 to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for the year's last episode of Security Matters. We're taking a break and the studio's taking a break so looking forward to I guess settling down for the holidays. I hope you are too. Kevin Henderson is with me today from Lone Star Communications. You probably if you know of them in the industry you think they're out of Texas but they're covering a lot more ground in Texas these days. He's the SDP. I'm going to let him introduce himself and just give you a little bit of his background. Kevin, thanks for joining me today. I know you're a busy guy. We're all trying to wrap up our year. I look forward to kind of walking through 2020 with you. I don't think anyone saw this year coming, but go ahead and give our audience a little introduction, some of your history as much as you care to share. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. I did, you know, I grew up in Michigan. I did eight years active duty at the Marine Corps. Did a little bit of this, a little bit of that. You know, we kind of touched on that and then kind of went to work for the State Department doing bread assessments essentially, a safety posture at embassies around the world. If you could believe it, I got tired of traveling. And so decided, you know, time to come back to the States and settle in a little bit. And so that's when I got into this portion of security. And so did a couple of different things. And Houston ended up here in Arkansas about 10 years ago. And we got purchased by Lone Star a couple of years ago, and we've been off and running ever since. So, and so a systems integrations firm, what's the focus of your work? Is it primary? I know they're big in healthcare. I don't know if you guys continue that or if you have other verticals that you folks focus on. We do. We're really big into healthcare, education, commercial, a lot of industrial. You know, here in Arkansas, a lot of chicken plants and food processing plants and, you know, Tyson is a big thing here. And so we kind of get to span, you know, everything from nurse calls to healthcare to video and access control and plants, fire alarm systems, a lot of integrated systems, you know, and really helping. It's not just security anymore, right? It's how can I interact with my environment without touching things or watch processing processes, people, you know, it's not just security. So it's really just helping them solve problems. That's awesome. Yeah, I think the the data piece of our world is finally coming to fruition, but seems like organizations are learning to ask those questions now. Hey, what information can I gather from my security, you know, equipment that could help my operations? That's been a bit of a change. Have you guys seen a rise in that level of work inside your organization? That's, you know, I'm glad you asked that. That is exactly where I see this going and we see it everywhere. You know, Amazon Web Services is, you know, their third party to a lot of people, including, you know, companies you and I have worked with in this industry. And it's all about the data. How do I get the data? How do I sort the data? How do I monetize the data? And that we're really seeing that in the healthcare market right now. So we have, you know, actual doctors on staff that are collecting this data with the nurse call system, analyzing it and going back to the facilities and saying, hey, here's here are these things that we can help you with to make you better and make your scores go go up as you know, the healthcare gets paid based on patient satisfaction. And so data's the key to all of that. Yes. I think a lot of folks that don't work in that industry don't understand those scores. I forget what the scores called the HCAP scores. Yeah. Those, you know, that truly that percentage of how high they score is the percentage of money they get reimbursed for the services they deliver. So no one wants a rude shock by scoring 70%. And at the end of the year, you only get 70% of your money for the service. I can't, I don't know how you do business that way. That's right. And that's the higher they can get and anything we can do to help them, you know, reduce fall risk, any of those things that come up across the nation. We try to focus on that. That's awesome. Yeah. So let's talk about this this year. I think there will continue to be a drive obviously for getting more value out of our systems as everybody's, you know, become quite aware of the digital world, right? We all went online basically. And if you weren't online, you had to learn how to do it. Back like last year, tell me how you folks were, how are you as an integration firm setting up sort of what were you looking at for 2020 before all this hit? You know, I mean, where were you headed? Well, you know, like a lot of companies, you know, we get together and do this strategic planning, you know, we, I know you guys use a different version, but you know, we do scaling up. Yeah. And so we had, you know, all these meetings and we're going to do these things and we're going to go out in the world and meet all these people and then suddenly, yeah, you're not