Learn about NexusCon!
Happy Thursday!
Welcome to this week’s deep dive exclusively for Nexus Pro members. It’s an honor to have you here. This deep dive is a follow up to my recent conversation with Deb Noller of Switch Automation. It was a fun conversation and want to share my takeaways and the full transcript with you below.
In case you missed it in your inbox, you can find the audio or video here:
Nexus site | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Add to other podcast apps
Enjoy!
—James
It’s always fun talking to Deb. We’ve had 3 conversations, and I always end up with amazing Deb quotes. She’s a quote machine:
“Warren Buffet has a very famous quote, which was, you know, when the stock market crashes, the tide goes out and everybody who is swimming with no pants on gets found out. And that’s very much what this is, what 2020 has done for people that are owning and operating buildings.”
“When I look at the way people are managing multi multibillion dollar portfolios, it looks like 1990.”
I realized my favorite question is “why buildings are 20 years behind?”! That might need to be the standard first question for future guests. What do you think?
The second part of Deb’s answer I hadn’t thought of before. People need to be taught how to buy software. People in the buildings industry only know how to buy projects and elevators. When we do buy tech, it’s the IT department, who doesn’t know shit about building tech.
Deb’s comment about her managed services team was interesting to me because she doesn’t see that scaling up. She sees smart building teams being built inside the organizations of her clients. I’d build on that by saying that instead of having facilities managers and building operators and smart building teams, the facility managers and operators and energy managers of the future will be smart buildings people. It’s only a matter of time.
My lightbulb moment was Deb’s point about advanced supervisory control. First of all, I think her and I are highly aligned on ASC. But she added to my perspective: Perhaps the highest value these sorts of strategies can play right now is helping manage schedules and set points across large portfolios of small buildings. Like thousands of big box or grocery stores. It might be several years before bigger buildings are ready for complex sequences (for the reasons I’ve outlined in my series on ASC). These smaller buildings need simple controls (like basic occupancy scheduling and setpoint standardization) now.
I enjoyed hearing Deb rip into consulting engineers. Those of you who are Nexus Pro members probably already see the light here, but there are many in your profession who don’t, and they need to hear Deb’s message.
Finally, I just wanted to share how I wasn’t just blowing smoke about how I feel about the Switch team. I just love their team and love Deb’s leadership of not just them but of the industry. I know that they have the same mission as I do building Nexus, and knowing they’re warriors and they’re not going to give up is a great feeling.
What do you think?
[00:07:32]
Firstly, we've got the incumbents, so we've got a lot of really large incumbents and that's everybody from the big hardware manufacturers, you know, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider, et cetera. Then we've got the large service companies, CBRE, JLL, Cushman and Wakefield. Then you've got all of the service companies that sit below that. Every single one of those companies is sitting on a business model that they have to protect and a digital transformation is going to disrupt every single one of those business models. So that's one part of it is we've got big players in the market who will actually actively-, and I'm not actually saying any of those actively doing it, but there are companies that really don't want to see too much of a transformation because they've got very large, particularly service contracts that are reliant on large workforces. And, you know, digital transformation will disrupt that. So that's one part of it.
The other part of it, which is probably the single biggest problem in why it hasn't happened faster, is on the other side of the desk we've got all of these people who know that sometime in the future all of these buildings that they manage, own, operate, whatever are going to be smart, connected, digital. But today they're just dealing with this problem: well, I've got all these different manufacturers, I've got all these different service providers. And they actually haven't ever rolled out a really large technology project before.
So if you look at real estate owners and operators, everything that they buy today is based on relationship or price. And buying technology has got nothing to do with relationship or price. It's all around, how do these things fit together? What's the interoperability? What are the standards? How does this scale?
And there's a really huge, devoid skillset missing out of that part of the market. And it's gradually changing, people like yourself coming in that, you know, we're seeing a lot of, there's a generational change. There's people coming into the industry, more IT people have come into the space within the customer base just because of the cyber risk, you know, so we've seen the IT people now coming in.
So I think it's gradually changing, but nowhere near fast enough to help the problem, which is every single large company needs at least one person inside their organization that understands how to buy technology. And they've got to have the political clout to bring everyone along with them. And they've got to have the willingness to be a risk taker and to step off the ledge.
[00:22:31]
Deb: Well, there's two parts to the connectivity. So my background is actually enterprise IT. I don't have a background in buildings. And when I look at the way people are managing multi multibillion dollar portfolios, it looks like 1990. It reminds me of the finance group before they got the ERP system, you know, everybody's just got spreadsheets and subsystems and paper and it's outsourced. And there isn't a single enterprise-wide approach to collecting and using data.
So a lot of people, when they think of connectivity, they go immediately to the physical connectivity. Whereas when I think about connectivity, I think about the business. I think about the data. It should only be stored once, accessed by all, single source of the truth. You know, great efficiencies by collecting it once and using it many times. But when people do go down the journey of smart buildings, they almost always want to start with one of their iconic buildings, which they know is digital-ready. It's got a BACnet BMS, it's got a smart lighting system, and they want to connect that up.
What we invariably find is what the customer or the client thinks they've got and what they really have are often two different things. They have a network that's not been configured correctly. They thought they had a BACnet license on the BMS, but actually they don't. And so often what our customers think they might have, and how digital-ready they are, is not quite the truth.
And so one of the fail fast things that we've done in our company over the last six months is to enhance our IoT appliance to build it up so that it can actually assess the digital readiness of buildings. So this product's called the DX3 and you buy that as a single, one-time purchase. You plug it into your building network, and overnight it will come back with an assessment of how digital-ready your building is. So, how many systems did it find? How many data points did it find? How many open ports did it find? How many versions of firmware did it find? And it's basically an assessment of whether your building is or is not ready for smart building programs, because if it's not, you might have three, six months worth of work to do to bring that network or some of those systems up to scratch.
James: Yeah. And I'm sure you've found, as others have found, that if you go ahead and try to, like, especially if you're a sales person, try to sell one of these projects to a building owner that doesn't have a digital-ready building, you can easily find that the first thing you do on that project is you need some huge upgrade, right? Is that what you've found? And then everyone's kind of disappointed.
Deb: A hundred percent. So it not only is it disappointing, but it puts us in a position of immediate conflict because what we sold was a 12 month SaaS agreement and a 12 month managed services agreement. And that's what the contract says. But the building's not ready. So whose fault is that? Was that our fault, because we didn't know that and you should've known that, but you didn't, or, you know. And so what we've realized is we needed to: one, remove the uncertainty; and two, remove that conflict, and give people the confidence that all I'm buying in step one of this with the Dx3 is the assessment.
And if the building's not ready to move on, I haven't committed to anything more than that. And the really fantastic thing about it, the Dx3, as opposed to a manual site audit, which is how people are doing that today, you know, hire somebody to come out with the clipboard, write down everything, go back, write up a big report. That report's out of date the very next day, because who knows what was plugged or unplugged from the network. The most fantastic thing about the Dx3 is it stays on the network. It will give you an updated report whenever you want to run that. And when you are ready for the next stage, which might be data ingestion, it might be fault detection, it could be energy management, whatever, that same appliance will do that interconnectivity and start pulling the data off those systems.
James: Cool. Really cool. So it's just basically turning it on whenever they're ready, essentially.
Deb: Yeah, you just turn the services on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
James: Cool. And what, what are you finding? I remember writing a newsletter about this, I don't know, last December, January. So what are you finding in the several months that's been part of the program?
Deb: Well, firstly, it's totally resonating with the market. So when I think about how we would have sold a smart building solution or a smart building program two years ago, you know, we would have gone and, you know, met with a client. We would have met with their procurement team, with their IT team, with all of the site teams, the head of operations, various people to get the okay to move into this, you know, does it satisfy our data governance and our compliance and our privacy and our cyber and all of that. But we've actually, de-risked the project down now to the point where any building facilities manager could say, I want to see how digital-ready the systems are, that the services teams have told me that these are all BACnet enabled and all open standards. I want to make sure of that before I sign off on this invoice, so they can actually do that.
And then what we're finding is people are buying these by the dozen and assessing all of their buildings and then turning their buildings on much, much faster than they would have done using our more recent sales cycle, which was to try and sell a whole smart building program.
[00:31:47]
Big commercial buildings, if you think about a Class A, 50-story office tower in the middle of New York City, highly unlikely to implement controls from Switch Automation. They may, and almost certainly will, use aspects of our controls, for example, for system tests. And it's certainly one of the reasons that that company would buy Switch, is because in the future, they would envisage that happening. But today, 2020, that's an unlikely scenario, and it's not really why they would be going down this route today.
The fully autonomous building, for example, is something that we all imagine will happen at some time in the future. You know, the analytics will detect this, it will then pass that command off to the controls to turn something off, dial something back, put something on, for example. So that's definitely our future view. But big office buildings are just, they're just unlikely to go straight from zero to a hundred on that.
Where the controls become incredibly important is where you've got a thousand bank branches, or 60 grocery stores, or 50 Louis Vuitton stores. And every single one of those stores has different equipment in it because it was regionally deployed. And so it was the controls person that you deployed, used their hardware of choice and programmed those devices. So when you've got a thousand bank branches, every single one of those bank branches either has a different set of equipment or a different set of controls schedules, or nothing at all. And they almost certainly never have a BMS. So in that case, we are the BMS. We're the thing that allows all of the equipment in that little bitty bank branch, that's probably one of the dumbest buildings that you'll have on the planet. You know, that they don't have smart lighting. They don't have, you know, fully integrated air conditioning. And we're able to actually provide them with something that is really cost effective and really smart.
But where it becomes incredibly valuable to those owners and operators, is you don't want a thousand bank branches to be all running on their own schedule, because then if you have a new bank holiday, next Monday you're going to have to log on to a thousand bank branches and reprogram them. And so what happens in that case is, they just don't. So somebody does a manual override and then, you know, three months later you find out the manual override is still on. So that's where Switch becomes incredibly valuable for those small footprint, large-scale portfolios, because we can actually roll out, push out schedules to all of the implementations with one push of the button.
[00:40:12]
Our whole industry, this entire industry will be rewritten on the basis of who has the data. If you think about your accounting, and every year when you do your tax, I don't know if you're big enough to have to go to a tax accountant to do that, but I do. Now I don't bid that out every year. I don't come to the end of every financial year and go, Oh, who will I use to submit my taxation accounts this year? Oh, I'll put a bid in the market and I'll ask them-. No. I go back to the same accountant every single year. Why? Because they have my files, they have my data, they have my history, they know me. You know, it's exactly the same with engineers.
Engineers need to look beyond their industry, and stop looking at how every other engineer is doing business, and look at other industries and say, how do we have a level of engagement with our customer that brings them back. Every, every single time, they come back to us for our work. Whereas engineers today think products like ours, oh, we've got to be hardware agnostic and software agnostic. We've got to be independent. Do you think accountants think like that? No, accountants use tools to do their work, and what's important to them is the engagement that they have with their customer. But for some reason, there's whole pieces of our industry that just haven't learned that lesson yet, that the engagement is the piece that's important.
[00:43:00]
Warren Buffet has a very famous quote, which was, you know, when the stock market crashes, the tide goes out and everybody who is swimming with no pants on it gets found out. And that's very much what this, what 2020 has done for people that are owning and operating buildings. You couldn't shut down a building without sending somebody to site. You have no idea how many people coming in and out of the building. So it's really kind of caught people off guard and made it very, very apparent just how technology could have helped during the last six months or so. So I think if nothing else, it has accelerated people's interest and made it more.
And also, I think there are some technologies that are just going to have to become a given. So I think indoor air quality, and people counting, and density metrics, just like your airline now will tell you when the plane is going to be late, is going to be a level of visibility that will be an expectation. If we're going to get people back in the buildings, they're going to have to feel happy and comfortable and be able to assess the risk on that. You know, post 9/11, we all changed the way we get on planes for the rest of our lives. We all, you know, accepted that. In fact, if you turned up to an airport today that didn't have that level of security, you would feel odd and a bit exposed.
And I think that's how building owners and operators are going to have to think about data, is how do they get those those metrics into the hands of their tenants, but also any visitor coming into the building so that they know that those building owners and operators are collecting those metrics and that they're managing that building in a way that lowers the risk.
[00:51:40]
What I'm seeing is the really big portfolios out here understand that digital transformation means creating a whole new digital skillset, and that there's actually a bit of a race on for this digital skillset and setting yourselves up to be the leaders in that. And I think particularly Singapore as a government understands that digital skill set is really important for the growth of their economy. So they're heavily invested in that. And I think most of the portfolio owners and operators that are in this region also understand that, and there's a really great appetite for adoption of tech for their competitive advantage. So they're not going slowly out here. They're not standing back and watching to see what other people are doing. They understand that this is potentially going to set them up for some sort of competitive edge in the future. And we don't know yet. It's like Google Maps never had any idea when they launched the number of applications and how that would be used. And it's a bit like that's how I think about digital transformation of real estate and collecting data. You just don't know the revenue streams and the opportunities for business models that will come out of that. And I think the real estate owners out here understand that that is an opportunity. They don't yet understand it either, but they know that that it will be there and getting in early is going to be key. So we're not seeing any hesitation out here on that whole adoption of technology.
