Start With A Win - Entrepreneurship and Staying Centered with RemoteLock CEO, Nolan Mondrow

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, Mark. Hey, Adam. You know, a lot of people talk about tech startups and some of the challenges that they go through. Maybe we should talk to one today. I think that's a great idea. Awesome. Atop of the 12th floor of the Remax World Headquarters, you're listening to Start With

Starting point is 00:00:14 a Win with CEO Adam Kantos. And top of the 12th floor, Remax World Headquarters here in snowy Denver, Colorado. It's Adam Contos, CEO of Remax with Start With A Win, here in studio with producer Mark. How you doing, buddy? I am so good. So good. It's Mark Labriola. The second. There we go.

Starting point is 00:00:42 So, hey, Mark, people talk a lot about tech startups, and you see a lot of tech companies just kind of pop up, and you go, wow, all right, they're here. But these things don't start quickly or easily, do they? No, I mean, it's a grind. It is a grind. And we have the honor today of talking to Nolan Mondro, who's the founder and CEO of RemoteLock, which is a Denver-based software company that actually created the first platform to control smart locks, which are really having

Starting point is 00:01:11 a great impact on our industry. So I'd like to say welcome, Nolan. How are you, man? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Hey, glad to have you here. You've been through the grind of tech startups and running tech companies and things like that. I mean, you've been at this for a little while and have a lot of great experience, you know, over a decade of running these different companies and having executive positions. Tell us a little bit about your history. Well, I'll give you a little bit of the arc, I suppose. After graduating college, I actually started my first business over in Japan. We started an import-export company there, and I was just a kid, didn't know much.

Starting point is 00:01:46 We went around to American manufacturers and said, we want to sell your stuff overseas. And some of the products we actually were able to convince to let us try it were a golf club that was made by the then record holder for the longest drive in Guinness, the Guinness book, and some clothing. And that actually morphed into a clothing export company that I ran for seven years. And we were doing all kinds of things, including used Levi's was a big phase. I remember that. Everybody was selling their Levi's and shipping them over to Japan, I guess, or Asia. And so you were at the base of that. We were. That was fascinating. I mean, the profit margin in these things was unbelievable. You could buy things for a few dollars and sell it over there for $50.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Oh, man. Yeah, it was quite a good business for a while. It was a lot of fun. It's funny because you see so many entrepreneurs. And really, you're an entrepreneur at heart. I mean, this is entrepreneur as ground level as it gets, going to another country and saying, how can we get Americans to sell their product here? Totally. I mean, it's- You know what? The principles are all the same.

Starting point is 00:02:58 I do remember making cold calls in what was then not very good Japanese, trying to get our products in the door. And there was one woman that I was speaking to on the other end. It was a furniture company. We were trying to sell furniture products. And she kept telling me in Japanese, yeah, I wouldn't expect somebody to get back to you. And I didn't understand the word she kept using. So I said, great. So I'll call you back in a week. How about that? No, I wouldn't expect someone to get back and say, fine. I thought it was a great call, hung up, and then looked up the word she kept using. So I said, great. So I'll call you back in a week. How about that? No, I wouldn't expect someone to get back and say, fine. I thought it was a great call, hung up, and then looked up the words she kept using. And I was like, oh, she's saying, don't call me back. So it's persistence no matter what country you're in. That's right. Never take no for an answer, right? It's just a

Starting point is 00:03:38 not now. I love that. So you start by doing import-export. And then how did you move into technology? So I ran that for seven years, decided I wanted to go back to school to get an MBA. My purpose for getting an MBA, ironically, was to learn how to think inside the box. I'd been thinking outside the box pretty much my whole career. So went and got an MBA at University of Michigan and got a little bit brainwashed that you're supposed to work for a big company when you get an MBA. So we came out of there and I worked for a couple of big companies for a few years and then jumped back into it. And I started a software company that did okay, but not great, and then landed on what we're doing right now. It is a little bit interesting story

Starting point is 00:04:23 for fear of making this too long of an arc story. But when I started the import export company, I still had a lot of roots in that business. So after my MBA and leaving corporate America, just to make some money on the side, I picked it up again until I figured out what I was going to do next. And that actually serendipitously landed me into the next thing. I had a container of safes that I was brokering from a Chinese factory to be sold into a Japanese company. At the last minute, the Japanese company pulled out of the deal. And so I stuck with all these safes. I brought them here. And then I was in the safe business. And that turned into an e-commerce business. And fast forward, 2011, we sold that off and started Remote Lock. So Remote Lock, you know, 2011, that's not exactly yesterday. I mean, you know, almost a decade ago.

