Banyan Hills Technologies: Steve Latham, On Applying IoT Solutions

IndustrialSage

Steve Latham, CEO & Founder of Banyan Hills Technologies, shares reasons why (and practical tips how) manufacturers should apply IoT solutions in their space.

Danny:

Okay, IoT, I’m sure you’ve never, ever heard of that in your life. Or maybe the industrial fourth revolution. Well, it is here, and it is not going away. And it is really awesome. So today we’re going to spend a little bit of time with Steve Latham from Banyan Hills Technology, and he’s going to walk us through some ideas and some strategies and some tips on how to actually use IoT solutions and to be able to have them to influence your digital marketing or just your marketing in general. It’s a really cool topic. There’s a lot of interesting use cases in here, so don’t miss out. You’re going to want to watch this. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage. I’m so excited to jump into this episode. So we’ve got Steve Latham here from Banyan Hills Technology who’s going to be walking us through IoT. What is that? Well, if you don’t know what that is, you’ve been living under a rock for a while, I didn’t know you know what it is. But we’re going to get into it from a marketing standpoint. It’s going to be really great. So before we really get into all that stuff, Steve, if you could just introduce yourself to the audience, tell us a little bit about yourself and Banyan Hills Technology, and we’ll go from there.

Steve:

Absolutely. So Steve Latham, I’m the founder and CEO of Banyan Hills Technologies. We’re a company that’s five years old, and we are focused on— we’re an IoT company. We’re bringing an IoT platform called Canopy to market, and then all associated services along with IoT.

Danny:

Okay, great. So IoT, industrial fourth revolution, all these great acronyms. For those, for the two people who are watching this who don’t know what that is— I’m not throwing shade. But if you’re not 100% familiar with it, what is it?

Steve:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s such an overused term in a lot of ways.

Danny:

A little bit, yeah.

Steve:

Yeah, so IoT, very simply at its core is about taking any machine or any device and then, connecting it, figuring out how to connect it to the internet. and then, leveraging the power of the internet to monitor that machine, maintain a constant conversation with that machine to remotely manage it, and create entirely new experiences based on the fact that that device is now connected.

Danny:

Yeah, and it’s amazing. There are so many different applications on it. And so from a manufacturing and industrial side, a million different use cases. We’re seeing an obviously, even just focusing it from plant operations, creating better efficiencies, better output. But there’s also a whole other aspect of new products that are coming out as a result. Talk to us a little bit about that, some of the things you’re seeing.

Steve:

Yeah, it’s absolutely— in the consumer space, so direct to consumer, I think everybody is now gaining in familiarity with these solutions like smart thermostats or smart lighting systems inside of a home, even smart doorbells so that you can tell when someone’s accessing your house from a remote location. And so I think, on the consumer side, we’ve seen the market be flooded with all kinds of really creative and innovative solutions. And so the consumers are starting to get an education on what IoT really is through that type of consumer engagement. And then, if you think about now, when a consumer walks into an enterprise, they start to expect that the same type of experiences that they have in their homes are now replicated inside of these big enterprises. And so we’re starting to see the adoption of really smart technology in enterprises, large industries, like we’ve never seen before, which is really, really exciting.

Danny:

That is exciting. And I’ve seen— it’s funny you mentioned the doorbell thing. I think I’ve seen that on my Facebook, the ads, the person looking who pings you on your phone and stuff like that. And then, even— I think one of the greatest ones is those little sensors that’ll detect water, so you put them around your faucets or toilets or whatever so you can detect that. I think, what a great way to be able to really solve some of those challenges from a manufacturing standpoint to consumer. Obviously, there’s enterprise applications to that as well, to be able to help solve some of those challenges around, hey, maybe we manufacture toilets or the inner workings there, but how can we help make that experience, to your point, better?