What did you think about these highlights? Let us know in the comments.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to Nexus, a smart buildings technology podcast for smart humans. I'm your host, James Dice. If we haven't met before, I write a weekly newsletter on the same topic. It's also called Nexus. Each week I share what I've learned, my opinions, and what I'm excited about in the quickly evolving world of intelligent buildings. Readers have called Nexus the best way to stay up to date on the future of this industry without all the marketing fluff. You can check it out and subscribe at nexus.substack.com or click the link in the show notes.
Since starting the Nexus newsletter, many of you have reached out to me wanting to talk shop, and we have. After a few weeks of those wonderful conversations, I realized I needed to record and share them with our growing community. So here we are. The Nexus podcast is born. This is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry together.
One more quick note before we get to this week's episode. I'm a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, otherwise known as NREL. All opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to me or the guest. No resources from NREL are used to support Nexus, and NREL does not endorse or support any aspect of Nexus.
Okay, Episode 15 is a conversation with Deb Noller, CEO of Switch Automation. It was fun talking to Deb. We've had three conversations so far, and I always end up with amazing Deb quotes. She's a quote machine. Switch has an awesome team. We talked about her keys to hiring and attracting talent in the smart building space.
We unpacked what it means for a building to be digital-ready and how Switch has evolved their approach to quickly figure out whether a building is ready to get smart or whether it actually needs basic connectivity upgrades first. Deb also give her answer to why building technology is 20 years behind the tech in our personal lives, and much, much more.
This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community. You can find info on how to join and support the podcast at nexus.substack.com. You also find the show notes, which has links to Deb's LinkedIn page and more. Oh, and by the way, if you take a look at your personal podcast feed and you're missing episodes 10, 12, and 14, that's because those episodes are exclusive to members of Nexus Pro.
You can sign up for a pro membership to get your personal podcast feed with access to all of the episodes. Without further ado, please enjoy Nexus Podcast Episode 15.
Alright. Hello, Deb. Welcome to the Nexus podcast. Can you introduce yourself?
Deb Noller: [00:02:40] Sure. Deb Noller. I'm the CEO of Switch Automation. Our company builds technology for smart buildings.
James Dice: [00:02:48] Alright, so can you briefly explain the origin story of Switch. It's something that I-, obviously I'm intimately familiar with Switch, but I don't know how it started. Can you give me a little background on that?
Deb Noller: [00:03:02] Sure. Everyone always asks me this question, how Switch started, and it's always a series of accidents. So my co founder and I have been in business since 1992, we've had a series of incredibly successful businesses. And we were kind of between companies. I was working for E-Trade, building financial tools for them, and John was, asked by, our CTO at E-Trade if he could develop the integration for the Australian lighting system for a product that was being brought in from the U S so it was a U S product, but didn't work with Australian lighting. and our CTO at E-Trade actually asked me, could I do that? And I went, no, I'm not anywhere near smart enough to do that.
I couldn't even imagine how you would even. Find out where the interface is to start talking to that lighting system, let alone anyway, that's, that's kind of the introduction into, that whole machine and machine layer. and John went off and did that for a couple of years and came back and kept having coffee with me in the city and saying, Deb, Deb, this is so exciting.
We can get lighting systems to talk to security systems. And, and I was like, yeah. Okay. And then one day he just got me on the right day and we started this company.
James Dice: [00:04:15] Wow. And when was that? What year was that?
Deb Noller: [00:04:18] 2005. So we spent two to three years in high end homes, which actually is a really challenging market because every single high end home is completely customized every, homeowner, when the wealthy, they have different requirements, right?
They, they want streaming video. They want a panic room. They want security tunnels. They want Turntables in their garage so that they don't have to back their car out. It ends up with every single time. It is completely customized, even though you've built software that scales the actual market doesn't.
So we spent three years kind of figuring that out. Which actually is one of the reasons that switch is so successful because we've done it all. We've done everything and anything. And when you've done that, all of integration and all of those types of projects, you learn as much about what you should do as you learn about what you should never do.
So we actually learned just as much about, things that we should always avoid. But the biggest thing we learned was how do you actually take these types of smart building applications into a market and only think about scale. And we constantly come back to that every single day of the week is, will this scale, how will this scale for hundreds of buildings, thousands of buildings, millions of data points.
James Dice: [00:05:41] Hmm. Cool. Alright. so what is the platform today? what's your, elevator pitch for someone who's never heard of switch before?
Deb Noller: [00:05:49] Everybody knows that at some point in the future, all buildings will be smart, connected, digital. You know, we all watched the Jetsons when we were little kids and that is, you know, the, fully autonomous buildings, right.
That's kind of the dream and it's 2020, and that's still not done. So what we're doing is we're helping. Big enterprise customers. So they could be class a real estate portfolios, or it could be large portfolios of small buildings like bank branches or supermarkets, or, retail stores or sheds or industrial or cold storage or airports.
It doesn't really matter if you've got lots of buildings, you actually have the same problem. Disconnect, data, disconnect systems, disconnected assets, disconnected teams. And. You know that the future is smart, connected, digital, but going from 2020 to that world is it's, it's an enormous lift. And what we're doing is actually helping people by giving them the interoperable tool sets that will connect all of that.
James Dice: [00:06:50] Hmm, cool. Yeah, that piece of like 20, 22, where we know where we're going to go. I spend a lot of time pondering that gap. As everyone who listens to this knows,
Deb Noller: [00:07:01] I think everybody in our industry does to be honest. I mean, that is, you know, it's, what's going to be the catalyst to make the uptake of these technologies go much, much faster.
And what are the technologies that are going to enable that transition?
James Dice: [00:07:18] Totally. Yeah. And this can be a place where sometimes people. worry about pissing someone off, but why do you think we are behind, where we're at today, where it is, where we should be
Deb Noller: [00:07:30] Well, there's a, there's several pieces to that.
Firstly, we've got the incumbents, so we've got a lot of really large incumbents and that's everybody from the big hardware manufacturers, you know, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider, et cetera. Then we've got the large service companies, CBRE, JLL, Cushman and Wakefield. Then you've got all of the service companies that sit below that. Every single one of those companies is sitting on a business model that they have to protect and a digital transformation is going to disrupt every single one of those business models. So that's one part of it is we've got big players in the market who will actually actively-, and I'm not actually saying any of those actively doing it, but there are companies that really don't want to see too much of a transformation because they've got very large, particularly service contracts that are reliant on large workforces. And, you know, digital transformation will disrupt that. So that's one part of it.
The other part of it, which is probably the single biggest problem in why it hasn't happened faster, is on the other side of the desk we've got all of these people who know that sometime in the future all of these buildings that they manage, own, operate, whatever are going to be smart, connected, digital. But today they're just dealing with this problem: well, I've got all these different manufacturers, I've got all these different service providers. And they actually haven't ever rolled out a really large technology project before.
So if you look at real estate owners and operators, everything that they buy today is based on relationship or price. And buying technology has got nothing to do with relationship or price. It's all around, how do these things fit together? What's the interoperability? What are the standards? How does this scale?
And there's a really huge, devoid skillset missing out of that part of the market. And it's gradually changing, people like yourself coming in that, you know, we're seeing a lot of, there's a generational change. There's people coming into the industry, more IT people have come into the space within the customer base just because of the cyber risk, you know, so we've seen the IT people now coming in.
So I think it's gradually changing, but nowhere near fast enough to help the problem, which is every single large company needs at least one person inside their organization that understands how to buy technology. And they've got to have the political clout to bring everyone along with them. And they've got to have the willingness to be a risk taker and to step off the ledge.
James Dice: [00:10:20] Yeah. Actually, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective, just in terms of the traditional buying patterns really of. Of just how people are used to buying things today.
Deb Noller: [00:10:31] Yeah. When people buy stuff for buildings, they're bought for one building, they buy an elevator, they buy an energy management metering system. They buy a service contract for cleaning. They haven't really had to think about buying enterprise tools. In this way before. And if anyone did buy enterprise tools, you know, we're moving to the cloud way, going to office three 65, it was usually the it department that did it, the it department doesn't understand all the nuances of bacnet and modbus and all of these various things that they're dealing with. And that's a learning curve for the it people.
James Dice: [00:11:08] Yeah, totally. so it really seems like it. Talent thing. And you and I have talked about this before, offline, but like, how do you think we can grow that talent pool of someone that can not only understand how to buy a software, but also bring all of the different pieces together for their organization?
Deb Noller: [00:11:28] I spend a lot of my time thinking about this, So when I first came to the U S in 2013, 2014, I spent my entire first year up and down the West coast of the USA, talking to everybody who serviced a building. So it was McKinstry and Glumac and yay. Everybody who had a existing contract that a service into buildings that every single one of those businesses is what I do.
Cool. A labor based model. They have a contract. They need X number of people. They hire those people, they add on a margin and that's how they make money. And I spent my entire first year in the U S saying, you can still charge for the service, the same amount as you would, but what you need to be thinking about is how do you do that service better, faster, cheaper with higher levels of engagement with your customer and higher levels of retention with your customer so that they're not going to churn and just bid that service contract out next year and give it to somebody else. And I call that the year that I tried to sell Uber to the taxi drivers. You know, taxi drivers have spent a lot of money on their medallions or their plates. They get up every morning, they know how they make their money, right. So, yeah, there's no reason to change. If nobody's on the block eating your lunch, then you're just going to get up every single day and do the same thing. So some of it is around the motivation of the talent pool to change and up until now, what we've seen is business. As usual, hasn't had any threat, therefore there's no incentives to change in the same way the universities keep churning out.
Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, data scientists for smart buildings. We actually need somebody that has all of those skill sets one more. cause there's actually skillsets amongst the traits that you need for smart buildings. You know, how do you connect a, metering system to a TCP IP, device and turn, You know, native mod bus into an IP based modus, you know, so there's a vast, and wide breadth of skills that you need for smart buildings.
And there's nobody addressing it. So up until now, it's really been people that just had a passionate interest, and self taught. And, you know, I've often talked about how, how can we add a little company fix this problem? Because ultimately it holds us back. If we had hundreds, more people in the market, that were skilled at this, then the whole market would move faster.
So it is, it's a, it's a huge issue. I'm not sure exactly what. The solution is, but I think we have to be part of it and so we actually, couple of my early hires left, you know, they did three years with us and they left. And at first I was kind of like bitter and twisted about it. Like, why don't they want to stay and help us build this amazing company.
And then, then I realized, actually this is not such a bad thing. We're actually. Being part of training the workforce and those people will go somewhere else now. And they will know much more than they would have known if they hadn't had the three years at switch and they are also strong advocates of what we do now.
So I think, yeah, but there's no single answer. We've all, we've all got to circle up and work out how we solve this problem.
James Dice: [00:14:55] Yeah. How are you seeing your clients or potential clients serving it and filling that, that gap? in their organization because I got to believe And obviously I know that these large portfolios are looking to figure out how they can do this. and I think a lot of them will realize at some point that they need the internal people to go on the journey and to guide them on the journey. So how are you seeing them?
Deb Noller: [00:15:20] the leaders understand it's a problem. They've identified at least one person and they are. Investing heavily in that person.
So they don't mind sending that person, even from Australia all the way to IB con to go to the events and they are giving that person the, permission and the authority to lead their organization. So they, I think some of it is just Shia. Feis, you pick the right person, you understand that person has the bones of what they need, and then you work out what else you've got to give them.
So we've seen a couple of companies doing that, and, doing it well. and then we're back here, those companies up. So when we first came to the U S we had no intention of creating a managed services group. And by that, I mean, people that have mechanical engineering, sustainability, data, science, integration skills, we were purely technology.
and we thought that all of our customers would adopt our technology and they would. Either do the service themselves, like look at the data and figure out what to do with it, or they would, give it to one of their existing service providers. And what we realized was the existing service providers actually didn't necessarily see that as an opportunity and would try and, continue providing the service that they did.
So then the customer would realize, well, that's not going to work. And so they would. Figure it out internally. And we realized that most of these customers just didn't have those skills on their team and that they would churn. So what we did was we created a whole team. Eventually I see that team will be supporting smart building teams all around the world, rather than doing the smart building services.
But for now it's a gap that we had to fill.
James Dice: [00:17:10] Yeah, totally. Well, that's a good segue. I wanted to just commend you on. The people that I've met in your company. I mean, you have amazing employees. so you guys have an office here in Denver. I haven't met anyone else Australia, but I'm sure they're awesome too.
like tell me about how you, created this awesome team and how did you attract them? Cause a lot of them weren't in the smart building space before. So how did you attract them?
