[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I'm lucky enough to be joined by Bill Douglas. He's a CEO of Optic Wise. He's also known as the Resilience guy.

Hello, Bill. How are you buddy?

[00:00:39] Bill: Great, Jay. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:41] Jay: You got it. We were talking before the show. This is my first episode back, from vacation. So, you know, excuse any rust as I shake my, you know, shake the, the cobwebs off. But I'm glad I got a good guy with a good story 10 days off. You know, that's a long time for a CEO. I don't know if I've ever taken that long off in my life.

but Bill, tell me where did you grow up and did you have an impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:01:04] Bill: I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and yeah, I wanted to earn enough money to buy my first car

when I was 14 years old. I wanted to buy a car by the time I was 15 and I started working bagging newspapers for the Fort Lauderdale News, and I created a little system. And I actually ended up hiring some friends and took a margin on everything they did.

So I had a little business going and when I was 15, I paid a thousand bucks for a car with cash.

[00:01:30] Jay: it is. What was the car? What was the car?

[00:01:32] Bill: a 68 Rally Sport Camaro that I still own.

[00:01:35] Jay: Wow, you 

[00:01:36] Bill: it?

needs a restoration, but I still own it. It's in storage.

[00:01:39] Jay: Okay. That's a hell of a story and it's still, you still own it. I love that. 

[00:01:43] Bill: Yeah. I'm the second owner, but I, I've owned it for quite a while. 45 years would be exact.

[00:01:49] Jay: Quite a while. All right. So you have like all sorts of really cool things in your background. you are known as the resilience guy. we won't, you know, dig into it too much, but just gimme the cliff notes, man.

Like, what are some of the kind of bigger things you've overcome and, you know, what are the, some of the reasons why they call you the resilience guy?

[00:02:07] Bill: when I was in my late twenties, I got bit by a coral snake in Florida. I actually survived, so that while I was laying there in the hospital paralyzed, I decided to quit my corporate job. It was a great company, but it wasn't gonna be me. And when you're told you might not make it through the day, nothing, money doesn't matter, and all that stuff.

So within one month of walking outta the hospital, a week and a half later, I quit my job, started a company, jumped out of airplanes, and proposed to my girlfriend. So be careful about having a near death experience.

[00:02:39] Jay: It'll do a lot to you. How did you get bit by a coral snake, by the way.

[00:02:43] Bill: I was building a deck for my parents and I was standing in a hole that I had dug, you know, a post hole, and it got me on the back of the leg and

people say It can't do that. And I can tell you, yeah, it can, because within about seven minutes I was paralyzed.

And thankfully my dad, I was building it for them as a gift. Thankfully they were home that day and rushed me to the hospital and. they give you an venom and it's painful. You don't want it. Yeah. So it's pretty rare that those exist.

But in, you know, there's a Miami serpent, they flew up some venom and saved my life.

[00:03:15] Jay: Holy cow. All 

[00:03:16] Bill: Yeah. And, 30 years to the day later, I had a ski rack and woke up in Denver, paralyzed. I was skiing Breckenridge, and I hit a snow maker at over 50 miles an hour. I was, and I woke up paralyzed. Like I said, didn't even remember the helicopter flight for life to the day, 30 years to the day later.

So my friends say I bounce off things. I think two's enough. I don't wanna do that again,

but life's a gift, so I'd rather do something than have something. And it's too short to revel in trying to earn money and be miserable. Soit's easy to earn money and be happy, you know, just control your expectations and your time and your health, and it's all good.

[00:03:57] Jay: beautiful. Well, now I see why they're, I'm starting to see why they call you the resilience guy. Let's hope we don't have a third, you know, another 30 years. We have like another thing. we don't 

[00:04:06] Bill: in between there I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis,

[00:04:09] Jay: Ah, well,

[00:04:10] Bill: with that half my life.

[00:04:12] Jay: and you're still here with a smile on your face. I mean, 

[00:04:14] Bill: Oh, life's, life's a gift.

[00:04:16] Jay: It is, right?

