Sequenza, a global company with an established presence in the US, Asia, and Europe, carries the business tagline “Why pay more?” Indeed, across all three of their brands, Sequenza, VINclusive, Sayage, they are well below market prices, which makes them a popular choice among consumers. Strings Kozisek shares that one of the contributing factors of the growth of their company is employee empowerment. He says that it’s important to hire people better than you and pay attention to their careers because as a CEO, you are delegating tasks that enhances the employees skills and overall career who then adds value to the company in the long run.

Employee Empowerment: A Big Contributor to Growth with Strings Kozisek

We’re lucky to have Strings Kozisek, CEO of Sequenza. Strings, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Bob. It’s good to be here.

Strings and I met at the local Bass Pro here some time ago and we must have chatted for a couple of hours.

I tend to do that to people. That was awesome. Thanks for talking to me.

We had a good time and trying to get to know and he was gracious enough to come down and be on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

We talked about Strings and we’re not sure where the nickname came from, but Strings Kozisek. If you would, tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

My business is Sequenza. Under Sequenza, we handle three different brands. Sequenza is an IT and A/V professional services firm. With our internal network of a couple thousand techs across the US, another thousand or so outside of the United States, we provide IT and AV services and we’re able to have somebody anywhere in the continental United States in four hours. We do this under market price. We handle a lot of retail, we do a lot of restaurants, we do technology companies, all that stuff. The two other brands, one of them is VinClusive. VINclusive is a host of technology services that enhance auto dealerships.

We provide proprietary tools for inventory management, for the status of cars, anti-theft protection, GPS, geo-fencing, inventory management tools, and these things. The third brand that comes under the Sequenza banner is called The Sayage. The Sayage is a digital signage platform. It is a proprietary Android box that connects wired, wirelessly or over cellular to our backend system that sits in the Amazon web services. This has been up and running about fifteen years. We are bringing this into the United States. The niche there is it’s very cheap and we’ve taken about 70% of the most used digital signage functionality, put it in a package that I could train somebody on in 45 minutes. Simple, cheap, easy to use.

First, going into digital signage for the person going like, “That doesn’t draw a mental picture for me,” what is digital signage?

When you’re out going through the day, you go to the dentist or you go to the doctor’s office, it has a monitor in the lobby that’s showing some advertisements. You go to your local clothing store and they have monitors up there that are showing the new fashions of the season. You go into your fast food restaurant and you’re looking at the menu. All of these things are examples of digital signage. Digital signage is saying something digitally.

Employee Empowerment: Digital signage is saying something digitally.

Within that space, what’s the pain point that the digital signage company solves for the customer?

The pain points we solve, there are two of them. One, most signage solutions have large learning curves. Ours, can easily be learned in an hour. And Second, A lot of systems are geared more towards enterprise, either by their cost or the over-abundant features they try to push. Our system is cheap enough to be meaningful to the family run businesses, and robust enough multi-thousand locations.

For folks that are lost, A/V is?

Audiovisual stuff. There are a lot of digital signage companies out there. This industry is growing. A lot of these are big enterprise. You require a special hardware, it requires months, weeks of training and a dedicated person to run these, a high bandwidth. What we do is our simple system allows Joe’s Garage down the street that has one monitor, it’s a great solution for him because he can afford it. The enterprise fast food restaurants that has 4,000 locations across the United States and six menu boards, it’s a great cheap solution for them. That’s the niches and the pain points that we fix.

When we met before, you had an interesting journey to get to today. Let’s go back a little bit and talk about your travels and how you got started in the A/V space.

I went to University of Northern Iowa. Back before then, I was the geek that always loaded up the sixteen-millimeter projector in grade school and high school. I studied some audiovisual and audio recording in the universities. I went out to San Francisco. I was working at Chevron back in the day of 35-millimeter slide projectors where we would have twenty projectors behind the screen in stockholders meetings, these things, producing videos. That’s where I got a lot of the experience. One day, living in the Bay Area, I realized I woke up and I thought, “I’ve only lived in the United States. I got to go somewhere.” Long story made somewhat shorter, I thought Japan was the hardest place to move to, I took off to Japan thinking I’d be there for a year. I came back about 22 years later to the United States, which is about four and a half years ago now. In Japan, the first three months, I was a bartender at the Lexington Queen Nightclub in Tokyo. Through there, I met people. I became a Country Manager for Gibson Guitars, Entertainment Relations. That’s MTV giveaways, Hard Rock giveaways, loaners for concerts, taking the band members out to bars and clubs after the concerts end.