doing that. You know, you're not coming into my facility, you're not going to do these things. And all of a sudden, you know, this, it's a little bit of what do we even do now? You know, kind of caught off guard. We have people that our whole plan is centered around them going to a site and interacting with staff. And now we can't go there. What do we do? And how do we pivot from that? How do we use the same people and achieve the same outcome remotely? And that, that took a little while to kind of get used to. Sure. Did, were you able to modify that and do, do like a virtual visit or have a virtual meetings with these same customers? I mean, I'm a big fan of Vern Harnish and scaling up. So I'm sure you, you, you found a way. We did. You know, it's, it's interesting to think about, you know, we try to do the training on the systems. And so you end up studying up a camera in a room, programming a system to mock the customer system and trying to do training remotely. And it's, it's different, but you can get it done and, you know, doing customer assessments remotely. And it, you know, there was a, there was a learning curve there for us for the customers, but eventually, you know, everybody gets used to the fact that some, some, someone's child is going to be standing right behind them while they're doing training and you just move about your day. That's awesome. It's great customer service, too, to stay dedicated to delivering the service, you know, via the available platform, which happens to be, you know, virtual or whatever it may be. Do you think, you think there's some learning lessons there that are, that will go forward even when we can go back, you know, person to person? Do you think there's some, some something we've learned about these tools that maybe we weren't leveraging before? Well, you know, what's interesting about that is it, it definitely made us realize maybe we don't need to necessarily go to every place to achieve the same outcome. And suddenly you're more efficient. So instead of driving two hours to go to this place to have a two hour meeting, two hours back, maybe I can get three, two hour sessions in with customers and still have time to button that work up and then start tomorrow fresh on a whole another customers or multiple customers and you just get more done. And so there was a lot of rethinking, is that the way we have to do it? I mean, that's how we've always done it, but do we have to do it that way? So I think, you know, initially there was a lot of shock and, you know, it was hard being at home and people weren't used to being at home. You kind of have this mindset of, I have to be here and I have to be there. So there was that adjustment. And then kind of just embracing it saying, you know what, this is how it is. So how can we be more efficient to get the work done? I, I'm appreciative of the fact that that's kept up and we continue to move forward with that even when we could go. I think it's been better for us, better for the customers. That's awesome. How big is your strategy team? And did you guys have to, you know, when they all of a sudden it's like, wow, we're not going back to the office. Did you guys have to totally sort of take the plans for the year apart and redo them? Did it take different staffing levels than you thought about? Or how did that go? Well, there's about 14 to 15 of us from multiple branches. So again, the same thing is, you know, we would get together at the, at a monthly quarterly and of course the annual and all of a sudden, same thing. Well, wait a minute. Okay. So then it's all in Zoom and breakout rooms and, you know, it was a lot of the same discussions. You know, luckily we have a lot of customers that still needed to get a bunch of work done and they still need us to meet with them. And so that was really helpful. But we did have to rethink getting together and now that we're not doing these things, let's reimagine the budget. Let's reimagine revenue. What does that look like? But we didn't, luckily, didn't really have to change staffing or increase staffing. So for us personally, you know, I think we got, we probably are one of the luckier ones on that front. Yeah, I know. And I know Ray's a big, big champion of culture building and does a lot of charity work on his own flying, flying folks around. And I'm pretty sure that that was a sort of a focus. As you guys, as you guys merged into Lone Star, did you, were they sort of a competitor before? Did you guys already know them and know how they worked? We knew them and we knew how they worked. We'd actually reached out to them before for some more high profile accounts that we had just to pick their brain. We weren't competitors because, you know, Roland is protected territory. Okay. And so you might, your territories might touch, but there's not usually a lot of overlap. And they helped us out a couple of times. They were always really good people, very gracious with their time. And so culture wise, it was a great fit. A lot of the same values and the way to do business and taking care of the customer and integrity. And so it really took off right away. That's awesome. Yeah, these, the