Neale 00:10
Hi, I am Neale Mighall. Welcome to another episode of the Another Bright Spark podcast. My guest today is Gary Digva. Hi, Gary.
Gary 00:16
Hi, I don’t know where to look. Gary Road Angel, how are you doing?
Neale 00:20
Not too bad. So Gary’s the owner of Road Angel. I wanted to talk to you because you’re really, really interesting to us. There’s been a lot like electronic development, which ties into what we do as a business. But you had quite a humble beginning. So Gary started off selling mobile accessories on a basically a market stall. You bought the rights to Road Angel. And I mean, it’s a really impressive story. What I want, why I’ve invited you here to start off to talk about is what was involved in scaling that up from going from that to such a large organization. What were the what were the challenges?
Gary 00:52
So originally my father and my older brothers started the business on a market stall literally going to markets and selling brick and brack and all sorts of stuff and my elder two brothers had a really keen interest in electronics and particularly automotive electronic speakers amplified for cars etc. So one day my father took my brothers to a retailer and they were looking around and said look we really want to give this stuff a go we have no money literally nothing they scraped a 500 quid or something and they went and picked 500 quids worth of gear maybe a thousand and the guy was an old guy at the time and he says you know what you look like honest people so i’ll say the 500 quid and sell what you sell and pay me the balance next week so they went to the markets and literally this sold out and it was like phenomenal you’re talking late 80s early 90s these guys done like a thousand pound on a market store which is unbelievable
Neale 01:51
What was the secret to the success personality, product?
Gary 01:55
I think knowledge is really important you’ve got to know what you’re talking about and if you’ve got passion in anything and you know what you’re talking about don’t just make it up but you’ve got the passion and the intelligence and the technical know-how people buy because people buy from people they don’t buy on tech spec or sheets or anything like that. Trust is really important. So those guys they sort of continued and built the market stall up from just being sort of non-tech to car audio and technical products. When I joined the business I was literally like 12 years old and I came in because I was really keen.
Neale 02:31
Just nine years ago?
Gary 02:32
Yeah yeah not long at all. Literally just when I passed my test yeah and so started the business started joining the business and I had a really keen interest in IT so I was at all the PCs all the gaming machines used to program used to do my own thing and I was like you know what guys we can we can really bring technology into the fold scale up yeah let’s scale it up and at that time we had no intention of scaling anything it was just a case of make a living do well, have food at the end of the table in the evening and you’ve done all righ.t So the family look at yourself yeah that was the ambition that was the ambition it was never to go and run a big business so we then I joined the business in the late 90s and we brought it into the internet so the first thing I launched was online commerce let’s digitize everything automation and I brought that technology side into the business we then started going creative in our technology products so we then started going to Far East in China and bringing in products off the shelf initially but then later bespoking them to how we needed them in terms of cosmetics changes but going one step beyond that we then started because I’ve got keen interest in electronics studied electronics at school got keen interest in that I then started talking to the factories about customizing the electronics to get it more European friendly because the key is the Chinese are great but they build products for their market or the American market that they follow not European or in particular Britain because we’re a bit we’re different.
Neale 04:09
Different language, different way of thinking, different mannerisms it’s just subtle things isn’t it and you want a better user experience for for a native to pick up.
Gary 04:17
100%. So we brought in that technology part of the business which did phenomenally well. We then grew our own retail stores because we became a retailer. We had at one point 12 retail stores throughout the UK which was a great part of the business and then guess what happened the big crash of 2008 literally the whole world just went up in flames. We had major customers go bankrupt on us, we have people owe us money, we had to really rationalize the business and it was case of what should we do, how should we do this. So we then just moved into our big headquarters which was seven acre site, we had loads of aspirations, great timing, perfect timing, beautiful showroom, really spent, really went to the months on the whole design thing.
Neale 05:02
Completely empty.
Gary 05:03
TV screens above the urinals, state-of-the-art, and then guess what, the whole world crashed. What do we do?
Neale 05:11
How do we pay, how do we keep the lights on? Yeah, yeah.
Gary 05:14
And that was it, and it was a point of survival, you have to survive, yeah.
