HAUS Gives a Peek Into Its Education, Training Facility but Keeps Dealer Info Under Wraps

HAUS executives -- CEO David Daniels, Senior Vice President-Business Development John Carlen and Chief Technology Officer Mike Thul -- all came out of Xssentials, a luxury-market custom integration company for upscale Colorado markets including Aspen and Vail. The Xssentials website still lists all three, but Daniels said the trio is “100 percent focused on HAUS” and the mid-market smart home consumer segment HAUS was chartered to serve.

HAUS’ 25,000-square-foot facility is a seedling in a sprouting business park southeast of Denver that’s so new Uber drivers found only a field on GPS maps when trying to locate the address. The two-story space exudes state of the art -- and green tech: Toto sensor-activated hand dryers, long Colorado Beetle Kill Pine tables with a copious amount of gadget charging stations, 52 digital displays, a video production room and classrooms outfitted with flexible seating that can morph from small-group learning to conventional classroom arrangements. An on-site bar serves local Colorado brews.

Executives wouldn’t disclose their investment in HAUS, which a company backgrounder said was expected to start member training in January. That date was pushed back a few months, and now 20-30 dealers are expected to gather for the inaugural weeklong training event April 18, Carlen told us. The goal is to sign 2,500 member companies in three years, with an initial focus on security dealers. Part of the idea of training sessions is to tap the knowledge of members and share that with other members, Carlen said. “We would be delighted” if a particular class had dealers with varying backgrounds in IT, AV and HVAC. “We think there’s going to be tremendous value in those interchanges between people that start down this journey from different places,” he said.

HAUS on-site training includes two days for CEO-level business training, two days for sales and marketing and three days for technical training for a business to get HAUS certification. Up to three dealer employees can attend per session as part of the $5,000 annual membership fee, and additional attendees are $1,000 per session. Dealers who pay upfront rather than quarterly get a 20 percent discount off dues, said Carlen. HAUS expects to put on one or two weeklong classes per month and can accommodate 50-60 businesses per event, he said. Associate memberships -- giving dealers access to online videos -- will be available for $599, Carlen said.

HAUS is hoping publicity brings in members, and it will be soliciting members at the homebuilder-focused TecHome X show in Orlando next week, followed by the ISC West security trade show in Las Vegas in early April, Carlen said.

Vendor members are also expected to be sources for potential dealers, said Carlen. Savant and Sonos, the only member vendors so far, have been given branded “presentations pods” within a large, open common space at the HAUS facility where dealers and vendors can sit during training weeks. The HAUS space has room for seven vendor partner pods, but HAUS executives wouldn’t say which additional vendors it’s talking to. Other categories they’re targeting include lighting, security, entertainment, environmental, networking and access control, Daniels told us. HAUS is looking for vendors that share HAUS’ commitment to customer service, Carlen said. Carlen wouldn’t disclose terms of the commercial relationships with Savant or Sonos.

HAUS doesn’t expect to double up on smart home categories to keep the model simple, Carlen said. Sonos and Savant will represent the multiroom audio and home control categories. “I can’t imagine the need to go outside of Savant and Sonos today,” he said. An exception is the security system segment, where target dealers are likely to have longstanding relationships with existing security manufacturers. Carlen cited Honeywell, GE Interlogix, and Nortek’s 2GIG, GoControl and Linear brands as companies HAUS is targeting as vendor members. The group hopes to have five to 10 platinum vendor partners, and there will also be gold members. The designation is based on “the amount of benefits that come back to them,” Carlen said, but didn’t elaborate.

The HAUS group is a planned offshoot of ebode, a 3-year-old company that has been the test bed for HAUS and is adjacent to the Colorado facility. HAUS members can visit ebode, officially HAUS’ first member company, and pick the minds of marketing, sales, operations logistics, management and support teams, said Daniels. HAUS calls ebode “our working model,” where it tests new ideas, concepts, growth and financial modeling and best practices to share with other members. Daniels described ebode as a “change agent” for “all of the basic business fundamentals you’d want to be able to scale and template."

Ebode is a “full-functioning, successful broad-market home automation company,” Daniels said. Carlen called it the real-world lab that takes the hits so other HAUS members don’t have to. With ebode as testing ground, dealers don’t have to be the “beta site that sometimes they feel like they are.” HAUS hopes having the curated list of products known to play nicely together will take away the tech fear factor for security and HVAC dealers, as it has with production homebuilders ebode has been working with.