Starting point is 00:05:12 We're just on the short side of that. Yeah. But, you know, so you're starting a company that has the ability to do, to remotely lock and unlock, you know, a house, whatever it might be. I mean, isn't that a little bit of an idea before it's time? You know, it was an idea before it's time. We were the first company to actually come out with a Wi-Fi connected lock. And the way that we weathered this early adopter storm was we found a niche market that was a perfect product market fit and took off. This was the vacation rental

Starting point is 00:05:44 space. We were one of the first companies to have partnerships with companies like Airbnb. So when people book on Airbnb, they dip into our system, and we instantly send that code to the guest, and that code is time-based. So the guest can't get in early, and it expires when their vacation ends, and it's completely no touch for the property manager. So it was a real win for them. And that's what propelled us to wait until things really started to take off over the last few years. Interesting. So describe the technology for us. So you've got an electronic lock, it's Wi-Fi based, you need an app on your phone. How does that whole thing work? Yeah. So we really bill ourselves as the only cloud for all smart

Starting point is 00:06:23 locks. And this, as you pointed out, many companies have made smart locks. A lot of the big brands people may have heard of, Schlage and Kwikset, et cetera. And we control those smart locks through a single cloud login. And that allows property managers, owners, business people to choose the lock that they prefer, but have a centralized cloud application that can manage all of their access control from really anywhere in the world from a single point, your iPhone or your computer. Interesting. So as 2011 progresses into, you know, really we go into more of a tech boom, 2012, 13, 14.

Starting point is 00:07:05 Things are really blowing up with Airbnb, with some of those other things, as well as with the real estate space. And now you see, I mean, you can't log into social media or Amazon or whatever without a smart lock showing up in your face. How is this whole thing evolving and where is it going, you think? Yeah, I think we've come to mainstream now with smart locking technology. And we're seeing our vertical markets completely expand across the board. We've got large retailers that use our system to manage doors across their entire retail portfolio. We've got large businesses that

Starting point is 00:07:38 use it to manage access in their buildings as well as other off-site offices. One of the things that this new technology allows people to do is directly control a smart lock from the cloud. So up until now, access control has all been about you have to have some piece of equipment on site and you wire it to a computer and wire it to doors. It was really expensive, like three grand a door. And what our technology does is it allows you to control doors directly without that piece of equipment on site. So you can imagine all the applications that are exploding. Even in actually the real estate space, we're seeing some real interesting innovation at the builder level where they are putting this technology on their model homes so that they can

Starting point is 00:08:24 track when a prospect goes into a home, which home they went into, how many times, and then they use our platform to suck that information out and put it into their CRM so they can better market to their audience. Interesting. So let's walk through that a little bit. So I'm a buyer, let's say I have an agent, I show up at a builder, and I want to go look at a couple of model homes. What do I do at the builder then to get a code here? What does that code look like? Do they give me some numbers or does it go on my phone? I mean, what does it do? So what they'll do is whoever is staffing the office will go into the remote lock system and

Starting point is 00:09:01 it'll generate automatically a time-based code. Let's say it's good for an hour. Then you and your agent can go tour any home that you want with that code, and it will work on all those homes, all those models, but only for that hour. And then you can come back to the office if it was self-touring and you want to talk about which ones you liked. When you go into each home, we're extracting the fact that you went into that home and we'll even be able to tell you how long you were there, putting that directly into your CRM if it's salesforce.com, for example. Now you can

Starting point is 00:09:37 say, wow, this prospect went into this home and they came back in and they did that like three or four times. This is obviously the model they want. So let's make sure we gear all our marketing to that. Let's make sure that our brokers are talking to them about that model and it lets them know their customer a lot better. So we're really diving deep into, I mean, really the kind of some of the basics of basic consumer behavioral data. Obviously, you know, these people keep coming back and showing their friends and their cousins and their parents or whatever, this same model, you know that and you're going, ah, we got one here. We've got buying signs.

