Mark Coxon.

Simon J Dudley (00:00:02) Hello everyone, this is Simon Dudley in the Before It Was Obvious podcast. This week's guest is my old friend Mark Coxon of Well, XTG A V I S P L. We were just discussing how that's a lot of letters, Mark, but why don't we start with a quick intro from you as to why does the company you work for have 19 letters in it? And what do you actually do right now? Mark Coxon (00:00:28) ⁓ Well, ⁓ yeah, somehow we fell into alphabet soup, but that's okay. You know, it's ⁓ it's ⁓ it's a large large alphabet. We use nine of nine of the twenty six. So, you know, we use more than anybody else. ⁓ no, I love ⁓ I love working for the group that I work for. XTG is an experienced technology group. ⁓ and you know, my passion ⁓ for technology has always been how it affects human beings. ⁓ And so I I think I finally found a spot where I'm able to on a daily basis really think about ⁓ the human side of what technology does for us as opposed to the speeds and feeds. I always joke that I've traded my inputs and outputs. My IO is now impact and outcomes. ⁓ And it's a real fun, it's a real fun place to be to talk about solving problems and not talk about connecting gear. Right. So that's how I ended up here. Happy to be here, but been in this industry a long time ⁓ as well, about twenty-four years now I guess I am sheepish to say, but ⁓ been kicking around a while and super happy to be here on the podcast with you, Simon. Simon J Dudley (00:01:39) Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Well, what we're going to do today is do what we all do every week, which is dig into how the hell did we get to here at this point. Because a lot of people look at the market and the world and, you know, things, and they go, Well, it's obvious. This thing obviously happened, and then that thing obviously happened. And it was a very clear path, and we could see ⁓ where we were going to end up. And having been in the market even ⁓ longer than you have. I can guarantee you that's not actually how it works. So I'm pretty certain it didn't work like that way for you either. So to that end, let's go way, way, way back and start with where did you start? And I mean like born, brought up, school, that sort of stuff. Mark Coxon (00:02:26) Huh. ⁓ Okay. Yeah. Well, I was I was born in Arizona, but we hightailed it out of Arizona when I think I was about two or three weeks old. So ⁓ my dad was born in Arizona, my grandpa was born in Arizona, my grandpa's mother was born in Arizona, all my kids were born in Arizona because we ended up returning there. ⁓ so to have five generations of a family born in a state that's, you know, a hundred and fourteen years old, ⁓ is a big deal. So the fact that I live in California now almost feels like I'm a trader. You know, like I'm an expatriate of some kind to not live in Arizona at this point. ⁓ but we ⁓ we moved out of Arizona and moved into northern Idaho. ⁓ my dad at the time had been working underground in a copper mine. ⁓ I was born in the Magma Copper Company hospital. My dad was born in the Magma Copper Company hospital. ⁓ So talk about company town all around the mine. ⁓ and we moved up there and he started working underground in a silver mine. Simon J Dudley (00:03:17) Yeah, yeah. Mark Coxon (00:03:22) So I lived in this little town called Wallace. It's like forty-five miles east of Cordelaine. If you know where Corderlaine, Idaho is. Spokane, Washington, Cordlane, Idaho, kind of the same line if you just draw a horizontal line across the country. ⁓ Wallace is almost on the Montana border up there in the panhandle. So lived up there with a bunch of at the time there were a bunch of militia, Montana militia, Freedman Group. All those folks were up there, miners were up there, and a bunch of loggers for the most part before the EPA, you know, kind of crushed the logging business in the northern part of the country. But ⁓ yeah, at the time it was kind of this place that people escaped to in a way. So I had a very interesting childhood, you know, meeting folks that, you know, thought the world was gonna end. They were new world order guys that buried money in ammo boxes in the woods and lived in cabins off grid and thought the government was gonna lock them in the high school. You know, so my dad happened to not be one of those guys, so I was lucky to not like inherit any of that ethos. But ⁓ definitely got exposed to a lot of conspiracy early in my life. Simon J Dudley (00:04:24) Wow. I did not know that at all. I I've got to ask one question. And you may or may not know the answer to this. Why is the world going to end and you're going to bury money? How how does that help? What are you going to do? If if society breaks down, then it's just a bunch of paper. And if it's truly the end of the world, then it's well it's it all just seems a bit mad to me. Maybe maybe I've just nailed it. Mark Coxon (00:04:44) Yeah. It it it doesn't it th I think you did just nail it for sure. I mean th I remember them saying, the government's gonna steal your money if you put it in a bank account. So, you know, they they buried it in an ammo box in the woods, you know. So I I'm sure they were ready for if it fell apart, you know, they knew how to do hydroponic farming or whatever they needed to do to live, but until they needed till they didn't need the money anymore, they didn't want to put it anywhere that anybody kept track of it other than them, right? So Simon J Dudley (00:05:12) Fair yeah, fair enough. So th I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say your high school was small. Mark Coxon (00:05:20) Well, I moved to Arizona when I was in fourth grade. So we moved back. So in the eighties, the price of silver dropped, economy tanked, they closed the mine. My dad needed to needed to find a new job to support, you know, my sister, my myself, and and my mom. And so he moved back home to Arizona and ended up at McDonnell Douglas Helicopter, worked at the Apache helicopter plant for like thirty-two years. ⁓ so I grew up in Gilbert, Arizona. At that stage, we moved to Gilbert. So my high school is actually fairly big in Gilbert. It's a suburb of Phoenix. ⁓ It was more kind of farm at the time, a lot more farmland. I used to ride motorcycles through cotton and cotton fields and cornfields and stuff. So ⁓ there was a lot of agriculture out there. So I think it was small enough that my dad felt comfortable. But we were, you know, a suburb of Phoenix. So we were still in a big city and still had a big school. So Simon J Dudley (00:06:06) No, that's fair enough. And of course you left school ⁓ at eighteen, I'm assuming, and immediately decided you wanted to be an A V Tech, right? Mark Coxon (00:06:14) I yeah, that's exactly what I did. I just I in fact I you know I I exited early, went and got my A V degree. No, ⁓ no, not at all. ⁓ there we go, and it's over. Straight line. ⁓ No zigzags in this ⁓ in this episode. No, I you know, I wanted to be a veterinarian ⁓ when I was growing up. ⁓ And as I got older, I decided I didn't really want to be a veterinarian, but I was still going to school for zoology. Simon J Dudley (00:06:23) And that ends the podcast. There you go. That's what you do, kids. Mark Coxon (00:06:42) And I honestly thought I was gonna end up working for the game and fish department. ⁓ you know, I thought I was gonna have a notebook and be counting guppies in a stream in Kingman, Arizona somewhere. ⁓ and then I met my wife ⁓ and my wife is not a camper, is not an outdoors girl, ⁓ let's say. ⁓ And ⁓ that was not gonna be ⁓ a life that she was gonna wanna sign up for if I get deployed to some trailer living in a trailer for six months doing, you know, wildlife population surveys and stuff. So I was waiting tables through college. I knew I needed to get a real job. And I went to a job fair at a ⁓ at a what ⁓ embassy suites hotel or you know, something of that nature, at the large atrium in the middle where all these companies will rent out a suite for the day and why and then you you put your resume in the in the little bucket on the door, and at some point somebody calls your name and you go in this room and they interview you at the hotel. ⁓ and got a job selling ⁓ Intel based equipment for IBM of all places, you know. ⁓ IBM Direct is what it was at the time, but it's when IBM still owned ThinkPad and ⁓ NetVista, Netfinity servers, like they still had desktops. It was before Lenovo took over the IBM line of personal computing products. So it was about 2000. 