His ‘Why’ is Improving Lives

How Early Insights Led to Success for SoundVision President Scott Sullivan

By Jeremy Glowacki

Scott Sullivan earned his degree in economics from UC Santa Cruz, but just barely. During college, the future president of SoundVision in Novato, CA, preferred the early morning adrenaline rush of surfing over attending classes. Fortunately for him, however, his first job out of school provided just about every insight he would need to get a good running start into his eventual career in custom integration.

As national sales manager for power management products manufacturer, Panamax, in the 1990s, he blanketed the country, meeting with the owners of some of the most successful CI companies in the industry. With the knowledge he gained from this collection of entrepreneurs, Sullivan learned so much about running a CI company that he almost felt sheepish about it.

“It was so much fun that I almost would have done it for free,” he recalled. “I mean, all of the people were so nice and generous with their time. I didn’t go in and pitch Panamax. That wasn’t my strategy. I would just ask them about their businesses, and these guys would open up and tell me everything. I would take note of their size both in revenue and headcount and what their organizational structures and facilities looked like and study how their proposals and design drawings were done and how their people presented themselves.”

While still employed for Panamax, Sullivan added a side gig working with his brother at Pacific Satellite, installing Dish Network and Direct TV equipment. That experience, combined with the insights gleaned from leading custom integrators, eventually gave him the confidence to open up his own firm. The timing and location of that launch couldn’t have been better. The San Francisco Bay Area around 2000 was in the midst of an unprecedented tech and financial boom.

“We inherited a group of potential customers here that loved tech, had virtually unlimited funds, and were looking for a partner to help them get creative,” Sullivan recalled. “If we were going to start a business in this industry, you could not have picked a better time and place in the history of the world.”

With that background for context, we wanted to learn more current insights from one of the most respected CI business owners in the industry. This portion of our conversation with Scott Sullivan, president of SoundVision in Novato, CA , has been edited for length and clarity from Episode 124 of the Residential Tech Talks podcast.

Residential Tech Today: Service has become a major focus in this industry as systems mature and technology evolves. What’s your opinion of offering service plans as a way to manage tech support requests?

What we do is design systems that aren’t nearly as vulnerable, so then you don’t need a support plan. We do offer a support plan in our proposals, but it’s only for the first year. Our point with that is if there are any problems in the first year, then no matter what, it’s our problem. After that, our advice to customers is to buy service on an as-needed basis. We’ve got a service department that’s incredibly responsive. I’m not saying that this approach works for every CI company. I’ve got friends in the business who are serving high-end vacation homes, and that’s a different animal. When equipment sits unused, sometimes things lock up. Then the homeowner comes to town having not used the system on a regular basis, and they don’t remember how things work… I think that is when concierge-type services are necessary.

RT Today: How do you manage inevitable after-hours service calls?

One of the things that we’ve done is to create an “APB” [all-points bulletin] blast that goes out to all of our techs via text. Now that we’re using iPoint, these requests go to an app, where they can look it up and see all the information. The guys will know that if it is an after-hours request then the first one to claim it gets it. They call the customer immediately and schedule to take care of them. The next morning, when they come into the office, they get $500 in cash. Who isn’t willing to interrupt an evening or a weekend for $500 in cash?

RT Today: Tell us about the unique advice HTSA’s Keith Esterly gave to your service techs.

Keith has a great line that the service department is the referral department, and he’s right. He came out and trained all our guys on how to make sure that people we work with feel like they’re the most important people in the whole world. In our company, nobody comes in contact with more people than our service techs. They go to three houses a day typically. So, with two of those guys, if you’re hitting six customers a day and making them feel like they’re the most important people in the whole world then, man, you’re just supercharging your referral base.

RT Today: How has that advice changed the way you interact with everyone on the jobsite?

I’m a big believer that clients don’t know how good the work we do is. I mean, if a customer goes and looks at the gear that we install, they don’t know if we did a good job or a bad job; they have no point of reference. So one of our mantras is that we want to do great work technically, but what is maybe more important is that we want to make customers feel like we recognize them, value them, serve them, like them, and just make them feel like they’re the most special people in the whole world. Once we do that, we create a team of zealots out there selling for us. Then, we take it further. We not only want our customers to feel amazing, but also the contractor we’re working with, the project manager, the onsite laborers… We want to know their names, give them a SoundVision shirt, and help them feel recognized and important. We also do that with the electricians, the painters, the plumbers, so that we get work referred to us from all of these people just because they know that we treat people kindly. It’s taken 22 years to do it [laughs] but it’s a really fun place to be. Our purpose, as we go through “The Why,” is to improve lives. It’s the lives of our customers. We want to improve their lives. We also want to improve the lives of our colleagues here and the lives of our vendors and industry friends and partners and the lives of every other design/build trade professional that we interact with. The beauty of that is that at the end of the day, you just feel good because you’re out there not just trying to make a buck or to take advantage of anybody, but out there trying to improve lives for everybody we come in contact with.

RT Today: You’ve been doing this for a long time. How have you prepared for your eventual retirement?

As I was watching this industry from afar during my eight years at Panamax, I wasn’t seeing companies like ours getting bought regularly and guys walking away with neverneed-to-work-again money. I have my econ background and, and I’ve always been interested in investing, so my thought was, I don’t need to grow and build this company to sell it to retire. Instead, I want to make a professional income and live below my means and squirrel away money and learn how to invest. I was able to hit a few grand slams on investments in the stock market and then parlaying that into real estate. We also bought the building that we’re in now. We’re only using a small portion of the front of this building, so we were able to rent to tenants in the back of the building to cover all the costs associated with the building. My goal was to use those kinds of tools to set myself up for retirement because I just didn’t see this industry being that kind of a model where companies are getting bought and people are walking away with significant amounts of money. In a 20-year period of buying real estate in the San Francisco Bay area, again, I was in the right place at the right time. I’ve got to pinch myself, but at this point I’m good, barring some kind of an earthquake where we all fall into the ocean. x