Deb Noller: [00:17:31] Yeah. Well, there's no such thing as smart building people, you know, there's no qualification for it.
you know, there's no such thing anywhere, And so I have a very unique hiring strategy. and I probably shouldn't talk about that on a podcast. Cause then it will be completely public, but, So, firstly, I don't read resumes, because I don't really care. I don't really care whether you went to university or not.
I don't really care, what jobs you've done in your past, because I can guarantee that you haven't done what I need. Right. You will have done. You've possibly done one. Thing that I need you might've done commissioning or integration. You might've done mechanical engineering, you might've done networking or data science.
So I actually don't really care very much about what qualification you have, or your experience does matter. and so typically in an interview, which an interview with me one, yeah. Lasts very long. it's okay. It's a conversation. And I'll start with, you know, what have you done? Tell me about, you know, and usually from that I can glean what somebody's passionate about.
cause we have very much passion driven business and that's what you're seeing when you meet our team. And I don't call, I don't ever refer to them as employees, that part of the team, and with very much vision and mission. driven. So everybody in our company understands what the end game is, everybody.
Okay. And knows that we've not yet figured out how to get to there and where trawling and erroring and filing and, correcting all along the way. So the things that I care about, raw intelligence, Do you have the intelligence to actually pick up all of these other skills that you're going to need to be able to do smart buildings?
And are you hardworking? Because this is really, really hard. It's incredibly difficult. And so what you see in ad group of people is people who are passionate about what we're trying to achieve and will move heaven and earth to get there. and haven't yet figured it out, but we know that there's a way in there.
And if we just all keep trying, but the most important thing is because we're all going to work so hard and we're probably gonna do 10, 12 hours a day. Do I like this person enough on a Friday afternoon, having spent 60 hours with them still go have a beer. And if the answer to those three things is yes, you probably got a role in that company.
So, yeah. We're, Bunch of people that have come from all different, ways of life and different backgrounds, but we all share the same thing, which is buildings should be smarter. They chest should be smarter. It's 2020, and they are a woeful poor impact on our planet. And it's just gotta be solved.
It just has to be
James Dice: [00:20:37] totally, that's amazing. I love that. okay. Thank you for building that team. I think the industry is grateful that those people are, trying for 12 hours a day, trying to get there and trying to figure it out over beers.
Deb Noller: [00:20:51] Yeah. I mean, you did absolutely hit on something that is core to switch and why we are successful.
Yes, we have incredible technology. There's there's no doubt about it. Our technology is best in best in the world. A lot of that is just because of how long we've been around. And we've figured a lot of stuff out. But the reason that our company is so successful and people want to do business with us is the quality of the team.
They're just awesome. They're just terrific, fantastic likable, hardworking, passionate people. And honestly, that what you have seen is exactly what I'm the most proud of.
James Dice: [00:21:32] That's awesome. Really cool. Hopefully people can learn from that and build their own teams like yours.
but transitioning into, I want to talk about kind of what you're seeing on some of, some of your projects. So number one thing I feel like I hear from your team when I talk to, and it's mostly from, the book club, if anyone's. Wondering though, there's a lot of switchers in the nexus book clubs.
So reach out to me if you want to join. And then on these conversations, as, switcher, the right Do you guys use that term or did I just make that up?
Yeah, we, we have lots of, switched on and switch it up and switches. Yeah. Okay.
Well, the word I hear from a lot of them is connectivity.
So. I have a feeling that, that just like has a special meeting inside your company. And I want you to kind of unpack it for me. And like, it sounds like there's been a lot of, do you have a lot of stories around, like what happens when building owners skip that first step of just connecting different systems?
Deb Noller: [00:22:29] I think the biggest problem is. Well, there's two parts to the connectivity. So my background is actually enterprise IT. I don't have a background in buildings. And when I look at the way people are managing multi multibillion dollar portfolios, it looks like 1990. It reminds me of the finance group before they got the ERP system, you know, everybody's just got spreadsheets and subsystems and paper and it's outsourced. And there isn't a single enterprise-wide approach to collecting and using data.
So a lot of people, when they think of connectivity, they go immediately to the physical connectivity. Whereas when I think about connectivity, I think about the business. I think about the data. It should only be stored once, accessed by all, single source of the truth. You know, great efficiencies by collecting it once and using it many times. But when people do go down the journey of smart buildings, they almost always want to start with one of their iconic buildings, which they know is digital-ready. It's got a BACnet BMS, it's got a smart lighting system, and they want to connect that up.
What we invariably find is what the customer or the client thinks they've got and what they really have are often two different things. They have a network that's not been configured correctly. They thought they had a BACnet license on the BMS, but actually they don't. And so often what our customers think they might have, and how digital-ready they are, is not quite the truth.
And so one of the fail fast things that we've done in our company over the last six months is to enhance our IoT appliance to build it up so that it can actually assess the digital readiness of buildings. So this product's called the DX3 and you buy that as a single, one-time purchase. You plug it into your building network, and overnight it will come back with an assessment of how digital-ready your building is. So, how many systems did it find? How many data points did it find? How many open ports did it find? How many versions of firmware did it find? And it's basically an assessment of whether your building is or is not ready for smart building programs, because if it's not, you might have three, six months worth of work to do to bring that network or some of those systems up to scratch.
James Dice: [00:25:12] Yeah. And I'm sure you've found, as others have found, that if you go ahead and try to, like, especially if you're a sales person, try to sell one of these projects to a building owner that doesn't have a digital-ready building, you can easily find that the first thing you do on that project is you need some huge upgrade, right? Is that what you've found? And then everyone's kind of disappointed.
Deb Noller: [00:25:36] A hundred percent. So it not only is it disappointing, but it puts us in a position of immediate conflict because what we sold was a 12 month SaaS agreement and a 12 month managed services agreement. And that's what the contract says. But the building's not ready. So whose fault is that? Was that our fault, because we didn't know that and you should've known that, but you didn't, or, you know. And so what we've realized is we needed to: one, remove the uncertainty; and two, remove that conflict, and give people the confidence that all I'm buying in step one of this with the Dx3 is the assessment.
And if the building's not ready to move on, I haven't committed to anything more than that. And the really fantastic thing about it, the Dx3, as opposed to a manual site audit, which is how people are doing that today, you know, hire somebody to come out with the clipboard, write down everything, go back, write up a big report. That report's out of date the very next day, because who knows what was plugged or unplugged from the network. The most fantastic thing about the Dx3 is it stays on the network. It will give you an updated report whenever you want to run that. And when you are ready for the next stage, which might be data ingestion, it might be fault detection, it could be energy management, whatever, that same appliance will do that interconnectivity and start pulling the data off those systems.
James Dice: [00:27:03] Cool. Really cool. So it's just basically turning it on whenever they're ready, essentially.
Deb Noller: [00:27:09] Yeah, you just turn the services on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:27:12] Cool. And what, what are you finding? I remember writing a newsletter about this, I don't know, last December, January. So what are you finding in the several months that's been part of the program?
Deb Noller: [00:27:22] Well, firstly, it's totally resonating with the market. So when I think about how we would have sold a smart building solution or a smart building program two years ago, you know, we would have gone and, you know, met with a client. We would have met with their procurement team, with their IT team, with all of the site teams, the head of operations, various people to get the okay to move into this, you know, does it satisfy our data governance and our compliance and our privacy and our cyber and all of that. But we've actually, de-risked the project down now to the point where any building facilities manager could say, I want to see how digital-ready the systems are, that the services teams have told me that these are all BACnet enabled and all open standards. I want to make sure of that before I sign off on this invoice, so they can actually do that.
And then what we're finding is people are buying these by the dozen and assessing all of their buildings and then turning their buildings on much, much faster than they would have done using our more recent sales cycle, which was to try and sell a whole smart building program.
James Dice: [00:28:35] Totally. And just for people that are beginners - I've been trying to bring them along in these conversations too, is if you're a beginner out there, how people typically would sell a piece of hardware like this is it's wrapped up in the solution, either an upfront cost or it's part of this, the subscription fee.
Deb Noller: [00:28:53] That's exactly how we would have sold it. Yeah. A year ago we would have said, you know, mr. ABC, here's your portfolio. How would you like to, run your smart building program? Almost certainly. They would have said, well, let's do two buildings first. And so it would have been by the appliance and, configuration fee.
You know, X, X amount of dollars and then assess that starts one month later, plus a managed services fi so it's, you know, per month for the next 12 months. And, you know, typically we try and sell it to them for at least 12 months. And over that 12 months, we try and prove the value in those two buildings so that they expand that for another.
Whereas what we're seeing now is people saying, okay, I want 40 of these. I'm going to assess all my buildings. I've got 10 that are digital. Ready? Let's go. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:29:42] And with the DX three, are you, like, does it come packaged with different drivers or are you looking for more open protocols like backnet and, using the open protocols to then say, how ready are you to start the data flowing?
Deb Noller: [00:29:56] We've been in the smart buildings, integration countries. Wait, because we started as a controls platform. If you think back to the very first question you asked me and where we started in all of this, we were a controls company. So we actually turn lights on and off week and control amplifies and televisions.
And. Cameras and you name it, pan tilt, zoom. and so we actually have a very cool pensive stack of drivers already on that, appliance. and we're constantly updating that because as you see all of these IOT sensors coming into the market, most of those won't the backnet backnet is a very traditional.
BMS style of a driver. And I would think as more and more IOT devices come into the market, it's highly unlikely that they'll all be backnet. I think there'll be new protocols built. We're starting to see a lot more LoRa and Sigfox. Okay.
James Dice: [00:31:00] Cool. So you mentioned control. So this is a topic I've been writing about for the last several weeks. I think people are maybe sick of me writing about it, but by the time this podcast comes out, maybe I'll have stopped writing about it. But, I've been running several essays around this, this trend that we're seeing. And you guys have been doing it for a long time, but actually doing controls from an overlay platform, like switch.
So. what have you seen as far as the owner's acceptance of, these types of commands that are coming from something other than the BMS? And I guess the, second question to that would be how are the vendors, liking it as well? So there's a lot of ownership issues and someone owns the control sequence and he then starts sending commands, from over top of it.
How have you guys seen that play out?
Deb Noller: [00:31:47] Big commercial buildings, if you think about a Class A, 50-story office tower in the middle of New York City, highly unlikely to implement controls from Switch Automation. They may, and almost certainly will, use aspects of our controls, for example, for system tests. And it's certainly one of the reasons that that company would buy Switch, is because in the future, they would envisage that happening. But today, 2020, that's an unlikely scenario, and it's not really why they would be going down this route today.
The fully autonomous building, for example, is something that we all imagine will happen at some time in the future. You know, the analytics will detect this, it will then pass that command off to the controls to turn something off, dial something back, put something on, for example. So that's definitely our future view. But big office buildings are just, they're just unlikely to go straight from zero to a hundred on that.
Where the controls become incredibly important is where you've got a thousand bank branches, or 60 grocery stores, or 50 Louis Vuitton stores. And every single one of those stores has different equipment in it because it was regionally deployed. And so it was the controls person that you deployed, used their hardware of choice and programmed those devices. So when you've got a thousand bank branches, every single one of those bank branches either has a different set of equipment or a different set of controls schedules, or nothing at all. And they almost certainly never have a BMS. So in that case, we are the BMS. We're the thing that allows all of the equipment in that little bitty bank branch, that's probably one of the dumbest buildings that you'll have on the planet. You know, that they don't have smart lighting. They don't have, you know, fully integrated air conditioning. And we're able to actually provide them with something that is really cost effective and really smart.
But where it becomes incredibly valuable to those owners and operators, is you don't want a thousand bank branches to be all running on their own schedule, because then if you have a new bank holiday, next Monday you're going to have to log on to a thousand bank branches and reprogram them.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so what happens in that case is, they just don't. So somebody does a manual override and then, you know, three months later you find out the manual override is still on. So that's where Switch becomes incredibly valuable for those small footprint, large-scale portfolios, because we can actually roll out, push out schedules to all of the implementations with one push of the button.
James Dice: [00:34:45] Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. And then you know, my history is all in big, big, huge buildings like you just started out that answer with. And so I've been learning more recently about retail and refrigerated retail especially, so well, you know, big, big grocery store chains and that, that whole side of the industry it's been fascinating lately. it's almost like two different worlds and you just described him perfectly there.
So a lot of what I've been writing about is on the bigger buildings, This supervisory control layer. There's just so many things they need to do before they can even get there to make that work. Is that kinda why, like you said, zero to 100, is that why they're just not ready for it? Is that the best way to think about it?
Deb Noller: [00:35:27] Well, I think the way that, there's been a couple of black box technologies in our market, it's like, you know, we're going to plug this thing in and it's going to assess your BMS and it's going to automatically improve your building performance. Now imagine that you're the facility manager for that building.