Neale 05:18
Or then you’re back to, can we put food on the table at that point?
Gary 05:21
100%. So it was the case of we survived, we went through it, we came out the other side. But it’s quite an interesting story. I went into licensed electronics first. So before Road Angel, I did licensed electronics. And at the time, it was my youngest who was big into Dora the Explorer. Okay. And I was in one of the Chinese shows as you go into China and digital photo frames became a big thing. So I called up Nickelodeon and I’m like, Hey, this is Gary Digva from a company in Nottingham InPhase. I’m interested in having a license for Dora the Explorer. And they’re like, really? They checked my company and they’re like, you do car audio and electronic products. I was like, yeah, no, I’ve got a good idea. I tried to float it by you. I said, no, no problem. Guess what? Nickelodeon came up. They turned up to my office, I had to explain to my business plan what I choose to do. And I launched a range of licensed electronics. So that was digital photo frames, DVD players, headphones, MP3s, toasters and all that kind of stuff. Under SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer.
Neale 06:24
Which are really common now. You get, like, branded Mickey Mouse, Mario, headsets.
Gary 06:29
Yeah, this is talking 2007-2008. Yeah I’m sorry no 2009 actually I launched that. Within a year or two I had products in Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrison’s, Comet, Curry’s, Argos you name it I put it everywhere.
Neale 06:44
What a turnaround!
Gary 06:44
Yeah phenomenal so really transformed our business but it was boring. No. License electronics, headphones.
Neale 06:55
The headphones over from manufacturing in China, manufacturing abroad, sending all the graphics over, printed over there, imported straight in.
Gary 07:01
Yeah boring business yeah it was great fun yeah and then the returns start stock piling, because you quickly learn that electronics to buy cheap you’ve got to build cheap you’ve got to buy cheap components
Neale 07:14
Not good quality.
Gary 07:16
Not good quality. No at all. That got my interest thinking, so then started with Road Angel, so we were a customer there. We very quickly became their number one customer throughout the world and I then approached them and said, hey, you know what, let me buy you guys out and they laughed and they walked away and then I approached them again and said, let me buy you out and they laughed and walked away and then one day I got the phone call to say, hey, you’re interested? The timing’s right and I think everything’s about timing, right time, right place, everything happens, the moon and the stars align and the rest is history, so we acquired Road Angel.
Neale 07:57
And for clarity for the viewers, Road Angels specialize in…
Gary 08:01
We’re speed awareness, so we do speed camera detectors, so we call it now ‘speed awareness device’ which tells you if you’re breaking the speed limit.
Neale 08:09
And this is an in-car device.
Gary 08:11
In-car yeah. And then dash cameras, so for recording accidents, parking mode, things like that, and then also car stereos. So we’re an automotive brand, we’re focused on automotive, and our ethos for Road Angel is trying to make the road safer, not just for the driver, but for all people who use the road, and not just people, animals as well. Because we believe in saving lives, whether those lives are human, or animals, we all love animals, we don’t want to run over a cat or a dog or a fox or anything, because it has impact, it affects everybody.
Neale 08:46
Well, I mean, she’s going to hate me for mentioning this. My considerably better half is learning to drive at the minute. She’s doing very, very well. Jenny, you’re fantastic. But she had to break suddenly a squirrel ran across the road and another oncoming car hit it and she was just in tears. It is quite traumatic. We’ve all hit things. It’s not pleasant.
Gary 09:04
Yeah 100% and people don’t want to do it so I our Road Angel ethos is let’s make the road safer for everybody. We believe in if you’re driving at the right speed at the right time you have enough time enough enough stopping distance to really stop and it’s time that you need you need space when people are driving 40 in a 30 it’s 30 for a reason because if you lose concentration and someone runs out to you runs out in front of you if you’re traveling at 30 you can stop in right amount of time traveling at 40 you can’t you’re going to hit that person and that’s going to be damaging so we want to bring people down to the right speed limits and then if in the eventuality you do have an accident with another car another person you’ve got it caught on your dash camera and then dash camera is not just about catching an accident it’s about making sure that the second biggest asset that you own outside of your house chances are is your car is to protect your vehicle you know and make sure it’s safe when it’s parked in the car park or outside on the street wherever it is.