2000, I think, yeah, 2000 to 2002, somewhere around there. Yeah. So Simon J Dudley (00:08:01) What what what year are we talking? Right. Okay. It's ⁓ sure ⁓ counting guppies to selling IBMs. Mark Coxon (00:08:13) it was it was hilarious because like all of our training was really just how to find inventory in their in their system. So there was no training on, you know, what is RAM, what is, you know, the what is what is ⁓ cash on a processor, what is bus speed. Like I didn't know any of that stuff. I didn't go to school for computer science and they put me on the phone calling IT managers. ⁓ The only saving grace was if you said IBM, people didn't hang up the phone on you because they they had some piece of IBM equipment in the building and they didn't know if you were to trying to sell them something at first or if you needed something or they needed something from you. Right. So you got a five-minute grace period before they figured out you were a you know a salesperson trying to get them to buy some more IBM gear. ⁓ but but I think what helped me a lot ⁓ in that role was that I was extremely curious. So I've always been good with people and I've always been really curious. I think those are like if you Can boil down my success at any level in my life. It's always been because of those two things. And so I would make a connection with somebody and I'd be talking to them and they'd say, Well, what's the level three cash on a you know Xeon processor? I'd be like, I don't know, but I'll I'll go find out for you. And I'd go talk to my server specialists and I'd, it's 512K at the time or something like that. And I'm like, ⁓ but instead of just going back with the answer, I'd always ask that guy, I'm like, why did they ask me that? What is what's level three cash? Why'd they ask me that? And he's like, Well, Level three cache is memory that sits on a chip so it doesn't have to go through the bus. So if you're a company that does like renderings or graphics or things like that, you know, you can actually speed up your production times and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, that's what they do. And so of course, the next time I called a graphics house, I would lead with, you know, these Xeon processors have, you know, a large amount of cash, level three cash on the chip. And then be like, that's really important to us. And I'd be like, Well, that's why I said it, because I know it is. ⁓ Right. But those were things that I had to learn. in the field doing, right? Like the I wasn't trained in it. I had to, I had to navigate my way through kind of that messy middle of not knowing anything, but being humble enough to say I don't know, being smart enough to know where to get it and being curious enough to understand why people were asking. And I think those were the three things, right? Like be humble, be honest, be resourceful, and then be curious about what you just learned. Mark Coxon (00:10:34) Why, why, why would somebody even ask me that question? Yeah, I know the answer, but I don't know why I'm giving them the answer. Right. And so ⁓ that just started my career in technology from there. And and that's where I started ⁓ in tech. And one of the guys I used to sit across from left at some point about a year and a half in and went to an audiovisual company. ⁓ And I'm sitting at my desk, and at the time it was AOL Instant Messenger, and I get these little IMs from him saying, I'm on a golf course talking to somebody about his ten thousand square foot house in Scottsdale, Arizona. How many dials do you have? Ha ha ha. You know, because I'm sitting there working a phone. ⁓ And so I would get that little bit of hazing. ⁓ but to his credit, when the company that he was working for needed someone, ⁓ he got me an interview ⁓ and I somehow found my way into A V after that. So Simon J Dudley (00:11:09) ⁓ Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:11:27) So when you were so you didn't do university, you went straight from high school to to this job with Ivy? Mark Coxon (00:11:31) No, I went to I went to college for ⁓ three years. I actually started in biomedical engineering, ⁓ because I had a really strong math aptitude. And so these counselors talked me into doing biomedical engineering. ⁓ but I really just wanted to work, you know, in biology, either as a vet or as a field biologist or something. And so at some point, ⁓ two years into the engineering core, I looked at my schedule and I had heat transfer systems, fluid dynamics, ⁓ linear algebra, which is Star Trek math, like ⁓ And I looked at my schedule and I said, I hate math. And I I pretty much have three math classes, two of them being high end physics classes, and two of them have labs. Like, what am I doing? Like so I switched over to zoology. ⁓ And ⁓ but I didn't I didn't end up finishing that. I I took the ⁓ I took the break from school to pay for my wedding. ⁓ I was getting married ⁓ and ended up with a job and just never never ended up going back. Simon J Dudley (00:12:26) Yeah, fair enough. But it you know, I I think a lot of people get their break into sales through the route that you did, the the the SDR or the BDR or whatever the three-letter acronym for an inside sales rep. ⁓ did they did they ever scotch tape your your hand to the handset with one finger out? We well, I did it, you know, maybe 15 years before you, that's exactly what they did to us. They would they would which hand do you write with? And I was left-handed, I still am, ⁓ and they would take your hand. Mark Coxon (00:12:45) Yeah. Mark Coxon (00:12:50) Wow. Simon J Dudley (00:12:56) put it on the handset and scotch tape it with one finger out so you could dial. ⁓ it may go into the restroom rather inconvenience. Mark Coxon (00:13:00) Wow. I I did I did not have that. ⁓ I did not have that, but we had to make Yeah, there you go. Well, we had to make 65 outbound dials a day. So you had to make 65 outbound calls a day. So 65 cold calls ⁓ during an eight hour day, which doesn't sound may not sound like a lot if you've never done it, but to do 65 calls a day to people you don't know, it's a lot of calls. Simon J Dudley (00:13:08) Well, I was in photocopy of sales, so it was worse. Mark Coxon (00:13:27) And if you have a book of business that's only 500 accounts, you're through your book of business in two weeks. So what do you do for the next two weeks? You can't call everybody back again a week later. ⁓ so you had to do a lot of prospecting. And then you had to do a lot of work on trying to figure out if people owned these accounts that you prospected. And then if nobody owned them, then you could call them. And so it was a it was a lot of work to just just to try to keep those metrics up, right? Like like you said, ⁓ it probably would have helped if my finger had been taped to the phone, actually. But ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:13:52) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:13:57) It it did. I mean, just for the record, and and I know that the world has moved on and you press a button now and la la. But ⁓ it did increase our call rate quite significantly because there was nothing else to do. You know, you couldn't sit there and go, ⁓ well, I'll I'll I'll go and check the infantry and the warehouse or I'll do ⁓ there's always something else to do, you know. It's like writing that report. The the house is beautifully vacuumed when when there's a report to write. ⁓ if your hand is set up to Mark Coxon (00:14:02) ⁓ Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:14:26) or Scotch tape to a to a handset, there's really nothing else to do. So Mark Coxon (00:14:30) Yeah. Mark Coxon (00:14:38) So I did that for I did that for two years ⁓ in that role. So about two years. I had become team lead after the first year, ⁓ which was ⁓ probably just a testament to my my aptitude for people because there were people there been there a lot longer than I had, but I was just I had quickly become the person that people asked a lot of questions of. How did you find this? Or which warehouse did you find this in? Or do you remember the part number for this thing? Or hey, that training we had the other day on XYZ. ⁓ you know, what what were they talking about again? And so I think management was seeing that the people on my team were using me as this resource. And so they were like, well, we should, we should make him lead and then he can be in a formal position to share these things and maybe get some of this ⁓ dialing off of his plate, you know, and and a little more helping ⁓ the other people find the resources that they need. I still had accounts and dials and quotas, so I still had to do all that. ⁓ but at some point I had graduated to talk time. So if I'd if I as long as I was on the phone with customers three hours a day, the dials didn't matter as much. ⁓ so there was some graduation there as you had owned accounts and accounts that were buying, as long as your quotas were being met and you were on a phone a certain amount of time. If it took me an hour and a half with three customers to work through four million dollars worth of orders, that was okay. I didn't need to make the extra 62 calls that day just to meet a number, right? So ⁓ anyways, yeah, so I it was. It was an interesting time. I mean, but yeah, I think I think for anybody that wants to do well in a customer facing role, like I worked in restaurants before that, right? So you're dealing with the public and everybody's bringing something different with them in and they all have different expectations and they all have different cultural norms. And and I worked in a hotel restaurant, which was even different, right? Because we had people coming from all over the world. It wasn't just locals from my region, right? So ⁓ I think that helped a lot and just learning how to deal with different people and ⁓ and ⁓ and learn their kind of cadence and the way that they communicated and what they would share and how open they were. And then getting into a technical sales role, you know, ⁓ again, I think the people part helped open the door. But then I had to become very curious and start to be able to catalog a lot of knowledge and and do those things. So for anybody that's wanting to do that, I think both of those things served me really, really well in my career as far as just being able to find rapport with people and being able to understand Mark Coxon (00:17:00) what was valuable to them ⁓ and figure out how I could put myself in a position to provide it. Right. Was really kind of the key to that. And yeah, sometimes sometimes it's reps. And if you want a lot of reps, you know, wait, wait, you know, forty tables a night or make sixty five calls a day, you get a lot of reps with people really, really quick. So Mark Coxon (00:17:45) yeah. Mark Coxon (00:17:49) All all three my kids work at In N Out Burger right now. You know, they work the counter, they're taking orders, they're cleaning dining rooms, they're learning how to do stuff, they're, you know, ⁓ they just they're learning some skill sets that I don't think you get when you're not in this public facing