It's very 

[00:04:17] Bill: Oh, I, they inter USA today interviewed me about the snake bite. And they ran the story the day before I had the ski rack, but I was quoted as saying, life's a gift. It's meant to be pursued, shared, and savored

not worked. 

[00:04:30] Jay: not worked.

[00:04:31] Bill: not worked. Yeah. You have to work. I have to work.

I'm not independently wealthy, but I love what I do and I don't think it's work. It's fun. I.

[00:04:38] Jay: Well, tell me about what you do, man. Tell me about Optic Wise, and how you came in and, you know, I know we talked about it before. You didn't found the company, but it would be interesting to hear how you kinda came in and what the landscape looked like and what you kind of tried to plan to do there, and how you got your first customer after you've kinda made the transformation.

[00:04:55] Bill: All right, I'll try and be brief. 2015 I exited the prior company I held. Which was a managed services company. We dealt medium sized manufacturers through Middle America, and I exited that and took a year off and then was looking at what to do. I tend to coach on coach and consult in between companies to figure out what's next.

And Drew Hall, who had founded Optic Wise about 11 or 12 years earlier said, Hey, can you, I know I'm from church. He said, Hey, can you help me out? So I gave him a go to market plan. I'm greatly shortening this. This is a six month process. He said, I'm a tech guy. I don't do that. Do you wanna do it? And I said, yeah, because this business is recurring revenue, nice margins, in serving the largest asset class in the world, which is commercial real estate.

So it's recurring revenue. The sales cycle is horrifically long, but the customer engagement cycle is. Equally as long, and that's a nice balance. So I fell in love with it. And when I joined, I sold off all the contracts we had. So we went down to zero revenue and started over taking the technology, packaging it differently, but selling it to two specific markets inside commercial real estate and that departments and office buildings, and a lot of the owners own both. So if you sell this, you can sell that, and the technology and the support is exactly the same. The denominator's just different. And office buildings is per foot. Apartments at Per Door,

[00:06:20] Jay: so that was eight years ago. It goes fast.

It does go fast. Well, tell me, take a step back and for people who don't really understand commercial real estate or kind of the. Infrastructure that has to go into it, or kind of like the data that's flowing through it. Like what, tell us a little bit more about like the problem that you saw that you were, that, you know, optic wise is solving.

[00:06:43] Bill: Well, drew was doing onsite student housing and he was solving internet access for students. And the problem I saw with that was not the technology, it was the customers weren't reputable, replicable, they weren't selling to the big student housing companies, the REITs. They didn't have a, you know, you don't sell it once and then get 10 or 12 or 15 clients. So that's why we backed out, commercial real estate Talk specifically about a large office building or a large apartment building. They have 12 to 15 systems running in that building. Access controls, heating, ventilator, a, air conditioning, tele telemetry, telephony, you know, elevators need to communicate access, controls, video security, and go on and on with the systems they need just to run the building. Well, the old way is those systems are all in their own network. They're run by a vendor maybe, or maybe run by an employee of the place. Well, the right way to do it is to aggregate all those networks onto one digital infrastructure and run it like a data center, make it hardened, make it run when the power's out, and at the same time, put a mesh network in that all the tenants and employees can connect to, not just in their lease space, not just in their apartment or in their office space, but in anywhere in the property

they can access whatever they want. From anywhere from their own network. That's Firewalled and V land off. So you've got operations that are becoming less expensive to build and less expensive to operate. And you'll have revenue generating things 'cause tenants will pay for this service. 'cause it makes their productivity higher. Like why not?