Neale 10:10
Big investment yeah makes sense. So there’s a few things I want to unpack it because I can, I can envision two challenges. Challenge one, let’s talk about manufacturing overseas. So far shore, near shore challenges. And then also obviously integration from car manufacturers, that’s going to be huge. But so let’s jump over to manufacturing and outsourcing. So you’re outsourcing still in China, manufacturing or what’s it like with the supply chain?
Gary 10:33
We manufacture in China but R&D is done in the UK. So very quickly, from my years of doing license electronics, you understand components of a value. The better the quality of the components, the better the construction methods, the better you design a product, the longer it’s going to last and we don’t like returns. We want to sell the product and we don’t want it to come back. So all our… Absolutely, so we give three-year warranties standard on Road Angel and our returns are down to less than zero, half a percent. So it’s the case of give three-year warranty, build a quality product but you’ve got to design that here because you don’t want to cut any corners. China and Asia are great but they’re interested in margin and profitability and so are we in terms of business but we also know that it costs money to do reverse logistics, to handle returns, customer service. So if you make a product that’s good, quality, reliable, doesn’t break down, you’re saving money in the long run. So we won’t save 50p or a cent or a pound, we’ll just pay extra and make sure that that product doesn’t break down. So R&D is really important to us. Engineering is really important to us. Engineering, R&D, electronics design, industrial design, it’s all done in the UK. Yeah.
Neale 11:46
What’s important for you for a supply partner for R&D, what do you look for?
Gary 11:51
Um
Neale 11:52
And just for clarity, Gary isn’t working with us. I’m genuinely interested. It’s not a pitch.
Gary 11:57
I’ve known Ignys for for many years. Ignys was brought to us by our old R&D director which is John Gooch. We had meetings with Ignys back in the day. What we look for with a good partner is one they’ve got to understand our ethos what we’re trying to develop. Two they’ve really got to be an expert in what they do which if you’re looking at opticals for dash camera we need a partner who’s got experience in dash cameras or optical experience. And three is to make sure that they’re not too expensive or they’re going to miss deadlines. So they’re the three most important factors for a straight four. And it’s important to us that we trust our partners and we can build a long-term relationship.
Neale 12:41
Like you said, people buy from people that trust’s important, the knowledge and all that good stuff. I’m really interested in you working abroad as well for your manufacturing. So obviously with the licensing for the Dora the Explorer, it was cheap products, licensed merchandise, that kind of stuff. What was the process of going from a better quality Chinese manufacturer? Because they can do both. They can do cheap knockoffs, but they can do some really good quality. Look at the BYD EV cars. That business is exploding over there. It’s a huge industry. So people watching this, some people watching this will be entrepreneurs. They’re thinking about going abroad to manufacture. What was your experience and what was that process? How did you find a really good quality manufacturer going from a previous life? What was that like?
Gary 13:25
Very difficult You can’t just go to China and expect to just pick up the yellow page. Yeah, it’s really it’s really controlled
Neale 13:34
You wouldn’t be able to read it anyway with any other pages.
Gary 13:37
Definitely not. And and it’s still to this day very very difficult to find good partners because there’s a lot of censorship out there and a lot of things are controlled by the way that the country’s ran but partners are very important and I have a fantastic partner out in Hong Kong who’s stationed out in Hong Kong we’ve just opened a base in China and we employ local staff we’ve got 25 years of knowledge and those guys have been working in the electronics industry for a long time so some of them worked in Hong Kong when Hong Kong was electronics industry. Can you remember back in…
Neale 14:11
Yeah, it was a huge hub, yeah.
Gary 14:14
And then even before China, it was all in Hong Kong. So we’ve got some guys, we’ve got that knowledge and whilst the world is small, it’s a very big place, it’s a very small place and you find out who the good factories are, who are the guys who you can really trust and rely on and there’s some phenomenal suppliers out there. So we’ve got some great partners that we worked with for many many years. Two of our partners are European-based companies who’ve set up in China so we trust them, they’re very good and we’ve been using them for many years.