Steve:

Yeah, I think on the enterprise side, what’s really, really fun to see is that an enterprise now is really trying to do several things. Any business that’s running a retail footprint or a physical footprint is trying to drive down costs through operational efficiencies. They’re trying to come up with new ways to create revenue streams. And that’s just the basic premise of a lot of business. And so the value that IoT brings in that case is that if IoT can help, through its implementation, drive automation into a physical footprint, that’s going to naturally reduce the cost for the operator, which is why you’ve got these enterprises or enterprise operators gaining in comfort with trying to pursue these. But then the things that’s really, where I start to get even more excited is so now, if I’m an operator of a facility, and I’ve got a connected thermostat or an HVAC unit and also a connected lighting system, and I’m managing those through one automation platform, can I start to correlate data from those two control systems and then drive entirely new experiences for a customer?

So we were talking earlier before the show about if we can tell that it’s Steve Latham that enters a property, and we know enough about Steve to where we can personalize the physical experience inside a building by maintaining a constant connection to these control systems, think about the power of that. There was a customer that we had that was in the gaming industry, a casino. You think about a casino, and you think about all the connected devices. If we know that, based on the profile of the customers that are in that casino, that we can drive a real-time, almost flash mob marketing campaign where on an instant, we turn all the screens to a certain color, a certain branded experience, we turn the music to that— really, a physical advertisement where the consumer gets merged into this experience, that’s pretty powerful stuff. Totally different way of thinking about marketing.

Danny:

That is super powerful. We touched a little bit on that experiential marketing aspect. From a digital marketing perspective, personalization is a really big thing. We’ve been seeing that a lot. But what I think is interesting is that IoT is opening that to be able to expand that beyond a digital experience. But they can kind of play together. So your example there of being able to, you enter into this facility, you put your information in there, and then the system knows who you are and because of that, they can adapt; they can personalize that experience there. So having those customer profiles and that information accessible through a database and having those right points there, play that together, and you’ve got digital plus that actual real physical reality experience; you’re able to drive that based off of that. I think that is awesome. It’s amazing.

Steve:

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Danny:

Also on that note, on personalization too, some of the things that we’ve seen, which is interesting, and I think that we might be seeing this a little bit more based on your example there, is that even in just outbound communications, some applications you could take from that is just looking at cost savings that you’ve generated for your client based on implementing this solution, having that built into an automated reporting tool, or being able to say, hey look, we’ve implemented this solution or this tool that we’ve sold to you to help measure your, I don’t know, your tank usage, the amount of gas that you’ve put into this tank. Or we’ve been able to reduce the amount of deliveries by X amount, being able to help automate that a little bit and then communicate that.

Steve:

Absolutely, right. Yeah, there’s this journey that our customers end up going through when we implement our product. Our product is all about any devices that you have in your retail footprint or physical footprint; it doesn’t necessarily need to be retail. Any of those, we can connect into one management platform. And usually, the journey that we take a customer through, the first thing that they want to do, they’re very cost-focused. They want to get visibility into all those connected devices. They want to make sure that the availability of those connected devices maintains a very high threshold, that they’re healthy, that they can start to do things like preventative maintenance or predictive service on these machines in order to keep them up and running.

And so usually, it starts with monitoring, just help me monitor all of the assets that I have deployed in this environment. Then, we take them, once everything is connected, then you can start to show them, we call them IoT campaigns which is really about, now that we’ve got real-time events coming from one device, is there a particular pattern that should trigger a reaction? And so that would initiate an IoT campaign which very well could be a marketing campaign. It could be flash mob advertising, or it could be as simple as creating a ticket and dispatch a technician to go service that unit. And so then we take them from this monitoring mindset to this idea that we’re going to help them create entirely new experiences based on the real-time data that’s coming in through the platform. And then the final destination really gets at what you were just driving at which is, let’s say you have 30,000 connected locations, and within those locations, you’ve got, on average, 50 to 100 devices at that location.

