Roadside MBA by Michael Mazzeo

Author:Michael Mazzeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

Jefferson City, Missouri

WREN SOLUTIONS

Improve Your Outside Options; Reduce Your Partner’s

Andy Wren, CEO of Wren Solutions, was kind enough to provide a thorough explanation of his company’s products and operations, as well as an interesting tour of his company’s Jefferson City, Missouri, facility. And some day we hope to meet him.

While Andy was enthusiastic about talking with us when we contacted him, he explained there was one important caveat. Wren’s corporate headquarters are in Jefferson City, but Andy and several parts of the operation are based in Atlanta. So our meeting consisted of the three of us sitting in a conference room in Missouri talking at a speakerphone with Andy, who sat two states away in Georgia.

“This is unusual,” Scott said as we waited alone in a beige conference room with a wood table large enough to seat the presidential cabinet.

“It’s perfect,” Mike quipped. “Now I can silently mock you when you ask a stupid question.”

When he joined our conversation, Andy explained the odd geography of the situation. “I grew up in Jeff City, went to Auburn, and majored in sports marketing. With the Olympics coming here in 1996, this seemed like the place to be. Then I decided to go to work for Dad, but there’s no baseball team in Jefferson City. I love Jeff City, but when I was twenty-three years old it didn’t seem as attractive as Atlanta from a quality-of-life perspective.”

Wren Solution’s main business is security systems, manufacturing housings and mounts for cameras, and developing solutions for monitoring. Wren originally focused on retail customers but has now expanded to other markets, particularly school systems.

Walmart, Wren’s biggest customer, uses their systems to watch customers from cameras mounted in the ceiling. “To frame up our industry, imagine a pyramid with three horizontal layers,” Andy explained. “The bottom of the pyramid is what we call system components. It’s very hardware-centric, it’s the plastic housings, the cameras, the monitors, and the recording platforms. That was our whole industry up through the 1990s. The bottom of the pyramid is commoditized now.

“As technology advanced, things shifted to digital video, so software started to make an entree into the business. We’ve now got ‘point’ solutions, where we have software driving some of those cameras and recording devices. That layer is where we are as an industry right now. The top is more of a pure software play, trying to integrate all those systems. That’s where we have positioned our business moving forward.”

Further discussion with Andy revealed that negotiating with customers, as well as setting the company’s strategy in anticipation of those negotiations, is essential to the success of Wren Solutions. Their experiences highlight the value of thinking strategically about how to improve your own next-best option and how to find partners whose next-best options are not so strong.

Paul got right to the heart of the issue. “Walmart has a reputation of being very hard on their suppliers. Are there downsides to having so much of your business with them?” Mike did not silently mock this, so it must have been a decent question.

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