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Status Solutions (Private) |
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October 15, 2012 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Providing Situational Awareness Technologies for Life Safety, Security, Environmental Monitoring and Mass Notification, Status Solutions Helps Enterprises Get Strategic About Risk Management and How to Better Protect Their Assets |
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www.statussolutions.com |
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Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – October 15, 2012
CEOCFO: Mr. MacLeod, what is Status Solutions? Mr. MacLeod: We are a technology company that provides situational awareness solutions, tools that in essence enable the protection of people and stuff. We help organizations know what’s happening to their people and stuff to prevent ignorance-based loss.
CEOCFO: Is situation awareness an industry category or is it the way you best describe Status Solutions? Mr. MacLeod: Situational awareness is actually a term that came out of the aeronautics industry. It represents the relationship of a pilot to his instrumentation, your altitude, your velocity, your SA as it is called. When you’re flying a plane, the key is not to run into a mountain or storm cell. In a business context, SA is being aware of potential threats to life, property, business and convenience. Just because you’re on the beach in Maui doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know that your doorbell is ringing in New York. Situational awareness is, as an application in broader society, knowing what is going on so you can deal with it.
CEOCFO: What are some of the common areas you work in and what are some of the situations you are monitoring that people would be surprised that you are able to monitor? Mr. MacLeod: Some threats are actually codified. For example, in a healthcare environment Code Blue means there’s a cardiac event, Code Grey indicates a weather event, Code Red means there’s a fire, Code Violet signals there’s an armed intruder, and Code Pink is an infant abduction. Our solutions will provide alerts for these sorts of triggering events as well as for the more mundane but still costly situations such as a malfunctioning freezer full of plasma or meds. Less sensational but inconvenient is when a high school kid plugs up a toilet, causing it to overflow for hours with no one realizing it. Or they flick a cigarette into a trashcan, starting a fire. A fire can cause a great amount of damage, and it can cause people to lose their lives. Knowing that there’s a fire and where it’s located is very important if you want to avoid it. Whether you need to evacuate a large campus versus a small elementary school, you still have to get people out safely. We view the world in terms of screens – from smartphones to workstations to TVs and digital signage – and getting information to those screens so action can be taken to protect people and stuff. People always ask me who my competition is, and I always tell them it’s ignorance. If you lose your car keys, that’s ignorance-based loss and it’s inconvenient. We can tell you where your car keys are or any other valuable asset so you won’t lose convenience much less experience ignorance-based loss of people and property, thereby disrupting your business’s operations.
CEOCFO: How do you track such a large variety of items and people as well as systems; how do you put it all together? Mr. MacLeod: Generally, speaking there’s a sensor for everything. At the Dannon plant, they monitor ammonia levels. Making yogurt is different than making cars, and a hospital is different than a hotel, but a head is a head and a bed is a bed. An infant isn’t supposed to leave the maternity ward without its mom. These environments are all different, but they each require certain controlled conditions to ensure the desired outcomes. Situational awareness provides centralized and automated monitoring, alerting and reporting to ensure optimal outcomes.
CEOCFO: You mentioned a variety of industries, are there particular areas of focus for you? Mr. MacLeod: We focus on life safety assurance, security, environmental monitoring and mass notification across a lot of industries. But we do a lot in healthcare, long-term and acute care as well as helping K-12 and higher education campuses. Fires, tornadoes and those sorts of incidents are indiscriminate; they affect everybody. Our belief is that any organization can and should implement situational awareness to protect people, property, business and convenience.
CEOCFO: How do you compare to competitors that are more industry specific? Mr. MacLeod: We are an outcome-focused company, and the outcome that we are trying to drive is right-now awareness. My company’s mission is to defeat ignorance. I don’t view Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Cisco and other companies as competitors, I view them as partners. When we go to a customer’s site, we may be integrating our solution with any number of other companies’ systems. That’s what we do – we specialize in making everything play nice. So we don’t like to characterize the makers of those systems as competitors but more as partners. Let’s get real, equal parts cooperation and competition is the new reality in business. We are first a middle-ware company. We sit in the middle of all kinds of manufacturers’ stuff and make it all better. I guess you could say we’re kind of like ketchup in that we make many things better.
CEOCFO: What happens day-to-day at Status? Mr. MacLeod: Hopefully our people are innovating because that’s what we’re here to do. A guy from the National Science Foundation told me a long time ago that “research is how you turn money into knowledge, and innovation is how you turn knowledge into money.” Planned ignorance is not a business strategy, it’s just apathy, but planned awareness is a strategy. We help people get strategic about risk management and how they are going to better protect their people and stuff regardless of industry or vertical. Our people innovate around situational awareness solutions that have real impact and ROI. In the case of Dannon, it costs $300,000 if they have to throw out one batch of yogurt. Helping people save money and lives has real ROI associated with it, and that is our relevance. I didn’t start the business to make money but to make a difference. Be a difference-maker, not a sameness-maker. There are many people out there just hawking wares, but we’re trying to make a difference and drive positive societal outcomes with urgency and differentiation.
CEOCFO: Do many of your customers come to you proactively or do they seek you out after they have a problem? Mr. MacLeod: It’s split down the middle. Situational awareness is a risk management strategy. Putting up a guardrail when a car is smoldering in a ravine is good for the next car. Many people implement our solution after the fire, but we prefer to implement before the fire, tornado or armed gunmen. We provide a lot of life-safety-based help but also a lot of convenience-based help. Pushing a button to request help or initiate certain actions has many legs depending on the customer’s business and requirements.
CEOCFO: Given all the opportunity and need, how do you decide where to focus? Mr. MacLeod: We are case study driven. The replication opportunities are everywhere. I sent one to our team today about a business club that uses our technology to signal to wait staff about whether a meeting is private or whether they need more coffee, etc. Those status indicators are included in a number of our solutions. They’re like the red flag on your mailbox that you put up to indicate your mail needs to be picked up.
CEOCFO: Status has won a number of awards in industry recognition. Is that important for business or just nice to be recognized; does it further people’s awareness? Mr. MacLeod: We can’t help people if they don’t know we exist, so we invest in marketing to get the word out about who we are, what we do, and why we do it. From the beginning, my vision has been for this company, our people, to make positive societal impacts. Awards are great, but we'll stay focused on our mission regardless of whether or not we win any formal industry recognition. In fact, because of the nature of their businesses, many customers don’t like to talk about how they use our technology. But we know that our solutions are being used to keep people safe, and saving lives is what’s really gratifying.
CEOCFO: Our readers are primarily in the business and investment community. Why should they pay attention to Status Solutions?
Mr. MacLeod:
Keeping people and stuff safe are huge considerations for every enterprise.
Property casualty companies can quantify all this, but what we do is provide
better tools. If you can squeeze costs out of your operation that have to do
with fixing broken stuff, tighten insurance claims, etc., that drops rates
to the bottom line. It is a huge impact. One infant abduction could put a
hospital out of business. |
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Planned ignorance is not a business strategy, it’s just apathy, but planned awareness is a strategy. We help people get strategic about risk management and how they are going to better protect their people and stuff regardless of industry or vertical. Our people innovate around situational awareness solutions that have real impact and ROI. - Mike MacLeod |
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