“Because of our mindset in terms of being as innovative as we can be and not settling for tried-and-true ways, as an exercise we started developing on top of [Solutions360] little things here and there like Google integrations that were a bit down the road for their own development then. In those conversations we were able to inspire each other.”
That Casaplex is a relatively small integration firm helped during software development, Bajic theorizes. Most members of Casaplex were able to get a lot of hands-on interaction with Solutions360 during the process, maximizing the functionality.
“We were very close with their development team,” he says. “We established peer-to-peer relationships between our staff and their staff. Not only do I think it’s a brilliant product, but we think that it’s because of companies like Solutions360 and their smaller users, such as us, that we have taken each other to the next level.”
Being a relatively small integration firm does have its downsides, Goldstein acknowledges. “We quite frankly don’t have enough money for the moon shot ideas,” he says. “With more structure you can accomplish bigger jobs. You can pull in more revenue. You can therefore, in my mind, invest in what I’m passionate about, which is the advancement of technology, R&D and innovation.”
It’s also more challenging for smaller firms to get the attention of manufacturers. “The ones we’re partners with and that have a long history with us, they know what we’re all about and they take us seriously,” Goldstein says.
Most of the small-versus-big challenges are money-related, Goldstein says. “A larger organization doing several contracts consistently, they’re going to have access to a lot more capital for growth than a small organization. That’s a big one and one we constantly struggle with.”
Staying Smart
As a relatively small firm one thing Casaplex does that almost no large integration firms do is serve residential customers. When Garcia and Goldstein started the firm they were entirely focused on the residential market (hence the name, Casaplex, which includes the Spanish word for home, casa) and diversified in part as residential customers asked for work on their businesses.
Sometime after the residential building market crashed in 2008 Casaplex’s business tilted toward the commercial side and now only about 20 percent of its revenue stems from residential. Balancing commercial and residential isn’t easy but the plan is to continue to do so.
“It’s definitely a challenge because they’re completely different industries,” Goldstein says. “We’ve tried to merge the processes but they differ a lot. We’ve gotten close. When you’re in a market and you commit to customers and they invest in you — purchasing products and services for the long run — to abandon that market, to me, just doesn’t feel right.”
There is an obvious other reason why Goldstein wouldn’t be inclined to shift his company away from residential — it was the concept of smart homes and then smart buildings that fueled his passion for integration in the first place. In the early 2000s, the young programmer and recent college graduate had already done some impressive things professionally.
“I was looking for something more interesting,” Goldstein says. “I really envisioned a world where we wouldn’t be interfacing with keyboards, mice and staring at a screen all day. I knew we had to evolve past that. I started thinking about innovative ways to take my programming skills and technical skills into the building environment.”
“I started to learn about the different physical aspects — audio and video systems, security systems, lighting — anything that could possibly be considered electronic or connected with a wire inside a home or a building. I kind of became obsessed with understanding how to control it.”
“I wasn’t sure if it would be five or 20 years, but the vision back then was that all of these different systems would be connected, that they’d be able to speak to each other. Not only within the building, but even from building to building all over the world. They’d be able to learn from each other.”
That impact, while maybe more powerful in a commercial environment, is far more personal in a residential environment. It was around that time that Goldstein met Garcia. “He was a total AV guru,” Goldstein recalls. It wasn’t long before they launched a business around Goldstein’s passion for smart buildings and Garcia’s passion for AV.
Twelve years later, Casaplex continues to be driven by those passions. The four consecutive years of approximately 20 percent growth suggest that the firm’s innovative approach to designing solutions might be exactly what the next generation of commercial and residential customers want.
“I think I can speak a lot of the younger generation’s language when it comes to tech and they’ll talk about having an open API and wanting to be able to make programming changes themselves,” Goldstein says. “They want to know it’s not something they’re locked into.”
It’s very possible that the more traditional integration firms with longer track records can learn from Casaplex’s perspective — even if Goldstein doesn’t see his company as fitting the same mold as the firms that typically grace the cover of
Commercial Integrator.