I went there. I realized I couldn’t do this forever. It wasn’t a career. It was great as a 28-year-old guy in Japan. I taught my way into an IT job that I was not at all qualified for and I hit the books. I went through Novell Certification, Microsoft Certification, Linux Certifications. I ran an office in Tokyo with twelve servers, 175 end users. I got out of that. I said, “I want to work on my marketing and branding.” It wasn’t even a company. I made a business card and I did promotions for some high-end fashion, high-end cigars, high-end automobiles, online, offline promotions. During that, somebody came up and said, “Don’t you know audio visual stuff?” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “Lehman Brothers is looking for a consultant.” I started Lehman Brothers. I built their Tokyo, Hong Kong and Beijing offices while they were still around. During this process, I realized nobody’s doing this business in Japan. I made the business. I ran it for eleven years, sold it and moved to Colorado. That’s one of my advantages, but one of my stumbling points, I think as a CEO is I want these changes to happen quick. I want the growth to go quick. Steady, consistent growth is good, but sometimes I get a little bit impatient, but that’s maybe where I get some of the drive.

When you went to Japan, you didn’t have any language skills either, did you?

No. Just that Styx song Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, but otherwise nothing. I made word cards and figured if I could speak nouns, adjectives and adverbs, I could communicate and that would give me confidence. That’s where I started. When I left, fairly fluent. I did some speaking at Toyo University, half of my staff, twenty some people in Japan. It was in Japanese, presentation is in Japanese, ordering beer in Japanese.

I think about that diverse background coming to college and going through Chevron and then going to Japan and coming back here and you’re a serial entrepreneur for lack of a better term. Thinking about the IT on-demand not less than four hour timeframe business that you have in the United States, for folks who are going, “I have problems in some of my rural locations,” how did they find that particular company?

That’s one of the niche items that we address. Here’s the scenario too that I’ve seen often is let’s pick on the guys on the East Coast. There’s a company in New Jersey, for example. It has the client and this client opens up an office in California and the Jersey company says, “We can take care of that.” Then they Google and find a partner, which is sometimes a very loose used word, and assign that partner to the project. What you miss there is the accountability on who owns the responsibility to deliver. With us, this small business in remote Montana for example, could contact us. We can get somebody to their office, we can get somebody anywhere in the United States and we do it. We own the responsibility. One of the things that I’m always telling my customers is, I personally own the responsibility for my company to deliver. I’m your person to point out. Here’s my cell phone to call.

There are a lot of challenges that people don’t realize. It’s a tough industry.CLICK TO TWEET

On social media, where do they find that point of contact with that company?

This is one of my big learning curves because I’ve been non-educated in social media. I myself, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Facebook. SequenzaInc.com is our website. We’re on LinkedIn. We’re very soon launching Instagram, Facebook, some other digital marketing. Sequenza Inc., we should be right at the top of the Google searches.

What I’m trying to do is paint a picture in the mind of somebody as to what type of problem would they have where they could reach out to Sequenza and solve that particular problem?

Anything technology. We can handle phones, we can handle microphones. We can handle computers, whether that’s desktop computers. We do structured cabling which is the running of the network cables. We take care of data centers. We take care of fast food restaurants POS systems. One of our clients is a nationwide sports company. We do all technology for and we do wireless access points, we do servers, we do structured cabling, we do POS, we do a lot of stuff. I hate to be so vague in the answer, but if you’re having a problem with technology, your phone, your computer, your microphone, call us.

You look at that both in the rural market and the major metropolitan areas and sometimes it’s often a problem in both. In looking at that, you’ve got that particular company and then you had a couple of others that you were talking about that you were the CEO of that fall under Sequenza. Let’s talk about those a little bit. We have The Sayage. Let’s talk about The Sayage a little bit.

Sayage is the digital signage platform. Having been around digital signage for 25 years when I was first starting out, I see the good points, the bad points. I had many, many conversations with customers on what is it, how do I use it, what’s it going to benefit me, how it benefits me? I know a lot of the big players out there. We are now competing with a lot of these big players and we’re doing well at it. I like niche business. I like the feel of certain niche requirements. With this company, Sayage, the niche is I want a digital signage platform that anybody could use. I said Joe’s Garage or the fast food restaurant that’s got 4,000 stores, anybody can use it. As some of the players go, “I’m going to charge you $2,800 a day for training.” Your training comes free. It’s 45 minutes. Most people in 45 minutes, they have a good handle on it. Another thing that we’re able to do now, everybody’s got smartphones. I could take a picture of you here and I could have that picture of you playing on a monitor in my office in Hong Kong in 90 seconds and I can teach you how to do that in half hour.

I think about it as a business owner. Let’s say that I’ve got a fast food restaurant and we’re now accustomed to the menu board behind the counter. Typically, who controls that message board before Sayage?

It varies from company to company. Sometimes it varies within a company. For example corporate stores adopt a certain technology. While the franchise stores adopt something different. Companies give franchisees more or fewer rights or control over the technology.