Starting point is 00:10:15 Total buying signs. And then you'll start to be able to measure those and say, wow, this person's really ready. We need to pounce on this. Interesting. Where do you see this expanding to? I mean, obviously model homes, one sector of the marketplace. Where else do you see this going? This is really cross vertical. So our blessing and our curse is there's not a vertical we don't touch. And there aren't applications. I mean, there aren't verticals that don't have applications for this. So we see a lot of multifamily. I'll tell you another kind of innovative thing I see happening in the multifamily space, where there's a merger between short-term rental and multifamily. I don't know if you've heard of these, but what we're seeing now,

Starting point is 00:10:57 originally when Airbnb started to come into cities, the multifamily providers or management companies were totally opposed to it because they didn't want people on their properties who they didn't know. They wanted to control who was on their property. But now Airbnb is sort of embracing this community and saying, let's work with you. Why don't you help your residents rent on Airbnb? And you'll share the profit with the residents. So it'll be a win-win. And now, so our system is being used to manage the short-term rental side of that. And this is

Starting point is 00:11:30 actually starting to become very popular in the multifamily community. Interesting. You know, you think about, or even you go to visit a friend in a multifamily complex. And, you know, a lot of the, you know, big cities, you're in an older building, whatever it might be, you show up at the front door. And what do you do? You push on one of those old buttons that ring into someplace. And what's the pizza guy do? He hammers on all of them until somebody buzzes him into the door. So you wouldn't have to do that anymore.

Starting point is 00:11:57 You just send him a code, right? That's right. Or you actually also can unlock the front door from your phone from our application as well. It depends on how the management company wants to give access to the residents. But yeah, it totally frees you up from that old system. Interesting. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. Yeah. And what about privacy here? You know, you're cloud-based, right? You know, how much personal information is stored up in there? Is there a risk to privacy issues? Or is somebody going to go in and unlock

Starting point is 00:12:25 half of the houses in the US? Or I mean, what's going on? Yeah, good question. We actually abide by a lot of the European standards because we do a lot of business there. And on whole, those are more strict than the United States with regard to personal information. And from that perspective, we're very, very closed. On the security side, if you do banking online, we use the same type of encryption that a bank would use for you to access their website. And we have multiple layers of security beyond that, all the way going to the door with certain checks to make sure that the packets of data that they're receiving are supposed to be there. And I don't want to get too deep into it, obviously, for security purposes. But it is a question that comes up a lot. And we are very attuned to it and have a very secure platform. Awesome. We've been penetration tested by some really large companies as well to make sure that we're doing

Starting point is 00:13:19 it holistically. So these are things you definitely have to have to worry about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's reassuring. And we've really kind of just briefly gone from one end of the spectrum of, okay, there's a lock with some sort of a circuit board or whatever in there that unlocks it when you hit the cloud of a code or whatever it might be, all the way to cybersecurity and things of that nature. Let's talk about you and being an entrepreneur and starting a business and a startup. It's kind of a grind. I mean, there's no two ways about it. You wake up and you go, all right, how do we stretch this dollar into hours in the business? How do I show up with my best self? How do I take care of myself, my employees, things like that. The podcast is called Start With a Win. And we

Starting point is 00:14:05 talk to so many entrepreneurs around the world. I was just in Europe and I had so many people come up going, I love the podcast because it helps me get going. I'm an entrepreneur. So let's talk about you. How do you start with a win? How do you get your day going and go, I'm going to show up with my business being my best self? That's a great question. And mine are very simplistic or seemingly simplistic. So my first win of the day is making my bed. I love it. The Navy SEAL make your bed trick, right? And I actually kind of adopted this habit on the suggestion of one of my employees. Shout out to Barkley there. But essentially, when you do one thing, you've already got one thing done. And you try to pile them up as the day goes on. The second habit I have is when I get to the

