Opening Gates to Opportunity Ghosts Controls addresses wants and needs BY STEVE BORNHOFT
Those are lessons that Joe Kelley has learned during his decades in business, the last few years as the president and CEO at Ghost Controls, LLC, a manufacturer of gate-opening systems. “But if there is an opportunity to leverage what you are doing with your business and move into other areas, do the research, give it a shot and see what happens,” Kelley advises. For Kelley, the increasingly popular chicken husbandry hobby presented such an opportunity. “I was amazed at how substantial the market is,” Kelley said of a phenomenon that has been fueled by a desire among people to avoid cage-raised poultry pumped full of growth hormones — and
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boosted, too, by a pandemic-induced quest for new at-home activities. Ghost Controls developed a new line of Coop Controls that react to light levels, opening coop doors as days begin to brighten and closing them after chickens go to roost. “We have done incredibly well with that product,” Kelly said. Research prior to product launch included use of a raccoon cam trained on a chicken coop behind the former Ghost Controls office on Capital Circle Northwest. Live streaming video enabled Kelley et al to gain valuable insights into the operating hours of predators. Kelley, an FSU grad with a business degree, helped found the region’s Economic Development Alliance and served as president of the Greater Tallahassee Area Chamber of Commerce. He first worked with gate openers more than 20 years ago when he went to work as a problem solver for a fledgling LLC, GTO (Gates That Open). GTO toyed around with an idea that Kelley would later seize upon: Produce an affordable gate opener that a homeowner could install without calling upon the services of a professional. GTO’s efforts to do so were fraught with a high defective ratio and were placed on a
back burner by the new owner when the company was sold. Some five years ago, Kelley assembled a five-person team that picked the DIY gate opener concept back up. “I knew three things about consumers in North America and beyond,” Kelley said. “They wanted openers that were faster, quieter and more reliable.” The team set about revolutionizing gate openers in much the way that Dyson disrupted the world of vacuum cleaners. “What Dyson did was to take a consumer product that had not changed much in 100 years, arrive at better motor technology through engineering and produce motors that would last forever,” Kelley said. “It was our goal to do that on the gate automation side.” Kelley wrote a strategic plan that afforded his team 18 months in which to design, prototype and test a product.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF GHOST CONTROLS, LLC
Never forget what got you to the dance. Never lose focus on your core product and the need to continuously innovate to make it better.