I think about pricing and sometimes you’ll see a special, not necessarily offered at every location. Let’s say that I’m an independent location. I’ve got the signage up there typically for me to control it. I’m assuming I control it off of a PC somewhere in my location.

Yes, usually at headquarters. They make the decision that the chicken sandwich is now $1.99 in these locations, $2.49 at others. Once this is input at headquarters, it changes on all menu boards everywhere.

Then for you guys, basically your system is set up for The Sayage is different because it’s simpler to train and not as expensive.

Yes. We operate on channels. Everybody’s used to a TV, turning the channels, to get different content on your TV. On our platform, it varies on our clients and how they’re using it, but generally speaking, we give our clients a set of players and we say, “Here’s your channels and here’s your ability to create more channels and you can upload this content to different channels and schedule when you want to change the channel. Thinking of it like a TV, seems to make it easier to understand.

I think about the ability with the staffing and whatnot and folks that are trying to manage staffing and make sure that they communicate with their customer well. It would seem like this would be a good solution and flexible.

You’ve got the menu boards and you’ve got the monitors in the fashion store or the doctor’s office, but there’s a lot of digital signage being used for internal communication. Think of universities or think of airports with delays. Think of things like emergency messages. The way the world is, this example of a university. The security guard is away from a PC but suddenly find he needs to put up a message on all monitors that there’s an active shooter. He could do that from anywhere with his cell phone.

Employee Empowerment: Different companies give franchisees more or fewer rights or control over the technology.

Then VINclusive, we talked at length about VINclusive when you and I met before. Talk about VeeTracker and the problems that it solves.

VINclusive stems out of a couple of the larger dealerships in the United States coming to us and with a few problems. We’ve developed a suite of technologies that helps the auto dealerships. We have tools that manage inventory so dealers know where every car is. On some of these dealerships that were working, they have 2,000 cars. I was in the dealership before where a this lady called in and asked if the dealership had this such and such a red car. The dealership queried their inventory and saw they had the car. When the lady came in, she waited for three hours. The dealer couldn’t find the car. She went over across the street, bought the car and brought it over to shove the dealer’s noses in it. With our utilities and our tools, dealers know where that car is within one and a half to two feet.

Unless you’re in the industry, there are a lot of the problems in that particular industry you just don’t know about. For me, I’ll take my vehicle to the service department and they go, “It’s outside.” I look around and I go, “No, it’s not outside. It’s somewhere.” Then they go track my vehicle now. Talk about some of the challenges that maybe the average person wouldn’t know about and how you guys started developing solutions for that.

On the lighter side, there is a thing that dealer’s deal with called floor plan cars, without getting into the details, dealers are motivated to sell these cars first With our systems, they know where the floor plan cars are. If we have six red cars of model A lined up here, I know that third one is the oldest floor plan car. I want to sell that car first. Another example is theft. People come in at night, there are cameras in the dealerships, the keys are locked in, but somebody comes in with the computer, in 30 seconds, they’re driving away with a car. They hacked into the cars’ computers, start it, unlock it and drive away. Cars are jacked up and wheels are stolen. We had a dealer tell us that somebody brought in a high-end Mustang for repair and while the Mustang sat in the dealership overnight, they took the tires, the seats and the dash.

With our systems in there, if a car is jacked up, we know it. We’ve got our 24/7 call center that is monitoring it. It sends an alert. We contact the dealer and say, “This car in this location has been jacked up. Somebody is taking the tires.” If somebody buys the car, they can opt in for this service. If their teenager is out driving their car, they know where the car is. They can set alerts to notify if the car experiences a shock or brakes suddenly, and alerts the owner. That offers the dealership security, but the people that buy the cars, it offers them a bit of security as well.

Is VINclusive well-known and well-understood?

It isn’t. We had been working with dealerships, but since the launch of this, we had been so busy that we’re still working on our website, everything. That is soon to be launching and we will do a press announcement when we do that. It’s the ideal case of an entrepreneur is you’re too busy to make a brochure or a website, but in this case, that’s where we are. Website address will be www.VINclusive.com

The typical problems that most car buyers are not about about is floor planning. They’re not going to think that that is a big issue because almost all dealership lots are highly lit and you would presume secure and safe. Particularly, about managing inventory is, we’ve all been in the circumstance where they go, “We can’t find your car right at the moment. We will find it in a few.” Then they go track your car down.

There are a lot of challenges that people don’t realize. It’s a tough industry.

The margins aren’t that high when you start to pay for interest on the car after floor planning expires. It’s a big deal. We’ve talked about what got you here. A bit about your journey and some of the initiatives and now comes the part where I get to quiz you. This is the challenge. What is the most recent book or