Understanding the Canadian AV Market

Hey everyone, welcome back to pro AV today today is a really fun episode. We get to talk about our friends to the north, specifically the Canadian market in AV. It's one of the fastest growing markets in North America, but it's also one of the most misunderstood for people here in the state. So wanted to bring in one of 1 to the friends of the show, Drew lively today to talk just a little bit more about that from census communications. Drew, Thanks so much for hopping on pro TV today. Thanks, Ben. Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here today. Well and what kind of stand there for a second? Drew was a fan of the show and we had a chance to chat. And drew, I mean, honestly, it's wonderful to have you on because I love hearing directly from some of the viewers. But you also provide incredible insight, not only as a viewer, but as a thought leader yourself. Tell us a little bit about that. Know, I first discovered you through the ethics, the organization and market scale, and I started watching some of the videos that you've been doing. And you it's just it's awesome. I'm just excited about technology and audio video, you know, like yourself and some of the topics, the diversity topics, the topics about emerging markets and new technology coming in is just, you know, part of the passion that I have for this industry. Well, I love to hear it, and I appreciate the kind words. And really, at the end of the day, the show exists to serve the community. Right it's I say this every once in a while, but this isn't a pay to play show. These guests are all organically sourced and it's something where we can have really meaningful and impactful conversations. And I and I love and appreciate the fact that you've been able to listen to some of those. And as we're talking about some of those topics that we get requests for all the time, the Canadian market is one that we get regularly, right. We have there is a little bit of a disconnect, even though we do have some representation in US based companies overseas, not even overseas, North of us, up in Canada. But there are just naturally a lot of questions, right? Everything from hardware manufacturers to exchange rates to shipping laws that we don't always get a chance to dive into. And I'm really excited to dig in with you a little bit. But, you know, drew, what kind of give you the floor here to start? You know, tell us a little bit about where the Canadian market is today versus where it maybe it even was five, 10 years ago. Transforming It's very interesting. The Canadian market, I almost compare it to being like myself. I look towards the American market, the US market to give me sort of a crystal ball into the future. So whatever is happening in the us, I look down South and I go, Oh hey, this is a new technology that's emerging, this is a new product that's being adopted. These are new practices, business practices that are just starting to come in. And in Canada we're about a year or two years after that. So it's great because I get this terrific insight as to what's coming down the pipeline for Canada. But it's been transformative since, you know, pre-pandemic to now know, just like I would imagine in the United States and many other countries, the adoption rate of video conferencing has just gone through the roof. It's unbelievable. So, you know, we were starting when I started with census communications five years ago, it was all very much hardware based codecs. And now we've completely transitioned into software based codecs. So it seems the Zooms and the teams of the world have taken over. And that's definitely something that's happened here in Canada. The market in Canada, to give some perspective, is, is it's minuscule compared to the United States. Our population alone in Canada is only 38 million people. And I down in the US there's, there's quite a few cities that are approaching, you know, that size. So, you know, just some of the states down there have the population of all of Canada, our GDP of Canada. I was just checking this out this morning is $1.6 trillion. And you compare that to the GDP of the United states, and that's $20.9 trillion. So, you know, just the state of New York has a GDP greater than all of Canada put together. So, you know, to give you a sort of a perspective as the scale of Canada, we're very big country. And we have a lot of space between everybody. So we have a lot of small towns. It's just like small town America, you know, and big cities. And the cities are very far apart. So we've got Toronto, which is going to be our largest city in Canada, followed up by Montreal, which has got a large population. And then we've got other cities such as Calgary and Ottawa and Vancouver and you know, they're a lot smaller than the Toronto area, but it's basically concentrated in some of these urban environments. And then everything else is small towns. So, you know, there's a lot of driving to a lot. Projects that might take 10 or 15 hours to get to. And there's no integrators between the cities. It's just very sparsely populated. Like I said, know, 38 million. So hey, well, the more sparsely populated means you guys have a natural need for connectivity. And obviously, as Canada continues to grow from an AV market standpoint, we could talk about some of the differences kind of specifically between the US and Canadian markets. But one of the things that I find most interesting is natural language barriers, right? So when you talk about Montreal being a primarily French speaking section of Canada, you know, largely in the us, for the most part, we are an English speaking nation. We do have, you