Why not do it that way? I don't have to, if I'm a tenant, I don't have to buy any hardware. I move into this building and I, my internet works right away. All my employees can be on my network right away behind my firewall from anywhere on the property. Or if I have an apartment, I can go visit you, Jay. If you're in five 15 and I'm in one-on-one, I can go visit you and I'm still on my network. Like I can sit by the pool and still be on my employer's network 'cause I'm working from home that day. All those kind of things are, that's the new way to do it Now. Talk about data, A lot of commercial real estate. Doesn't own the systems I just talked

[00:08:46] Jay: of times they let a vendor put them in for free, but in return they can't use them. So when they go to add a camera, let's say they have to add a whole nother system or smart thermostats, smart locks, they don't have a way to communicate with them that shouldn't be. So we advocate that the property owner should own the network and they should run it aggregated, one digital infrastructure, and then connect all the systems and collect the data. A lot of times they don't even have the data that's theirs. They don't have access to it. If they get it, it's old and stale by the time they get it. So things like AI and machine learning, you and business intelligence are finally starting to creep into the commercial real estate space because the owners have typically, you know, old school owners have said, we just rent space.

[00:09:31] Bill: We don't do technology.

And now the tenants are saying, you better do technology, or I'm not signing a lease.

[00:09:36] Jay: what kind of data? Are you getting out of there that's usable to somebody who owns that building or owns a bunch of buildings, you know, in commercial real estate? what is the benefit of having that data?

[00:09:48] Bill: Well, we're not collecting user data. When I'm talking about data, I'm talking about operating systems.

So simple, low hanging fruit. Why aren't you looking at activities going around and pricing your parking deck dynamically.

Youwhy are you setting the thermostats to be Monday to Friday if it's an office building? I'm not looking at the actual temperature or the actual density. How many people are actually in the building today? Maybe it's a holiday, you know? But if there's nobody in there, why am I heating this sucker up to 70 degrees or 68 degrees in the middle of winter? I could run it at 64, you know, and those are shared expenses in an office environment, but in the common areas in an apartment, it's just a pure expense. So if nobody's there, like if your gym is empty all the time and you're at this nice gym in an apartment complex at 10 o'clock, and we have clients that do this, why don't you rent it out, let the YMCA do some classes and make some money off that you're not gonna disrupt your tenants at all.

You know it's empty and those are just the easy things. But if you start to see large motors drag when they start. You know, not only are you spiking your power bill, better not start those during peak hours, but you're, you can almost predict when they're gonna fail. So you can do maintenance on them ahead of time, and then you start looking at the same data sets across your portfolio and it lets you start to normalize your purchasing or your support contracts.

[00:11:06] Jay: Beautiful.

[00:11:07] Bill: That is just some low hanging fruit. Those are the easy ones to do right off the bat. But like we're, we're publishing a book in June of 25. I say the year in case somebody watches this in the future, I. It's called Peak Property Performance. It's all about performance. It's all about data and digital strategies for commercial real estate.

So we're giving away the playbook on how to do this. We believe the whole industry would be better. commercial real estate's al already a huge emitter of energy. Um, so we're, we focus on utilities, insurance, and vacancy, and then give somebody a million ideas about what else they could do if they had their data.

So instead of looking at data in 15 different data sets, pull it in and have one data lake and do some learning across it. See what you can find.

[00:11:51] Jay: Now, do you offer or offer any services in that vein of like what to do with the data that they get, or are you just kinda like, here it is.

[00:11:59] Bill: We do,

that's all la carte. Some clients have their own data group. I. They don't physically run their network or they don't, they haven't physically connected to these systems to collect the data. So we do digital infrastructure services. We'll actually run the network connect, and then we do the data services where we collect and analyze the data. How they do control is after that you don't, you can't use. Data. You can't use business intelligence until you have enough data to run an algorithm to get a control on, you know,

algorithm to do like to apply.

So control stage is next. We focus on the first couple and then our clients always go there, but we don't really know what that is yet.

So 

we have to be involved for six to 12 months before the data's even worth it.

[00:12:44] Jay: Right. Yeah.

[00:12:45] Bill: But if it's making money from day one. I, we don't lose clients. they stay with us even after they sell the property. We stay with the property

[00:12:53] Jay: Love that. So, I mean, first of all, tell me about when you came in. You sold all the contracts, off you go down to zero. who did you target? Like how did you target, like what was the idea behind that? And then who was the first customer you kinda landed after you, you did the reset?

