Case Study: Working Two Roles Pays Off

Launching any company takes untold hours of hard work and perseverance, but when you're starting one while still working full time in a completely different market, it takes all the juggling power one can muster. That's the challenge facing Todd Bunch, president and CEO of Lexington, Ky.-based digital integrator If Walls Could Talk. Bunch spent the past two and a half years building up his company while working full-time as IT manager of CMW Architects, also in Lexington. During that time, Bunch built a showroom and hired four part-time employees for If Walls Could Talk. Today, the company completes several new and retrofit home installations a year. But with business increasing, Bunch may leave CMW sometime in the future to focus full time on his new company. Though his supervisors at CMW are aware of his other company and his eventual plans to leave, Bunch says his managers actually see benefits to him working the two jobs. "The two jobs are very complementary of each other ... the home automation business teaches me about new products, new techniques which I can then share with [CMW] for their clients," Bunch says. On the other side of the coin, working at CMW has given Bunch the financial stability to launch the side company as well as the IT skills necessary to achieve success in the home integration market. If Walls Could Talk installs mostly products from On-Q/ Legrand. Bunch believes that the skills required to integrate the vendor's structured wiring, thermostats and intercoms are very similar to the skills he uses during daytime hours maintaining CMW's servers, printers and fax machines.

> . . . 'To build a business you need to ... only put the people with you that have the same desires, goals and drives that you have' --Todd Bunch, If Walls Could Talk

"When you're an IT manager, you have to understand electronic communication, networking, how things communicate, and you get almost a vision in your mind of the actual wiring and how things are laid out," Bunch says. "The technologies used to communicate in the home are very similar but have different names. It's basically describing a type of communication protocol and those same communication protocols interact with thermostats, keypads, phone systems, lighting controls, all of it. There's no doubt in my mind that if I wasn't an IT manager in the past I wouldn't be at the point today where I could do this business." While some potential customers are initially concerned about hiring a company run by someone who only works at it part-time, Bunch's clients say his and his employees' professionalism and commitment, along with his company's solid reputation, ease any worries. "I would have thought him being part-time would have been an issue, but it's not. He comes on evenings and weekends. It does not affect my schedule," says David Sigler, who recently used If Walls Could Talk for a retrofit installation of automated thermostats, cabling, cameras and other products in his Lexington home. "He hasn't been the one slowing me down, it's been my electricians." If Walls Could Talk employs an architect, electrician, carpenter and a manager of field installations. The employees often work on-site by themselves during the day or evenings, and Bunch stops by job sites at night to check their work and meet with customers. Though he isn't always on-site with his employees, Bunch has spent significant amounts of time instilling his work ethic and values in them and is confident they will do a good job. "You're invading someone's home--you have to realize that you're in their home, you have to be quiet, do what you have to do and get out," Bunch says. He also requires his employees to dress and act professionally on-site, and to make sure no work stretches past 9 p.m. to avoid disrupting the family's schedule. "I have one-on-one conversations with employees," he says. "It's not an optional situation. I am the president of the company, and I run it in a certain way. If an employee of mine doesn't want to cooperate, they don't have to be an employee of mine." Consequently, his hiring and retention practices are extremely demanding. During the past two and a half years, Bunch has gone through 15 employees to find the current four.

"People working with me are hand-selected based on traits they have, such as professionalism, competency with electronics and also how they present themselves to the clients," Bunch says. "If you're going to build a business, you need to do it as well as you can and only put the people with you that have the same desires, goals and drive that you have." Though he trusts his employees, Bunch still does all the programming of systems himself and also personally educates customers on the devices his company has installed. Bunch says handling those tasks himself allows him to uphold the strong reputation of his company. That reputation and word-of-mouth publicity have been key to If Walls Could Talk's growth, and more important, more successful than any paid advertising he has ever done. Given the modest size of the Lexington home market, a reputation can easily make or break a company. "The referrals I had from him were what earned my trust for him. If we don't have people we've done business with that will give good ratings, or even step forward and refer us as subcontractors, you'd better look for another job," says Eddie Garner, owner of Richmond, Ky.-based home builder EHG Enterprises, which is using If Walls Could Talk on the custom homes it is building. "We're in a community where we see the same vans going down the road every day. The same companies surround our region, so it's not a hard thing to get a bad reputation." For EHG homes, If Walls Could Talk is installing basic packages of video intercom systems, telephone and television cabling and Internet connectivity, and it will offer upgrades of other products at additional cost. Garner says while he doesn't expect the installed devices to significantly increase the cost of the houses, they should make it easier for him to sell them. With the rising prices of building materials and the high interest EHG pays on the mortgages it takes out when building new homes, Garner says his profit can be cut in half if a finished house sits unsold for six months. Any extras go a long way toward speeding the sales. "The market may be becoming saturated with new construction," Garner says. "If you have something, it doesn't have to be 50 percent better, just 1 [percent] to 2 percent better than what's down the road, and it's enough to get them to come to you and not the guy down the road." With business growing, Bunch is looking at hiring a full-time employee to staff the company's showroom. He's also looking at new technology services such as installing voice-recognition technology in walls to allow customers to control their home systems through speech. That type of offering will help the company live up to its name of helping the walls in customers' homes listen and talk to them. Bunch acknowledges there are some risks associated with making the jump into home integration full-time, but he is not looking back. "It will be an enormous market. I think we're still at the very beginning of it being adopted by the general public," he says. "You just can't deny it; people will adopt it simply because it's good. It gives them so much more opportunity to be able to be a part of this whole technology push that will never end, it will only get more and more interesting."