people interface role. And so, ⁓ you know, and in California, In and Out pays great. So they're there you are to boot, right? ⁓ And they they gamify their system, they have discrete levels, you have exact targets on what you need to learn in order to move up to the next pay raise. And it's why they have the least turnover of any fast food chain anywhere, is because ⁓ they actually have a plan for the way that there's professional development, even within something as a you know, a fast food restaurant. So ⁓ anyways, yeah, I've been they've been blessed to, I think, have that opportunity to do that as they've been going through school. And I think it's helped them them a lot too, just in dealing with. Teachers, other students, conflict, you know, it's great. Mark Coxon (00:18:48) Yeah, money's good. Then they don't have to ask me for it. So that's good. ⁓ no, never. Never, never. Mark Coxon (00:19:03) ⁓ Ha ha. Mark Coxon (00:19:20) Well, like I said, I had a friend who went to residential A V in Arizona. So I actually started in on the residential side. ⁓ you know, it was two thousand two. ⁓ housing market was going really, really well from two thousand two to two thousand eight. So there was this, you know, especially in Arizona. Arizona was one of those really fast growing markets. There's a lot of land available. Phoenix is a, you know, horizontal spread, you know, the sprawl. They have the sprawl, they can't go vertical, so they just start moving out. There's a lot of dirt in the desert, right? So They just started moving a lot of dirt and building a lot of houses. And we had contracts with builders like Toll Brothers and DR Horton and Shea Homes. And and we were doing, you know, these track neighborhoods for them. And then we were doing some custom homes as well. And ⁓ so yeah, I just I started meeting a lot of homeowners. I got into that, I got into that mode of AV there. But it it's funny that you said that ⁓ you think of me more as technical than sales, because I get I actually get that feedback quite a bit from a lot of people ⁓ who think that maybe my background was more in as a DE or, you know, sales engineer or or more from a technical training standpoint. I will say that ⁓ again, it was just the curiosity and the and the situation that I was in that created that. So when I worked for these really small companies, we didn't have sales engineers. We didn't have what they call four-legged sales calls, right? Where the salesperson does the talking and the sales engineer does the the translation of the talking into technical design and then gives it to the salesperson and then they translate it back to the customer. Right. So I know a lot of ⁓ companies use that. I think it's a great system. It's just not one that I had the advantage of having. So when I was talking to customers, I had to do all my own designs. So we're talking about their homes. I had to know the products. I had to know the designs. In fact, I had to go through the whole bill of materials all the way through ⁓ the mod plug, the insert, the mud ring, ⁓ I had to have all that stuff in my spreadsheet. And it wasn't automated. We weren't using a D tools or a whatever. We didn't have any of that back then. Like it was just, it was me manually inputting. I need 10 drops of cat five average runs of 85 feet. I need two mod plugs for each side. I need a decor insert for an RJ45. I need a ⁓ so I had to learn all that stuff just to get my order out the door. And then I had to be able to translate what I had done to my project manager so that he could actually go. Mark Coxon (00:21:42) have the technicians in the field install it and get it up and running. And then I usually had to do the training and turnover to the customer. So we didn't have anybody really customer facing on the back end. So hopefully it got built the way we all thought. And then at the end I had to teach the customer how to use it. Right. So so there was a lot of pressure on me to understand exactly what I was doing because I wasn't ever going to get to walk away from it. I had to be there at the end and I actually had to see if my work worked or not. ⁓ And I had to shake the customer's hand at the end and walk away. Saying, yes, I got what I paid for, and no, you didn't lie to me about anything. ⁓ I'm satisfied with what's here. So, because of that, I had to learn how to build everything from the ground up. ⁓ And I just never really lost that. So when I came into commercial AV in California in 2009, ⁓ housing market crashed, you know, residential AV was dead, especially Arizona. 90% of the market disappeared like in a month. I mean, we went from 60,000. ⁓ New home starts a year to 6,000 new home starts within like a month and a half. Right. So ⁓ like ⁓ really 90% of the market just fell out. ⁓ moved to California and got in with a museum firm. ⁓ And same thing. Like they did have some really great technical talent, but you know, they were a team of 12 people. So again, I had to do a lot of my own design. I had to do all that and translate it for the project managers. And then when I got into the manufacturer side, course if I'm repping a product, I'm talking to engineers who want to know the technical specifications of the product so they know how to specify it. And so ⁓ at you know, look when I was Chief Daylight Vadio, the tech specs weren't as tough. When I got to Barco and I was doing visualization and projection and things like that, tech specs became even more important. And I had to have the trust of that person that was going to specify the gear. So I always had to have that technical kind of background in order to do that. Or I felt at least that I should. And so I've always developed the technical skill set, even though today, like I don't touch anything on the design side. I don't do my own designs anymore. I don't do any of those things, but I can still have those conversations with customers and clients. ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:23:52) I I wish. ⁓ I wish. ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:23:59) Sorry, I went fast. Mark Coxon (00:24:48) Yeah, so yeah, I think I mean, here we go. Before it was obvious, right? ⁓ so for me, ⁓ the manufacturer ⁓ line of work was not something that I had really pursued ever in my career. ⁓ you know, I I started an integration and I just thought that's where I was probably gonna be because I was I was good at talking to people and finding out their needs and creating systems that fix those needs. ⁓ and I liked having the breadth of the conversation. ⁓ you know, I lost a job in 2013 and I was looking for another job, and I was in interviewing with a lot of integrators in 2013, and I also interviewed with Chief or Milestone at the time before LeGrand bought, you know, Chief and that group. But it was pretty much Chief and Daylight were milestone at the time. Vadoyo was still its own company. ⁓ so it was Chief and Daylight, it was milestone AV. ⁓ and Quite frankly, even the gentleman that hired me, Jay Rowe, who I've thanked profusely over the years, but I'll say thank you again to Jay, because I really needed the job at the time and I had two, you know, three small kids at home, ⁓ you know, took a chance on me, right? Like I didn't have a manufacturer background. I didn't have a book of business. I hadn't worked for his biggest competitor in the region and already knew all the purchasing managers and all the engineering managers. And we see this a lot in A V, right? Where you see a lot of lateral movement, the person doing The job for company ABC ends up doing that same job for company XYZ and brings that book of business, that Rolodex with them. And it makes an easy transition with just a new polo shirt, right? Like it's ⁓ it you we see that a lot. Mark Coxon (00:26:36) Usually, yeah. You there there is a pro yeah. Mark Coxon (00:26:44) There is a problem with that. And I'm not I haven't been immune to changing jobs, so I can't I can't really bash on it too much. But ⁓ yeah, that's that's really how that typically works. And so, you know, I remember at the end of the day I'd went out to Minnesota and interviewed with a bunch of the folks at milestone and and ⁓ at the end of the day when it came time to kind of make a decision, Jay looked at me and he's like, Hey, I've interviewed a lot of people for this job and a lot of them are much more qualified for it than you are. And At that point in time, I thought I wasn't getting the offer because it just that that part of conversation didn't go too well. ⁓ And he just looked at me and he said, But anytime I've gone against my gut, like it's come back to bite me. And that being said, I've written you an offer, you know, ⁓ and ⁓ you know, got into the manufacturing side of the business really because I needed a job, they needed a rep. ⁓ and it was just it was an opportunity that came to me through friends, ⁓ Twitter. You know, went to work for me and found out that this position was open, guy named Joel Hagan, who worked at Milestone as a twit as their social media guy, Chris Neto, ⁓ this woman named Michelle Montezari, Mitch Golden that I interviewed with in the local market. And it just in three days I had that job. So I interviewed on a Tuesday in California, I interviewed on Thursday in Minnesota, and I came home Thursday night with the offer in my hand. So like the quickest three day process ever to make that happen. ⁓ and so it felt meant to be. I will say that I went back the other way. I work for an integrator again. And a lot of people thought that was kind of crazy, right? Like, why would you leave the manufacturer life? ⁓ some people see it as a graduation, I think, because you get out of the project-based craziness that sometimes happens in integration. Like nobody likes having to be on a job site on a Saturday at