Starting point is 00:14:58 office, I get my kids out the door and try to stay as present as I can during that process. And then when I get to the office, I try to stroll around a little bit every day and get a feel for the environment, the mood, what's the atmosphere, what's the energy level, have a couple of conversations just to ground myself. As an entrepreneur, we are obsessive people by nature. And so obsessing about this business is something that's just habit to me. It's probably not an hour that goes by where I'm not thinking about it in some form. So these small grounding activities are actually the way I build to the busyness of the day, starting it slow, making a bed, walking around the office. Then I settle into the busyness of the day and I want it to be momentum building. I don't want to come in and just have a crash of activity that I'm having to get sucked into right away. And so that's how I start with a win,

Starting point is 00:16:00 if you will, is make sure that there's momentum through the morning. All right, let's talk about you hit a challenge. It might be a piece of software doesn't work. Somebody forgot to pay a bill. Somebody's upset with you. Maybe one of your suppliers closes down for some particular reason or has an issue or just something's going on. How do you reset yourself? Because we can't walk into the next meeting going,

Starting point is 00:16:25 all right, that last one was terrible. You've ruined my day, whatever it is, and take it out on other people in the room. And that's something that, you know, as a leader, you're always being watched. You're always being mimicked and people look at you and go, I'm going to act like he's acting in this meeting. So what, what gives you the ability or ability or what do you do as a human being to say, take a deep breath, Nolan, and let's go in and do this the right way? Yeah, this is something every business leader and entrepreneur has to deal with. Something horrible has happened and you've got to go to the next meeting. How do you pick yourself up? The way I like to think about it, and you're right,

Starting point is 00:17:06 people look at your reaction, and so you always have to be conscious of how you're reacting to things people are saying in meetings and presentations, what have you. So the one thing that I really keep in mind is that this is a game. This is a game. And if you forget that, then you're going to be feeling tragic a lot. So you have to constantly pull yourself back and say, okay, worst case scenario, what? Internalize that. Socialize that with yourself. Okay? Worst case scenario is this thing's going

Starting point is 00:17:41 to take the business down and I'm out of business. Best case scenario is no one notices anything and things go on as normal. And one thing I did learn from a local entrepreneur actually is this concept of the rule of half, meaning things are never as great as you think they're going to be. You're going to land this big, huge account and that's going to double your revenue. And things are never as bad as you think they're going to be. That's usually half. And so those are the tools that I use to say, hey, it's a game. I'm going to go put on my game face and do my best. And I'm prepared to deal with the worst case scenario. And that's what I'll do if I have to. I love that. That centers you. You're not having this big emotional swing

Starting point is 00:18:26 go on when it comes to a success or a failure. You're back in that marathon. Because business isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. It's going, okay, I got another mile. I got another mile. But there are emotional swings. We all have them. Oh, totally. God, you just have to continually recalibrate. That's right. I love it. So do you have a favorite quote? Actually, it's a quote by a woman that wrote a book, and she meant it about kids.

Starting point is 00:18:53 It's the days are long, but the years are short. And it applies to raising your kids and being present, but it also applies to business. I love this. Nolan Mondro, CEO of Remote Lock, an amazing Denver-based technology company, working on a lot of great things that we just don't see, but we use all the time. So thank you for being on the show. We learned a lot of business leadership principles

Starting point is 00:19:19 and some technology ideas from you too. So we appreciate you being here. Thank you very much for having me. Awesome. Well, Nolan, where can we appreciate you being here. Thank you very much for having me. Awesome. Well, Nolan, where can we find you guys on social media? You guys on Facebook? We're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or you can just go to the website, remotelock.com.

Starting point is 00:19:36 Awesome. Thank you. All right. Thanks very much. Thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to go onto iTunes and subscribe, write a review, or rate the show. It helps us get the word out and reach more people. You can follow Adam on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And remember, start with a win.

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Start With A Win - Entrepreneurship and Staying Centered with RemoteLock CEO, Nolan Mondrow

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