scale of your like operations is hard for me to imagine. Hawaii is so small, you know, like our, if you even have a one hour service call on this island, I don't know if there's a place that in traffic, it could take an hour to get there, right? But you guys thinking like, terms of hundreds of miles or, you know, you'll drive, you know, it's not really a big deal to take off in the morning and drive somewhere and get there by lunch and do some work and come back or whatever. It's just so interesting to me. Is the, is the healthcare market really large? I mean, are there, I know there's a lot of, you know, I'm no military hospitals and things in Texas, but is that, is that a, what's the sort of population that you guys serve? It's from Louis, from what New Orleans, Southern Louisiana, all the way across to Little Rock. I mean, that's a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. So it goes from essentially Alexandria, Louisiana, North into Arkansas. So all the way into Memphis. Oh, wow. And if you include Texas, I think it goes way out west. I mean, we're, it's in the millions of people and in the hundreds of thousands of miles, just in Arkansas, we have customers that are three hours away. Oh wow. Okay. And so, you know, that's when you start, some of those things that you really start to try to strategize and plan around is, how can we do business with them and take care of them, but maybe not necessarily have to roll a truck to work on something? And I think that's, you know, where a lot of these services are going. I'm sure you're seeing the same thing there. Yeah. Yeah, we haven't, it's our outer island guys, right, that are the least service because you got to, you know, literally, I mean, you got to get on a plane. A lot of times our customers will sort of bundle up services. So we'll, we'll go and do two or three different customers in one day. They'll wait because it's not a critical outage that they're having or something. So we'll go and try to do two or three, four things on Maui or whatever. Right. So, and then share that cost across all of them. Nobody likes to pay a thousand dollars for a service call, you know? That's right. Oh, I know that. Yeah. You get those, you know, customer calls and, you know, why don't I build this much for swapping out batteries as well? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the drive to and from, right? That's right. So what, so as you got, as you got into this and you got your teams, you know, we get into, and I don't know how quickly it spread and, you know, the sort of shut down occurred. And I don't, did you, I don't know if you got pushed out of customers. We were named essential services. And so our hospital work kept going on, our DOD work kept going on. As it, as it started to close down, how, how, what was the impact there for your operations? We had, so there was really two pieces. So we actually have a fire sprinkler division here in Arkansas. Oh, okay. For them, nothing changed. Every day, all year, every month, there was no change. They had work upon work upon work upon work. And of course, as you mentioned, healthcare, you know, at a time when you think that it would slow down to some degree, you had a lot of places, a lot of IDMs trying to convert units to COVID units. And so there was a lot of very quick action of let's order the parts and get the programming to meet with the staff and get all this stuff done. I think where we probably saw the biggest downturn was in plants. I mean, they didn't want anybody to come in, but they didn't want anybody in schools, you know, and really none of the commercial. So the healthcare and fire sprinkler kind of carried us for a while until, you know, what's interesting is that there's a lot more cases now that's spreading faster now, but people are just used to it. Interesting. And so people are traveling around, people are having meetings, but they're just used to having to have a mask and we have to keep a distance. But I've been finding that answer seeing as you, it's way worse now, but nothing's really shut down. Interesting. Now, that's interesting. Well, we'll pick up on that and we get back. We're going to take a break for about one minute, pay a few bills, and we'll be right back with Kevin Henderson. Stick around. Welcome back to Security Matters. We're talking with Kevin Henderson. We were just getting into sort of the, as this pandemic took off and people, essential workforce, as those of you in the industry know, had to keep working. And Kevin was saying that now it's actually worse than it was when it first started kicking off as we got into this. Kevin, what did your team go through? You know, we went through a lot of reassurance about where your mask and trying to, trying to, there's obviously fear, right? They don't, they don't want to go work in the hospital where everybody's sick and there's, you know, you know, bodies piling up outside in semi-trucks and things like that. I mean, super scary environment that we weren't really used to working in that environment or didn't have that, that, you know, that, that sort of threat before. So how, how did you guys go about