That is terrifying because you're going to wake up tomorrow. Have no idea what was done overnight and get a hundred phone calls. And because you didn't know what was done, you don't even know how to resolve it. So yes, that is the future. That at some point in the future, that is likely to be exactly what happens.
But we have to take an entire industry on a journey here from where we are today to that world. And the first step is, That people getting really comforted with what are these technologies going to find? So, yeah, the supervisory control is something we can do today, but it's just highly unlikely that anybody's going to allow that to happen until they get a huge level of comfort around what the first step did.
What the second step did, what the third step did, which is why I think the system testing is the first part of where the controls in the really big buildings will occur is. You know, systems need to be tested, and regularly. And typically that's done by sending somebody out to site and, you know, running all the tests.
Whereas we could automate that. We could do it out of hours on a Sunday afternoon with, you know, hard data backing up those tests and a report on your desk on Monday morning to say whether all of the systems pass that test or not.
James Dice: [00:37:05] Yeah. Yeah. And if you're a commissioning agent right now, it means that you can start to test. You know, more than just 10% of the VAV boxes and things like that. So I'm definitely. Big proponent of that.
Deb Noller: [00:37:16] I think the other aspect is that, you know, if you just look at the way buildings are built, you know, the owner goes to the architect and they design something truly incredible. And then it gets handed over to all the consulting engineers who break that down into all the pieces and they specify that and exactly how it should work.
And it's all stunning on paper. And then it's handed over to the general contractors who then have to tender or quote on that. Job. Typically it doesn't go to the lowest price, but it will go to somebody who's, you know, one step or two step from the lowest price. Everybody has cut their pricing to get into the project. How are they going to deliver that? They're going to cut every corner they can and make up their money on it variation. So what gets delivered in a building? Is typically not what was specified by the consulting engineers. The consulting engineers made all of their money while they were writing documents and developing the paperwork for that.
When they hand over to the, general contractor to build it, they've made all of their profit on that particular project. Then the building gets handed over to the owner, and now we have it fact liability period during that defect liability period, the onus is on everybody to find all of the problems in that buildings to make sure that the things that were not delivered or not delivered correctly, get fixed while the defect liability periods on otherwise, the owner is going to pay for those things to be rectified afterwards.
Uh, rice, during that period, the consulting engineers lose money, hand over fist. They are turning up to site meetings and trying to justify or validate. associate blame to somebody about why something's not working the way it was specified. Yeah.
And the finger pointing.
Yeah, exactly. So not only are they losing profit from this day on, in an exasperations, you know, and just.
Mating automating, automating site visits and, you know, quite antagonistic to not only are they losing money on the job that they've already finished and banked, but that also losing opportunity costs. And that's where it's an absolute nightmare. Bryana from me. And I just don't understand why the industry hasn't really woken up to this yet.
That. Those consulting engineers should be putting DX cute into every single project, because it's basically going to help them protect their profit collect data that validates where the systems were implemented and commissioned correctly, but also give them an ongoing engagement with the customer.
James Dice: [00:40:02] Yeah. Especially warranty period. Like you said, there's an entire year. Sometimes a little less than a year, but almost a year of, of just being able to,
Deb Noller: [00:40:11] yeah. I mean our whole industry, this entire industry will be rewritten on the basis of who has the data. If you think about your accounting, and every year when you do your tax, I don't know if you're big enough to have to go to a tax accountant to do that, but I do. Now I don't bid that out every year. I don't come to the end of every financial year and go, Oh, who will I use to submit my taxation accounts this year? Oh, I'll put a bid in the market and I'll ask them-. No. I go back to the same accountant every single year. Why? Because they have my files, they have my data, they have my history, they know me. You know, it's exactly the same with engineers.
Engineers need to look beyond their industry, and stop looking at how every other engineer is doing business, and look at other industries and say, how do we have a level of engagement with our customer that brings them back. Every, every single time, they come back to us for our work. Whereas engineers today think products like ours, oh, we've got to be hardware agnostic and software agnostic. We've got to be independent. Do you think accountants think like that? No, accountants use tools to do their work, and what's important to them is the engagement that they have with their customer. But for some reason, there's whole pieces of our industry that just haven't learned that lesson yet, that the engagement is the piece that's important.
James Dice: [00:41:45] Yeah, totally. Yeah. And especially from the building owners perspective, I mean, ideally all of these service providers, engineers, yeah. Cannibal control service, the people that are designed in the renovation and the wing down there, like, ideally that they'd all be using this hub where the data is, and someone's got to own it.
Like, the owner could own it. You know, the consulting engineer could own it. The commissioning agent could own it. And yeah, it's, it's a huge opportunity for whoever wants to take that on. And I think, like you said, at the beginning, it's a business model thing. it's a business model obstacle.
Deb Noller: [00:42:22] Yeah. And, you know, people that already have so much invested in an existing business model, it is so difficult to change that takes an enormous, you know, deep breath and a jumper.
James Dice: [00:42:35] Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's transition again. So it's, what's today, August 6th. and so we're still, I've been saying this for many months of podcasts now. We're still in the middle of the pandemic, especially in the U S maybe another countries they're out of it, but we're still in the middle of it in the U S so. I wanted to see like what you're seeing with your clients and sort of what general outlook you have for the industry at this point.
Deb Noller: [00:42:59] Yeah. So Warren buffet has a very famous quote, which was, you know, when the stock market crashes, the tide goes out and everybody who is swimming with no pants on it gets found out. And that's very much what this, what 2020 has done for people that are owning and operating buildings. You couldn't shut down a building without sending somebody to site. You have no idea how many people coming in and out of the building. So it's really kind of caught people off guard and made it very, very apparent just how technology could have helped during the last six months or so. So I think if nothing else, it has accelerated people's interest and made it more.
And also, I think there are some technologies that are just going to have to become a given. So I think indoor air quality, and people counting, and density metrics, just like your airline now will tell you when the plane is going to be late, is going to be a level of visibility that will be an expectation. If we're going to get people back in the buildings, they're going to have to feel happy and comfortable and be able to assess the risk on that. You know, post 9/11, we all changed the way we get on planes for the rest of our lives. We all, you know, accepted that. In fact, if you turned up to an airport today that didn't have that level of security, you would feel odd and a bit exposed.
And I think that's how building owners and operators are going to have to think about data, is how do they get those those metrics into the hands of their tenants, but also any visitor coming into the building so that they know that those building owners and operators are collecting those metrics and that they're managing that building in a way that lowers the risk.
James Dice: [00:44:59] Yeah. And it's really an acceleration, what you're describing, it seems like towards more digitalization in the buildings. So are you seeing that happen in strategic ways or one-off ways, because I've seen different approaches, right? So I've seen, you know, let's go through an occupancy sensor over here, or an IOT occupancy solution over here, and let's do this over there. We need CO2 sensors and let's increase ventilation over here. But I don't know that I've seen More motivation to bring everything together and connect everything together in a strategic, longterm way. And I would think that companies like switch would be seeing more interest. I, just, I haven't seen that. And I'm wondering what you've seen, as far as the value proposition of pulling everything together, and, and bringing the analytics in as well.
Deb Noller: [00:45:48] Yeah, we're definitely, we're definitely seeing interest. everybody's interested in having these conversations now and they're interested in how do they solve for those short urgent things that they've got to do today, but also with a view to how they bring that together for the longterm view.
So nobody's Doing the entire project today, but that definitely, looking at these technologies in a very strategic way, I can buy this indoor air quality sensor today. How does that fit in with my longterm plan to have all of my data collected? I think that's the one thing that I have seen over the last 12 months is there's so many more people who now understand I've got this energy management platform. I've got my utility billing platform. I've got this fault detection in this building and another one in another building. And I don't want to see another platform. I don't want to see another, you know, people counting or a workplace management platform or where I've got a log in.
and so, yeah, I think. We are seeing a bit more sophistication on the buyer's side, for sure. Does that mean? And so they recognize us now when we walk in, they recognize we're not selling you in an indirect quality sensor. We're not selling you a access control system. We're not selling. You are a BMS.
We're giving you the tools to be able to bring together all the things you've done in the past. Plus all the things you want to do in the future.
James Dice: [00:47:15] That makes me feel really good. That makes me feel like people are starting to get it. And thank you for, I needed a boost today. So I appreciate that. cool.
So I wanted to spend some time at the end with, I know you guys raised them. A round of financing during a COBIT. So congrats on that. And I wanted to ask you, like, what's your outlook for the company? And like what you're excited about, moving forward, besides all of the acceleration we just talked about.
Deb Noller: [00:47:42] Yeah. So fundraising is hard. and I actually had lunch with somebody yesterday and they said, you know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you wear a lot of hats. You have to a product you have to develop. A marketing plan. You have to do the sales. I mean, mostly you're doing the sales, but nothing is as hard as fundraising.
And it's honestly just one of the most difficult, tasks that you'll ever take on as an entrepreneur. And it's very soul destroying because you've built this company that you believe is truly amazing. It's going to solve the thing and you get told a thousand times that your baby is ugly basically.
And, people give you the most lame yeah. Excuses for why they're not interested. And I think the first thing you've got to do is change your mindset and realize. They are going to say no to 99.9% of everything. So almost certainly every conversation you're going to have that going to say no. So it's a game of numbers.
You've got to talk to a lot of people and you've got to go in there knowing that they're likely to say no. So get to know facts. What size checks do you write? What sort of the companies you interested in? What was the last thing you invested in? you know, and you can actually. Control the conversation and it's less soul destroying when you're in control of the conversation.
So I think that's the first thing, but even though I've found, fundraising really difficult and there's a lot of, materials around about female founders and how, how much more difficult it is for us. I don't tend to dwell on that very much. Cause I know a lot of male founders and it looks to me just as hard for them as it is for, for us.
And I think there's probably other people that are even more challenged to raise money. I'm not a person of color. I'm not disabled. You know, there's, there's a lot of things that could have, you know, stacked up against me. At least there's a focus on female founders. So at least we have that going for us.
But yeah. At the end of the day, even though fundraising really, really difficult, I'm a totally grateful that we've got amazing investors. So even though I had to grind through a lot, I ended up with really fantastic investors and that's actually a bit like, you know, developing a really great team. It's really awesome to have great investors because hopefully one day we, we make them a lot of money and there's nothing better than meeting investors that you're really happy to make a lot of money for, so, yeah, that's the fundraising story. So most recently we, took funding from GAW Capital at a Hong Kong who are a real estate company. and. The really fabulous thing about that is not only are they incredibly well connected, particularly in Asia, but they actually have a lot of buildings.
So they're actually going to give us revenue as well as the investment funds they already already put in. So that's a really fabulous, you know, win-win situation. Then what I'm really excited about was when covert hit, I was, I'd actually gone out to Australia for my son's wedding. and I'd already booked and stuff, paying rent on an apartment in New York.
So I was about to fly back to New York and start our expansion into the New York market. And because we'd taken funding from. Go and because of the, unfolding covert situation, I just decided, well, we should go to Singapore instead. So we canceled apartments in Denver and New York and flew to Singapore.
And I'm really excited about what I'm seeing in Southeast Asia. So I think, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore. Japan are going to be really high growth markets for switch. So I'm really excited about what we can do out here over the next two or three years.
James Dice: [00:51:36] Cool. What are you saying that's different than the U S?
Deb Noller: [00:51:40] What I'm seeing is the really big portfolios out here understand that digital transformation means creating a whole new digital skillset, and that there's actually a bit of a race on for this digital skillset and setting yourselves up to be the leaders in that. And I think particularly Singapore as a government understands that digital skill set is really important for the growth of their economy. So they're heavily invested in that. And I think most of the portfolio owners and operators that are in this region also understand that, and there's a really great appetite for adoption of tech for their competitive advantage.
So they're not going slowly out here. They're not standing back and watching to see what other people are doing. They understand that this is potentially going to set them up for some sort of competitive edge in the future. And we don't know yet. It's like Google Maps never had any idea when they launched the number of applications and how that would be used. And it's a bit like that's how I think about digital transformation of real estate and collecting data. You just don't know the revenue streams and the opportunities for business models that will come out of that. And I think the real estate owners out here understand that that is an opportunity. They don't yet understand it either, but they know that that it will be there and getting in early is going to be key. So we're not seeing any hesitation out here on that whole adoption of technology.
James Dice: [00:53:23] Yeah, they just kind of see it already. That's awesome. Well, cool. I want to say thanks for, coming on the podcast, Deb, and thanks for joining me across so many different time zones. it's awesome that we're able to do this, from so far away.
So yeah, thank you.
Deb Noller: [00:53:38] Thank you.
James Dice: [00:53:39] Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus newsletter, please subscribe at nexus.substack.com. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. As always, please reach out on LinkedIn with any thoughts on this episode.
I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.
Happy Thursday!
Welcome to this week’s deep dive exclusively for Nexus Pro members. It’s an honor to have you here. This deep dive is a follow up to my recent conversation with Deb Noller of Switch Automation. It was a fun conversation and want to share my takeaways and the full transcript with you below.