Neale 14:42
So you’d recommend getting someone local, who knows the ground, knows who to contact.
Gary 14:47
Yeah, yeah. Always. Always important.
Neale 14:49
Fantastic. Trust is key. So jumping back to the point that I want to talk about, obviously we’re in a very integrated world, as you know, software, mechanics software, car manufacturers. You think about a TomTom, no one buys a Tom Tom anymore. They’ve got the phone, they’ve got the GPS, you plug it in, you’ve got Apple, you’ve got Google, your phone just connects and stuff. How are you facing that challenge with Road Angel and what sort of extra features are you looking at and how do you get there?
Gary 15:21
I’m going to answer that question in two parts. So first, we at Road Angel developed the Connector GPS satellite navigation system in 2007 before TomTom. So Road Angel had been doing IoT since 2007, before IoT was a thing. So that was a challenge. And TomTom came over and took the market. They became the default brand, marketing, investment, more marketing, and literally everybody bought their products and that’s what it was. So wiped out loads of big players, people like Garmin, et cetera. Garmin, you forgot that name, yeah. I think it had a Garmin. Yeah, yeah. So it did go crazy. And then we felt an impact to our business when the mobile phone became really big. You know, when the smartphone, everybody started buying, I think 2010, 2011, we became more prevalent. I remember. At the market, we came big.
Neale 16:17
Yeah, no, sorry to interrupt, I remember it was a really poignant moment. I had a drummer at the time, the previous drummer, and we were meeting up for a gig and he turned up and he was using the Google Maps as a sat-nav. And he had limited data, but he could use it. He goes, oh, yeah, I’ve chucked my TomTom or Garmin or whatever he had. He’s like, yeah, I just use this now. Yeah, because I know most of the streets, but if I need to just find somewhere just plugs that in on this thing. And yeah, I was like, what? You can use your phone to to find place?
Gary 16:37
Yeah, you don’t need a map.
Neale 16:37
No, I think I had a Nokia 3210, but early Nokia smartphone with the Windows OS. That was terrible. I only had one of those phones, but yeah, it was revolutionary. I as like, you can walk around with your…
Gary 17:00
Yeah yeah and the app store just transformed business yeah
Neale 17:04
Well, TomTom became an app, didn’t it, when the physical product came away.
Gary 17:08
And that had damaged our business, many businesses, because everybody wants a free product, don’t they? They wanna be a case of, I can download this app for either a pound or two pound, or for free, and I can use it. So the app store really affected us as a business because at that time, Road Angel was predominantly a speed camera to set to a straight speed awareness product. And that’s all we were focused on. Dash cameras wasn’t a thing. So that impacted our business. With the integration of the car manufacturers working with Google, Apple, whilst that’s the way the future’s going, they’ve got lots of red tape, lots of compliance issues, lots of different laws in different countries. So it’s not that seamless. So there’s little gaps that we can find our ways in, and we’re now talking to car manufacturers because we can do things they can’t. So as an aftermarket perspective, we’re talking to two major car manufacturers about how Road Angel can help solve some of their problems because they’ve got geographical barriers. Right, yeah, yeah. And we can be a lot quicker. Yeah, a lot more agile. And a lot cheaper, because I think the project from this side is probably 20 million if they were to do it, much cheaper with Road Angel.
Neale 18:18
Do you do a lot of retrofitting for older cars?
Gary 18:22
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re the global supplier to Bentley Motors globally for dash cameras. Our dash cameras are designed to fit in every Bentley and literally they can be fitted from your 1920s Bentley to your 2020 model. Fantastic. So all our products are designed to be retrofitted.
Neale 18:43
You’re very driven. Obviously, you’ve come from, I was gonna say humble beginnings, and that sounds very condescending. Don’t mean it at all, but you know, you started off market stall, so obviously, you’ve grown this tenacious, you know, had some really great ideas and been successful in business. If we had some entrepreneurs look into this, they’re thinking fired up, they’re thinking of a career to build on their own idea, their own project. What would your advice be to them?
Gary 19:07
In my market or in a different market?
