2201 - From Check-In to Check-Out How Innovation in Security Wins Guest Loyalty with Stratoscope's Dan Donovan

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1:05With us right now, it is Dan Donovan. Dan, you are the founder and managing partner at Stratoscope and Ingressotech. Your website is stratoscope.com and ingressotech.com. We've got the direct links to that in the show notes. And Dan, before we talk about the work that you do, and I'm really excited to talk about this. This is a very fascinating topic. But before we get into that, Dan, what are you currently doing for fun right now? or kind of hobbies or things you're geeking out on? Well, listen, there's a few things. I just got engaged and we're going to get married on New Year's Eve. Hey, congrats.

1:47So there's that project. A new relationship, a new engagement, yes. Well, not only that, but planning a wedding. And then, you know, whenever we can, we're out on my boat. I have a 50 foot boat. We spend a lot of time on the water. That's my like happy place. and being out on the water is is like you know anytime i can be out there that's that's that's a good day yeah what you said 50 foot boat what kind is it it's a tiara tiara it's a it's called tiara 48 le um it's it's it's beautiful it's like you can have day boat and you've got two bedrooms and two baths and we can go to the bahamas in it and i've got you know um uh elon musk's internet That's Starlink.

2:32Yeah, sure. I can sit and, you know, I can run the company from the boat. Yes. Oh, my God. I'm looking at photos of this right now. All right. You're getting me. After you start looking at photos, then you start looking at listings. Yeah, well. Buy and sell. Exactly. Oh, that looks fun. That looks fun. Well, I don't blame you. That would be a happy spot. Have you ever been out in, like, obviously, you know, you know what the weather is going to be doing. so you can kind of avoid most stuff. But have you been in a situation where kind of like weather was kind of unavoidable? Well, it's a funny story.

3:09I took my, three of my vice presidents, it was last spring and we were planning to go over to Bimini and we had a short window where they could fly in and then I had to get them back out a couple of weekdays and some weather was going on elsewhere in the US. flights got delayed everything got pushed back you want to cross the ocean in the morning that's when it's flattest well we ended up having to cross in the afternoon and of course just before we were going to make the crossing this storm goes through and just stirs up the ocean and I said listen it's going to be a rough ride but we're going to go because we had to be back in like 36 hours so so we made the crossing in kind of four to five foot waters seas and it was bumpy It was a bumpy ride over, but it was well worth it to wake up the next morning in Bimini and beautiful blue water and have a great 24 hours over there.

4:06Yeah, that's got to be great. I bet you get out to the Keys pretty often, too. Yeah, the Keys, the Bahamas. The Bahamas are closer, actually, than the Keys, where I am. Yeah, yeah, okay. I can see that. So it's a lot of fun. We thoroughly enjoy it. Oh, man, that's wonderful. All right, so let's talk about the work that you do. What a fascinating topic. Yeah. Look, it's very unique what we do, and it's actually hard to explain it to people that aren't in the event business. Yes. You know, I'll meet people at parties. They're like, what do you do? I said, well, I'm in the event security business.

4:44We're the strategic end of it. And, you know, people are like, you have security guards? And I'm like, no, we don't do security guards. We hire companies that do that, but we're the design consultant that pulls a whole security plan together on the consulting side. And then we go manage it. We're the general contractor. We contract all the pieces, whether it's guard companies or video surveillance or screening for guests or canine or police. Whatever that event needs, our team pulls that plan together. And then you have one throat to choke. You turn to us for all things access control, security, crowd management, emergency operations, crisis management.

5:24That's the Stratoscope business. And then Ingressotech is where we provide the latest in weapons detection systems. So AI-based weapons detection. So when you go to an event, instead of your TSA style, you go through a magnetometer, some guard has to go through your wife's purse, and you can't carry a bag. With these technologies, you walk through it to speed of life. And in literally only about 10 % of the crowd ever alerts. And so you can flow right through. And we know that we don't have a big bang, big boom problem within the perimeter. It's really advanced technologies. And it's really our team of experts that go and deploy that.