In case you missed it in your inbox, you can find the audio or video here:
Nexus site | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Add to other podcast apps
Enjoy!
—James
It’s always fun talking to Deb. We’ve had 3 conversations, and I always end up with amazing Deb quotes. She’s a quote machine:
“Warren Buffet has a very famous quote, which was, you know, when the stock market crashes, the tide goes out and everybody who is swimming with no pants on gets found out. And that’s very much what this is, what 2020 has done for people that are owning and operating buildings.”
“When I look at the way people are managing multi multibillion dollar portfolios, it looks like 1990.”
I realized my favorite question is “why buildings are 20 years behind?”! That might need to be the standard first question for future guests. What do you think?
The second part of Deb’s answer I hadn’t thought of before. People need to be taught how to buy software. People in the buildings industry only know how to buy projects and elevators. When we do buy tech, it’s the IT department, who doesn’t know shit about building tech.
Deb’s comment about her managed services team was interesting to me because she doesn’t see that scaling up. She sees smart building teams being built inside the organizations of her clients. I’d build on that by saying that instead of having facilities managers and building operators and smart building teams, the facility managers and operators and energy managers of the future will be smart buildings people. It’s only a matter of time.
My lightbulb moment was Deb’s point about advanced supervisory control. First of all, I think her and I are highly aligned on ASC. But she added to my perspective: Perhaps the highest value these sorts of strategies can play right now is helping manage schedules and set points across large portfolios of small buildings. Like thousands of big box or grocery stores. It might be several years before bigger buildings are ready for complex sequences (for the reasons I’ve outlined in my series on ASC). These smaller buildings need simple controls (like basic occupancy scheduling and setpoint standardization) now.
I enjoyed hearing Deb rip into consulting engineers. Those of you who are Nexus Pro members probably already see the light here, but there are many in your profession who don’t, and they need to hear Deb’s message.
Finally, I just wanted to share how I wasn’t just blowing smoke about how I feel about the Switch team. I just love their team and love Deb’s leadership of not just them but of the industry. I know that they have the same mission as I do building Nexus, and knowing they’re warriors and they’re not going to give up is a great feeling.
What do you think?
[00:07:32]
Firstly, we've got the incumbents, so we've got a lot of really large incumbents and that's everybody from the big hardware manufacturers, you know, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider, et cetera. Then we've got the large service companies, CBRE, JLL, Cushman and Wakefield. Then you've got all of the service companies that sit below that. Every single one of those companies is sitting on a business model that they have to protect and a digital transformation is going to disrupt every single one of those business models. So that's one part of it is we've got big players in the market who will actually actively-, and I'm not actually saying any of those actively doing it, but there are companies that really don't want to see too much of a transformation because they've got very large, particularly service contracts that are reliant on large workforces. And, you know, digital transformation will disrupt that. So that's one part of it.
The other part of it, which is probably the single biggest problem in why it hasn't happened faster, is on the other side of the desk we've got all of these people who know that sometime in the future all of these buildings that they manage, own, operate, whatever are going to be smart, connected, digital. But today they're just dealing with this problem: well, I've got all these different manufacturers, I've got all these different service providers. And they actually haven't ever rolled out a really large technology project before.
So if you look at real estate owners and operators, everything that they buy today is based on relationship or price. And buying technology has got nothing to do with relationship or price. It's all around, how do these things fit together? What's the interoperability? What are the standards? How does this scale?
And there's a really huge, devoid skillset missing out of that part of the market. And it's gradually changing, people like yourself coming in that, you know, we're seeing a lot of, there's a generational change. There's people coming into the industry, more IT people have come into the space within the customer base just because of the cyber risk, you know, so we've seen the IT people now coming in.
So I think it's gradually changing, but nowhere near fast enough to help the problem, which is every single large company needs at least one person inside their organization that understands how to buy technology. And they've got to have the political clout to bring everyone along with them. And they've got to have the willingness to be a risk taker and to step off the ledge.
[00:22:31]
Deb: Well, there's two parts to the connectivity. So my background is actually enterprise IT. I don't have a background in buildings. And when I look at the way people are managing multi multibillion dollar portfolios, it looks like 1990. It reminds me of the finance group before they got the ERP system, you know, everybody's just got spreadsheets and subsystems and paper and it's outsourced. And there isn't a single enterprise-wide approach to collecting and using data.
So a lot of people, when they think of connectivity, they go immediately to the physical connectivity. Whereas when I think about connectivity, I think about the business. I think about the data. It should only be stored once, accessed by all, single source of the truth. You know, great efficiencies by collecting it once and using it many times. But when people do go down the journey of smart buildings, they almost always want to start with one of their iconic buildings, which they know is digital-ready. It's got a BACnet BMS, it's got a smart lighting system, and they want to connect that up.
What we invariably find is what the customer or the client thinks they've got and what they really have are often two different things. They have a network that's not been configured correctly. They thought they had a BACnet license on the BMS, but actually they don't. And so often what our customers think they might have, and how digital-ready they are, is not quite the truth.
And so one of the fail fast things that we've done in our company over the last six months is to enhance our IoT appliance to build it up so that it can actually assess the digital readiness of buildings. So this product's called the DX3 and you buy that as a single, one-time purchase. You plug it into your building network, and overnight it will come back with an assessment of how digital-ready your building is. So, how many systems did it find? How many data points did it find? How many open ports did it find? How many versions of firmware did it find? And it's basically an assessment of whether your building is or is not ready for smart building programs, because if it's not, you might have three, six months worth of work to do to bring that network or some of those systems up to scratch.
James: Yeah. And I'm sure you've found, as others have found, that if you go ahead and try to, like, especially if you're a sales person, try to sell one of these projects to a building owner that doesn't have a digital-ready building, you can easily find that the first thing you do on that project is you need some huge upgrade, right? Is that what you've found? And then everyone's kind of disappointed.
Deb: A hundred percent. So it not only is it disappointing, but it puts us in a position of immediate conflict because what we sold was a 12 month SaaS agreement and a 12 month managed services agreement. And that's what the contract says. But the building's not ready. So whose fault is that? Was that our fault, because we didn't know that and you should've known that, but you didn't, or, you know. And so what we've realized is we needed to: one, remove the uncertainty; and two, remove that conflict, and give people the confidence that all I'm buying in step one of this with the Dx3 is the assessment.
And if the building's not ready to move on, I haven't committed to anything more than that. And the really fantastic thing about it, the Dx3, as opposed to a manual site audit, which is how people are doing that today, you know, hire somebody to come out with the clipboard, write down everything, go back, write up a big report. That report's out of date the very next day, because who knows what was plugged or unplugged from the network. The most fantastic thing about the Dx3 is it stays on the network. It will give you an updated report whenever you want to run that. And when you are ready for the next stage, which might be data ingestion, it might be fault detection, it could be energy management, whatever, that same appliance will do that interconnectivity and start pulling the data off those systems.
James: Cool. Really cool. So it's just basically turning it on whenever they're ready, essentially.
Deb: Yeah, you just turn the services on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
James: Cool. And what, what are you finding? I remember writing a newsletter about this, I don't know, last December, January. So what are you finding in the several months that's been part of the program?
Deb: Well, firstly, it's totally resonating with the market. So when I think about how we would have sold a smart building solution or a smart building program two years ago, you know, we would have gone and, you know, met with a client. We would have met with their procurement team, with their IT team, with all of the site teams, the head of operations, various people to get the okay to move into this, you know, does it satisfy our data governance and our compliance and our privacy and our cyber and all of that. But we've actually, de-risked the project down now to the point where any building facilities manager could say, I want to see how digital-ready the systems are, that the services teams have told me that these are all BACnet enabled and all open standards. I want to make sure of that before I sign off on this invoice, so they can actually do that.
And then what we're finding is people are buying these by the dozen and assessing all of their buildings and then turning their buildings on much, much faster than they would have done using our more recent sales cycle, which was to try and sell a whole smart building program.
[00:31:47]
Big commercial buildings, if you think about a Class A, 50-story office tower in the middle of New York City, highly unlikely to implement controls from Switch Automation. They may, and almost certainly will, use aspects of our controls, for example, for system tests. And it's certainly one of the reasons that that company would buy Switch, is because in the future, they would envisage that happening. But today, 2020, that's an unlikely scenario, and it's not really why they would be going down this route today.
The fully autonomous building, for example, is something that we all imagine will happen at some time in the future. You know, the analytics will detect this, it will then pass that command off to the controls to turn something off, dial something back, put something on, for example. So that's definitely our future view. But big office buildings are just, they're just unlikely to go straight from zero to a hundred on that.
Where the controls become incredibly important is where you've got a thousand bank branches, or 60 grocery stores, or 50 Louis Vuitton stores. And every single one of those stores has different equipment in it because it was regionally deployed. And so it was the controls person that you deployed, used their hardware of choice and programmed those devices. So when you've got a thousand bank branches, every single one of those bank branches either has a different set of equipment or a different set of controls schedules, or nothing at all. And they almost certainly never have a BMS. So in that case, we are the BMS. We're the thing that allows all of the equipment in that little bitty bank branch, that's probably one of the dumbest buildings that you'll have on the planet. You know, that they don't have smart lighting. They don't have, you know, fully integrated air conditioning. And we're able to actually provide them with something that is really cost effective and really smart.
But where it becomes incredibly valuable to those owners and operators, is you don't want a thousand bank branches to be all running on their own schedule, because then if you have a new bank holiday, next Monday you're going to have to log on to a thousand bank branches and reprogram them. And so what happens in that case is, they just don't. So somebody does a manual override and then, you know, three months later you find out the manual override is still on. So that's where Switch becomes incredibly valuable for those small footprint, large-scale portfolios, because we can actually roll out, push out schedules to all of the implementations with one push of the button.
[00:40:12]
Our whole industry, this entire industry will be rewritten on the basis of who has the data. If you think about your accounting, and every year when you do your tax, I don't know if you're big enough to have to go to a tax accountant to do that, but I do. Now I don't bid that out every year. I don't come to the end of every financial year and go, Oh, who will I use to submit my taxation accounts this year? Oh, I'll put a bid in the market and I'll ask them-. No. I go back to the same accountant every single year. Why? Because they have my files, they have my data, they have my history, they know me. You know, it's exactly the same with engineers.
Engineers need to look beyond their industry, and stop looking at how every other engineer is doing business, and look at other industries and say, how do we have a level of engagement with our customer that brings them back. Every, every single time, they come back to us for our work. Whereas engineers today think products like ours, oh, we've got to be hardware agnostic and software agnostic. We've got to be independent. Do you think accountants think like that? No, accountants use tools to do their work, and what's important to them is the engagement that they have with their customer. But for some reason, there's whole pieces of our industry that just haven't learned that lesson yet, that the engagement is the piece that's important.
[00:43:00]
Warren Buffet has a very famous quote, which was, you know, when the stock market crashes, the tide goes out and everybody who is swimming with no pants on it gets found out. And that's very much what this, what 2020 has done for people that are owning and operating buildings. You couldn't shut down a building without sending somebody to site. You have no idea how many people coming in and out of the building. So it's really kind of caught people off guard and made it very, very apparent just how technology could have helped during the last six months or so. So I think if nothing else, it has accelerated people's interest and made it more.
And also, I think there are some technologies that are just going to have to become a given. So I think indoor air quality, and people counting, and density metrics, just like your airline now will tell you when the plane is going to be late, is going to be a level of visibility that will be an expectation. If we're going to get people back in the buildings, they're going to have to feel happy and comfortable and be able to assess the risk on that. You know, post 9/11, we all changed the way we get on planes for the rest of our lives. We all, you know, accepted that. In fact, if you turned up to an airport today that didn't have that level of security, you would feel odd and a bit exposed.
And I think that's how building owners and operators are going to have to think about data, is how do they get those those metrics into the hands of their tenants, but also any visitor coming into the building so that they know that those building owners and operators are collecting those metrics and that they're managing that building in a way that lowers the risk.
[00:51:40]
What I'm seeing is the really big portfolios out here understand that digital transformation means creating a whole new digital skillset, and that there's actually a bit of a race on for this digital skillset and setting yourselves up to be the leaders in that. And I think particularly Singapore as a government understands that digital skill set is really important for the growth of their economy. So they're heavily invested in that. And I think most of the portfolio owners and operators that are in this region also understand that, and there's a really great appetite for adoption of tech for their competitive advantage. So they're not going slowly out here. They're not standing back and watching to see what other people are doing. They understand that this is potentially going to set them up for some sort of competitive edge in the future. And we don't know yet. It's like Google Maps never had any idea when they launched the number of applications and how that would be used. And it's a bit like that's how I think about digital transformation of real estate and collecting data. You just don't know the revenue streams and the opportunities for business models that will come out of that. And I think the real estate owners out here understand that that is an opportunity. They don't yet understand it either, but they know that that it will be there and getting in early is going to be key. So we're not seeing any hesitation out here on that whole adoption of technology.