Neale 19:09
In general, someone who’s ambitious and hungry, and has an idea.
Gary 19:12
You’ve got to be hardworking. You’ve got to be prepared to put the graft in. If you don’t put the graft in, it’s not a nine to five job. You’ve all heard it on Instagram, social, you’ve got to be working all the time. You’ve got to have knowledge. There’s too many people try and start businesses with very little knowledge. And if you know what you’re doing, put your customer first, which is really important and put all those business processes in place, I think you can be successful in any industry, whether it’s waste disposal or tech or fintech, whatever you’re working in, you get those, that ingredients together correctly, you’ll do well. Yeah. And it’s all about hard work, passion and knowledge with the customer at the focal point.
Neale 19:54
It’s interesting that you’ve mentioned hard work and then mentioned social media. I think there’s an impression sometimes on social media that, that people just get the final snippet, it’s like, Oh, it’s an overnight success story. What they don’t see is the days, the hours, the years of what’s gone behind that. It’s like Chappell Roan. And all of a sudden she’s an overnight success. Well, no, she’s been grafting away for years and years.
Gary 20:14
Yeah, yeah. And that is the problem with social media. I mean, people just see the end result. It’s hard where people start from. Sometimes the biggest businesses that you see today didn’t didn’t set out to be a business. They fell into it. And the focus and the hard work naturally just excelled them. A great business. I mean, everybody knows the success of people at Apple and Amazon. But Amazon worked hard. You know, you’ve all seen the pictures of Jeff with his door desk and he grafted. But he’s a smart guy because he worked for a company who was saying, look into this internet thing. What is this internet thing? And the numbers just spoke for himself. And he had a very processed way of working out that I need to sell books because what other product can I sell, which has got loads of SKUs, can go deep, can apply to most of the market. And he stumbled across books and he’s right. You’ve got millions of titles, essentially. And then he started Amazon. But then branching off into web services and then buying Ring and they’re phenomenal, phenomenal businesses.
Neale 21:18
When, he’s very adaptable, isn’t he? And when you took on Road Angel, what challenges did you face there? I mean, it’s a different business, different organisation. Obviously, the electronics kind of held it together and obviously your passion for that and your interest in that and you’re driven, you saw the potential of the business, but going from one to the other, what were the obstacles and how did you overcome them?
Gary 21:41
So there’s many obstacles with Road Angel, one of them was infrastructure, so a lot of the time, at the time I settled my own data center, so I had plenty of bandwidth, plenty of storage, plenty of data storage and Road Angel were outsourcing them and they were spending 20-30 grand a month, you could see savings right away, so straight away the first thing I did, it was old kit, invested in new technology, brought the kit in, brought it in-house and straight away profitable in terms of we’re saving that money and then we’re pumping it into our other business, which was great. The customer service element of it, Road Angel didn’t have it together, so the way they were handling customer service, they would spend maybe two or three hours on a call, if a customer couldn’t diagnose it, because the demographic of the customer was quite old, the technology was new, customers would struggle, they spent hours on the phone, so the challenge was how do we speed that up?
Neale 22:35
My cup holder’s not working! It’s a CD tray.
Gary 22:37
Yeah yeah so you’ve got these guys and they can’t make the technology work. So it was a case of the challenge was how do we improve the customer service. So we dissected the business, we dissected the product and the first thing I did is started designing a new product. Went to Cambridge, set up an R&D centre, employed staff. We obviously made a couple of rounds of employment, found the right staff eventually and we designed our first product which would address all the problems that we had with Road Angel with the legacy product, with the issues with IoT, the latency, poor connectivity, in issues with windscreens because windscreens are designed to keep everything out and everything in. So we had to penetrate windscreens with our GPS and frequencies and we designed our new product and the new product had an accompanying app because the app was emerging, the old product didn’t. We had YouTube so we straight away launched help videos. We made the onboarding process simpler. We said to our customer service teams like if a guy can’t or a customer can’t manage the setup, we’ll set it up for them and we’ll ship the unit out and they were the type of challenges that we addressed so there were many challenges multifaceted but we managed to solve them in bringing out a better product, easier to use, better customer service and if you’ve got a problem we’ll take it back and give you a new one.