nine PM because on Monday morning that system needs to go and the other trades were behind and you got access to the building four weeks late and now you're still made, you've got to make up the time and the schedule somehow, right? ⁓ Like ⁓ someone else's delays never affect your delivery date somehow in A V. We haven't figured out how to actually get a rolling delivery date based on interdependencies. But ⁓ you know Mark Coxon (00:28:57) That's the part of A V that I think it's wearing in integration over time and why I think some people see manufacturers kind of a graduation of that, right? Like you you still have deadlines and order dates and ⁓ backlogs and all those things you have to manage. And there's certainly fire drills in managing some of that. But at the end of the day, like you're one step removed from the customer and you're one step removed from that pressure. So Mark Coxon (00:29:42) It is. Yeah. Mark Coxon (00:29:56) Yeah. Mark Coxon (00:30:28) Yeah. I I totally get it. And that honestly, that's kind of why I came back ⁓ to the integration side, because for me, I I was I missed seeing the end product delivered. So I missed seeing the customer turn it on and be excited about using the thing that they had only seen in their head until that point. I missed having that initial conversation of like, and I would try to ask my vendors all the time, like, okay, well, what are they doing in this room? I know you're asking me for a UDX, you know. 30K or whatever, but what are they doing in this room? And they're like, well, we didn't really know. The you IT guy just gave me this spec and I need to give them a quote. And I'm like, man, like, why aren't we asking these questions? Right. Like in my mind, I'm like, I really want to know what this project is, even though I'm just the vendor and my job is to provide a price and availability of a product. Like I wanted to know what was going on in the room still. I was too curious still about the actual project. And so for me, getting back to the integration side got me back to The front end of the of the conversation, right? I get I get to talk to people about what they're trying to accomplish. I get to talk to people about what they're trying to do. I get to help them potentially think about options that they hadn't thought about yet. And then, like you said, you get to build best of breed, right? Because you're an integrator with all of these products at your disposal. Like, and the more you know about what they are, the better you are at building the best of breed solution, which makes it kind of fun too. Like, hey, I know, I know three things about this product that it Like nobody else knows, and I know how to use it in a special way that nobody else has really used it before ⁓ to deliver a new result. And so ⁓ I get I really geeked out, geek out on that part. ⁓ I just I like helping people solve problems. And I felt like a lot of times on the manufacturer side, I was I was managing registrations, bids, backlogs, ⁓ process. Yeah. Mark Coxon (00:32:22) And ⁓ that's not to say that I didn't love supporting my dealers. I I will say the people here and s I usually I supported mostly California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii, and the dealers I got to work with, amazing and still a ton of friends. I still get I still get in trouble every once in a while because I'll like something one of my friends posts, but they work for a competitor of mine or something. And people are like, Are you trying to get a job over at XYZ? And I'm like, No, I'm not trying to go anywhere. I promise. I just know Bob ⁓ and he's always been good to me. So I just liked his stuff. I'm not I'm not trying to not trying to jump ship. Mark Coxon (00:33:36) ⁓ Yeah. And honestly, like even when I worked on the vendor side, I mean, now that I don't do it, I can say it. But like if there was something I didn't believe in, I didn't, I didn't push it forward. Honestly. Like I played Macy Santa's Santa Claus a lot. Like, you know what? I see what you're trying to do now. And you actually shouldn't buy this thing. Like, you should go buy this other piece of equipment because it's gonna do it better than this is for what you're trying to do. And I will tell you, like, that probably sold me more of the products that were the right fit because. You know, I would have vendors come to me and and ask me, like, if you know, like when I worked for when I worked for Milestone, you know, they had three brands. And I was only responsible for one of them at the time. It was before LeGran kind of consolidated that, but I was responsible for one brand. I had people come to me and say, Hey, if I buy your sister brands, does that help you personally? They were just gonna switch to sister brands just to help me. You know, e b because if the products were very similar. You know, you're buying a projection screen and you know, Draper makes a great screen and Daylight makes a great screen and Stuart makes a great screen. And so does AV Stumpfel, right? Like the four of them make pretty decent screens and they probably make some pretty comparable products. ⁓ one of them may have, you know, an edge in certain categories over another, but for the most part, you're not going to get hurt if you stick with, you know, the majors, right? But they were like, hey, we'll switch from one of the other majors to you if it helps you. You know? And it, I mean, that means that goes a long way. Like when you have those kind of relationships in the industry. Now, I I told them it doesn't help me personally. So do what's good for your business, right? ⁓ maybe I should have said, you know, buy, buy more because it helped the company as a whole. But I was, I'm just always kind of been honest. And I think, you know, what you said about the the industry and it being about people, you know, I've always said like, I got to work in this industry for another 20 years. I'm not independently wealthy. Right. Like, ⁓ and yeah, the the the brand might have been the the at fault or the product might have been at fault, but I'm the one who stood in front of them, shook their hand, and took their money. Like at the end of the day, I did that. ⁓ And I've got to work in this industry for 20 years. So I don't want to have to explain that when it goes wrong. Like if I know it's going to go wrong, I'm just I'm not going to take it. Because for better or worse, I'm going to have to I'm going to be accountable for that to somebody at some point. Right. And so I've always tried to play long game, honestly. Mark Coxon (00:36:01) and maybe that's why I'm not lighting cigars with fifties at this point, because I have played long game, but I've I've really tried to play long game ⁓ and, you know, navigate with integrity as much as I can. And have there been things that I regret or things that didn't always go right? Of course, it it happens in any career, but ⁓ not because of lack of trying for sure. So Mark Coxon (00:37:03) Yeah. I mean, there there are very few products. ⁓ you know, there was a time, there was a time in A V where ⁓ you know, products were mystery black boxes. You couldn't find any info online, everything was gated, right? So there was no internet, you couldn't figure out what XYZ product did ⁓ unless you were a dealer that had access to the super secret, you know, spec sheet. ⁓ and, you know, ⁓ I honestly think it was You know, I know some people pine for that because those were the days of 30 and 40 points of protected margin with products nobody could shop. And, you know, that was great for that part of the industry, but I think it encouraged a lot of bad behavior because people didn't have to explain themselves. If somebody needed something, you could charge them whatever you want. ⁓ I had one manufacturer, you know, back in my residential days that I I kept trying to get a retail price out of them. I'm like, we want to sell this thing, but we don't know what to quote it at. Like, what should I quote it at? And they said, well, it depends on how much the person's house cost. And I said, What? And he goes, Well, you know, if they're in a $500,000 house, it's a $5,000 box. And if they're in a $300,000 house, it's a $2,500 box. I'm like, but it's same box. And he's they're like, no, that's the way we do it, you know? So ⁓ so there was so much of that kind of like slimy used car mentality in some of that age, I think, that I'm glad I wasn't, I was I kind of came in at the tail end of it. You know, internet was starting to get big in 2000. Most people were getting internet in their homes and, you know, it was still some AOL in what is dot com when I was working at IBM. Google wasn't quite the everyday name that it is now. But ⁓ you know, I I feel I feel a little ⁓ I guess privileged that I was able to come in in a place where there's a little more transparency and you have to compete a little bit more on merit, not on mystery, right? Like the mystery, the margins in the mystery. I That is the worst phrase I ever heard in my life. Like I j I that phrase makes me cringe, right? Like if we can confuse the customer enough, then they they'll pay whatever we say because they actually don't understand what they're getting. I'm like the margin isn't the mystery. The value, the value is in how you communicate how the thing's gonna solve their problem. Right. Like for me, that's always been the the trick. So I don't know. Some people, some people still love that phrase, but I it's one that's always rubbed me the wrong way. Mark Coxon (00:39:42) Yeah. Yep. Mark Coxon (00:39:57) Yeah. Mark Coxon (00:40:38) Yeah. ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:40:44) Yes. ⁓ it's a hundred percent yeah, ⁓ a hundred percent in that way. I think I think it's one of those interesting pieces. You know, we ⁓ the Gartner Gartner research, and this is years old now, you know, would always talk about like the tip of the arrow, right? Like that a customer is sixty through or sixty plus percent of their way through the buying cycle when they engage a vendor. So they've already done, like you said, they've already done online education, they've already done some online research, they already might know retail pricing. ⁓ they might have three or four already isolated three or four people that they know they can buy the product from. And a lot of times they're coming to you for ⁓ verification, availability, and price, final price, right? Like that's really what they're looking for. ⁓ and so like one of the things, but I don't always know exactly what the research they did was or how comprehensive it was, right? So I will say as a salesperson now, one of the most most important ⁓ things that Or one of the things that has yielded the most value for both me and customers has been can you ⁓ take five minutes ⁓ to walk me through how you got to where you're at right now? So it sounds like you've done a lot of research. You already have a product in mind. ⁓ Obviously, you've already got some, you know, some information on the product and and you think the ⁓ reasons that you think it's gonna, you know, deliver the value that you think you can. Can you give me five minutes to just walk me through? What the problem was, what you quickly researched, and how you got to where you're at now. And it's funny because customers wanna tell you what they did. Often they do. It helps them shine, right? Like, hey, look, this is what I did. you know, the CEO came to me and said, This is a problem and we got to fix it. And I knew these three things. So I went out and found this product. And I I knew enough to know how this worked that I thought this would work for our problem. And they go through this thing. And as they do that, you get to ask some questions. well, how did you, you know? How did you decide between, you know, SDVOE on a 10 gig network and just doing it through your normal switches? ⁓ and then sometimes they're like, we did this. Or another times they're like, we actually hadn't looked at that option. Is that something we should have looked at? ⁓ So I will ask questions that kind of drop breadcrumbs that may expose some gaps. And then if those gaps are something that are valuable, they'll they'll pick them up and we explore them together. And then if even if we move through with exactly what they asked for. Mark Coxon (00:43:05) They now have a clearer vision of the alternatives that they dismissed and why they dismissed them to get to the solution that they have. And so going through that process for me has like that's the process where I feel like I'm adding a ton of value to the customer. Now, the end result may be they buy the exact same thing they came and asked for. But I guarantee you the next time they're doing research, they call me. So they call me before the 59% of the work and they go. You know what, Mark really helped us vet a lot of things last time that we might have missed. Instead of just doing a whole bunch of online research, why don't we call him and see if we can get a little workshop together and work through this and then find out and then get to a specification that we need to chase? Right. Mark Coxon (00:44:02) Yeah. ⁓ Bad sales is you working only on the PO. You have to work on the PO at some point, but if your only purpose is the PO. Mark Coxon (00:44:12) Yes. Mark Coxon (00:44:29) Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I I do the same with presentations. You know, we we have you know, I I talk to a lot of people about ⁓ communication and presentation and you know, I've written for industry publications for the last, you know, fourteen, fifteen years. I've done you know, a lot of panels and speaking and things of that nature. And I was having a discussion with an executive the other day and he asked me, goes, What do you think most salespeople think the ⁓ point of or the The point of a presentation is. And I said PO. And he said, yeah, most of them do think that. And but I've always said, you know, like when you when you open a presentation, your goal should not be completion. So like your goal isn't to get through your 42 slides and say all the things that you want to say. That should never be the goal of that meeting. The goal of that meeting should be connection. So you're going to bring that so you don't, so you're not just winging it, right? Like, If nobody in the room says a word, if I have zero connection, I've still got something to do and something to say in this room for the 40 minutes. But my biggest, my biggest goal is that somebody derails me five minutes in and we start talking about something relevant to what they actually need me to help them solve. Right. And that just something in that process prompts that trust, connection, or or ⁓ spark. That causes them to want to pursue that piece. So if I leave that room with, if I leave that room with someone saying, you know what, like we have four projects we need to talk about. Let's let's get some time on the calendar and start working through some of these problems. For me, that's much better than a one-time sale. ⁓ and I think too many people worry about just getting through the deck. Like they're so nervous about the public speaking and being in front of the PowerPoint slides that they just start running through all this verbiage and they forget to look around the room and see who's see who's interested, see who's connecting, see where somebody's eyes light up. Like, wait, we should spend ten minutes on that because like five people in the room just leaned forward when I said this word. Like, but they're not watching for it. Right. So for me that's Mark Coxon (00:46:37) Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:47:13) Yeah. Yeah. Well, a hundred percent. Well, I well, and I say, and I think there's so many ways that you know you create that engagement. And I'll I'll give you some kudos here. I'll give you some flowers on your own show. I will say that my first ever experience with you was online. And it was ⁓ probably in 2013 or 14. You were still with Life Size. So this is a while ago. So so probably sometime around that window, maybe 2010 or 11, maybe in that area, somewhere around there. ⁓ You were at a conference and you were talking about the danger of calling technologies by an overarching term. And you were saying video teleconferencing. Well, what is that? Right. And you went through this thing of like, well, let's say transportation device. Well, a car is a transportation device, a bicycle is a transportation device, a scooter's a transportation device. Like, but these things are nowhere near the same. But somehow, like when we're an A V, we're grouping all these things into one category. that has this wide range of meaning and cost. And then we wonder why customers are confused about like what we're trying to talk to them about. I don't know if you remember using this analogy of the scooter to the do you don't really? ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:48:26) It it stuck with me. No, it stuck with me because it was one of those things that like I was kind of newer into commercial A V and I was doing museums. So I wasn't a traditional life-sized Handberg polycom dealer. ⁓ you know, and and the soft codec hadn't really broke through yet. And so, you know, I was I was doing more experiential work, you know, like if you're building an exhibit on bird calls or the alumni center for University of Oregon, you're not worried about a teleconferencing room, right? You're You're doing other stuff. But it just stuck with me because I thought, that's really interesting. Like he's he's really good at capturing someone's attention. And I think in that same talk you talked about the hyper loop. You're like, everybody's talking about this hyper loop. He goes, You're like, the hyper loop is a hundred and forty year old idea that nobody's ever capitalized on, right? Like, ⁓ so yeah. ⁓ and and then he put Teslas in tunnels instead, right? Like ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:49:33) So I'm sorry. Mark Coxon (00:50:12) Mm-hmm. Mark Coxon (00:50:45) geez. ⁓ Product that was horrible that I had to interact with that was a disaster. ⁓ well I'm not gonna I'm not gonna put brands on blast. Do I have to put a brand on blast? I don't really want to put a brand on. I do. Okay. ⁓ So ⁓ you know, when ⁓ when when daylight first came out with idea screen. So idea screen, if you didn't know, was like a whiteboard that you can project on, which is actually a brilliant idea for a product. Because ⁓ people were projecting, teachers, ⁓ elementary schools, et cetera, they have these whiteboards in class and they don't want to do a a ⁓ manual pull down or the cost of an electric drop-down screen in a classroom in an elementary school times 50 classrooms at four, five, six grand a pop if they don't have a lot of money in the district, right? So, ⁓ and then the the manual screens just ⁓ they take up more space. You have to you have to pull it down, then project. So their thought was like, we already have these whiteboards. The whiteboards, why don't we coat these whiteboards with with a gain coating so they don't bloom out? Because pro teachers were already projecting on their whiteboards anyway, which were ceramic. They were getting really, really poor results because the reflectivity isn't uniform, right? And you get these big white blotches in the middle of the screen where the bulb centers up and and you really weren't getting good things. So, like, why don't we make a projection screen that we can write on with markers? ⁓ and it It was a great idea. And and eventually they perfected it. But I