Daisy is having one heck of a year, adding franchises in key areas across the country and enlisting a who’s who of industry luminaries to help keep the momentum going. When invited to a meeting at Daisy’s CEDIA Expo conference room, I wasn’t sure who I would be speaking with, but I got more and more awe-struck with each person who joined the conversation.
At first, I was seated with Hagan Kappler, co-founder and CEO of Daisy, and Gavin Lantzy, CEO of SaaviHome, a new Daisy franchisee. As we talked, others wandered over and took a seat, including Matt Walin, owner of Brilliant AV who was one of Daisy’s earliest franchisees and who has now opened a second franchise in Palm Springs, Gordon van Zuiden, Residential Systems columnist whose cyberManor joined Daisy in April, and Richard Glikes, the buying group legend who serves as a senior advisor to Daisy. Whew!
I have written in this space before about my fascination with franchises as a business format, and having the industry’s two main proponents — Kappler and Lantzy — sitting on either side of me gave me the opportunity to find out when they became aware of each other’s interests, and how they eventually got together.
Related: How a 25-year-old Integration Company Transitioned to Daisy
“I had called Gavin because I knew I wanted to invest in this space and so I wanted to understand what he was doing and how he was doing it,” said Kappler. “He was super-helpful and friendly and explained the rationale and also asked a lot of diligence questions about me. Why was I asking all these questions and who was I, and would I be willing to move to Utah to set up my franchise? And I’m thinking, I think he’s on to me and why I’m asking these questions…
“It’s a huge market — a $30 billion market. So, we felt excited to see another company that was looking to pursue his dream of taking his business and franchising it. To us, that felt like verification that this is possible. We’re not crazy — somebody else thinks it’s possible. And we welcome others who are investing in the space. We think that’s a great thing.”
Lantzy had put a lot of effort into creating a franchise program for the industry — independently of any work that Daisy was doing. So, I asked how much of that work was able to be translated to Daisy’s workflow now that SavviHome had been acquired.
“I think there’s a synergy with our strategies, but they are a little bit different,” he said. “We’ve been focused on new franchise growth — taking people from outside the industry who have no experience and training them from the ground floor. So, all my content training programs were for very basic, newbie businesses. Daisy has been focused mostly on the existing integrator and converting those people through franchising. I think there was a good marriage with bringing those things together — to leverage all that market knowledge in one growth strategy.”
Related: Watching Daisy Grow
Regardless of how each impressive person arrived at that CEDIA Expo table, they all had the same reason for being there — a shared interest in growth. And not only for their individual companies, but for the custom installation industry as a whole.
Looking around the table it was easy to believe that if any group can do it, it’s this one.
