details here, why don't you give a quick introduction to yourself just for any of our listeners who aren't familiar with you or your background in the industry? All right. Well, so I've been in this industry for almost 30 years now.

So I started in 92 as an integrator, as actually a technician. And I think I've worked in just about every role possible at my former company, working my way up to be one of the owners. And about four and a half years ago, I took this position at Crestron, which did not exist prior to me joining. And it's been an exciting journey. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. A man after my own heart. I definitely, Seth and I both come from the integration background and I did, I think pretty much everything short of ownership. I started out in the crawl spaces and attics and worked up through wiring racks and programming and ops and project management, and even a little bit of sales, which

I wasn't very good at, but here we are. And so it's fun to talk to somebody who's really had such a wide depth of experience in the industry. To that end, why don't you share a little bit about your current position as the VP of residential there at Crestron and to the extent that you have a typical day, what does that look like for you? Well, look, I'll step back one second because I will say as the integrator, it's so easy to sit back and point fingers and complain about manufacturers and their products and all this stuff. And now being on this side, with 4,000 SKUs at Crestron and new things coming just about on a weekly basis, it is a challenge to say the least.

But, you know, my typical role daily is, you know, obviously I manage and run the business unit globally, right? So I'm involved with our sales, our marketing. I am involved with product development, software development. There isn't really much that touches this channel for Crestron Residential that I'm not involved with. Very good. Well, let's take a step back in time here and start at kind of the beginning of when you joined the team at Crestron. This is going back to around, right around 2015. And obviously most of the listeners to our show will remember one of the big significant stories

that year was Crestron pulling out of Cedia. And that certainly sparked a lot of conversation in the industry. So let's start there and talk about your take on Crestron's decision and sort of what that prompted you to do. Sure. So it was at Cedia in 2015 that I was formally elected to the Cedia board of directors. I had spent basically probably 20 plus years, 20, yeah, around 20 years at that point in time,

primarily selling Crestron in the residential space. And when that announcement was made, I was, I guess, somewhat infuriated. I had some doubts as to Crestron's commitment to the residential channel at that time. And here, you know, this is all I do for the most part. Our company was solely focused on Crestron in the residential space. We were, if not the biggest, one of the biggest Crestron residential dealers in the world. And so I had a conversation with the CEO and president of Crestron, Randy Klein, who is now my current boss. And it was really about that. I was, you know, I said exactly that, you know, I already had my doubts about your

commitment to the residential channel, you guys pulling out of Cedia, this is just terrible. And he explained to me his reasons. And, you know, I didn't get it at first. And after a few conversations, you know, we finally came to terms and I understood what he was doing. At that point in time, if you remember back, the Cedia Expo show was really changing its direction and kind of, I wouldn't say misdirected, but it was kind of all over the place. It was trying to be everything to everyone. There was a lot of DIY product at the show. I believe some DIY products who were really built or these products that were really built

to bypass the integrator, right, to be sold to the end user were winning awards and had this primary focus at the show. And I think that really infuriated, you know, Brandy in the sense that, you know, here's Crestron, this professional, professionally installed solution provider at this show where these DIY products are surrounding it. And it didn't feel right. And and I think, you know, when looking back, I somewhat agree to that. And anyway, that evolved over the course of time with essentially, you know, if Crestron had some real focus and and dedicated direction in the residential channel, we can you know, they can dominate. And that evolved into, well, John, why don't you come here and do something about it? I was not looking for a job. I was one of the owners of my company.

My office, I'm here at home now. My office was or is six miles away. Now I get in the car and I travel sometimes two hours in the morning to go from Long Island to New Jersey. And it's not easy. But I really, I was looking for a challenge. And I certainly got that. But I really believe, and I still do that, you know,

this was like waking the sleeping giant. You know, if I can just focus some of the energy towards towards, towards the residential space, we can, we can really, you know, do some magic. Yeah. That's, that's it's funny. You were mentioning about, you know, do some magic. Yeah. That's, that's, um, it's funny. You were mentioning about, you know, complaining about, uh, almost complaining about manufacturers and the decisions that they're making as an integrators, like in the job description. And I'm just like, I was laughing about that because it's just what we do. It's what we do it so well. Um, but, but going from being an integrator and transitioning over into your new role at

Crestron, like how, what was that initial onboarding like? How did you make the transition from being an integrator who deals with the sales side of the product and move into a role where you're having to actually manage the product to be sold out? You're having to put the pieces together for an integrator. Well, look, and I think, like you said, I think we've all opened boxes and looked at stuff and said, who in the world thought of this? Like, why did they do this? So I don't have that excuse anymore. Right. But I will say, you know, especially early on, it was it was certainly culture shock, right? Going from a small company, where I had gone through the ranks, most of the people there I hired for the most part, and being the boss, essentially, to going into this multi-billion dollar company. Yes, it's a senior level position. I report to the president and CEO.