What did you think about these highlights? Let us know in the comments.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to Nexus, a smart buildings technology podcast for smart humans. I'm your host, James Dice. If we haven't met before, I write a weekly newsletter on the same topic. It's also called Nexus. Each week I share what I've learned, my opinions, and what I'm excited about in the quickly evolving world of intelligent buildings. Readers have called Nexus the best way to stay up to date on the future of this industry without all the marketing fluff. You can check it out and subscribe at nexus.substack.com or click the link in the show notes.
Since starting the Nexus newsletter, many of you have reached out to me wanting to talk shop, and we have. After a few weeks of those wonderful conversations, I realized I needed to record and share them with our growing community. So here we are. The Nexus podcast is born. This is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry together.
One more quick note before we get to this week's episode. I'm a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, otherwise known as NREL. All opinions expressed on this podcast belong solely to me or the guest. No resources from NREL are used to support Nexus, and NREL does not endorse or support any aspect of Nexus.
Okay, Episode 15 is a conversation with Deb Noller, CEO of Switch Automation. It was fun talking to Deb. We've had three conversations so far, and I always end up with amazing Deb quotes. She's a quote machine. Switch has an awesome team. We talked about her keys to hiring and attracting talent in the smart building space.
We unpacked what it means for a building to be digital-ready and how Switch has evolved their approach to quickly figure out whether a building is ready to get smart or whether it actually needs basic connectivity upgrades first. Deb also give her answer to why building technology is 20 years behind the tech in our personal lives, and much, much more.
This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community. You can find info on how to join and support the podcast at nexus.substack.com. You also find the show notes, which has links to Deb's LinkedIn page and more. Oh, and by the way, if you take a look at your personal podcast feed and you're missing episodes 10, 12, and 14, that's because those episodes are exclusive to members of Nexus Pro.
You can sign up for a pro membership to get your personal podcast feed with access to all of the episodes. Without further ado, please enjoy Nexus Podcast Episode 15.
Alright. Hello, Deb. Welcome to the Nexus podcast. Can you introduce yourself?
Deb Noller: [00:02:40] Sure. Deb Noller. I'm the CEO of Switch Automation. Our company builds technology for smart buildings.
James Dice: [00:02:48] Alright, so can you briefly explain the origin story of Switch. It's something that I-, obviously I'm intimately familiar with Switch, but I don't know how it started. Can you give me a little background on that?
Deb Noller: [00:03:02] Sure. Everyone always asks me this question, how Switch started, and it's always a series of accidents. So my co founder and I have been in business since 1992, we've had a series of incredibly successful businesses. And we were kind of between companies. I was working for E-Trade, building financial tools for them, and John was, asked by, our CTO at E-Trade if he could develop the integration for the Australian lighting system for a product that was being brought in from the U S so it was a U S product, but didn't work with Australian lighting. and our CTO at E-Trade actually asked me, could I do that? And I went, no, I'm not anywhere near smart enough to do that.
I couldn't even imagine how you would even. Find out where the interface is to start talking to that lighting system, let alone anyway, that's, that's kind of the introduction into, that whole machine and machine layer. and John went off and did that for a couple of years and came back and kept having coffee with me in the city and saying, Deb, Deb, this is so exciting.
We can get lighting systems to talk to security systems. And, and I was like, yeah. Okay. And then one day he just got me on the right day and we started this company.
James Dice: [00:04:15] Wow. And when was that? What year was that?
Deb Noller: [00:04:18] 2005. So we spent two to three years in high end homes, which actually is a really challenging market because every single high end home is completely customized every, homeowner, when the wealthy, they have different requirements, right?
They, they want streaming video. They want a panic room. They want security tunnels. They want Turntables in their garage so that they don't have to back their car out. It ends up with every single time. It is completely customized, even though you've built software that scales the actual market doesn't.
So we spent three years kind of figuring that out. Which actually is one of the reasons that switch is so successful because we've done it all. We've done everything and anything. And when you've done that, all of integration and all of those types of projects, you learn as much about what you should do as you learn about what you should never do.
So we actually learned just as much about, things that we should always avoid. But the biggest thing we learned was how do you actually take these types of smart building applications into a market and only think about scale. And we constantly come back to that every single day of the week is, will this scale, how will this scale for hundreds of buildings, thousands of buildings, millions of data points.
James Dice: [00:05:41] Hmm. Cool. Alright. so what is the platform today? what's your, elevator pitch for someone who's never heard of switch before?
Deb Noller: [00:05:49] Everybody knows that at some point in the future, all buildings will be smart, connected, digital. You know, we all watched the Jetsons when we were little kids and that is, you know, the, fully autonomous buildings, right.
That's kind of the dream and it's 2020, and that's still not done. So what we're doing is we're helping. Big enterprise customers. So they could be class a real estate portfolios, or it could be large portfolios of small buildings like bank branches or supermarkets, or, retail stores or sheds or industrial or cold storage or airports.
It doesn't really matter if you've got lots of buildings, you actually have the same problem. Disconnect, data, disconnect systems, disconnected assets, disconnected teams. And. You know that the future is smart, connected, digital, but going from 2020 to that world is it's, it's an enormous lift. And what we're doing is actually helping people by giving them the interoperable tool sets that will connect all of that.
James Dice: [00:06:50] Hmm, cool. Yeah, that piece of like 20, 22, where we know where we're going to go. I spend a lot of time pondering that gap. As everyone who listens to this knows,
Deb Noller: [00:07:01] I think everybody in our industry does to be honest. I mean, that is, you know, it's, what's going to be the catalyst to make the uptake of these technologies go much, much faster.
And what are the technologies that are going to enable that transition?
James Dice: [00:07:18] Totally. Yeah. And this can be a place where sometimes people. worry about pissing someone off, but why do you think we are behind, where we're at today, where it is, where we should be
Deb Noller: [00:07:30] Well, there's a, there's several pieces to that.
Firstly, we've got the incumbents, so we've got a lot of really large incumbents and that's everybody from the big hardware manufacturers, you know, Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider, et cetera. Then we've got the large service companies, CBRE, JLL, Cushman and Wakefield. Then you've got all of the service companies that sit below that. Every single one of those companies is sitting on a business model that they have to protect and a digital transformation is going to disrupt every single one of those business models. So that's one part of it is we've got big players in the market who will actually actively-, and I'm not actually saying any of those actively doing it, but there are companies that really don't want to see too much of a transformation because they've got very large, particularly service contracts that are reliant on large workforces. And, you know, digital transformation will disrupt that. So that's one part of it.
The other part of it, which is probably the single biggest problem in why it hasn't happened faster, is on the other side of the desk we've got all of these people who know that sometime in the future all of these buildings that they manage, own, operate, whatever are going to be smart, connected, digital. But today they're just dealing with this problem: well, I've got all these different manufacturers, I've got all these different service providers. And they actually haven't ever rolled out a really large technology project before.
So if you look at real estate owners and operators, everything that they buy today is based on relationship or price. And buying technology has got nothing to do with relationship or price. It's all around, how do these things fit together? What's the interoperability? What are the standards? How does this scale?
And there's a really huge, devoid skillset missing out of that part of the market. And it's gradually changing, people like yourself coming in that, you know, we're seeing a lot of, there's a generational change. There's people coming into the industry, more IT people have come into the space within the customer base just because of the cyber risk, you know, so we've seen the IT people now coming in.
So I think it's gradually changing, but nowhere near fast enough to help the problem, which is every single large company needs at least one person inside their organization that understands how to buy technology. And they've got to have the political clout to bring everyone along with them. And they've got to have the willingness to be a risk taker and to step off the ledge.
James Dice: [00:10:20] Yeah. Actually, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective, just in terms of the traditional buying patterns really of. Of just how people are used to buying things today.
Deb Noller: [00:10:31] Yeah. When people buy stuff for buildings, they're bought for one building, they buy an elevator, they buy an energy management metering system. They buy a service contract for cleaning. They haven't really had to think about buying enterprise tools. In this way before. And if anyone did buy enterprise tools, you know, we're moving to the cloud way, going to office three 65, it was usually the it department that did it, the it department doesn't understand all the nuances of bacnet and modbus and all of these various things that they're dealing with. And that's a learning curve for the it people.
James Dice: [00:11:08] Yeah, totally. so it really seems like it. Talent thing. And you and I have talked about this before, offline, but like, how do you think we can grow that talent pool of someone that can not only understand how to buy a software, but also bring all of the different pieces together for their organization?
Deb Noller: [00:11:28] I spend a lot of my time thinking about this, So when I first came to the U S in 2013, 2014, I spent my entire first year up and down the West coast of the USA, talking to everybody who serviced a building. So it was McKinstry and Glumac and yay. Everybody who had a existing contract that a service into buildings that every single one of those businesses is what I do.
Cool. A labor based model. They have a contract. They need X number of people. They hire those people, they add on a margin and that's how they make money. And I spent my entire first year in the U S saying, you can still charge for the service, the same amount as you would, but what you need to be thinking about is how do you do that service better, faster, cheaper with higher levels of engagement with your customer and higher levels of retention with your customer so that they're not going to churn and just bid that service contract out next year and give it to somebody else. And I call that the year that I tried to sell Uber to the taxi drivers. You know, taxi drivers have spent a lot of money on their medallions or their plates. They get up every morning, they know how they make their money, right. So, yeah, there's no reason to change. If nobody's on the block eating your lunch, then you're just going to get up every single day and do the same thing. So some of it is around the motivation of the talent pool to change and up until now, what we've seen is business. As usual, hasn't had any threat, therefore there's no incentives to change in the same way the universities keep churning out.
Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, data scientists for smart buildings. We actually need somebody that has all of those skill sets one more. cause there's actually skillsets amongst the traits that you need for smart buildings. You know, how do you connect a, metering system to a TCP IP, device and turn, You know, native mod bus into an IP based modus, you know, so there's a vast, and wide breadth of skills that you need for smart buildings.
And there's nobody addressing it. So up until now, it's really been people that just had a passionate interest, and self taught. And, you know, I've often talked about how, how can we add a little company fix this problem? Because ultimately it holds us back. If we had hundreds, more people in the market, that were skilled at this, then the whole market would move faster.
So it is, it's a, it's a huge issue. I'm not sure exactly what. The solution is, but I think we have to be part of it and so we actually, couple of my early hires left, you know, they did three years with us and they left. And at first I was kind of like bitter and twisted about it. Like, why don't they want to stay and help us build this amazing company.
And then, then I realized, actually this is not such a bad thing. We're actually. Being part of training the workforce and those people will go somewhere else now. And they will know much more than they would have known if they hadn't had the three years at switch and they are also strong advocates of what we do now.
So I think, yeah, but there's no single answer. We've all, we've all got to circle up and work out how we solve this problem.
James Dice: [00:14:55] Yeah. How are you seeing your clients or potential clients serving it and filling that, that gap? in their organization because I got to believe And obviously I know that these large portfolios are looking to figure out how they can do this. and I think a lot of them will realize at some point that they need the internal people to go on the journey and to guide them on the journey. So how are you seeing them?
Deb Noller: [00:15:20] the leaders understand it's a problem. They've identified at least one person and they are. Investing heavily in that person.
So they don't mind sending that person, even from Australia all the way to IB con to go to the events and they are giving that person the, permission and the authority to lead their organization. So they, I think some of it is just Shia. Feis, you pick the right person, you understand that person has the bones of what they need, and then you work out what else you've got to give them.
So we've seen a couple of companies doing that, and, doing it well. and then we're back here, those companies up. So when we first came to the U S we had no intention of creating a managed services group. And by that, I mean, people that have mechanical engineering, sustainability, data, science, integration skills, we were purely technology.
and we thought that all of our customers would adopt our technology and they would. Either do the service themselves, like look at the data and figure out what to do with it, or they would, give it to one of their existing service providers. And what we realized was the existing service providers actually didn't necessarily see that as an opportunity and would try and, continue providing the service that they did.
So then the customer would realize, well, that's not going to work. And so they would. Figure it out internally. And we realized that most of these customers just didn't have those skills on their team and that they would churn. So what we did was we created a whole team. Eventually I see that team will be supporting smart building teams all around the world, rather than doing the smart building services.
But for now it's a gap that we had to fill.
James Dice: [00:17:10] Yeah, totally. Well, that's a good segue. I wanted to just commend you on. The people that I've met in your company. I mean, you have amazing employees. so you guys have an office here in Denver. I haven't met anyone else Australia, but I'm sure they're awesome too.
like tell me about how you, created this awesome team and how did you attract them? Cause a lot of them weren't in the smart building space before. So how did you attract them?
Deb Noller: [00:17:31] Yeah. Well, there's no such thing as smart building people, you know, there's no qualification for it.
you know, there's no such thing anywhere, And so I have a very unique hiring strategy. and I probably shouldn't talk about that on a podcast. Cause then it will be completely public, but, So, firstly, I don't read resumes, because I don't really care. I don't really care whether you went to university or not.
