“We were always fascinated by the fact that there has never been really focused training to help and support dealers’ businesses,” Daniels said. The seeds of HAUS were beginning to grow as Daniels and his partners recognized a huge opportunity in the explosion of what he calls the broad market of home automation.

“Three years ago,” Daniels said, we asked each other, “Why doesn’t the consumer electronics industry do this?” It was then they decided to build something that can be replicated and that helps all their dealer friends improve their businesses and get out of their silos to become home technology service providers. “That’s when we made the conscious decision to help the entire industry grow and provide better customer experiences with HAUS by filling the void we saw,” Daniels said.

Daniels explained, “We said, if we are going to do this, why don’t we build something cost effective for anyone in the industry who wants to go after the 60 million customers of existing homes and new homes with competitive advantages, the right training, the right business resources and the right tools to organize and run their businesses efficiently — and that’s what made us say, ‘We’re going to build HAUS.’”

They then began the development process by learning all the attributes of that broad market customer: knowing what those customers’ needs are and how they buy and what they want to buy. “We spent a year analyzing the marketplace,” Daniels said, “and doing customer studies to understand how to build an organization that helps dealers succeed and saves them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in wasted time and effort.” Daniels said they wanted to help customers build a “wash, rinse ‘n’ repeat” kind of business so they can go attack the marketplace and gain hundreds and thousands of new customers.

The program, he said, is designed to help train people and eliminate the shadow training deficit that can cost $30,000 to $40,000 for every new employee, and help put the right systems in place to attract new customers.

In January 2015 they began in earnest to make their vision a reality, spending a year building a 26,000-square-foot campus and training center that opened March 1, 2016. They designed an educational process that is a mix of online, on-campus, continuing education and digital content management.

“A member of HAUS has a place to go where there is hands-on learning,” Daniels said. “They get to work on their business and learn how to manage their business, sales and marketing, and the technical side of their business in a very fun, adult learning-type of environment where they don’t sit and listen to someone speaking for days.”

HAUS has its own staff of 15 full-time trainers who update members by the day and by the week about new marketing ideas, sales techniques, troubleshooting methodologies, business efficiencies, practical guidelines, and forms and processes they can use in their businesses. “Our entire team acts as a sixth man for the businesses,” Daniels said, “so all staff members must have the same values.” This way, Daniels explained, HAUS can teach practical application and can control how and what dealers learn.

Each of HAUS’s members can send an owner/manager, someone from the sales team and someone from the technical team, who get the entire hands-on experience in a four-day program in Denver. The program is designed to train members across the three disciplines of products, service and support, teaching members to provide exceptional customer experience with strong competitive advantage, Daniels said.

“There is good product training out there, but not good business training,” Daniels said. “Our training eliminates years of trial and error.”