I'm a vice president. But it's a big company. We're four buildings on our campus. This is not a little thing, right? And so the culture shock of going from that small mom and pop company to this big corporate environment was part of it. And then obviously flipping sides, going from the one who's specifying, selling, and installing to the one now who's got to build these products and build the software and support our dealers and everything that goes into that,

it was definitely challenging. It took me probably a few months just to come to grips with, you know, what am I doing here? Like... Yeah, I have a similar story where I went to work for, briefly for a manufacturer, and there were little things that I would come across like, why did you print the serial number on the bottom of the box where you'll never see it in the rack once it's installed and next flat up against the other thing? It's just like little things like, oh, we can move this. We can move the sticker that we stick on everything here so you can actually read it.

So, yeah, I totally, totally get that one. Jason, I think you wanted to follow up on something. Yeah, yeah, I did. I can't imagine that was a big transition. And to that end, John, I also know Audio Command Systems, a very successful integration company. And it sounds like you were really on a great track there and part ownership and presumably could have very easily ridden out your career there. And so that couldn't have been an easy decision. What was it ultimately that swayed you over to the side of Crestron? Yeah, so I would say by all means, it was probably the most difficult decision of my life because I had invested so much into ACS. You know, I'd been there for 20 plus years when I left, almost 23 years. And I had an opportunity there,

right, to, you know, that most people don't ever really get. Just if you shut up and go to work every day, you'll eventually own the company, right? And that was really what was put in front of me. And that's an amazing opportunity. And it's a great company by all means. But I saw this as something different. And I, you know, I think about, you know, things in life. And I guess it's the things that you don't do that you regret the most, right? Not necessarily the things you do, everyone makes mistakes and makes the wrong choice here and there. But, you know, I didn't want to pass up this opportunity and then regret it later because, you know, arguably this is probably one of the best jobs in the industry and a fantastic opportunity to come into a company like Crestron

and deliver, you know, direction and focus towards the residential business unit and really, you know, just, just, just take the reins. And, and, and to be honest, my boss now, Randy, he's given me everything I've asked for since I've been here. You know, the support that I get from him and from the rest of the company to just do this has been just, just, just amazing. Just amazing. Yeah. I want to kind of go back in time with you there. Just one more, one last time, I promise. Cedia 2014 is kind of that era that, that, that we, we began to notice the DIY products brought in and,

and surrounding the giant anchor booth of Crestron, which I can totally understand why he felt that way. So what, what, one of the things that did come out of, uh, a CD of 2014 was a small little system called Crestron ping. And I, I remember that Jason and I were both super excited about this. We had, uh, Evan Ackman on back on episode episode 38, I came in and gave us the rundown on what you could do with a little $599 box to get a Crestron system started. That has evolved since you have been there.

And kind of is, I don't know, as far as the residential side is concerned and what I see coming out of Crestron, has evolved into the flagship product during your tenure at Crestron. So, yeah. So, look, I am a former Crestron program. In fact, I'm a gold master programmer. Last I checked, there were, I don't know, 40 of us on the planet. Right. So I, that's where I, I, I had really earned my, or, or, or, or, or my place at my company prior to, to leaving. And,

you know, I knew that it was, that situation was for the, for the, the bulk of our dealers was unsustainable, right? Having to sit there with a laptop for a few hours, days or weeks to get a system up and running. Um, even if it's a basic system and having to draw buttons and screens on touch panels, you know, was unsustainable for the, for, for, for the, for the longterm. Right. Now, now, before I go on, you know, I still will say that, you know, that's part of Crestron's heritage and being able to do that will, will something will, will, that will always be there. Right.