I don't really care, what jobs you've done in your past, because I can guarantee that you haven't done what I need. Right. You will have done. You've possibly done one. Thing that I need you might've done commissioning or integration. You might've done mechanical engineering, you might've done networking or data science.
So I actually don't really care very much about what qualification you have, or your experience does matter. and so typically in an interview, which an interview with me one, yeah. Lasts very long. it's okay. It's a conversation. And I'll start with, you know, what have you done? Tell me about, you know, and usually from that I can glean what somebody's passionate about.
cause we have very much passion driven business and that's what you're seeing when you meet our team. And I don't call, I don't ever refer to them as employees, that part of the team, and with very much vision and mission. driven. So everybody in our company understands what the end game is, everybody.
Okay. And knows that we've not yet figured out how to get to there and where trawling and erroring and filing and, correcting all along the way. So the things that I care about, raw intelligence, Do you have the intelligence to actually pick up all of these other skills that you're going to need to be able to do smart buildings?
And are you hardworking? Because this is really, really hard. It's incredibly difficult. And so what you see in ad group of people is people who are passionate about what we're trying to achieve and will move heaven and earth to get there. and haven't yet figured it out, but we know that there's a way in there.
And if we just all keep trying, but the most important thing is because we're all going to work so hard and we're probably gonna do 10, 12 hours a day. Do I like this person enough on a Friday afternoon, having spent 60 hours with them still go have a beer. And if the answer to those three things is yes, you probably got a role in that company.
So, yeah. We're, Bunch of people that have come from all different, ways of life and different backgrounds, but we all share the same thing, which is buildings should be smarter. They chest should be smarter. It's 2020, and they are a woeful poor impact on our planet. And it's just gotta be solved.
It just has to be
James Dice: [00:20:37] totally, that's amazing. I love that. okay. Thank you for building that team. I think the industry is grateful that those people are, trying for 12 hours a day, trying to get there and trying to figure it out over beers.
Deb Noller: [00:20:51] Yeah. I mean, you did absolutely hit on something that is core to switch and why we are successful.
Yes, we have incredible technology. There's there's no doubt about it. Our technology is best in best in the world. A lot of that is just because of how long we've been around. And we've figured a lot of stuff out. But the reason that our company is so successful and people want to do business with us is the quality of the team.
They're just awesome. They're just terrific, fantastic likable, hardworking, passionate people. And honestly, that what you have seen is exactly what I'm the most proud of.
James Dice: [00:21:32] That's awesome. Really cool. Hopefully people can learn from that and build their own teams like yours.
but transitioning into, I want to talk about kind of what you're seeing on some of, some of your projects. So number one thing I feel like I hear from your team when I talk to, and it's mostly from, the book club, if anyone's. Wondering though, there's a lot of switchers in the nexus book clubs.
So reach out to me if you want to join. And then on these conversations, as, switcher, the right Do you guys use that term or did I just make that up?
Yeah, we, we have lots of, switched on and switch it up and switches. Yeah. Okay.
Well, the word I hear from a lot of them is connectivity.
So. I have a feeling that, that just like has a special meeting inside your company. And I want you to kind of unpack it for me. And like, it sounds like there's been a lot of, do you have a lot of stories around, like what happens when building owners skip that first step of just connecting different systems?
Deb Noller: [00:22:29] I think the biggest problem is. Well, there's two parts to the connectivity. So my background is actually enterprise IT. I don't have a background in buildings. And when I look at the way people are managing multi multibillion dollar portfolios, it looks like 1990. It reminds me of the finance group before they got the ERP system, you know, everybody's just got spreadsheets and subsystems and paper and it's outsourced. And there isn't a single enterprise-wide approach to collecting and using data.
So a lot of people, when they think of connectivity, they go immediately to the physical connectivity. Whereas when I think about connectivity, I think about the business. I think about the data. It should only be stored once, accessed by all, single source of the truth. You know, great efficiencies by collecting it once and using it many times. But when people do go down the journey of smart buildings, they almost always want to start with one of their iconic buildings, which they know is digital-ready. It's got a BACnet BMS, it's got a smart lighting system, and they want to connect that up.
What we invariably find is what the customer or the client thinks they've got and what they really have are often two different things. They have a network that's not been configured correctly. They thought they had a BACnet license on the BMS, but actually they don't. And so often what our customers think they might have, and how digital-ready they are, is not quite the truth.
And so one of the fail fast things that we've done in our company over the last six months is to enhance our IoT appliance to build it up so that it can actually assess the digital readiness of buildings. So this product's called the DX3 and you buy that as a single, one-time purchase. You plug it into your building network, and overnight it will come back with an assessment of how digital-ready your building is. So, how many systems did it find? How many data points did it find? How many open ports did it find? How many versions of firmware did it find? And it's basically an assessment of whether your building is or is not ready for smart building programs, because if it's not, you might have three, six months worth of work to do to bring that network or some of those systems up to scratch.
James Dice: [00:25:12] Yeah. And I'm sure you've found, as others have found, that if you go ahead and try to, like, especially if you're a sales person, try to sell one of these projects to a building owner that doesn't have a digital-ready building, you can easily find that the first thing you do on that project is you need some huge upgrade, right? Is that what you've found? And then everyone's kind of disappointed.
Deb Noller: [00:25:36] A hundred percent. So it not only is it disappointing, but it puts us in a position of immediate conflict because what we sold was a 12 month SaaS agreement and a 12 month managed services agreement. And that's what the contract says. But the building's not ready. So whose fault is that? Was that our fault, because we didn't know that and you should've known that, but you didn't, or, you know. And so what we've realized is we needed to: one, remove the uncertainty; and two, remove that conflict, and give people the confidence that all I'm buying in step one of this with the Dx3 is the assessment.
And if the building's not ready to move on, I haven't committed to anything more than that. And the really fantastic thing about it, the Dx3, as opposed to a manual site audit, which is how people are doing that today, you know, hire somebody to come out with the clipboard, write down everything, go back, write up a big report. That report's out of date the very next day, because who knows what was plugged or unplugged from the network. The most fantastic thing about the Dx3 is it stays on the network. It will give you an updated report whenever you want to run that. And when you are ready for the next stage, which might be data ingestion, it might be fault detection, it could be energy management, whatever, that same appliance will do that interconnectivity and start pulling the data off those systems.
James Dice: [00:27:03] Cool. Really cool. So it's just basically turning it on whenever they're ready, essentially.
Deb Noller: [00:27:09] Yeah, you just turn the services on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:27:12] Cool. And what, what are you finding? I remember writing a newsletter about this, I don't know, last December, January. So what are you finding in the several months that's been part of the program?
Deb Noller: [00:27:22] Well, firstly, it's totally resonating with the market. So when I think about how we would have sold a smart building solution or a smart building program two years ago, you know, we would have gone and, you know, met with a client. We would have met with their procurement team, with their IT team, with all of the site teams, the head of operations, various people to get the okay to move into this, you know, does it satisfy our data governance and our compliance and our privacy and our cyber and all of that. But we've actually, de-risked the project down now to the point where any building facilities manager could say, I want to see how digital-ready the systems are, that the services teams have told me that these are all BACnet enabled and all open standards. I want to make sure of that before I sign off on this invoice, so they can actually do that.
And then what we're finding is people are buying these by the dozen and assessing all of their buildings and then turning their buildings on much, much faster than they would have done using our more recent sales cycle, which was to try and sell a whole smart building program.
James Dice: [00:28:35] Totally. And just for people that are beginners - I've been trying to bring them along in these conversations too, is if you're a beginner out there, how people typically would sell a piece of hardware like this is it's wrapped up in the solution, either an upfront cost or it's part of this, the subscription fee.
Deb Noller: [00:28:53] That's exactly how we would have sold it. Yeah. A year ago we would have said, you know, mr. ABC, here's your portfolio. How would you like to, run your smart building program? Almost certainly. They would have said, well, let's do two buildings first. And so it would have been by the appliance and, configuration fee.
You know, X, X amount of dollars and then assess that starts one month later, plus a managed services fi so it's, you know, per month for the next 12 months. And, you know, typically we try and sell it to them for at least 12 months. And over that 12 months, we try and prove the value in those two buildings so that they expand that for another.
Whereas what we're seeing now is people saying, okay, I want 40 of these. I'm going to assess all my buildings. I've got 10 that are digital. Ready? Let's go. Yeah.
James Dice: [00:29:42] And with the DX three, are you, like, does it come packaged with different drivers or are you looking for more open protocols like backnet and, using the open protocols to then say, how ready are you to start the data flowing?
Deb Noller: [00:29:56] We've been in the smart buildings, integration countries. Wait, because we started as a controls platform. If you think back to the very first question you asked me and where we started in all of this, we were a controls company. So we actually turn lights on and off week and control amplifies and televisions.
And. Cameras and you name it, pan tilt, zoom. and so we actually have a very cool pensive stack of drivers already on that, appliance. and we're constantly updating that because as you see all of these IOT sensors coming into the market, most of those won't the backnet backnet is a very traditional.
BMS style of a driver. And I would think as more and more IOT devices come into the market, it's highly unlikely that they'll all be backnet. I think there'll be new protocols built. We're starting to see a lot more LoRa and Sigfox. Okay.
James Dice: [00:31:00] Cool. So you mentioned control. So this is a topic I've been writing about for the last several weeks. I think people are maybe sick of me writing about it, but by the time this podcast comes out, maybe I'll have stopped writing about it. But, I've been running several essays around this, this trend that we're seeing. And you guys have been doing it for a long time, but actually doing controls from an overlay platform, like switch.
So. what have you seen as far as the owner's acceptance of, these types of commands that are coming from something other than the BMS? And I guess the, second question to that would be how are the vendors, liking it as well? So there's a lot of ownership issues and someone owns the control sequence and he then starts sending commands, from over top of it.
How have you guys seen that play out?
Deb Noller: [00:31:47] Big commercial buildings, if you think about a Class A, 50-story office tower in the middle of New York City, highly unlikely to implement controls from Switch Automation. They may, and almost certainly will, use aspects of our controls, for example, for system tests. And it's certainly one of the reasons that that company would buy Switch, is because in the future, they would envisage that happening. But today, 2020, that's an unlikely scenario, and it's not really why they would be going down this route today.
The fully autonomous building, for example, is something that we all imagine will happen at some time in the future. You know, the analytics will detect this, it will then pass that command off to the controls to turn something off, dial something back, put something on, for example. So that's definitely our future view. But big office buildings are just, they're just unlikely to go straight from zero to a hundred on that.
Where the controls become incredibly important is where you've got a thousand bank branches, or 60 grocery stores, or 50 Louis Vuitton stores. And every single one of those stores has different equipment in it because it was regionally deployed. And so it was the controls person that you deployed, used their hardware of choice and programmed those devices. So when you've got a thousand bank branches, every single one of those bank branches either has a different set of equipment or a different set of controls schedules, or nothing at all. And they almost certainly never have a BMS. So in that case, we are the BMS. We're the thing that allows all of the equipment in that little bitty bank branch, that's probably one of the dumbest buildings that you'll have on the planet. You know, that they don't have smart lighting. They don't have, you know, fully integrated air conditioning. And we're able to actually provide them with something that is really cost effective and really smart.
But where it becomes incredibly valuable to those owners and operators, is you don't want a thousand bank branches to be all running on their own schedule, because then if you have a new bank holiday, next Monday you're going to have to log on to a thousand bank branches and reprogram them.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so what happens in that case is, they just don't. So somebody does a manual override and then, you know, three months later you find out the manual override is still on. So that's where Switch becomes incredibly valuable for those small footprint, large-scale portfolios, because we can actually roll out, push out schedules to all of the implementations with one push of the button.
James Dice: [00:34:45] Cool. Yeah, that's awesome. And then you know, my history is all in big, big, huge buildings like you just started out that answer with. And so I've been learning more recently about retail and refrigerated retail especially, so well, you know, big, big grocery store chains and that, that whole side of the industry it's been fascinating lately. it's almost like two different worlds and you just described him perfectly there.
So a lot of what I've been writing about is on the bigger buildings, This supervisory control layer. There's just so many things they need to do before they can even get there to make that work. Is that kinda why, like you said, zero to 100, is that why they're just not ready for it? Is that the best way to think about it?
Deb Noller: [00:35:27] Well, I think the way that, there's been a couple of black box technologies in our market, it's like, you know, we're going to plug this thing in and it's going to assess your BMS and it's going to automatically improve your building performance. Now imagine that you're the facility manager for that building.
That is terrifying because you're going to wake up tomorrow. Have no idea what was done overnight and get a hundred phone calls. And because you didn't know what was done, you don't even know how to resolve it. So yes, that is the future. That at some point in the future, that is likely to be exactly what happens.
