“Most integrators seem to be bound by the traditional tools and programming interfaces provided by the vendors. These guys say, ‘Why not try connecting to Google Docs or write our own web interface to an existing A/V product?'” says Brad Dempsey, CEO of Solutions360. “I think the biggest difference is that they approach integration much like an IT company would develop a software solution.”
As a relatively small integration firm with many young, empowered employees who are new to the integration market, “we really want to push the envelope,” Bajic says, adding that Casaplex doesn’t want “to be at the mercy of our vendors” and limited by “those things that are coming out at every trade show.”
While the premise of always telling a customer “we can do anything you want,” as Goldstein says, can potentially be problematic, it also forces Casaplex to push that envelope, according to Bajic. “Through that exercise we push our vendors to develop products that allow newer things to get done and new features to get accomplished.”
Rethinking Team Development
One reason most integration firms don’t push vendors quite as far or program out-of-the-box solutions quite as much as Casaplex does is that they don’t have the proper personnel in place to do so. In an industry in which talent recruitment often means hiring employees as they bounce from integration firm to firm, Casaplex has only a few who previously worked in the industry.
Hiring at Casaplex is uncommonly organic. For instance, Casaplex tries not to find itself in a position where it has to hire a certain number of technicians.
“We try not to get into the habit of filling a particular void in terms of operations or just to fill some sort of gap,” Bajic says. “We find brilliant people that we want to work with and we kind of make it work. What we don’t do is look for somebody with a certain skill set. We look at the skill sets they have and think about how we can apply that internally.”
“We find brilliant people that we want to work with and we kind of make it work. What we don’t do is look for somebody with a certain skill set.”—Luka Bajic, business development, Casaplex
That’s something Dempsey has noticed in Solution360’s experience working with Casaplex. It’s unique, he says, for a firm to “employ development staff to leverage new technology and look for ways to integrate it into the AV world.”
IT director Rike’s background, for example, is in IT, building servers, setting up infrastructures, server networks, Microsoft Exchange, networking and wireless networks, he says. Casaplex encountered him as a contractor doing some website design.
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Through conversations Goldstein realized that Rike’s expertise could be invaluable, and the contractor was enlisted to help a client that happened to need some IT work. It turned into an IT services contract in which Casaplex also included some AV, with Rike’s programming ability improving the customer’s solution.
“A lot of hiring decisions are risk-taking ventures where we say we’re going to invest a little bit of time and effort in this person because we think they’re brilliant and we’re going to see what comes down the road,” Goldstein says. “Sometimes you run into these really coincidental and serendipitous opportunities and we have somebody that we just pulled on board that’s perfect for that opportunity.”
Rethinking Business Processes
If Casaplex wants to be a different kind of integration firm in terms of how it develops technology solutions for its customers, it needs to reflect that on the business end, too. Meanwhile, it’s not ready to walk away from that 20 percent year-over-year revenue growth it has been experiencing in recent years. Before Casaplex’s aggressive growth began in 2012, the team had the foresight to realize that aspects of its infrastructure weren’t going to cut it for a larger company.
“We really try to prepare ourselves for growth in advance and try to be forward-looking while keeping in mind that we need to be as agile as we can be in in our offerings and the way we speak, but very disciplined and methodical in the way we execute our processes,” Bajic says.
One big problem — and one that many smaller companies face — was Casaplex’s disparate software solutions. Its financial, project management, time-tracking, scheduling software and more were all different solutions “that we figured out in our own FranPROFILE: Casaplex kenstein way,” Bajic quips. “I think a lot of small businesses face that issue and can’t grow out of it.”
That’s essentially when Casaplex crossed paths with Solutions360. Perhaps tailor-made to work with an open architecture software company due to its enthusiasm for programming, the process seems to have had not just a functional but a therapeutic impact on Casaplex.