I mean, that's something that sets us apart from everyone else. And there are places for that. But for your average home, your average media room, family room, living room, that shouldn't be required, right? And I think that in looking at Ping, because it had been a stable platform for a while, really that's the base. That's where Crestron Home evolved from, right? You know, we started with adding, you know, video sources into it, and we called it Ping,

and we gave it a name. We called it OS2, right? Because I really wanted, you know, one of the questions I got a lot was, what is Ping, right? And it was really hard to describe, because from a product perspective, it's all of our regular products, but it was just a processor and an application, but it was really hard to describe until I called it an OS, an operating system, because now then light bulbs went off and people got it. Okay, this is this platform that's this anchor for everything else that we do. But knowing that the user experience wasn't fantastic and knowing that we also needed some things on the back end

to help support and grow that platform, we invested heavily into end-user testing, a lot of interaction with our dealers. I mean, we hired this outside firm to come in and interview end users who own Crestron systems and own competing systems to try and define what the user experience should really be like. And that's what you see now in Crestron Home. It was years of development that got us there, and it's been around for, excuse me, 13 months now. But also on the back backend, it is the base of what ping was, right? You can figure it with an iPad app. You can do it from a desktop app also,

but it's, it's served to you. It's not a piece of software you download from our website and install and have to keep up with, with versions. It's a completely different way of doing things. And it, and from our, you know, at least from my perspective, I think it's the future of how, how these systems will be done. Yeah. That, that, that makes a lot of sense.

You touched on it there at the end and I'd love to zoom in a little bit on it and talk about some of the, what were some of the biggest challenges in going from that model where all of the programming was done on a, on an executable file that you put on your laptop to now having it to be able to drag and drop in an iPad interface. And can you give us a sense, sort of an overview of what some of the biggest product design

and engineering design challenges are associated with a transition like that? So let me step back for one second because look, as a business owner and a former programmer who ran a team of programmers at my company, just the management of that is really, really tough to sustain and to maintain. Um, who's making sure everyone's on the latest version. Um, who's got the latest files. Did you back up your laptop? When I go to, uh, Mr. Jones's home to go do an update, do I have all the latest files? Sure you do, until you get there and you find out, no, you don't. And now you're calling everyone in the company to find out who's got the latest touch panel file for the master bathroom or where's this module or driver or whatever. So that all goes out the window with Crestron Home, right? This is all

stored in the cloud, right? If someone's processor fails, we can go there with a new processor and pull down the configuration from the cloud. I don't have to worry about versioning or who's got the files or where they might reside, you know? So that really is what I think defines what modern software really should be. I got to say, people listening to this, this was less than 10 years ago. This is a standard industry practice. And yeah, you look at how fast things have developed on the, like the, the software development side for say, you know, iOS, Android for, for web technologies. Oh my gosh, it's light speed. Uh, and, and not having the up-to-date code synced across 20 computers through your get account. You know, it's like, it, it, it, it's, it's unfathomable to me now that, that like you just going over that.

I'm having flashbacks, mostly trauma flashbacks of, of yesteryears where, yeah, you'd get on a project and you'd be like, where, where, where do I begin with this? I don't, I don't have what I need for this. And it's all comes down to, I don't have a piece of software that I can't download at this house to run on this panel. So yeah, yeah. I, yeah, it's a night and day difference coming in, moving into a modern architecture like Crestron home. Yeah. Look, I had a, I had a programmer one time lose his laptop, right? Now we're trying to figure out when he last backed up and how many projects were affected by that. Right. And, and, and, you know, you hope that the people who were between the last time you backed up and the

time he lost his laptop, never call you. And that's just horrible to think that way. And, you know, the world has changed so quickly and so dramatically that that's not, that doesn't, it's kind of silly to even talk about that. It does. Yeah. So, and I'm sitting here smiling and nodding my head as well, because, you know, definitely been there before and it was a painful experience. So certainly I think going to this, this new, well, new as of, you know, four or five years ago, newer model of, of, of programming and managing the code, obviously I would, I would call it a slam dunk on the integrator side. But, but I I'd love to get your perspectives on just like inside of a company like Crestron. I've never worked at a company that big. And I just have to imagine that that sort of a shift

requires significant investment in just time and energy and kind of moving to new models. Can you give us a feel for what navigating a transition like that at a company like Crestron feels like. Well, you know, the one good thing was that I did have a really close connection to Crestron. The proximity of where my office is or where Crestron is now, or always has been, and where I live. We had a, being one of their bigger dealers at the time, you know, being able to go there routinely, have some insight of what was going on from a hardware and software perspective, being able to provide feedback to that team. So I kind of knew a lot of the guys on the back end. But when I came aboard, again, my initial role was really just domestic residential in the

