Sometimes great things come out of failure - As seen on Utah Success Stories on ABC4 News.

SOMETIMES GREAT THING COME OUT OF FAILURE. 

By Doug Jessop -ABC4 News

(ABC4 NEWS – Utah County) Sometimes great things come out of failure. Tyler Crawford, CEO of Utah County based Novi Security, explains what happened when a group of BYU students had a class assignment to set up a business and got an idea “If we build a device that goes in your car that tells you over text when your car alarm is going off everybody going to buy it. They asked people around the mail if they would buy that…failed miserably…but one person in that conversation said if you did that for my house that I would be interested. They built a cardboard prototype and knocked on over a thousand doors and continued to innovate on that.

That prototype idea has grown up to be an inexpensive, but powerful, security device that has motion detection, a high definition camera, a smoke sensor and a siren all run through an app.

Stoel Rives patent attorney, Whit Johnson, reports that Novi Security as awarded the 2018 Utah Innovation Award for Outdoor and Consumer Products. “Utah is an entrepreneurial and creative community and we have lots of people that are trying to do cool new things. They brought home security to a market that hadn’t been served. Now many more people can have peace of mind of having a camera and a system in their that help them protect their belongings and their space.”

What does the Utah Innovation Award mean to Crawford? “It’s a really big deal. Utah Innovation is among the top in the country. The ability to have this recognized is awesome.” Novi Security is proud of the fact of being a Utah made product. “We built this here. The whole thing is built in Utah. Our circuit boards, our plastic, our tech support. Everything is done in Utah.”

The drive towards success is certainly going in the right direction. Imagine having only 15 minutes to present your product to Home Depot and you forgot that you put in an extra slide the night before. “These are the buyers, so this your one change to kind of tell your story. I have our slides and it has ‘traditional security’ on this slide and ‘do it yourself security’ on this slide, so I stuck us in the middle and put ‘beyond do it yourself’. The buyers from Home Depot go, what is ‘beyond do it yourself. What does it mean. We don’t have anything like this.’ So that’s what we coined ourselves. We blend the high-end functionality of traditional security with the price point and install time of do it yourself systems.

So, what motivates Crawford to do great things? It gets personal. “My oldest daughter, when she was 3, I got home from work one day and she said, ‘Did you do anything great today?’ which I thought was a profound question. Bringing a product to life that you can go to a store and see on the shelf is a big deal. That’s really what drives me.”

With another Utah Success Story, I’m Doug Jessop.