[00:13:09] Bill: Well, we started targeting first internet distribution in large

buildings. Like why are you letting an ISP drill all the way through your building to each tenant, right? A lot of commercial real estate buildings are full of wires and networks that nobody knows what they are. So if you design it right, we found a building and we actually got introduced to the owner that was building a building. It was a large renovation, it might as well be a new one. And we said, look, have you looked at this policy and we've done this? 20 or 30 pitches. And this guy said, I love it. You can take an expense, make it a revenue generator. I love it, but it'll keep my inside of my building very beautiful. And not wires, open ceilings, you know, a lot of industrial look to it. It'll keep wires out of the way. and I can make money off of it. And then he said, very astute, he said, I've never seen this before. I have seven months before I get our certificate of occupancy on this building. I. If you have this running, when the CEO comes in, I will sign this contract. And we agreed on the contract. He said, if you don't, everything you've invested in, the building is lost and it's mine, and I'm gonna turn on the ISPs because I have to have internet, I have to have connectivity for my tenants. We can go back to the old way. I, I'll let you swing the bat, but you only have seven months. So that was our first real client under this model and I believed in it so much.

I wrote the check. To front it and it was pushing six digits. So write a personal check for six digits and then you'll watch yourself perform. And the day it was on, they had a grand opening party and the next day the client wired us the money. And they've been a client ever since.

[00:14:49] Jay: Beautiful.

[00:14:49] Bill: They've gone on to build other buildings all over the country.

And every one of them, they literally text me and say, send me a new agreement for this building.

It's size, it's coming online this date. pricing's already agreed on. It's just terms,

it's a two page addendum to the master services agreement and they've been a great referral source. But we took a huge bet, like we would've been out $80,000 in equipment, probably 25 in labor, in like outsource labor, not insource, not payroll. So it was nearly a hundred grand.

[00:15:22] Jay: It's a big.

[00:15:22] Bill: then, yeah, and then they bought the infrastructure from us. So that was, it wasn't customer financing. I've done customer financing before for my first customer, and that comes with big discounts if we meet dates and things like that. This was, I will be your five year recurring revenue customer.

I'll be your anchor customer.

[00:15:40] Jay: And he got it. We were right up front like, look, we're not huge. We're very good at what we do, and here's some references about what we've done in the past, but this is the same technology in a new space. And the client, he was willing to give us a shot and it worked, and that was what, seven and a half years ago and many, many clients ago, and millions of square feet ago.

I love that. so speaking of that, who is your customer today? And is it the same as it was when you did your reset and the first, that same first customer, is it the same type of company, same type of people you're going after? Or has that changed and morphed kind of over the years? Like, what does the customer look like today versus when you started?

[00:16:20] Bill: The properties are the same. The customer now is more a portfolio holder, so

like we do really well with family offices or medium sized corporations that. Actually understand their properties, not REITs. REITs are so big that the operator on the ground level ha, you know, they have the ability to make different decisions. But the, so we have REIT customers, but they have bought properties that we built with clients. we do retrofits and we do new, we used to just focus on new, we do office and apartments, and in the beginning we just did office. But the ownership groups, you know, there, there's a lot of private equity, there's a lot of real estate investment.

Groups that are not REITs. Maybe they're private REITs, but not public REITs. They act differently. So we got into that because like this property I just told you about got bought or they sold a portion of it, that owner is still involved. He's the managing partner, but he is not the. All the money anymore. So we've seen our audience get a lot more mature from a financial perspective. The operators are still the operators, but now we're selling to the people with the money that want the return on the investment. 'cause the basic premise is technology should generate income. It should be an investment for you. The old way, it just was an expense and it was a nightmare. And commercial real estate avoided it. They let the tenants deal with it. Now they're dealing with it themselves. 'cause it attracts tenants.

[00:17:43] Jay: Now, do you guys have. Your own platform or technology, or is it, kind of just aggregating all these different services and you know, is there some common kind of platform you guys have built around this? what's the technology from you guys' side? Or is it a straight services play?

