The prior post in this series covered how Envysion’s culture needs to change. This MVaaS innovator has done a masterful job in productizing a unique and highly-appreciated solution for using video to better manage businesses with dozens or hundreds of locations. The culture that enabled this accomplishment is fast-becoming obsolete, as Envysion’s challenge has shifted to marketing, public relations, and sales effectiveness.

What to do? Hire a Chief Marketing Officer? Better sales executive? Different type of CEO? Lot’s more sales “feet-on-the-street”. No, no, no, and no.

The change needs to come from the existing team, and every functional area of the organization needs to push themselves to be part of this transformation. Two reasons: One, the core team is essential as they know their customers, they understand the needs, and the team has developed the well-conceived Envysion solution. Lose the team and you lose Envysion. Second, the best type of cultural change comes from within a team, not from new hires. Sure, new hires can help ignite the change—but they cannot be viewed as the solution. Instead, every element of Envysion needs to reflect on the challenge and sort through what their role needs to be.

The questions each team member needs to reflect on are:

• Are you passionate about Envysion? If not, please move on.
• Do you understand why Envysion’s MVaaS approach is unique? If not, ask Darren for a tutorial.
• Do you appreciate why the solution helps our customers improve their profitability? If not, talk to Matt, Rob, or Bruce.
• Do you buy-into the notion that the entire team needs to push itself to change Envysion’s culture? If not, speak up. As questions. Don’t sleep well at night until you reconcile why this is so important.

Let’s say you get through these questions and you are ready to go. What do you do differently? I will offer some thoughts in future posts but don’t wait for me to tell you—ask the person who sits next to you; or your boss; or Michael; or Rob; or Darren; or Bruce; or Matt. Keep asking until it stimulates some good ideas. Be part of the culture change; be a leader.

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Last week I began a series called “Scott Beck beckons Envysion“. Scott and I are two of the three members of the board. We spent three hours with the executive team in a very productive strategy meeting. I ended the prior post on this topic with the assertion that Envysion’s culture needs to change dramatically. The historical culture played a huge role in getting the company to where it is today—the leader in the emerging Managed Video as a Service(“MVaaS”) space. Great technology; great product; and well conceived strategy. The early adopter customers have been thrilled with the service.

Envysion’s challenge is shifting as we speak. An ecosystem needs to form around MVaaS—and Envysion needs to collaborate with other industry thought leaders to ignite this. Envysion has had great success with a small number of customers—it needs to develop the sales capability to ramp up the relationships by a factor of 5+. Most of its success to date has been in the restaurant vertical—Envysion needs to springboard this traction into several other verticals. Envysion has had partnership discussions with a few thought-leaders in the areas of telecom/managed services and physical security. It needs to sort through how to propel these healthy interactions into revenue.

Marketing, public relations, evangelizing, and most importantly sales/customers need to be central to Envysion’s culture. Envysion must find ways to communicate its insights, experience, and know-how to others. More and more individuals and companies are beginning to understand the role of MVaaS; Envysion needs to help these people and companies get up the learning curve real quick. Envysion needs to make itself easy to find (amongst the clutter than surrounds the broadly defined physical security, SaaS, and video spaces) and it needs to get good at finding other MVaaS thought-leaders. Blogging, speaking at conferences, and applying rigorous sales methodology are essential activities. User groups for customers will ensure the product evolves in a customer-driven way. Industry groups will provide Envysion the opportunity to collaborate with other thought-leaders, and thereby accelerate the development of the MVaaS space.  The simple acts of discovering like-minded companies and reaching out to them with a phone call will help build MVaaS momentum. 

“Ah, I get it,” you say, “Envysion needs a Chief Marketing Officer.”

“Nope!”, is my well-thought out response. I’ll explain in next post.

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(Part II of the Scott Beck Sessions.)

Envysion’s culture has been ideal for what it has accomplished to date.  Yet Envysion’s culture could be a major handicap to it reaching its full potential.

Over the past two years, Envysion developed a fantastic solution for marrying video surveillance with the Internet.  I can say this with conviction because we hear this over and over again from every customer that has taken a hard look at Envysion’s service.    Do you have dozens of business locations? Do you want to visit 10 of them in 30 minutes–and be able to focus on the particular time of day you most care about?  Do you want to tie the video to business data, so you can focus on transactions you care most about?  If so, you will cherish Envysion’s service. 

The culture of Envysion enabled it to build a fine solution to a hard problem.  Strong technical expertise in the areas of IP networking, telecom, and software architecture are at the core of its culture.  The company is analytical, curious, deliberate, thorough, and strategic.  It is financially responsible.  Many of the individuals are more on the quiet and introverted side.  It’s telecom and Internet bent meant it approached the challenge from a very different angle than those with many years of physical security experience.   Though too early to declare victory for the company, I believe the roots of what will be an extremely successful endevour will always be the culture described in this paragraph.  This culture allowed Envysion to get to the enviable position it is in today.

Nonetheless, if Envysion’s culture doesn’t change dramatically, it will likely fall short of exploiting the phenominal opportunity it has created for itself.  And what a shame that would be.

More on this in coming posts.

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I spent yesterday afternoon in a 3 hour working session at Envysion.   Over my career, I have found that more times than not, strategy sessions prove to be frustrating and disappointing.  But sometimes these working sessions turn out to be extremely valuable.  Thankfully, this one was the latter.

Scott Beck, our newest board member and an extremely successful entreprenuer, prompted the pow wow.  Envysion is largely aimed at the retail industry–and this is an industry which Scott has extensive expertise.  Scott was CEO of Blockbuster Video, Boston Market, and founder of Einstein’s Bagel.  Therefore, he was able to help Envysion better position its messaging to this sector. 

Scott also offered insights into the broader topic of what makes early stage companies successful.  How do you get them to be customer focused, metrics driven, and full of energy.  Though we spent only 20 minutes on this broader target (most of the session was messaging to retail), it was every bit as valuable.

Scott brought a subject matter expert with him named Keith Robinson.  Keith has a bunch of marketing expertise in the retail space and his contributions bolstered the quality of the discussion.  Thanks Keith.

I will share some of what I took away in a series of blog posts titled “Scott Beck Sessions”.  We appreciate the time you are spending with Envysion Scott.

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