It’s fairly typical in the early growth of a startup for a company to pivot — to adapt its game plan as the reality of the market begins to reveal different methods of operating.
Those business pivots can be legendary, such as when Starbucks switched from selling espresso makers to selling freshly brewed coffee, or when Play-Doh, originally designed as a wall cleaner in the 1930s, became the ubiquitous children’s toy we know and love today.
But it’s far more rare — and also more risky — when a successful, thriving company decides to pivot. That goes double when the founder of that company has to pivot on his own.
That’s exactly what happened to Neil Willis, a Spartanburg-based entrepreneur who had founded Cynergy Systems, a major audiovisual integrator services company operating in Duncan. Back in 2009, Willis was still at the helm of Cynergy, and the company had grown into a major player in the Southeast. One day he and his team were touring a school in Charleston for which they were developing an integrated AV system: a delicate choreography of audiovisual technology, information technology, security surveillance and structured wiring.
“And then one other thing they wanted was digital boards to display their cafeteria menu, so they could change the menu easily every day,” Willis recalled.
Cynergy didn’t have its own digital signage technology, so it sold the school one from a separate company.
“And they absolutely hated it,” Willis said. “It required them to go through two full days of training, was hard to use and they just couldn’t stand it. They came to me and said, ‘Just get rid of it.’ At that point I turned to my team and said, ‘I guess we should probably do something with digital signage, huh?’”
One year later in 2010, the digital signage solution Willis and his team created was revealed at the Digital Signage Expo conference in Las Vegas, where it took home best in show.
“Because of those cafeteria menu boards, we went from knowing basically nothing about digital signage to being the best in the industry in less than a year,” Willis said.
It wasn’t long before he sold his interest in Cynergy and dove headfirst into the world of digital signage.
His new company, Hypersign, is now a massive presence not only in the Upstate, and not only in the Southeast, but all over the country and even globally.
It’s easy to see why the digital signage industry has all but devoured the old-school billboard. Digital signs can be changed on the fly, with clients updating the displays on their own through simple interfaces. There’s no lag time; once you hit “update,” the display changes in fewer than two seconds. Businesses like Hypersign, which structures itself as a software-as-a-service company, can constantly update services via the cloud to meet shifting needs and challenges.
“From our very small displays all the way up to the giant 12k walls inside the LAX airport, it’s all managed the same way,” Willis said. “There’s really not added complexity depending on the size of the display. All of it is designed around how the content is going to be used by the everyday person.”
Locally, the easiest example of Hypersign’s presence one can point to is Clemson University, where Hypersign handles all the way-finding screens, large LED screens, conference screens and more on the school’s campus. That includes the 210-foot-wide screen that shows off the Watt Family Innovation Center and the jumbotron sideboard inside Clemson Memorial Stadium, which itself measures 125 feet wide and 56.8 feet tall. It is the eighth-largest screen among college football stadiums in the country.
But that’s just Hypersign’s largest client locally. Beyond the Upstate, the company handles displays for convention centers, Marriott hotels, airports such as LAX, and Nashville’s HCA Healthcare, the largest health care system in the country.
“We’ve got a global reach and we’re based out of the state of South Carolina, a company founded and developed here,” Willis said. “I think that has a really interesting aspect to it that a small business can do that. I’m constantly looking for new solutions, and I love my state, so I think there’s so much we can do here to lift up the entire area.”
Jumbotron bigger than a house
Clemson’s video board at Memorial Stadium is a giant, clocking in at 7,100 square feet. It’s 125 feet wide and nearly 578 feet tall. At 6.7 million pixels, it has the highest resolution of any video board in college sports.
Is SaaS the way of the future?
Software as a service companies utilize a cloud-delivery model that offers customers access to a fully supported software application through the internet. Practically speaking, that means clients pay a subscription fee to use a service like Hypersign. That recurring revenue has made the model far more appealing in recent years.