will say that in the first in the first few months of that product being out, whatever coding they would use did not release markers. And so you would get all of this ghosting. ⁓ the markers wouldn't erase. And so, like if you were trying to project and you wanted to erase the screen, like you would still have very faint definitions of like math problems and stuff like that. And so like Would you rather have the hotspot blooming, or would you rather have a bunch of like marker marks on the on the video that you're watching? Right. And so ⁓ yeah, there were there were some there were some issues with that in the beginning. And I I'd say the other thing that happened ⁓ most of the time with that product, and it was this wasn't Daylight's fault. This was a logistics thing. They would crate the hell out of these things to try to keep them because you got to ship them in one big piece. So imagine you're shipping a hundred and thirty-three inch screen. Well, it's it's a it's a rigid surface. Mark Coxon (00:53:02) So this has to be in a big crate that stores vertically in a truck. You can't stack step on top of it. It'll bend. And then you got to be able to load these things in. And I swear, man, whoever whoever the forklift drivers were, they must have had like magnets for idea screens on the front of their forks because like every single one of those boxes got punctured and there'd be forklift like scratches in the surface of the screen. And so the delivery of them in the beginning was like a nightmare as well. I think they finally figured all that stuff out. But when you talk about like new products coming to market, I think there's always that that piece where it's like, hey, this is actually a really good fit. It's a good product. It should work. And you feel confident in it. And then you start to see some of the things happen and you kind of have to wait it out. So ⁓ you know, to their credit, they went and replaced like I think they replaced hundreds of them with schools and stuff with new versions when they came out. So they they made it right by who they were talking to because they're a stand-up company. But ⁓ yeah, in the beginning it was not ⁓ it was not fun. And those phone calls were not fun. Like ⁓ you just knew, like somebody called, like, hey, I got this, I'm projecting on the screen, and you're like, he's gonna tell me he can't get the markers off the board. You know, you just get the phone call and you're like, You already know. You already know. I will say the worst call though that I ever fielded, and this wasn't a manufacture call, but this was an integration call. Cause I think this is a more fun story, honestly. That's why I'm gonna tell it to you. ⁓ So the worst call, the worst phone call I ever got. ⁓ we had a a gentleman who was bought a bunch of back boxes for their residential speakers. So they were, you know, so your speakers aren't just amplifying up into open attic space above. You want to contain the sound and create a box. Like if it was, you know, in a cabinet on a on a on a table, speaker has a cabinet. You don't leave the driver out on a flat piece of wood and and not let not create a back for it. ⁓ So they made these rubberized back boxes that you could squish through the round hole. It would create a rubber back box and then the speaker would have its own container. really cool product. ⁓ so he bought a bunch of them. And ⁓ of course whoever did the install didn't put them in. ⁓ so he, being an engineer himself, when he got into his house after he moved into his home and he heard how terrible his audio was sounding, he decided to pull one of the speakers and realized that the back boxes weren't back there. ⁓ All right. So we had to come back and we had to put all these back boxes back in the speaker. So the technicians came back, put all the back boxes in. ⁓ But apparently the Mark Coxon (00:55:26) The speakers didn't have ⁓ symmetrical. He had rectangular speakers, ⁓ but he didn't they didn't have ⁓ symmetrical screws. So two screws were on top, two were on the bottom, and the ones in the middle weren't really in the middle. They were maybe shifted a third of the way up. So if you don't put it in right, they don't go with the bracket. So like half of the speakers, the guy would put them in, put four screws in, go to the middle, and then they weren't grabbing on anything. So Instead of taking it out, flipping it around, putting it back in, and putting the fifth and sixth screws in, they just put the grill on it, thinking, well, customers never gonna see that the screws aren't in there. We'll just put the grill on it. It hides everything and we'll go on our way. ⁓ So I get this phone call. ⁓ if you ever get a phone call that anybody listening, if you ever get a phone call that starts like this, you're in trouble. ⁓ Mark, let me tell you something about professional integrity. ⁓ ⁓ And then he proceeds to tell me what happened. ⁓ And of course, I can't argue with his point. It's we're a hundred percent in the wrong twice. And he says, you know, I checked them once. ⁓ Wouldn't these guys know I'm gonna check them again? Like, so anyways, he he said, you know, I I told him I'd get him the I'd have the guys come back. He goes, No, nobody's coming back in my house. He goes, what you're gonna do, because they didn't leave the screws, they threw them all away because they didn't want me to know they didn't put them in. You're going to find the parts ⁓ and you are going to bring them to me tonight to my house and you are going to hand them to me and I am going to fix them myself and I will work at the builder for whatever refund I think I need to get. ⁓ And ⁓ I did. I showed up at his house at eight at night. I had a handful of screws that I had to go pull out of product because we don't just have spare parts ⁓ and shelf all that product until we could get it. you know, replaced and then ⁓ hand him his stuff, look him in the eyes, tell him I'm sorry in person and and leave. So ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:57:29) He honestly with me, he was icy calm. He was not he was not ⁓ yeah, he was not ad he was not yelling, he was not agitated, he was very direct, but he wanted to look at me face to face ⁓ as our last interaction ⁓ as I handed him stuff for the problem that we caused. ⁓ Like It's like I reminded it it reminded me of my mom making me go get the paddle out of the drawer, right? Like go get the paddle out of the drawer because you know you're about to get beat, but you had to go get it. You're like the psychological torture of going and getting it. So that drive with the screws in my, you know, box of screws on my passenger seat in my car for 35 minutes or whatever it took me to get to his house. That was just like psychological torture. ⁓ You know. And I probably would have felt better if he yelled at me, honestly. Like then if ⁓ Mark Coxon (00:58:24) Yeah. ⁓ yeah, yeah, just terrible human. Mark Coxon (00:59:06) ⁓ so I will say originally, ⁓ my first CTS I got because I worked at Milestone Le Grande, they required you to get your general. They wanted you to have at least your general. If you're gonna go in and talk to engineers, they wanted you to have CTS. And so they paid for it ⁓ and they wanted you to study for it and you go get that. And that was something that they preferred that everybody do. I don't know that it was absolutely required, but we all did it, right? ⁓ so I got my first one. ⁓ then ⁓ as I was going through, I so I'm kind of a, I don't know, I guess I'm a geek about exclusivity in a way. So at the time I found out there were less than 250 people in like 2013 that had a CTSD and a CTSI that had them both. Now I think it's still under a thousand people worldwide, but but at the time it was like 250 people or so had it. And I'm like, hmm. That'd be interesting to be part of that club. We get your D and your I, you know. And so I I ⁓ I ran my mouth on Rave and said I was gonna go get them all. ⁓ And I kind of did that just to force myself to do it. Cause I knew if I publicly, you know, ⁓ put it out there that I was gonna go do this thing, that I would, I would go do it. ⁓ And it took me a little longer ⁓ to do. I think it took me two or three years to get them both. I was gonna try to get them in a year and It took me, it took me like a year and a half to get the D and another year and a half to get the I, just based on studying and getting through. And I didn't pass a D the first time. I had to, I got like 347 on the first one. I took none of the classes. I did none of the stuff and I I missed it by like three points. And so I had to retake it. ⁓ But ⁓ but yeah, so I ended up with both of them. ⁓ And ⁓ I think they've helped me a lot. I'll say ⁓ the reason being ⁓ number one, it makes you be conscious about continuing education. So I'm curious anyway. I I still like to learn things, but ⁓ if you are just learning the things that you want to learn, sometimes you don't grow. Right. So like when you're saying Barco, like Barco made a lot of great products. I hated selling ClickShare because I thought it was boring. It wasn't that it was an awesome product, it was an awesome product. Especially 2016, 17, 18, when we didn't have like screen sharing through our soft codecs and all that stuff worked out yet. Like ⁓ it was the product that everybody needed. Mark Coxon (01:01:36) I just thought it was boring. It was a USB button. Like it's really I mean, yeah, it works. It's awesome. It's but it's boring to me. So, you know, so I wanted to sell advanced visualization. I wanted to sell E2 and E3 video processors. I wanted to sell, you know, 4K projectors, ⁓ true four K RGB projectors. I wanted to know the difference between, you know, a projector that used a twenty fifty twenty-five sixty chip that moved around versus a full four K