reassuring your team and sort of keep your culture, culture put together? That's a really good question. Actually, I was, I had kind of forgotten somehow what everything going on, but we actually ended up having a couple of different town hall meetings with, and kind of talked about, here are precautions that we're taking, here's some suggestions we're making to you. Here are the customers we've reached out to here, the things that they're doing, but it wasn't without bumps. You know, we did have a couple of, a couple of different instances where hospitals were saying, hey, you know, we had COVID patients in here, we need you to go work out something. And of course, that's a scary prospect if you're being told this is a serious thing and you don't want to be around it. Hey, go work in here. So it was really just a matter of getting with the facility. Okay, what precautions are you taking? What, what should they pay? And then reassuring them, you know, the, you know, the facility's message was, we're here to take care of everybody. We wouldn't ask you to go in there if we thought you were in danger. So it was really just reassuring them about, make sure you have on the proper PPE. And we went through, you know, we purchased a ton of masks, and that, you know, everybody was wearing gloves at the beginning. So we had a lot of gloves, we had it out. And loads, you know, hand sanitizer with wipes, then we were, you know, at the beginning, it was all trying to figure out what to do. And so we were advising them to, you know, if you go to a hospital and you have these things, wipe down your tools and your hands. And as soon as you get home, change your clothes, take a shower, you know, try to do our best guess of how do we minimize their risk. And we actually ended up instituting hazard pay. Oh, wow. Nice. Just to kind of try to give back a little bit for the people on the front lines. So those were just, that was a few of the things we ran into and how we addressed it. It's awesome. Yeah, we had a couple sites, we had a couple of offices that had someone test positive so they close the whole office, clean it and you're, you know, you got to go back in. That maybe usually was like 48 hours later, they'd open. We had a construction site that had mandatory stop and go wash your hands every 30 minutes. Our guys are getting a little tired of that. That's right. Yeah. You know, so the weird thing is you realize that there's no set way anywhere. It's just what they think sounds good. Yeah. And our guys were, another trend we saw was that we were doing all this stuff and then they'd go to a job site and a bunch of people weren't and then they're like, well, can we, can we have somebody talk to their super, super, like people were trying to start policing themselves eventually as it, I guess as it got more real, you know, towards sort of the, I guess May, June sort of center of the year kind of timeframe there adoption seemed to pick up, you know, and Hawaii did really well. I don't think we've hardly had any cases until then, you know, that were, of course, they shut tourism down, which, which probably helped us a lot. That's true. Yeah. Actually, I was wondering about that, you know, what the impact, you know, on, on Hawaii has been, you know, oh yeah, yeah, we're broke. I mean, for sure. That's a most of the state tax revenue comes from hotel room taxes. And so that's just been zero. There's, I think, I think it's back up some, we've got about 20 or 30% of people kind of starting to come now. But they have to, they have to quarantine if they're, if they're positive, or if they don't get the right kind of test before they come. And so nobody wants to pay for two weeks in Hawaii and spend it all on the hotel room. That's right. I think I saw that Hawaii, if, if you work remotely, and you promise to stay 30 days, they're buying wrap trip tickets for remote workers or something like that. Is that right? There's a, there's a push out to get, they always, they're always trying to bring people home. And so now I can tell you, you know, if we have a lot of folks that are educated here, but then they go work on the mainland, you know, maybe, you know, keep their career there for a long time, but they're trying to bring some of that brain drain. They call it, you know, back here, like, Hey, if you can work remotely, think about coming back home and up and tech workers that can work remotely, obviously, could work here as well. So, interesting. We've had a, I'm not sure if the popular, I think the population has been decreasing, you know, in general, they, the, the, everybody just keeps leaving Hawaii just for the amount of opportunity that's available on the mainland. Your money goes a lot further through definitely lots of technicians over the years to the mainland, you know, because they just, as they, you know, they're senior technicians, but their money that they can earn is similar on the mainland. It just goes a whole lot further in that economy than it does out here. So, if we're trying to raise families and stuff, it's a little difficult. So, as we, as we got through this thing, we're getting, you know, the, the, everybody