You think about all of that data that’s coming into this central management system and how can you use that data? Once you get enough history, you can really start to develop. It’s not just one location that’s providing you what might be data or trends in isolation. You’re looking at 30,000 locations at scale, and you can really develop some ideas about patterns that are occurring inside of your business that you can start to drive reactions. And so that data, that final stage, is really about using the data to become way, way, way smarter about your IoT campaigns. But then also, now you have data that’s really interesting for the industry you’re serving, and they’re willing to pay you for it.

Danny:

Exactly, it’s another product.

Steve:

Right, and that’s really the typical journey. So it starts at monitoring, and it goes to this enhanced customer experience, and it lands at this really massive data store that becomes extremely powerful for them.

Danny:

Well, what I love about that is that it’s all about— well, a couple things— all about the data. So in everything that’s going on, it’s all data-driven. But the thing that’s really cool to me is that there’s a ton of creativity inside of that. One of the things, I think there’s— so I have an accounting background, and some people are like, how do you have an accounting background, and then you’re doing some creative stuff? One of the things I think is interesting is that, on the creative side, we’re always telling a story. But when you look at the numbers, there is a story inside those numbers. And I think that’s what bringing in these kind of platforms and having that data gives you the ability to be able to have that marble block, if you will. And there’s a story inside that. Now, we just have to chisel away and work away to figure out what that is and say, oh, wow; we just discovered now that we can connect all these different data points to be able to drive this marketing campaign.

Or now we have a whole new product that we can— it just dorkily gets me very excited about all the opportunities that it poses. It’s really just a matter of stepping back, analyzing it, looking at it, and then thinking creatively, okay, well what does this mean if we’ve got this connection? And to your point, we’re seeing this trend over here. Well, maybe if we see a lot of people performing XYZ function, maybe we could at that point, we dispatch somebody. Well, maybe we’re sending an email; we’re just going to trigger an email that we’re going to fire out to say, hey, just wanted to let you know, we’ve detected this; we’re dispatching this. We’re on top of it. And from a customer service standpoint, it’s okay, wow, this is great. They’ve already gotten— we’re detecting some abnormalities; we want to keep the up time up. We don’t want any down time.

Steve:

I’ve got a great example of that which is exactly what you just said. There is one of our partners and a customer of ours is in the self-storage industry, and they manage access control systems within self-storage. And they have their technology deployed across over 35,000 locations.

Danny:

That’s a lot of locations.

Steve:

A lot of locations.

Danny:

A lot of data.

Steve:

Exactly. And one of the things is we’ve been talking to their customers about the value that IoT brings to this space. Almost every customer said, hey, could you tell us when a customer is about to leave by access control data? Which seems very logical, right? If you’ve got a customer that, there’s a lot of activity when they move in, and there’s a lot of activity when they move out—

Danny:

But in between—

Steve:

In between, it’s pretty silent. And so if you start to see increased usage, that would suggest that they’re probably going to leave. And that should trigger some sort of light touch to the customer initially just to say, hey, check out these incremental services like a moving service, for example. So I just think that more data, more visibility into a physical footprint through IoT can drive all kinds of new campaigns that we’ve never thought about.

Danny:

What a great use case there. Whether you have that moving service or not or being able to partner with somebody, again, it’s helping to solve the challenge. You’re taking that data; you understand what’s going on. Hey there’s something— I love it. And I think, it’s one of those things, I don’t know, necessarily, there’s a finite path, per se. Obviously, you have to have some sort of platform in place to be able to have that data and be able to analyze it. But just stepping back and thinking, what could we do to help make a better experience for our customers, or our customers’ customer, depending on who that is? That’s awesome. Another question is, is there such a thing as too much IoT? Or just because we can do something, I suppose we can measure it— I imagine, is there a balance?