mirror, you know. ⁓ in a projector, like I wanted to know all that stuff. And then when I was talking to people, I wanted to understand like when I was giving them a technical recommendation, I wanted them to know that I had a basis other than I make more on this one because I'm a sales guy, right? Like that one's more expensive. So of course I want to sell that one. Okay. No, but if we go with this one, this is what we gain. And if you go down a level, it costs you 10,000 less. And these are the four things you're going to lose. If those things aren't important to you, let's save the money. If those things are Deal breaker, let's make sure that we invest now and you get something you actually want to use long term. But I think the D in the I gave me the street cred in that room because the guy I'm talking to had the D and he took the test. And so when he'd see it on my card, he's like, you have your CTSD. I'm just this isn't just some guy trying to sell me a product off a spec sheet. Like he actually, and then they would ask me a question and I would actually know most of the answer. ⁓ and they'd be like, ⁓ okay. And so I think that D in the I gave me a foothold to walk in the backdoor of some engineering departments that I wouldn't have got access to through sales if I didn't have them. ⁓ and so I've I've kept them just for that. I I've I find them valuable just for being in a room and having a conversation and ⁓ and and people understanding that I take my career seriously, that I'm continuing to take these, you know. learning units that I spent the time taking the tests that ⁓ you know, I didn't take them once and say I did it and then let them lapse, you know, and make sure I do them every three years and and keep them up. And I have to take classes that maybe necessarily I wouldn't have normally taken. Right. Because you have to get 15 D credits, you have to get 15 I credits. ⁓ there are a lot of ways to get them, but you have to get, you know, I can't take general credits anymore because I have to maintain 15 for the D and 15 for the I. I can't take Mark Coxon (01:03:57) I can't take like, you know, mounting procedure of 55-inch TV and just do that once every three years and get points for it anymore. I have to take some more advanced level stuff just to keep the higher certifications. So ⁓ yeah. So, anyways, it's been I think it's been valuable. And it's funny because I I made a I didn't make fun of it, but I had a lot of criticism of CTS before I got it. ⁓ you know, my first my first public ⁓ I guess comments on CTS was it's not like a driver's license. You know, people are well, it's like a driver's license. It doesn't say you can drive, but but it it says at least you know the basics, right? Cause I would say there are a lot of people with CTS that aren't doing a great job. ⁓ and Avixa has no way to strip a CTS from someone. And they would say, Well, it's like a driver's license. I'm like, No, the state can take away your driver's license. If you prove you're not a great driver over time, ⁓ you will accumulate points. And at some point somebody's gonna say, you know what, you don't get to drive anymore. that doesn't happen, you know, in our industry, we don't police certificate holders to check the quality of their work. ⁓ that's up to the employer to to keep a a hold on. But I had some I had a little bit of I had a little bit of criticism of that in the beginning that, you know, people are paying this money and and marketing. And the other thing that I always thought was, you know, a little little weird was, you know, the stance from Avixa had always been that ⁓ it was up to the holders to market themselves. And I'm like, well, wait, you're the industry association. Shouldn't you be marketing why? Architects and consultants and customers should be looking for people that have CTS. If you think of like the realtor, hire a licensed realtor. You remember those commercials, right? Like that wasn't that wasn't Keller Williams doing that. That was the realtor association doing that and making sure you were hiring somebody licensed to handle your stuff. So ⁓ I always was like, why isn't why aren't they doing a little more to get out there and get our credentials recognized like a C C N A or a C C N P or a CPA or anything, right? Like, why aren't we getting those recognized with our customers a little more? So ⁓ I'll say it hasn't always been sunny. ⁓ but I'm in a good place with Avixa right now and my certification. So I'm proud to say that you know, all those things got worked out. But ⁓ anyways, yeah. So it wasn't always like I was a fanboy either, which was kind of part of that journey, right? ⁓ yeah, yeah. Mark Coxon (01:06:27) ⁓ almost five years. Yeah. Mark Coxon (01:06:34) I think I think we are an amazing, ⁓ I honestly think we're an amazing place. I I will tell you this is ⁓ so I've been at three places for five years. Maybe maybe this is the fourth that I've been at for almost five years. I was at ⁓ I was at ⁓ milestone for four. I was at my residential company in Arizona for five, and I was at Mad Systems in Orange for four. ⁓ so I may be dangerously close to this being my longest tenure at a company in my career at five years. ⁓ it was joked about at one of the summits that they would be the first people to keep me for six years. That was one of the goals that people wrote on the board. ⁓ It's like for first company to keep Mark for six years. ⁓ that's happening for sure. Like I this is the this has been five years of me not even looking at sideways at anything. ⁓ so I really feel like I've found a home. ⁓ and I think I've found a home because you know, our whole group is just based on. experience ⁓ design and ⁓ and human impact. ⁓ And I I just geek out on that. Like all my casual reading is ⁓ behavioral psychology. Like right now I'm reading this ⁓ Safe Danger by Ben Swire about how you ⁓ foster ⁓ safety in workplaces to get better innovation and how you can stretch the boundaries of what's what is safe in order to put people kind of in a place where they have psychological safety but they go outside the box a little bit. ⁓ I this kind of stuff I think about all the time. And the systems that we build either require that kind of thinking in the beginning in the iteration, or they require us to get our customers to start to think this way to expand their definition of what's possible. Right. And so I get really passionate about having those type of conversations. And I've been really blessed to have mentors like Julian Phillips and Chris Rogers who have helped me really find my stride ⁓ within this group. I think For the industry, I think the great part is is I think we're seeing, you know, we always talked about the convergence of A V and IT and all these things, right? ⁓ that was a 10-year conversation that was inevitable in some point that we were gonna have A V signals on ⁓ on IP networks, which is pretty prominent now. ⁓ But I think we're in this we're in this accelerated phase of, you know, ⁓ companies no longer wanna have siloed information, right? They don't want to have all of these different Mark Coxon (01:08:58) You don't want facilities to own the occupancy data and IT to own the Teams room data and HR to own the attendance and access and ⁓ building, you know, data. ⁓ Like ⁓ you want to be able to connect the dots on these things to have like real world impact on what's happening ⁓ throughout someone's day or throughout your real estate portfolio or any of those things. And I think, you know, in the past, the the problem has always been that we've built all these things on different software backbones. ⁓ And obviously with today with what people are doing with AI and model context protocol and ⁓ aggregators and all of these things, like all of a sudden these data sources can be connected together a lot, lot easier than they used to. I mean, you could always go out and hire a company to do some really high-end integration between Salesforce and your ERP and you could spend millions of dollars connecting your back end systems together to get fifty percent of the result you wanted. ⁓ The amount of money it's gonna take to do that in the future is gonna be drastically less. And you're gonna be able to get a lot more access to the things you want to actually do make decisions. And I think as A V people, we have this amazing opportunity to take the lead on it. So we're already in the meeting room, we're already got IT contacts, we've already got A V contacts, we've already got facilities contacts. we're not all security companies or building automation companies, but there's a real case for us to be the master systems integrator. in a lot of these ⁓ in a lot of these types of projects, if we bring on a little bit more of those skill sets. And so I'm just seeing the opportunity for a fully connected ecosystem of technology in the workplace ⁓ to finally come to fruition. I think it's really exciting to kind of pursue that, right? Like what is the digital workplace experience ⁓ of the future ⁓ and how do all these systems not work in silos and bring those together? So ⁓ and it's it's the same even with What IT comp you know, like if you think of control rooms, they've always handled things in silos too, right? Like you have a cybersecurity threat team and you have somebody that's watching your your physical security, and then you have somebody that's watching your supply chain. ⁓ but now threats don't stay in a lane, right? Like think of like what's going on right now. You know, if if all of a sudden, you know, the talks fall through with Iran, ⁓ guess what? Cybersecurity tax are gonna go up. Mark Coxon (01:11:22) Because all a sudden we have bad actors that wanna get into networks and cause us some pain and disruption. So that happens. Then HR needs to know which countries