beginning. But again, feeling your way through this corporate environment, having, you know, executive leadership meetings where I'm surrounded by, you know, six other, you know, executives, VPs, C-level executives, and the rest of the team, that's very different than a mom and pop couple of guys in the conference room meeting, you know, where everyone's got a PowerPoint presentation, you're talking about projections, you're talking about things that, yeah, we did a pretty good job with that at ACS, but this is a whole new ballgame, right? And, you know, the numbers are so big and the employees are just so vast. Everything is different. And, you know, it was learning on the job really quickly. And, you know, the second year

I was there, my role expanded to be global. And so now you're dealing with, you know, integration companies in other countries, right? From Australia to Spain, to France, to Latin America and all over the place. And they all have similar, but different needs. And understanding that, you know, the first 18 months was a tremendous learning experience. And honestly, I still learn. I say to my boss, Randy, I learn things here every single day. Yeah, yeah, I have to imagine. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. Timely here having you on the show.

You guys just, I believe last week, officially released your 70 series touch panels. Give us an overview of those, both from a hardware and software perspective. So some of the things you'd expect in the next generation of touchscreens, right? You know, better displays, higher resolution, great off-axis viewing, faster processing. So that, you know, and obviously a cleaner, newer industrial design, right? Thin bezels, really, really clean look. We do have two

different models now. So typically in the, in the, on the previous generation, we had a wall mount. And if you wanted the table mount that you bought a little add on kit and it clipped into there. The new ones are two, two discreetly different models. The table mount is a molded piece of aluminum. It's really, really beautiful. If you can use that word for a touchscreen. I think it's just spectacular. The wall mount is a separate unit. All models have, or at least the table and the wall mounts, have a new feature, a couple of new features.

So we do exclusively run the Sonos app in our touchscreens and have for a while. So yes, we can do things with their integration API. So I can browse my Sonos favorites list. I can see what's playing through our typical integration, just like all of our competitors. But I can also, and this has been going on for a couple of years now, where I can launch the Sonos app if I want to search or browse for content, right? So this is the new panel supports the S2 version of the Sonos app.

And we also added two new features that I think are really, really awesome. The first one is a proximity sensor. It sounds silly, right? You have to let the panel wakes up when I walk up to it, and big deal. I'd normally just touch the screen to wake it or to get it out of a screensaver. But that little second, second and a half, whatever it is, just really makes the user experience really, really nice. When I walk up to my 70 series touchscreens here at home and they just come to life when I go

there, being able to just look at information immediately is awesome, right? And then the other feature that I think is really nice is that we added Wi-Fi into these, right? So that does a couple of things. We have lots of legacy panels out there from the old days that don't or may not have ethernet cabling in the wall, right? Have old Crescent cabling to drive our older panels. So you can now power that panel and connect via Wi-Fi, right? So great for upgrading older customers, customers with older systems for their wall-mounted devices. But the use cases that I have for the couple that I have here at home are my bedside. I don't have an Ethernet jack at my bedside. And being able to just power this and have a Crestron home

table mount touchscreen on my bedside is awesome. And my kitchen counter is another place and my coffee table in my family room. I don't, I didn't wire Ethan at Jackson, all these places. And this is a great, great little tool that allows us to, to, you know, spread more of these around the home. Yeah. Well, and they look great too. We, we talked about, about them a little bit on, on last week's show and, and from all of the imagery that I've seen online, you guys did a really fantastic job. I think with the design on those, a very modern, sleek looking touch panel, and it sounds like you've got a great feature set there. I like the proximity thing. I agree. It seems like a small

thing, but those are kind of the little experiences that just make for a more delightful engagement with a device. And over time, those add up. It's funny, words don't do it justice. We can talk about it all we want here, but until you actually use it, it sounds silly, but it really changes the way you interact with the panel. This is why I miss trade shows right here.

The Chris Strong group, really. Yeah, indeed. Well, speaking of missing trade shows, nice segue into the next question here, because with COVID and everything going on with that this year, obviously a lot of people working from home and not just working, but trying to find new ways to stay at home, but still stay connected. And I know that home conferencing for you guys has been a big focus this year. So share some of your perspectives on the growing importance of this category and what you at Crestron are doing to both capitalize on it yourselves and, of course, help your integrator partners do that as well.