On Press Day, HAUS was a work in progress with roughly a month before its first planned training event. A videoconference set up with Chief Experience Officer Shuli Steele, who was offsite for personal reasons, was marred by several audio glitches that disrupted communication. The practical lab for hands-on training was virtually without product, except for a Kwikset connected door lock. Carlen wouldn’t say whether Kwikset was a vendor member. In the future, one workstation in the practical lab will show how to mount a TV, Carlen said. “If you’ve never hung a TV, we’ll have some drywall back there, and you’ll be able to cut drywall for the first time and hang a TV.” Since most of the connected home involves the network, much of the learning will be focused on making dealers “comfortable in the networked home world,” Carlen said.

Executives skirted questions on dealer membership and who's on the roster for the first training in April. On what the cross-section of dealers looks like for the April 18 program, Carlen said, “We’ll tell you in April. That’s just getting signed up now.” A more guarded Daniels said HAUS isn’t going to release member names until “sometime in the future” so dealers “don’t feel like they’re in the limelight.” HAUS wants dealers to consider the organization their “trusted advocate” in the same way it asks dealers to treat their customers, he said. “We don’t want to expose them if they don’t want to be exposed.”

Savant and Sonos are the only member vendors to be announced. No one was at the event representing Sonos, but Brian Dempsey, who handles strategic accounts at Savant, told us the benefit of being a HAUS member is a like-minded view of the potential of the middle market and having trained dealers to serve that market. The timing of HAUS’ coming to market coincided with Savant’s development of entry-level home automation targeted to the mid-market consumer. HAUS’ strategy of a “curated sandbox” of partner products known to work well together to create a “repeatable” user experience meshes with Savant’s mission to work with best-of-breed third-party products, Dempsey said.

The “curated” approach to product selection is an integral part of the HAUS strategy, said Carlen. If dealers “stay within the set of curated products, we can provide support and anything you need related to those products,” he said. If dealers go outside of the curated products list, HAUS won’t support a system because it could lead to a “lesser customer experience,” said Carlen.

On who makes the decision of which products fall onto the curated products list, Savant’s Dempsey said, “We have some say.” Savant has its own Elite partners, including Sonos, “so being able to work directly with Sonos in a deep integration with our user interface” has been a successful implementation for HAUS dealers, he said. If products "all play nice together within that sandbox, then your success of training a dealer to go to market with this sandbox is going to be through the roof.”

HAUS has no plans for retail or do-it-yourself (DIY) bundles or stores, Carlen told us. Savant, though, still has DIY on its radar, after the launch of a remote control-lamp module bundle last year, Dempsey said. That's the first Savant product that can be set up with a mobile device app without requiring computer programming from a certified installer. Savant’s $499 Remote + Host isn’t meant to be a DIY product, but setup with its new app “lends itself to being friendly to the prosumer” with some AV acumen and networking knowledge, said Dempsey.

It's the “do-it-for-me” consumer segment that HAUS' sister ebode business is just beginning to address and the segment of the market HAUS hopes to capitalize on. HAUS sees a huge opportunity in grabbing a slice of the 1.8-billion connected device pie forecast for 2019. The timing is right as products like Savant’s Remote + Host system have reached a tipping point in price, functionality and reliability, said Carlen.

A Savant system a few years ago was a luxury purchase in the “tens or hundreds of thousand dollars,” said Carlen, but today consumers can have a reliable, functional control system for several hundred dollars. Sonos, similarly, is hundreds of dollars versus thousands of dollars, he said. “What’s changed is the price, quality and reliability of the products that are available for the mass market, and the reliability is spectacular,” he said.

With smart home players including Apple, Google, Home Depot and Lowe’s exposing mainstream consumers to the smart home concept, the DIY world will expand, said Carlen. But he sees the number of consumers wanting to have smart home work done for them tracking a similar curve. “We’re about the dealer that wants to create an exceptional customer service experience for their customers, and we believe that’s got a lot of legs.” To support that strategy, less than half of the time HAUS dealers spend during training will be about product, said Carlen, and the rest will be about "communicating with homeowners."