kind of figured out how to work, right? We all decided, okay, we're going to make it. Our industry as a, as a whole actually is doing, you know, doing pretty well because we're required to sort of keep working, you know, an essential workforce. And I think a lot of the owners collectively took a little bit of a sigh of relief, right? Okay. What, what kind of business do we have, you know, compared to other industries like tourism, as you mentioned, you know, just shut down. What was the, what was the thinking getting into Q3? And I'm not sure if you guys are on a fiscal budget or how you budget your year out, but what was the thinking getting into the fall here about, you know, how, how the year is going to end and, you know, are some of these changes going to stay with us that we've made? What did we learn, basically? Well, you know, I kind of go back to the other thing you asked me about, you know, what were we talking about at the beginning of the year? And one of the things that we talked about, you've heard this, that PSA conferences and that SCA conferences have been at, but recurring revenue. And like any good integrator that that was on our radar, hey, we need to do recurring revenue and but the urgency of the moment always overcome some of that. And so it absolutely reinforced, okay, we do have some, but we really need to focus on it. And what are the different ways? And that was one of our pivots during our planning, you know, in the middle of the year that you had asked about was, what are the things that we really need to speed up and really bring to the forefront that makes recurring revenue a thing? Because, you know, anybody that was really doing a lot of that, they may not have felt as big of a pinch this year as, you know, if you, if you were, I'm going to go install something and leave, you probably felt it this year pretty heavily. And so that was, I think that that's here to stay. Your total value to the customer here to stay. You know, I think about some people in that AV industry that I spoke to, it was a struggle. It was a struggle. They were trying to figure out, okay, what can we pivot into? And so that's, it all comes, it really brings the mind, how do I future proof for something, whatever it may be that allows us to continue despite what might be happening in the world? And how do I, how do we staff for that? What do we have now? What do we need in the future to get to these places? And it's interesting to kind of hear just in the different industries and ours especially, even how that's going. Yeah, I know the AV guys, many of them really struggled, you know, all the shows quit happening, the hotels were closed, so that's a big market for them. So as we, as we look, now we, maybe we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, maybe we'll all be vaccinated, you know, surely by summer, hopefully a little bit sooner. I'm hoping the essential workforce gets a little bit of a prioritization there, since we're in these healthcare spaces and in, in government spaces working for those folks. What's it, what does, what's it look like as we exit this, you know, how will you plan maybe differently, you know, when you start looking at next year than you did when you were looking at 2020? Well, it's all about those efficiencies. And really focusing in on what, if you're going to do any kind of scaling or, you know, any, whatever your plan is at your companies, what has to get done right now and what could wait as you kind of see, you know, we, we think we see where businesses are going to have the money and we're going to kind of cut out of it, but we don't, it's not a guarantee yet. And so what do you need to do right now and what could wait is kind of what we're looking at and, you know, really dig it into efficiencies just to make sure that you're doing everything as efficiently as you can, is what we've been looking at here. And, you know, we just got done doing budgeting for next year and, you know, making sure that we stick to training and do all those things that keeps your texts happy and educated and doing what they do. Sure. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. I know, I know the everybody's kind of been a little, a little more conservative that I've talked to, you know, across the industry with what they think and efficiencies, you know, those things that can kind of get away from you when you're not really paying attention to them, right? Those extra, those extra few points may come in handy, you know, in the, when we finally look at the revenues, you know, they came in. So I think that's super smart. I wish you guys a lot of luck out there. I hope you have a good holiday season. And any final thoughts, anything you'd like to share with the industry before we sign off here today? Well, we touched on it briefly at the beginning, but if you're not doing it yet, big day to embrace it. Nice. I love it. All right, Kevin, I truly appreciate your time here today. I look forward to hopefully seeing you, seeing you in person next year as our shows get going again and we'll catch up soon. Absolutely. Thanks, Andrew. Take care of yourself. Aloha. Aloha, everybody.