6:04And then, you know, oddly, since we connected, we just closed on the acquisition of a new canine company. So we bought Ford Canine, the leaders in training and certification and consulting with handlers and dogs, weapons and explosive detection dogs. And we're launching Stratos Canine, and that'll be the service to be able to provide handlers and dogs to the event industry, to companies, to campuses, and provide a really high-end canine and handler service. um how did uh these two companies or how did these companies start like how did you go from you know working uh and you know you were previously kind of a vp of sport and entertainment security solutions and then you started your own thing like how did you start that well it goes back you know i coached college football at georgia tech i got involved the atlanta olympics on the sports department side.

7:06And I got recruited by the Sydney organizing committee to go and be part of the sports department for the Sydney organizing for the Sydney Olympics, which was in 2000. I was the first expat hired by the Sydney organizers, I ended up running the whole sports department. So all 28 sports reported to me. And when I so when I finished that, I said, I want to be in the event industry, but I want to own my own business. And so I started a company called the Indicon Group. And, you know, Josh, for 10 years, I ran that company. And looking back, I didn't run it really well. And so I sold that company to a New York firm, Guidepost Solutions, and then stayed with them for a while.

7:43And then TNM in New York also. And I realized I needed to go out on my own again. I needed to do my own thing. COVID happened. And it was my opportunity to leave TNM and bring my team with me. And we started Stratoscope in the middle of a pandemic and Ingressotech, fully knowing that events were going to come back. And when they did, event organizers were going to need very high-end consultants and technologies to run events at a very high level post-pandemic. And the bet paid off. You know, we took the risk. It was a big risk at the time because, you know, during COVID, there were no events going on.

8:28And we took that risk. It was the best risk I've taken in my life because now we've got the two companies are flourishing four and a half years later. And we bought the canine company and business is great. Congratulations on that. I'm really excited, Dan, to hear maybe just a bit more about how AI, because you talked about this, obviously, and it's kind of part of your solution. But logistically, if you can minimize the impact of security, we've certainly seen improvements. We go to a lot of theme parks, for example. Well, you're not getting into Disney without going through some pretty significant screening.

9:09and they've really improved a lot of the systems, the ticket taking, like everything is really improving. We go to a lot of live music venues and concerts. I'm excited to see how things are becoming less obtrusive and just more effective to keep folks safe. Yeah, look, our job in the security space is to apply security to the event. there's no event that you've ever gone to that's a security event right so how do we apply security to keep guests attendees fans safe and still provide that real premium guest experience right because you know i had a marketing person that knew nothing about the event industry when i was starting with the ingresso tech and and she said dan you're not in the security space I said, I'm not, what am I in?

10:02And she said, you're in the emotion space. Because you think about it, you buy that Taylor Swift ticket, you buy that, you know, Orlando magic or, you know, pick an event, your emotions are way up here. And then you make that path, you make that journey to the event that day and you get there and there's long lines for security and your emotions go way down and you're looking around and you're saying, man, this is this sucks. We should have come earlier. We should have listened to them. And, you know, so our job is really to keep that emotion up here, because once you go into that that that perimeter, we our clients want you to go buy that merchandise, want you to go buy that that that food and beverage that they're charging a premium for.

10:48And our job then is to keep that that emotion way up here, not to let it drop down and then have to try and build it back up once you go through the process. So we've really looked at it from how do we how do we provide that great guest experience while keeping it very safe and secure? Because you also want that when you go through there, you go to Disney or you go to a concert with your family and you don't see that security in that in that process. You're like, hey, what's going on? Is this a safe event? Should I be here? What am I doing? So a balancing act. Right. And, you know, our team strives to get that balance just right.

11:23Right. And, you know, Dan, in terms of like your growth, and by the way, you have worked with some, I mean, the biggest of the big events. Do you mind maybe just kind of sharing a little bit about who you've worked with? And then, you know, how have you how have you grown at this pace? And, you know, what does growth look like, do you imagine, over the next year? Well, you know, I have been fortunate. I've been involved in 13 Super Bowls and seven Olympic Games. So I've seen the biggest events take place that, you know, frankly, get the most resources also. You know, we were appointed when Formula One went to Las Vegas to pull together the first security plan for running a Formula One in a city like Las Vegas.