So that's been a tremendous effort since I'd say since we all got kind of sequestered at home in March, you know, we uniquely fit in this space where we straddle both sides, commercial and residential. Our enterprise products that are used for unified communications, both in the corporate boardroom and the like, can easily be adapted to the home space. Now, I know it can be overwhelming for a lot of our residential dealers. So what we try to do is figure out a few things that really make sense. You know, we, like I said, we have over 4,000 SKUs on our website. It can be daunting for a lot of our residential dealers who are used to just selling the typical things that would go

into a household. You know, where do I start? What goes into a home office? And then going just beyond the home office, right? What does the home classroom look like? And what products from Crestron fit in that space? And then, you know, we came out with a product we call Crestron Home Time, which is really about socializing from home, right? This literally came out of a conversation on Zoom between my boss and I, I'd say mid-March, end of March, about people gathering around a laptop, trying to communicate, a family gathering around a laptop, trying to communicate with extended family and how difficult that was and what a horrible experience that is, right? Trying to get the kids to wave at grandma with a laptop on the kitchen table. And we make products that sit in large corporate boardroom spaces.

And so how can we adapt that for home? And we did, and we partnered with Zoom and we built this product. And Zoom thought we were crazy because here's a product that was really intended for a corporate boardroom with an IT and AV staff to support it. So we kind of had to sell the idea to them.

This was not a product. Zoom room products were not intended for the residential space. So making it simple, providing controls was the key. He said, I'm holding the remote in my hand because this is programmed for my Crestron home time. So being able to join a Zoom conference, being able to look at my list of scheduled meetings, or being able to invite people from my contacts list right from a scrolling list of my touchscreen remote is amazing. And then when I'm in the call, I can pan, tilt, and zoom the

camera. I can mute my mic. I can mute my camera, all from the remote control, the same one I turn the TV on with, select sources, and control my lighting and shading with. So tying that all together and then demonstrating that for the Zoom people, I think they were kind of blown away. Yeah. And I think this is one of those technologies, like we're talking about this in the scope, in the context of a pandemic, but there's plenty of people who have gone to work over the past number of months, who have started to work from home and realize that they can always work from home if they wanted to. And there are companies that have realized the same thing. So like having the technology and the ability to leverage the technology into these homes, especially in the homes that you and I are talking about and the C-level executives and that kind of thing, they're going to want to look and sound great.

They're not going to want to use their laptop camera and say something, and then the rest of the board doesn't hear them. They want to be known. Well, look, sorry to interrupt. I'll take it even one step further. After I installed this and we're using it, I have two daughters who are finishing their spring semester in college who were sent home. And, you know, next thing I know, they're buying for, you know, time in my family room so that they can attend their Zoom classrooms on my Crestron Home Time unit, right? Because they wanted to, you know, trying to do that on a 13 or 15-inch laptop while you're trying to it and, and communicate can be difficult. I mean, we've all done it,

but now the, the family room becomes the classroom. My 80 inch TV is their, their portal into the classroom and they can use their laptop to take notes and do their schoolwork on and freeing that up from, from being a communication device. Right. So just that in itself was amazing to see. Yeah. The only place I was going with this, I think like post-pandemic, we're obviously going to get past this one of

these days. But post-pandemic, this is still going to be a technology I think that integrators should brush up on and at least get involved in a little bit more. And it's great to have leadership from a company like Crestron and getting on board with this idea because the, the idea from working from home, isn't going away. The idea of doing happy hour calls or whatever from home, that's not going to go away. And I think our customers are going to all show us what they, they want to do with this technology now that it exists in the house and it's easy to set up a, you know,

a call amongst their friends and have a quick happy hour. I think, I think they're going to show us what exactly they want to do. And like I said, it's great to have product that we can actually get into the house that works. I think you're right. I think the, you know, the, in the old days, like 10 months ago, the home office was a, was a desk and maybe a laptop on it. Right. And now, you know, we get calls from our design build professional partners, you know, the architects and the interior designers who are working on new projects, new residential projects, and asking us how they should be preparing these spaces at home. What does the home office look like? What infrastructure do I need in place? You know,