Steve:

Yeah, a lot of times— and I’m a big advocate of this. I almost feel like we’re a little past with IoT as an emerging technology trend. IoT has arrived. It’s here; it’s on our face. It’s being used. There are standards that are coming to life around IoT. And so I feel like, in the last 12 to 24 months, we’ve really seen IoT arrive. But previous to that, one of the warnings that I would give a lot of people that would come in is, I would say, make sure you understand the value proposition that you’re pursuing before you just go experiment because at the end of the day, if it’s not enhancing the customer experience or changing your cost or revenue profile, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth the experiment of doing it. And so I absolutely agree with you. The good news to that question is because of where IoT is in its lifecycle, I think that we’re a little beyond a lot of experimentation. Things are really hardening and coming to life in a way that I think is pretty powerful for IoT. I think there are new emerging technology trends that are coming to life as a result of IoT that have that risk profile.

Danny:

Sure, yeah. So last question: speaking to a digital marketer, I am working for a manufacturing company, and we have got some IoT solutions rolled out. We have some things that are maybe helping us from an efficiency standpoint in our plant operations but also on the products that we have manufactured. What advice would you give to somebody who’s sitting there, different things that they might be able to do to be able to make their digital marketing campaigns a little better, a little smarter?

Steve:

Right, well I think there’s probably a few different ways to answer that. I think first and foremost, the advice that I would give a customer if they were asking me that would be that, focus on your strength. If your core competency is manufacturing hardware, that’s your 80, 80% of what you do, so focus on your 80, and develop relationships with firms that have a strong presence around digital marketing or IoT as a discipline, and leverage that to help you get that product to market. I think that, if you’re a manufacturing company and believing that you can become a consumer or even an enterprise marketing company around IoT is probably a little bit of a stretch. Some companies can do it, obviously. But I think most of the time, especially initially as you’re considering this, developing strong relationships with companies that can help you develop the right message is really important.

And without a doubt, the most important thing to do, I believe, is to understand what your customers want. Understand the real value proposition of what it is that you’re building so that your message can be really focused, really targeted, and solve the right problems for them. I think, back to the point that you had previously, a trap is that you have just built something that technically is very cool and very fun. But it doesn’t actually solve the issue for the customer. And so your product is wrong; your marketing is wrong. You’re missing the point. So I would say, off the cuff, the two things that I would recommend are: get to the voice of the customer; make sure you’ve got that right. And then, develop the right partnership with a company that can help you target your message for that customer.

Danny:

I was hoping you would give us a silver bullet answer. But it’s a very consistent theme here on the show all the time. It goes to really looking at the personas, really getting an understanding of your customer. What are their challenges? What are their needs? And when it comes to product development is making something that is actually solving a problem, or is it just really cool, and you think it’s amazing?

Steve:

Yeah.

Danny:

Just because it’s really cool and it’s amazing, it might not take off. But if you’re solving a challenge, you’ve got to go through all of that. Alright, well thanks so much for coming on. If somebody has a question and would like to reach out, what’s the best way of contacting you?

Steve:

Sure, so you can reach us; go to our website. It’s www.banyanhills.com. You can reach out to [e-mail] to get in touch with us, and we’d love to talk with you.

Danny:

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on.

Steve:

Yeah, thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Danny:

Excellent. So alright, IoT, a lot of great nuggets of information here. I think one of the coolest things that I took away was the endless amounts of possibilities there are if you have an IoT solution that’s implemented or if you’re thinking about doing that. From a digital marketing standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, are you able to take that data and create better experiences, whether that’s digitally or even in person in that physical reality. So think creatively. Think about, okay, if we have access to the data, analyze it. Spend that time looking at it. Try to help to figure out what you might be able to do with that. It could be as simple as, if you’re dispatching preventative maintenance calls, being able to send an email campaign to be able to communicate hey look, we’re helping. We’re on your side; we’re helping you to solve that challenge or make sure that you guys don’t have down time. Things like that, they’re simple, but they really mean a lot.

So hopefully you took something away. I know I did; it was awesome. If you are listening to this on iTunes, hey, we’d love to have a review. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them; IndustrialSage.com/questions, we’ll answer those for you. Please share, like this, send, do all the things. And until next week, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

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