Neale 23:58
You’ve got a case of we can help you can add that on but while you’re there did you also know let’s just say they’ve got a dash cam did you know all your your stereos oh we also do there’s a lot of upsell cross sell and the more hands on you get I mean I’m not trying to say that you’re trying to squeeze every penny out of them but from a business point customer service just makes sense surely
Gary 24:18
100% that’s that’s what it’s down to because you spend a lot of money acquiring customer advertising whether it’s billboard magazine YouTube wherever you’re advertising You’re spending money and once you’ve acquired that customer, you must maintain that customer and keep them
Neale 24:33
And it’s easier to maintain them than it is to lose them again and again.
Gary 24:35
Absolutely, 100% and that’s what we focus on. We focus on maintaining our customer base. We’ve got a very good customer base once they join us that don’t tend to leave because it’s all about making sure that the customer gets what they need. Not necessarily want all the time because we have had some customers who just want everything. And you do have to say no.
Neale 24:56
Of course they do. I want a free stereo and a car.
Gary 25:00
This is, I’ll tell you the story of this one. I was in the office and the phone kept ringing and ringing. And it was like late half past eight or something like that in the evening, winter. I thought, this guy’s really persistent. So we didn’t have a sophisticated phone system and that wouldn’t manage it through call handling. It was just ringing. So I thought, I’ll answer it. Answered it. And the guy’s like, about time you guys answered, I said, we were closed. So why did you answer the phone? I said, well, I was just working here. And you just kept ringing and ringing and ringing. It’s been half an hour. So I thought, you’ve got a serious issue. I’ll address it. It’s like, yes, I’ve been driving on this road, A1, blah, blah, blah. This speed camera is missing. No problems. Give me a location. I’ll get it added to the database, find out what’s happening from the team. Right. Well, I want compensation. So what do you mean? He says, well, your product’s not up to scratch. I say, look, whilst we missed the camera, that from what you’re telling us, I don’t know. I’ve got no access to the system. I’m just taking your word for it. I’m going to relay it on to the correct person. We’ll address it tomorrow when the teams are back in. We’ll go back to you. So, well, I want compensation. I said, well, what do you mean you want compensation? He says, well, your product’s no good. I said, okay, if my product’s no good, no problem. I said, send it back. How long have you had it for? I’ve had it for a year and a half. It’s no problem. I said, send it back. I’ll give you full refund. Well don’t want a refund. But why not? He says, I want compensation. I said, so you’re just after free money. No, I’m not after free money. I want compensation.
Neale 26:30
Sounds like, Sounds like free money to me.
Gary 26:32
Absolutely. And I said, look, I’ll just give you your money back in full. Yeah, I said I’ll refund your entire subscription the cost of your goods Yeah, and we’ll give you back your money. Well, no your product is good. I said, well, you know, earlier you told me it wasn’t good. Yeah Which one is it? Yeah, yeah. Well, aren’t you gonna do anything for me? I said Yes What I’m willing to do is get the database investigate in that area We’ll report back to you whether it’s a glitch in your device or it was a genuine missing camera And we’ll let you know, but we’re not gonna give you any free money Oh, you’re not being very helpful. I want to speak to the owner. Did you tell him? Yeah, yeah, and then they’ve never believed they never believe you they’re just a no chance But it happens it we’re in the business. We’re working out and making sure that it’s there. Yeah
Neale 27:18
You can’t get better customer service than the owner. I mean he doesn’t pick up every phone call So please don’t I don’t want I don’t want you to get inundated with phone calls now. You can’t get further than that.
Gary 27:27
I tell you what, I do learn a lot from my customers. In my main office, where all our sales people sit and our technical guys, I have a desk in the corner, a bit like this, a desk in the corner, because I listen and that’s really important. My parents always used to say, and everybody says it, two ears, one mouth, listen more than you talk. When I’m sitting in the office doing my work, I can hear what’s happening in the office and very quickly you find out if there’s a problem, you find out what you’re good at, you find out what you’re not so good at and you find out if the staff are happy and you just help address it.