[00:17:59] Bill: We have a SaaS platform, so we have

written software that maintains the user experience. I talked about the being able to connect from anywhere, so that's five s 'cause it, it's trademarked, but it stands for five Ss and I don't want to sell it here. But the other side of it is the strategy of the building of things. Everybody knows the internet of things. What we call it, the building of things, because it's a commercial building and it's full of people and devices and systems and servers and big and small sensors. So it's a building of things. So that's a strategy to go about. How do you collect the data and leverage the data from all of those things. So one is a service and one is a software, and they're bundled together. I mean, if you're a client of ours, you get access to it all and you can license for free or included with, you get all of those trademarks. So you should license those to your property and market it as a private, secure, seamlessly mobile, you know, redundant, resilient infrastructure, and your tenants flock to it. They just love it. Like as soon as they sign their lease, all their technology is handled.

[00:19:05] Jay: That's fantastic.

[00:19:06] Bill: They don't have to build it out. They don't have to wait for the cable guy. Yeah, they don't have to go

[00:19:10] Jay: no. 12 to eight. No. 12 to 8:00 PM window to sit and wait for you guys to 

[00:19:15] Bill: And we support it all too. We have our own customer support agents, English speaking employees that handle the problem. I.

[00:19:23] Jay: and I mean, being a quality assurance guy, I have to wonder like how do you guys validate all that data that's coming from all these different kind of integrated sources, right? Because you're kind of relying on the vendors themselves, you know, if you have a heating system and a elevator, you know, system security.

So all this stuff is kind of being aggregated together. How are you? How are you getting around, relying on them to validate the data that you're giving you? Or are you just kind of a data in, data out kind of, platform?

[00:19:53] Bill: in the beginning it's data in, and then it's analyzed. You don't send data out until you've done the control

algorithms and know that piece in the, and in the beginning, you know, five to seven years ago, before AI was stronger, you had to validate a lot of data. Now you can have structured and unstructured data or semi-structured data inside of a data lake. Machine learning can start to see trends in all of those. Of course, you want it as clean as possible, 'cause garbage in, garbage out, garbage in is useless. Maybe it doesn't have garbage out, but you don't have to have such a heavy filter. 'cause if it doesn't make sense, it just moves

[00:20:26] Jay: It's looking for trends in things and some of the fanciest, the largest vendors out there selling, building management, building access controls, have the worst data. They really do. They're, it's like somebody 15 years ago wrote a flat file. And it's done in SQL instead of, you know, any other thing that, it could have been nothing against Microsoft, but for this size data, it just bogs it down, you know? So we are trying to normalize the platform and again, I'm not the data scientist, so I'll let them speak about it, but it's a horrific problem in the beginning of every client engagement.

[00:21:00] Bill: And then once it's set, it's just ingesting it all on the same procedure that was set up on go to go, like go live.

[00:21:10] Jay: I noticed you have 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is not a small number. how do you kind of balance, you know, build the personal, you know, branding kind of side of things versus optic wise? Or are they just kind of so coupled together that, you know, that's how you promote it? Or just tell me a little bit about personal branding for yourself.

[00:21:31] Bill: You mean the resilience guy or the

[00:21:33] Jay: I mean, just in general, just Bill, like, I mean, what, how do you treat your social slash digital footprint? Are you sharing stuff that you know, that you find interesting in the space? Is it more about you as a person? Like how do, how are you kind of building and promoting your personal brand on LinkedIn and otherwise?

Or is it not something you think about and it's just kind of.

[00:21:53] Bill: No, it's something we very much think about. you don't get 30,000 by accident.

[00:21:57] Jay: I didn't think so.

[00:21:58] Bill: Yeah. I. Last year I hired somebody to handle it. Like they, she does all of our social postings on all the platforms, and that is company focused. It's not just what we do, it's a lot of what's going on. It's a lot of trends.