we have employees in that might need to either figure out not to go to a physical office and be able to work remotely or get them out of the country based on travel policies, et cetera. Then you have to worry about which components come out of which countries and are they gonna be stuck in the street, right? Like, so all of a sudden that one thing that happened. has like 15 downstream effects that affect all these different teams within your business. And then if you know your supply chain's disrupted, then all of a sudden you should be going through your CRM and finding out everybody who's buying a product or expecting one in the next three months that needs this component that you're not going to get. And sales all of a sudden needs to get on the phone and start managing expectations. Right. But in the past you've never had your ERP connected to your CRM, connected to your cybersecurity team, connected to your HR database. Like We never had that, right? But now you can. And so the amount of business intelligence that if we start to be able to connect the dots in an intelligent way, the amount of business intelligence and productivity we can get out of just being more efficient in the sharing of information across silos ⁓ is like so huge. So ⁓ I'm I'm excited kind of for this next chapter to see where we end up playing the role in that. But I think That's the biggest opportunity for technology and businesses today is to really start to break down these individual software, hardware silos ⁓ and connect business intelligence. Cause they said, you know, like 67% ⁓ of business interruption could be eliminated if systems were connected. Like most people saw a threat, but they just didn't share the info. And then the team that needed it didn't have it. And so something happen something bad happens. And business interruption is like the biggest cost any business can go through. you know, for the most part. So anyways, it's a it's a long winded answer, but I think I think the landscape of technology has been changing so fast that I think we have this really cool opportunity to redefine what it means to be ⁓ at the forefront of it. Mark Coxon (01:13:56) Yeah. Mark Coxon (01:14:04) Yeah. Mark Coxon (01:14:08) Yeah, well, I mean I mean, I'm writing right now on adaptability and the the gap between human adaptability and and technological change, right? Like that's the thesis of this this book that I'm writing right now. And when I think about that, ⁓ think about exactly what you just said, you know, ⁓ I kind of come of it at it from a biological perspective is that ⁓ i and when you look at any species, ⁓ biodiversity is the biggest indicator of species health. You have to have variation in order to draw traits from. But variation requires you to maintain things that aren't advantageous right now in order for things to in order for them to become valuable in the future. Right. And in biology, we have mutation that does that. Genetic mutation keeps producing new traits. And then those traits will either be found to be valuable or not valuable ⁓ over the course of generations and either wash out or become dominant. Right. Like that's the way that that works. And in organizations, if we get in this sameness thing, yeah, like we can hire 18 people that all have the same mindset and they'll produce this widget together four times faster than if we hired some people from outside the the unit. Great. But what if that widget is no longer the thing that the world needs? ⁓ You've got all these people with these very narrow view of product development in the world that can't pivot because they just don't have the experience, background, breadth, variation. They don't have it. They that you can't draw from what you don't have, right? And so S ⁓ Mark Coxon (01:16:15) Yeah, and you have to not not so much. Or like the biggest, one of the biggest kind of 20th century examples is the they have the speckled moth that was in in the UK, right? ⁓ in London. Or where was it? It was ⁓ I forget the city, Manchester, I think. But the speckled moth. So like the speckled moth, the most dominant version of that was a light colored moth. And they had a dark version. It was never too more than two percent of the population. ⁓ Happened like that all the way up until like the 1890s because the trees there had dark bark, but they had white lichen on them. So when the moth landed on a tree, bird couldn't see it. ⁓ industrial revolution happened. Soot, coal killed the lichen, tree bark went dark, soot cut made the bark darker. 98% of the population became the black moths because the white one stuck up, stuck out like a sore thumb. And then in 1956, seven, like Clean Air Act, a whole bunch of stuff happened. Soot started to go away. Now the black moth is 2% of the population again. Because the white ones now are thriving. The lichen came back and they're back on the thing. But if you didn't have those two versions, what you have is an extinct species. They were both speckled moths and they both had certain traits, but those traits became advantageous during a certain environmental kind of condition that kept the species alive long enough. And then it didn't kill it off for it to revert. So it still had to keep flexibility in case things went back the the the other way. So the first pivot isn't always the last one, right? So like you have to continually You have to continually maintain that health in order to to have longevity. Right. And I think we need that in hiring an AV. Like we need to hire people from different cultures and different backgrounds and different industries who have seen different problems. And yeah, they need to be able to do the job at hand in front of them that is making us money now. But having those things that are benched, but but on deck. They're on deck though. So when things start to move, all of a sudden. Those might become your most valuable people in your organization. And you didn't even know it. Right. And so I yeah, I'm I'm passionate about that for sure. Mark Coxon (01:18:25) Fine. Mark Coxon (01:19:00) A hundred percent. What do you mean there's what do you mean clean water's a problem? Every time I turn on my faucet, some comes out. Mark Coxon (01:19:17) That's fine. Mark Coxon (01:19:21) Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. Mark Coxon (01:19:32) Ooh. That's good. Mark Coxon (01:19:41) Maybe ⁓ so for me, maybe and maybe it's as I'm getting older, ⁓ am I fulfilled? Mark Coxon (01:19:49) It's a that's an interesting question. Or would I would I if I had it to do over, would I go be the field biologist? Mark Coxon (01:20:01) Yeah, so if I so if I had it to do all over, would I go be a wildlife biologist? ⁓ Well, I think there ⁓ there are two answers to that question. One is ⁓ everything that we everything that we do leads us to where we are today. And I'm I'm very happy with where I am today as a father, a grandfather, or a husband, ⁓ been blessed to not have to, you know, ⁓ never been homeless, always been able to provide food, you know, all of those kind of things. ⁓ I will say that I do pine for some of the simplicity that that might have given, right? Like I wouldn't be tied to a I wouldn't be tied to a a phone most days. Probably be hiking, not on a screen, ⁓ moving around a lot, out in nature. ⁓ I think it ⁓ may have kept me out of the city ⁓ and some of the, you know, like living in California is not cheap. So you got to do a lot of things to make sure that you're able to maintain your household and things like that. ⁓ so I think there's something to be said for I don't know that I would go back and be a field. wildlife biologist that I would trade it all. But maybe I would find some ways to keep a little more analog in my life and to build something that's a little lighter, right? Build something a little easier to maintain. I tell young people all the time, they're like, they ask me, like, what's your biggest piece of advice? I'm like, build a light life. Because a light life allows you to pivot. Right. Like if I wanted tomorrow to go be a wildlife biologist, I couldn't do it because I would take a 75% pay cut. My life wouldn't allow me to do that. So Build a life that allows you to pivot if you want to, right? Like that gives you some of that opportunity because you know, you may find out that's what you wanted to do and you want to go back and do that thing, but ⁓ just logistics at that point would never let you go back and and do it again. So, ⁓ anyways, I think I think that's the main answer is is I would just find ways to integrate a little of what made that so special to me into my life a little more over time. Mark Coxon (01:22:19) Yeah. ⁓ I mean, I I know it's a s it's a ⁓ it's ⁓ trite because you know jobs and everybody have already said it, but like be c and be curious. Right? Like curiosity has opened so many doors for me. ⁓ I would have never chosen A V out of a if you gave me a checklist of jobs when I was twenty that I thought I would go do, A V would have never been one of them. Right. But But I've always again I've always I've been successful because I've been curious, not because it was in my aptitude. And I think sometimes, you know, we think we know what we're passionate about. You know, there's this idea that you chase your passion as a young person. But maybe there's maybe there's something that's you passionate about, you don't know. You don't know you just don't know yet. Right. Like explore a lot. Like that's for me, that's the big thing too. Like explore, be curious, explore a lot. ⁓ And again, yeah, make it light enough that when you do find what you want to do, that you're able to pursue it without having handcuffs from building a life around something else. Right. So Mark Coxon (01:23:53) I really appreciate it. Thanks for having the conversation.