But we have to take an entire industry on a journey here from where we are today to that world. And the first step is, That people getting really comforted with what are these technologies going to find? So, yeah, the supervisory control is something we can do today, but it's just highly unlikely that anybody's going to allow that to happen until they get a huge level of comfort around what the first step did.
What the second step did, what the third step did, which is why I think the system testing is the first part of where the controls in the really big buildings will occur is. You know, systems need to be tested, and regularly. And typically that's done by sending somebody out to site and, you know, running all the tests.
Whereas we could automate that. We could do it out of hours on a Sunday afternoon with, you know, hard data backing up those tests and a report on your desk on Monday morning to say whether all of the systems pass that test or not.
James Dice: [00:37:05] Yeah. Yeah. And if you're a commissioning agent right now, it means that you can start to test. You know, more than just 10% of the VAV boxes and things like that. So I'm definitely. Big proponent of that.
Deb Noller: [00:37:16] I think the other aspect is that, you know, if you just look at the way buildings are built, you know, the owner goes to the architect and they design something truly incredible. And then it gets handed over to all the consulting engineers who break that down into all the pieces and they specify that and exactly how it should work.
And it's all stunning on paper. And then it's handed over to the general contractors who then have to tender or quote on that. Job. Typically it doesn't go to the lowest price, but it will go to somebody who's, you know, one step or two step from the lowest price. Everybody has cut their pricing to get into the project. How are they going to deliver that? They're going to cut every corner they can and make up their money on it variation. So what gets delivered in a building? Is typically not what was specified by the consulting engineers. The consulting engineers made all of their money while they were writing documents and developing the paperwork for that.
When they hand over to the, general contractor to build it, they've made all of their profit on that particular project. Then the building gets handed over to the owner, and now we have it fact liability period during that defect liability period, the onus is on everybody to find all of the problems in that buildings to make sure that the things that were not delivered or not delivered correctly, get fixed while the defect liability periods on otherwise, the owner is going to pay for those things to be rectified afterwards.
Uh, rice, during that period, the consulting engineers lose money, hand over fist. They are turning up to site meetings and trying to justify or validate. associate blame to somebody about why something's not working the way it was specified. Yeah.
And the finger pointing.
Yeah, exactly. So not only are they losing profit from this day on, in an exasperations, you know, and just.
Mating automating, automating site visits and, you know, quite antagonistic to not only are they losing money on the job that they've already finished and banked, but that also losing opportunity costs. And that's where it's an absolute nightmare. Bryana from me. And I just don't understand why the industry hasn't really woken up to this yet.
That. Those consulting engineers should be putting DX cute into every single project, because it's basically going to help them protect their profit collect data that validates where the systems were implemented and commissioned correctly, but also give them an ongoing engagement with the customer.
James Dice: [00:40:02] Yeah. Especially warranty period. Like you said, there's an entire year. Sometimes a little less than a year, but almost a year of, of just being able to,
Deb Noller: [00:40:11] yeah. I mean our whole industry, this entire industry will be rewritten on the basis of who has the data. If you think about your accounting, and every year when you do your tax, I don't know if you're big enough to have to go to a tax accountant to do that, but I do. Now I don't bid that out every year. I don't come to the end of every financial year and go, Oh, who will I use to submit my taxation accounts this year? Oh, I'll put a bid in the market and I'll ask them-. No. I go back to the same accountant every single year. Why? Because they have my files, they have my data, they have my history, they know me. You know, it's exactly the same with engineers.
Engineers need to look beyond their industry, and stop looking at how every other engineer is doing business, and look at other industries and say, how do we have a level of engagement with our customer that brings them back. Every, every single time, they come back to us for our work. Whereas engineers today think products like ours, oh, we've got to be hardware agnostic and software agnostic. We've got to be independent. Do you think accountants think like that? No, accountants use tools to do their work, and what's important to them is the engagement that they have with their customer. But for some reason, there's whole pieces of our industry that just haven't learned that lesson yet, that the engagement is the piece that's important.
James Dice: [00:41:45] Yeah, totally. Yeah. And especially from the building owners perspective, I mean, ideally all of these service providers, engineers, yeah. Cannibal control service, the people that are designed in the renovation and the wing down there, like, ideally that they'd all be using this hub where the data is, and someone's got to own it.
Like, the owner could own it. You know, the consulting engineer could own it. The commissioning agent could own it. And yeah, it's, it's a huge opportunity for whoever wants to take that on. And I think, like you said, at the beginning, it's a business model thing. it's a business model obstacle.
Deb Noller: [00:42:22] Yeah. And, you know, people that already have so much invested in an existing business model, it is so difficult to change that takes an enormous, you know, deep breath and a jumper.
James Dice: [00:42:35] Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's transition again. So it's, what's today, August 6th. and so we're still, I've been saying this for many months of podcasts now. We're still in the middle of the pandemic, especially in the U S maybe another countries they're out of it, but we're still in the middle of it in the U S so. I wanted to see like what you're seeing with your clients and sort of what general outlook you have for the industry at this point.
Deb Noller: [00:42:59] Yeah. So Warren buffet has a very famous quote, which was, you know, when the stock market crashes, the tide goes out and everybody who is swimming with no pants on it gets found out. And that's very much what this, what 2020 has done for people that are owning and operating buildings. You couldn't shut down a building without sending somebody to site. You have no idea how many people coming in and out of the building. So it's really kind of caught people off guard and made it very, very apparent just how technology could have helped during the last six months or so. So I think if nothing else, it has accelerated people's interest and made it more.
And also, I think there are some technologies that are just going to have to become a given. So I think indoor air quality, and people counting, and density metrics, just like your airline now will tell you when the plane is going to be late, is going to be a level of visibility that will be an expectation. If we're going to get people back in the buildings, they're going to have to feel happy and comfortable and be able to assess the risk on that. You know, post 9/11, we all changed the way we get on planes for the rest of our lives. We all, you know, accepted that. In fact, if you turned up to an airport today that didn't have that level of security, you would feel odd and a bit exposed.
And I think that's how building owners and operators are going to have to think about data, is how do they get those those metrics into the hands of their tenants, but also any visitor coming into the building so that they know that those building owners and operators are collecting those metrics and that they're managing that building in a way that lowers the risk.
James Dice: [00:44:59] Yeah. And it's really an acceleration, what you're describing, it seems like towards more digitalization in the buildings. So are you seeing that happen in strategic ways or one-off ways, because I've seen different approaches, right? So I've seen, you know, let's go through an occupancy sensor over here, or an IOT occupancy solution over here, and let's do this over there. We need CO2 sensors and let's increase ventilation over here. But I don't know that I've seen More motivation to bring everything together and connect everything together in a strategic, longterm way. And I would think that companies like switch would be seeing more interest. I, just, I haven't seen that. And I'm wondering what you've seen, as far as the value proposition of pulling everything together, and, and bringing the analytics in as well.
Deb Noller: [00:45:48] Yeah, we're definitely, we're definitely seeing interest. everybody's interested in having these conversations now and they're interested in how do they solve for those short urgent things that they've got to do today, but also with a view to how they bring that together for the longterm view.
So nobody's Doing the entire project today, but that definitely, looking at these technologies in a very strategic way, I can buy this indoor air quality sensor today. How does that fit in with my longterm plan to have all of my data collected? I think that's the one thing that I have seen over the last 12 months is there's so many more people who now understand I've got this energy management platform. I've got my utility billing platform. I've got this fault detection in this building and another one in another building. And I don't want to see another platform. I don't want to see another, you know, people counting or a workplace management platform or where I've got a log in.
and so, yeah, I think. We are seeing a bit more sophistication on the buyer's side, for sure. Does that mean? And so they recognize us now when we walk in, they recognize we're not selling you in an indirect quality sensor. We're not selling you a access control system. We're not selling. You are a BMS.
We're giving you the tools to be able to bring together all the things you've done in the past. Plus all the things you want to do in the future.
James Dice: [00:47:15] That makes me feel really good. That makes me feel like people are starting to get it. And thank you for, I needed a boost today. So I appreciate that. cool.
So I wanted to spend some time at the end with, I know you guys raised them. A round of financing during a COBIT. So congrats on that. And I wanted to ask you, like, what's your outlook for the company? And like what you're excited about, moving forward, besides all of the acceleration we just talked about.
Deb Noller: [00:47:42] Yeah. So fundraising is hard. and I actually had lunch with somebody yesterday and they said, you know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you wear a lot of hats. You have to a product you have to develop. A marketing plan. You have to do the sales. I mean, mostly you're doing the sales, but nothing is as hard as fundraising.
And it's honestly just one of the most difficult, tasks that you'll ever take on as an entrepreneur. And it's very soul destroying because you've built this company that you believe is truly amazing. It's going to solve the thing and you get told a thousand times that your baby is ugly basically.
And, people give you the most lame yeah. Excuses for why they're not interested. And I think the first thing you've got to do is change your mindset and realize. They are going to say no to 99.9% of everything. So almost certainly every conversation you're going to have that going to say no. So it's a game of numbers.
You've got to talk to a lot of people and you've got to go in there knowing that they're likely to say no. So get to know facts. What size checks do you write? What sort of the companies you interested in? What was the last thing you invested in? you know, and you can actually. Control the conversation and it's less soul destroying when you're in control of the conversation.
So I think that's the first thing, but even though I've found, fundraising really difficult and there's a lot of, materials around about female founders and how, how much more difficult it is for us. I don't tend to dwell on that very much. Cause I know a lot of male founders and it looks to me just as hard for them as it is for, for us.
And I think there's probably other people that are even more challenged to raise money. I'm not a person of color. I'm not disabled. You know, there's, there's a lot of things that could have, you know, stacked up against me. At least there's a focus on female founders. So at least we have that going for us.
But yeah. At the end of the day, even though fundraising really, really difficult, I'm a totally grateful that we've got amazing investors. So even though I had to grind through a lot, I ended up with really fantastic investors and that's actually a bit like, you know, developing a really great team. It's really awesome to have great investors because hopefully one day we, we make them a lot of money and there's nothing better than meeting investors that you're really happy to make a lot of money for, so, yeah, that's the fundraising story. So most recently we, took funding from GAW Capital at a Hong Kong who are a real estate company. and. The really fabulous thing about that is not only are they incredibly well connected, particularly in Asia, but they actually have a lot of buildings.
So they're actually going to give us revenue as well as the investment funds they already already put in. So that's a really fabulous, you know, win-win situation. Then what I'm really excited about was when covert hit, I was, I'd actually gone out to Australia for my son's wedding. and I'd already booked and stuff, paying rent on an apartment in New York.
So I was about to fly back to New York and start our expansion into the New York market. And because we'd taken funding from. Go and because of the, unfolding covert situation, I just decided, well, we should go to Singapore instead. So we canceled apartments in Denver and New York and flew to Singapore.
And I'm really excited about what I'm seeing in Southeast Asia. So I think, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore. Japan are going to be really high growth markets for switch. So I'm really excited about what we can do out here over the next two or three years.
James Dice: [00:51:36] Cool. What are you saying that's different than the U S?
Deb Noller: [00:51:40] What I'm seeing is the really big portfolios out here understand that digital transformation means creating a whole new digital skillset, and that there's actually a bit of a race on for this digital skillset and setting yourselves up to be the leaders in that. And I think particularly Singapore as a government understands that digital skill set is really important for the growth of their economy. So they're heavily invested in that. And I think most of the portfolio owners and operators that are in this region also understand that, and there's a really great appetite for adoption of tech for their competitive advantage.
So they're not going slowly out here. They're not standing back and watching to see what other people are doing. They understand that this is potentially going to set them up for some sort of competitive edge in the future. And we don't know yet. It's like Google Maps never had any idea when they launched the number of applications and how that would be used. And it's a bit like that's how I think about digital transformation of real estate and collecting data. You just don't know the revenue streams and the opportunities for business models that will come out of that. And I think the real estate owners out here understand that that is an opportunity. They don't yet understand it either, but they know that that it will be there and getting in early is going to be key. So we're not seeing any hesitation out here on that whole adoption of technology.
James Dice: [00:53:23] Yeah, they just kind of see it already. That's awesome. Well, cool. I want to say thanks for, coming on the podcast, Deb, and thanks for joining me across so many different time zones. it's awesome that we're able to do this, from so far away.
So yeah, thank you.
Deb Noller: [00:53:38] Thank you.
James Dice: [00:53:39] Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus newsletter, please subscribe at nexus.substack.com. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. As always, please reach out on LinkedIn with any thoughts on this episode.
I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.
Head over to Nexus Connect and see what’s new in the community. Don’t forget to check out the latest member-only events.
Go to Nexus ConnectJoin Nexus Pro and get full access including invite-only member gatherings, access to the community chatroom Nexus Connect, networking opportunities, and deep dive essays.
Sign Up
Nexus Labs exists to move the smart buildings industry forward, without the fluff.
On Wednesday, we send out the renowned (and free) Nexus Newsletter.