how should things be positioned so, you know, the TV across the room does make sense to use, or what does the home classroom look like? So again, I think, you know, whether, you know, I know this will go back to normal at some point in time, but I think, you know, for the foreseeable future, people will think differently about how they build out these spaces in their homes. Yeah, totally agree. And I think along those same lines, another topic we wanted to touch on was your partnership with Delos and the home wellness movement in general. I think this is another trend that certainly has been around for a while and will exist beyond the pandemic that we're dealing with right now. But similar to home conferencing, also a category that is, is being boosted and being lifted up into more people's people's minds. So talk a little bit

about your take on the overall wellness market and give us a little bit of information about what your guys, what you guys are doing in conjunction with Delos. Sure. So, um, obviously wellness is on the front of mind for everyone these days for the obvious reason, right? But what Delos does is really unique. And what they did behind building the wellness building standard and the people that they partnered with before coming to market, like the Mayo Clinic, to define what wellness should really be, I think was really amazing, right? Besides air quality and water quality and, you know, the sleep quality and light quality and, you know, all of these things that tie together to deliver a well environment or a wellness focused environment. So, you know, I think that was, again, very timely. You know, I was connected to them and we talked about what we can do together. We had lots of projects

that were going in and it was, you know, I'd say a little difficult for some of our dealers to integrate Crestron and Delos. So how can we make that easier? So when we launched our 70 series panels last week, one other app that we allow our residential dealers to be able to deploy in the touchscreens is the Delos Darwin app, right? So yes, we integrate, and yes, we can do some cool things between the two systems through programming. But if I want to go to that next level of integration, I can literally launch the Delos app right on the touchscreen. And this is just, I would call it phase one in the level of integration that we're working with the Delos team on, this is going to continue.

We really look at a tight partnership between us and that will continue to evolve. And the demand is, is really just beginning right now. So, you know, I get calls a few times a week from dealers on how does this work? What, how do I talk to my customers about it? You know, what's the best way to present this to them? And, and, you know, we connect them with Delos, we work together on this and, and it's been, it's been really good so far. Got it. Great. Well, we are running close to our time here and I want to start to wrap things up by, by zooming out a little bit. We, especially when we get somebody like you, who's been around the industry for a long time in a wide variety of roles. We love to kind of close these interviews out with maybe more business type or leadership

type topics. And I'd love to end there and ask you, what advice do you give to integrators who are looking to grow your business? You work at Crestron now and before you worked at a very, very large integrator. And so what sort of advice do you give to integrators who are grappling with that challenge? So that's a great question. So when, like I said, back in the old days, like 10 months ago, when I used to travel a lot and go see dealers, obviously my purpose was to talk about Crestron and we'd spend a lot of time talking about Crestron. But literally right after that, more often than not, the conversation evolved into business-related questions.

How did you grow ACS from 15 people to 150 people? Is that something I should do? And again, I would, you know, what I try to do is explain things in a way where these are the things that work for me. And these are the things after being in this job now for almost five years that I've seen throughout the world with integrators that have worked for them. Right. And I, you know, it's not a, you should do this in a business advice kind of way. It's, it's, you know, I try and hold some discussion around,

like I said, the things that work for me. And honestly, you know, one of the most important things that I try and reinforce is, you know, having good financial metrics, I would say that it always almost always evolves into that type of a discussion, right dealers, especially the smaller ones who've been in business just a few years, and we have a handful of employees, right, they go through these growing pains at different periods. It's when they hire their first non-billable employee, right? You know, when it's a small company and it's four or five people, essentially everyone's working on job sites and everyone is essentially billable. But what happens when you hire the first warehouse person or the first receptionist or the first bookkeeper? And this is now essentially overhead, right? These are people

you have to pay that really aren't generating direct revenue. And having that discussion is always interesting, right? And then the other part that I touched on is having good financial metrics. I'd say, unfortunately, many dealers in our space don't really know if they made money on the previous project or the previous quarter. You know, having those abilities really, really helped us grow and helped us protect ourselves when we went through tough times. You know, going through the 07-08 housing crunch and being proactive there, I think really, really helped save the company. And in the end, I think when, you know, 2010 came around, and we look back, we were a leaner, meaner, stronger company, we were able to protect the best employees that we had. And, you know, in some cases, we look back, and we, you know, we probably offloaded people that we probably shouldn't have hired in the first

place. And, you know, you learn these things as you go through them. But nonetheless, you know, I really try and provide that bit of advice, just my own personal experiences and then what I've seen other successful companies around the world just be good at. I mean, there are things that I wish I had done that I see now from some of our dealers. You know, I met with a dealer about a year and a half ago who happened to be there on a day where he shut down his company in the afternoon and took all of his employees to a, to a job site. Right.