Neale 28:02
I had some of something that sort of blew my mind a little bit was a couple years ago I was sitting in a marketing and sales seminar and the guy giving the talk basically said you don’t know your business You don’t know the experience of your business because you don’t receive your business No matter what you think your organization or your business does unless you’re on the other side You’ve got no idea. Absolutely. And it’s just like of course, it’s it’s perception isn’t it? It’s like people think That it’s like almost psychological. It’s like I have an idea how people perceive me Yeah, but that doesn’t exist because it’s not in their heads. What’s in their heads is completely different to what’s in yours
Gary 28:38
And you know you you guys are engineers when when you’ve got an engineer designing a product you need to go you need to go through UX/UI design you need to have customers touching it you need to go through a focus group because engineers we do things that are different quirky we know all the ways you should do it but we don’t we don’t use the products all the time day in and out so the focus groups are really important you’ve got I always say my mom if my mom can use it it’s a great product so if she can’t use it back to the drawing board and start again.
Neale 29:08
And that’s no diss on you mom.
Gary 29:08
No no no not at all no.
Neale 29:13
Well you nailed it on the head before as well you were talking about you’re buying from China very early on. Yeah. It’s like you had to get them adapted to the European market because if an end user can’t use it then it’s not worth the price.
Gary 29:23
Yeah, I say, my customers will say, tell you and anybody you ask, we’ve got chubby fingers. We have chubby fingers in the UK, not just UK, but Europe, and the king’s got really chubby fingers by the way, but I hope he’s not watching this. Yeah, yeah, but I remember shaking his hand once and just thinking, wow, your hands are big. They’re like big man hands. But yeah, that makes a difference because at the end of the day when you’re developing a product, especially a touch screen, user interface, if the button’s too small and then you pull that into a vehicle, then you’re driving, then you’ve got bumps and suspension and bottles, you’re all over the shop. Yeah, absolutely. So it’s really important. So the key for me is to make sure you design good quality products in the native country where your customers are going to be. Makes perfect sense. Which is always important.
Neale 30:15
Okay, so what’s what’s next? What’s in the roadmap? What’s coming up for Road Angel? So what you can talk about anyway? Give us a taste.
Gary 30:22
So we’ve got loads and loads of stuff in the pipeline. I started the podcast off with technology, making roads safer for all. We’re developing products for many, many different organisations. We can’t talk about who we’re developing what for. But the key is bringing technology to the everyday person in their vehicle to make sure that they can drive safer. So one of the new innovations that we’ve got coming out for next year, which I will talk about, is ANPR on a dash camera, which is phenomenally new. The reason why people buy 4k or higher resolution dash cameras is to look at the number plate. Who’ve been hit by a car. Can I see the number plate?
Neale 31:06
ANPR as well is registration plate recognition. You see them in car parks when you go in, you see your registration plate come up and a lot of car parking companies use it, don’t they, to sort of issue fines and that kind of stuff and it’s used in a lot of ways but yeah.
Gary 31:19
Absolutely and that’s what we’re using so that launches on our new product next year so hopefully by May they’ll be sold in most retailers will have ANPR working on standard which will then say if you’ve been hit by a vehicle this was the actual number plate off that vehicle using AI technology to determine that. So we’re bringing in a lot of AI we’re working with a lot of camera technology different coatings reflections just to make the dash camera perform better and two to give you a better experience. The other thing that we’re bringing in Road Angel is great for speed awareness so you have to buy a Road Angel Pure Sync or a Pure One which sits on your dashboard and then you have your dash camera that sits on your windscreen. So next year we’ll combine the two into one so we’ll have a dash camera that sits on your windscreen that will give you everything that the Road Angel Pure speed awareness does via your dash camera. We’re launching into Europe, we’re launching into America so yeah we’ve got a lot on the horizon.
Neale 32:24
Fantastic, sounds really exciting.
Gary 32:25
It is exciting four new patterns of products as well for next year. Oh fantastic exciting times.
Neale 32:32
Yeah, brilliant, Gary, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming.
Gary 32:34
Wonderful. Thanks Neale. Thanks for having me. Cheers.