12:07Wow, that was a huge project. Massive. And, you know, it's those those types of events take tons of resources and planning time. And that's where our niche really came in is how do you get involved in the event early enough to where you can work with the event owner to plan the security elements, the safety elements, the emergency response plan, everything that's needed as they're pulling their plans together so that that planning process is really aligned. And you get to that event day and everybody knows, hey, the security team's got this. We've got crowd management. We're going to take care of these pieces and then pull together that.

12:50I love having a really fine-tuned event op center. And I get decision makers in the same room. And we have video surveillance. And we can run the whole event from the op center. You know, think about Apollo 13, Houston, we have a problem. We want to make sure we never have Houston, we have a problem at our event. because we have decision makers together and we're solving problems in real time. Yeah. So from a company standpoint, how do you manage growth or what does your team look like on that side of it? You know, growth is the challenge. We're still in the people business. We have technologies that we deploy, but we're in the people business because without the right people, the technology doesn't go well.

13:34You know, you've all deployed technologies before and said, oh, this is a great technology, but it failed for me. It wasn't because the technology failed. It was because how you operationalize that technology is really the key. So growth for us is twofold. It's finding the right clients, and we know who the right client is for us. And we've defined who that client is, and I think that's really critical in any business. because if you try and be, you know, all things to all people, you're going to struggle, right? So define who your client is and then focus on building your revenue growth with that type of client.

14:16And then it's the people, like how do we attract the right people so that we can, you know, we can scale with the demand that our clients have. And, you know, we just ran an event for Google a few weeks ago in Las Vegas, and we run Salesforce's annual event in San Francisco. We fly in 90 to 100 people from our team to manage this massive, you know, security posture and crowd management plan. So growth is critical to, you know, the two critical elements of growth are the right people, the right experience, and then making sure you define your client and you're providing the right resources for them.

14:55Yeah. Okay. So your website, stratoscope.com, and then, oh, I'm so sorry, Dan, what was the other website for the other brand? Ingressotech.com, I-N-G-R-E-S-S-O-T-E-K, and then stratoscanine.com. Yeah. Okay. So to our friends that are listening right now, and who is like an ideal connection for you? At what level do you start engagement? Does it make sense to engage you? Big events that a company might be putting on. Maybe you could kind of help stimulate some ideas of who should be reaching out. Yeah, it's a great question. Our real niche right now is with that internal corporate event. And size isn't the issue anymore.

15:47because we've seen incidents at a shareholder meeting in New York City with UnitedHealthcare where a CEO gets murdered on the street. So it could be 100 or 1 ,000, 500 people, 1 ,000-person corporate meeting that's public. There's a public agenda. Now you have risk, and you should have a security consultant or plan for every event like that. You need to budget for that and get that security element involved in your planning process early because you can determine, hey, I don't need 17 doors open. I need two or three doors open. I can manage the rest. I can screen people if that's what's necessary.

16:25So engage that security consultant early in your planning process. And then look at these technologies like Ingressotech has and say, you know what? I can screen everybody that's coming into this perimeter. And I can do it in a very non-obtrusive way. And I can make sure I've got a really safe event space. So it could be that internal corporate event planner. It's that production company. It's, you know, think about all the healthcare conferences and financial conferences and legal conferences that are taking place, you know, weekly around the country. What is necessary? What should be added to those event plans to make sure we keep everybody as safe as possible?

17:10Yeah, your website, again, Stratoscope and InnoTech. I'm so sorry, Conley. I didn't have it in front of me, and that's my fault. It's all right. No, I'm embarrassed. It's all right. Ingressotech, my goodness. Listen to our friend that's listening to us. Easy. We got directly one click away for you. But again, Dan, it's been a great conversation. Again, your founder, managing partner at Stratoscope and Ingressotech. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it. All right. Enjoy some time on that boat. I appreciate it. We will.

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