And I thought that was brilliant because the warehouse person or the receptionist or whoever else is never leaving the building doesn't really understand what the company does, right? They have their job, their task that they go through every day. But until they got to a job site and saw a completed project and were able to experience a happy end customer who was thrilled with the job that was done and to see it all in action. It was, it was, it was breathtaking. And I, you know, that's one of my, you know, one of the things that I've learned from, from, from, from, from traveling with, with some of the dealers I've met. Love it. Well, John, sorry, go ahead, Seth. Well, John, we're coming up on our time here, but I just, I do want to jump in here at the end and

ask what is next for Crestron? What, what are you, what are you and the team getting excited about these days? Well, look, I will say that the constant evolution of Crestron Home is one of the big focuses. It's hard to keep track of for a lot of our dealers because it is such a rapidly moving platform. Even internally, I mean, we have a release coming next week, and that will be our ninth major release to the platform in the 14 months of its existence. And each one of those releases adds in new features, streamlines some deployment aspects, and just the platform is literally evolving at a very rapid pace. I mean, so, you know, that is the heart and the future of Crestron Residential.

And by far, this is a huge statement, it is the single biggest engineering project at Crestron, right? And this is a company, you know, that where the significant portion of our business is focused on the enterprise space. You know, the Crestron home team internally on the engineering and product development side is by far the single largest group inside of Crestron. So we are dead serious about this and fully invested in the future of this platform.

But obviously, there are some hardware pieces coming along, too, that you'll see soon. Oh, excellent. Well, John, thanks. Thanks so much for your time tonight and dropping by and telling us a little bit what's going on at Crestron these days. If people want to connect with you or learn more about Crestron Home, where can they go? Jay Clancy at Crestron for email at Crestron.com, sorry. And then on LinkedIn are probably the two easiest places to reach me. Awesome. Well, John, this was a lot of fun. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks again. My pleasure. Thank you guys. And that'll do it for our conversation

with John. Again, really fun. I've been wanting to get John on the show for quite some time. And, and in a way I'm glad we waited like it, it not that they haven't been busy this whole time, but it just felt, it feels like things have really matured there at Crestron on, on the residential front and being able to take that long view over the last five or so years since, since he took the helm and really covering a bunch of those broad topics was, was really cool. Hopefully it won't be another five years until we get somebody from, from Crestron on the show. But, um, but again, yeah, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm very interested to see where the Crestron home product goes.

It's a very exciting product to me just because I can see how much potential it has built in under the hood there from being like an easy deploy, reliable system. And it's been a long time coming and I'm just glad we got to finally sit down with John and talk about all the stuff they've done to get the product where it is. And I'm excited to see what they're doing with it these days. And, of course, all the teasing that he did about new products that are coming out.

I don't know if that made the interview, but it may have been after the interview. But, yeah. Yeah. There's a little bit in there, but a little bit more after. So yeah. So it sounds like some big things come in there. And I thought the last comment I'll make, and then we'll move on, that it was just fascinating to hear, given all the speculation when Crestron pulled out of Cedia, and then to hear that John, who at the time was working at one of the biggest Crestron dealers, probably in the world, had gone to Crestron and said, Hey, you guys have kind of

confirmed my doubts here. I was, I was worried about your commitment to the channel and how, how they basically said, well, you know, if you believe in it so much, come do something about it. And he did. And I think that's so cool. I really loved hearing that story. That's one of my favorite things to do at my homeowners association meetings. You can bring ideas, but keep your hand up. Yeah, exactly. All volunteers are welcome. Yeah. Great way to, um, limit the amount of ideas being thrown at you. And that's true. That's true. All right. Well, moving on, Seth, looks like you got a pick of the week here. I do.

I do. It's a pretty good one now. Jason, I think I found the cure for our trade show woes in 2021. What we're going to have to do is I'll get one of these things, though. And go ahead and click that link. All right. I'm opening this up here. Cue the Jeopardy music.

