Let me start with the obvious, Dan Caruso is a brilliant entrepreneur, in an elite group certainly in the state and even the country, probably in the world. First, as one of the founding employees of Level3, then with the ICG turn around and now Zayo. Dan prints money for his employees, himself and his investors and builds sustainable world class enterprises in the process. With ICG, he took a $15M investment from Columbia Capital and returned them over $200M eighteen months later - that's amazing. And by all accounts, he is doing the same thing at Zayo which will likely have a market cap of $6-8B when they go public in the next year. Dan Caruso is a brilliant entrepreneur.
Dan is also one of my favorite people in the whole world - intense but easy going, laser focused but open minded, tough as nails but generous, intelligent but practical. Dan is a unique individual.
With that said, when he first told me about his vision for Envysion seven or eight years ago, I didn't get it. A company focused on putting video survelance as a service into retail outlets using newly installed broadband pipes - where was the value add? Why couldn't the company just do that themselves? More importantly, if it was something the retailer decided not to do themselves, how hard would it be to convince them to completely change their work flow to include video as a management tool if you did it for them? The whole proposition seemed difficult at best.
Well I was wrong as I learned in a briefing recently from Dan and Matt Steinfort, (Envysion co-founder and CEO). Envysion is thriving. They have almost a hundred employees in Louisville, strong financial backing from CapitalOne and Parthenon Capital Partners and multi-year contracts with large clients such as Chipotle, Big Lots, Einstein, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-a, Cinemark and Verizon and show healthy growth and profitability.
The key value add (that I was missing before) comes from Envysion's ability to tie video surveillance to critical company data, providing operators with instant and actionable insights (through innovative analytics and targeted audits) improving their operations and saving them money.
Chipotle is a case in point. They use the Envysion system in every store they have nationwide and it is a critical part of their management process. One of their Key Performance Metrics is how quickly they can get a customer through the line and they use the Envysion video in detailed time and motion studies to carve seconds from that process. They use it to compare one store to the next, or single store performance throughout a day. They use it to make staffing decisions or flag performance issues. In short, it is a fully integrated part of their work flow analysis and they pay Envysion a bundle for that insight. That is cool.
Aside from Dan's brilliance, a lot of credit has to be given to Matt Steinfort for his persistence and strong execution. He has built a really talented management team and impeccable customer service. Congrats to Dan and Matt for building a great company and proving me wrong!