We write blogs and we talk about competitors and like our blog has a plethora of information in there. We reference all kinds of things going on in and around the space. It might be about data and it might be about technology and not commercial real estate, but it's in there 'cause it's relevant to it. Relevant to me. I don't draw a line. I'm just me, like I you're gonna talk to me the same. if I had a code on tomorrow and I was pitching a large client or an investment bank somewhere, 'cause we're doing an acquisition, then I would be the same person. Maybe I have a different outfit on, but I'm not posting to get likes and followers I'm posting.

'cause I think what we do is very interesting and. A lot of people could do it. Rising tide raises all boats. I don't need every customer, like we're we grow and we're profitable. And I hope that more people embrace our philosophies. Like we want to give away the standards that we're doing. That's why we're doing this book.

Like we're giving away the playbook. Here's how you audit your digital infrastructure. Here's how you should look at your data. Here's how you build a team that's actually data centric, not your data scientists. I'm talking about the other people that are scared to death of ai.

[00:23:17] Jay: Right.

[00:23:18] Bill: All those kind of things, like embrace it, it's not going away.

Digital transformation is not new, and it's certainly not leaving.

It's here for a long 

[00:23:27] Jay: A long time until everything's digital, then we won't have anything. Well, there'll be something else that we have to transform 

[00:23:32] Bill: some analog systems in real estate. Some of these things you walk into mothballs and there are analog, but we can figure out how to digitize that data if it's valuable to the client. Otherwise, we'll just upgrade the system. That, that's their call. we don't walk around selling systems. If anything, we're trying to reduce the number of systems and reduce the burn for the client, not here to sell more. We're here to make you more money from your technology and your digital assets.

[00:23:56] Jay: Love that. yeah, I loved, we help commercial real estate owners leverage technology to create entirely new revenue streams. that's a fantastic summary. and I think, you know, there's a lot of stuff that people can kind of glean from this episode. I have one more question for you. non-business related.

It's interesting. I always, people who have done a lot of things or maybe have. Got bitten by coral snakes and almost died. I always find it interesting to ask this question, what would you do, you know, non-business related? What would you do? if you could do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail?

[00:24:28] Bill: Holy cow. What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? I would find something that impacted more people, like commercial real estate's the largest asset class in the world, but it's not gonna impact. I. Millions of people. So how could I, one of my personal core values is positively impact others. So I would have to go back through my journals and find one of those ideas that could positively impact millions of people.

[00:24:55] Jay: Love 

[00:24:55] Bill: I don't, I couldn't think about what it is right now, but if I couldn't fail, I would think about how I could, like we, Americans are 5% of the world's population and. WI think I hit the lottery by being born here. How could we spread what we have here into other countries? I don't mean money, I mean lifestyle and like we Maslow's hierarchy.

We don't have to struggle for food and water and the rest of the, a lot of the rest of the world does. Maybe I would focus

Uh 

[00:25:25] Jay: that answer. Well, Bill, you're awesome. We've got a 

[00:25:27] Bill: It wouldn't be technology. 

[00:25:29] Jay: No technology. Yeah, we'll figure out something humanitarian to do together 'cause I'm very much in the same vein as you. well, Bill, how can people find out more about you if they wanna reach out? and then obviously optic wise, what's the best way to get in touch if they need to talk about something they heard today?

[00:25:42] Bill: info at Optic Wise and just if you wanna talk to me, just reference it and somebody will forward it to me.

LinkedIn, you can search, I think it's Bill Resilience Guy Douglas. 'cause there's a few. Bill Douglas is out there,

or the resilience guy.com is my personal site. But If you wanna talk about work, go through optic wise and if you wanna, talk about being an entrepreneur and loving life, go through the other channel.

[00:26:03] Jay: Or snakes, if you wanna talk about snakes, Bill. 

[00:26:06] Bill: Was never a fan of 

[00:26:07] Jay: No. Now he's 

[00:26:08] Bill: 

[00:26:08] Jay: really not a big fan of snakes. All right, Bill. Well, you're awesome dude. Thank you for the time today and, we'll stay in touch and best of luck going forward. All right, brother. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of your week.

I'll talk to you. Thanks 

[00:26:16] Bill: care. 

[00:26:17] Jay: See you man. 

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