This is a personal air purifying shield. And just imagine a trade show full of integrators walking around with these things on. Oh, my God. Only $379, too. Right. Now, I can think of a number of creative ways that One Vision can sponsor these trade show bubbles, if you will. There you go. I like where you're going with this. Look at that. It's got a fanny pack in the front of it.

Wow. I mean, this is styling. This is styling. I mean, this is legit. I like the middle. I don't know if this is a gif or what you even call these but the guy just looks so casual he's just chilling that's just imagine that guy talking to a vendor about 70 touch screens yeah zipper pockets looks like three of them this is brilliant it's uh it's it's very interesting it's on sale right now so make sure you go pick one up and they've got one of these little fake thing that say somebody in Canada just purchased one of these.

Now, this thing's popping up every two seconds, so I expect that people are going to have these things all over the place next week. You're just going to be walking down the street and notice somebody walking around in one of these. Oh, these are going to take off. Totally. They only come in three sizes, small and adult large and i'm wondering if to service our industry they may need a couple of other sizes i'm not going to say which direction but i'll leave that aaron in iceland just purchased a box of filters oh yeah look at that good stuff where did you where do you find this?

Actually, I was scrolling through the hub and I noticed that James had posted it. And I don't know if I clicked that or not, that link that he had posted, because I ran across it on Facebook. It was a Facebook ad that I saw. And so I didn't click the ad in Facebook because why would you do something like that?

I just went directly to the website. But as I was scrolling up to find the funny picture that I posted of this guy standing there, I ran across that James had actually beat me to the punch. And maybe he clicked on the Facebook ad. And that's what got us all down this rabbit hole. This is great. Well, you got to hand it to him. Enterprise.

Enterprising. and who knows me you know maybe the next pandemic that comes out will be like just so virulent and deadly that we'll look back at this and think how stupid we were for not buying one i should have gotten my visor yeah exactly you can buy it with apple pay oh Oh, man. That's good stuff. All right. Well, if you have any feedback, by the way, you got to go look at this one in the show notes. Just imagine, like I should have said this sooner because we're an audio only show here, but it looks like an astronaut helmet, like the big giant astronaut suits, like the helmet.

It just sits over your shoulders. But not shaped anything like that. It looks like a giant thumb. It looks like a thumb. And you're inside a bubble, and it just rests on your shoulders, and you got little zipper fanny packs on the front, filter on the back. So, I don't know. I wonder if it's hot.

It's got to be. I mean, in Florida, this can't be the most fun thing to traverse your local outdoor, what do they call those things? Farmer's market. That's right. I'd almost want to have a hidden camera and walk around with one of these at a farmer's market. Well, I can tell you that you'd probably get similar looks to what I got. I was one of the very first people that I saw wearing a mask, a bandana over my face at the grocery store early in the pandemic. And now, of course, everybody wears them, but definitely felt like a crazy person.

So I think I could buy one of these and get that reaction again if I were so inclined. If you wanted to, this would get you a reaction. It definitely would. All right, well, let's keep moving. If you got any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that is feedback at hometech.fm.

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 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 uh to chat about i think we were talking about home pods earlier there you go home pods they go on sale november 6th all right so the little minis well i know seth you're the early adopter here so i'll let

you go first i i don't know i'm thinking about it are you i am thinking about i feel like you have to i feel like i yeah i probably will feel like I, yeah, I probably will. I'm probably going to order one. Like, I mean, we've waited this long and we had so much speculation and I don't know. Someone's got to do it. If you're looking for other ways to support the show, we would really appreciate a positive review on iTunes

or in your podcast app of choice. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you're enjoying what we do here on the podcast, please take a minute to do that. We would really appreciate it. All right, Jason, that wraps up this week's show. Really fun show. Really fun conversation with John Clancy.

I am so glad we finally got somebody from Crestron on that could talk to the product rather than speculate around it like you and I do. Because I'm not an expert in Crestron at all. I've been around the product, but that's about it. Yeah, no, I agree. It was a really fun show and had a good time, uh, coordinating it and putting it together. So thanks everybody for tuning in.

Um, Seth, I hope you have a great weekend and, and hopefully by the time people are hearing this, we've got a little bit more clarity around what, what the heck is going to go on in this country here for the next, uh, four years or so. Yeah, well, it's 2020, Jason. So temper your expectations a little bit. It could be somewhat after the show. No doubt. No doubt about that. All right, man. Well, have a good weekend. You too. Have a good weekend.