know, different languages that we will translate things into. But you guys have this unique challenge to where a huge chunk of your population in the country is. French speaking, speaks actually a different language. And that's something here that the American side. We could do a bit better job of. Right talk about how some of those language barriers specifically maybe could cause some challenges in the AV and even the integration side markets. The Canada is very culturally diverse, just like the United states, but scale it up by 10-fold. I'm out on the West Coast. So in the West Coast know, we're very diverse. We've got quite a few. I mean, Canada is built on immigration. So if we don't have a steady pipeline of immigrants coming into Canada, then we start, you know, running out of people in order to fill all those job positions. It's crazy. But as the different cultures come into the country, we're also embracing our First Nations culture through the Truth and Reconciliation that's going on. The French culture has been a huge part of Canada since the beginning of Canada. And when I travel out to Ontario and Quebec and I do business in those provinces, it's I don't speak French very well. I'm pretty poor, as they would say, but just a little bit. But it is a barrier because, as you know, as the different manufacturers, you know, HP, lenovo, you know, poly crestron, you know, Cisco as they're doing business in Canada. Now, all of a sudden there's this language requirement when you come into Canada to have all of your packaging, all of your documentation, all of your instructions in both official languages, and that's a mandate of the Canadian law. So on top of that mandate, if you come and visit Canada, you'll see street signs that will be in First Nations language. You know, you'll see street signs that will be in Mandarin. You'll see street signs that will be in Punjabi. So we do try to embrace all the different cultures in Canada. And when people come to Canada, they embrace Canada as well. This is a, you know, a new big free country. And we all get along or we all try and get along as best as we can. But yeah, the language barrier that can be huge. I have to say. Hats off to everybody in Montreal and Quebec and Quebec City and that entire province and all the French speaking Canadians. I would say 99% of them are probably fully bilingual. And that I can't say for the Canadian speaking population. So sorry, the not Canadian, the English speaking population. Yeah it's not much down here in the US either. We're definitely not 99% bilingual, maybe in slang, in pig Latin, I don't know. But definitely not too fluent languages. Yeah well, drew, we talked about some of those differences a little bit. Obviously, language being a massive, significant barrier, but from a market standpoint and not specifically just market cap, but what are some of the differences maybe in the end user communities between the US and Canada base, the end users? You know, it's hard for me to say from a, you know, a US perspective as to what the end users are like in your country. But I would imagine it's very similar. So we're dealing with a lot of the same companies. Most of the Canadian population is employed by a small business, small to medium business. We don't have as many mega, you know, big corporations here in Canada as there are in other countries. So because of that, you know, we're doing business on a smaller scale and it's a lot of hard to explain. It's good question, Ben. Hey, that's why we ask him. That's why we. It's OK. You don't have the answers. I mean, honestly, it's so interesting because we have and I've done quite a bit of business and we have great relationships with companies in Canada. Ross video being one of those who is really a phenomenal company right there based out of Ottawa and, you know, have great success in the American market. But, you know, even let's talk bigger than that, right? It's so interesting because as we go to shows like infocom and IBC and ISC, you kind of see this globalization in general of AV technology. So it's so intriguing to see how manufacturers and integrators and obviously end users are having this like conglomeration of demands from region to region. Talk a little bit about obviously as we're seeing growth into some of these newer regions, talk about some of the ways that Canadian manufacturers specifically are kind of adapting to some of those challenges. So the Canadian the Canadian manufacturers that I interact with are probably many of the same that everybody else. They're operating on a global scale. So, you know, I know there's this one manufacturer, I work with and they're actually based out of Quebec city, in Montreal, in Quebec, and it's called I/O jeni and they provide little USB and input devices that go back and forth. I first met them at infocom I think about five years ago and you know, they quickly got on board with Zoom and that was, I believe, in 2019, 2020, which really helped propel their company. So a lot of the Canadian manufacturers, they're really small companies. They're, you know, five, 10 people. And when they're able to break out of just the Canadian market, just the 38 million people that we have here into the United states, then that's really when those companies are able to scale up, they're able to get to that global size. So it's that would be the big sort of goal that many of the Canadian manufacturers are after are to go to grow beyond just the Canadian market. But having that, you know, that starting place of being in Canada, we have that testbed that's a smaller audience. We've got multiple languages to deal with. So that gives it makes it easier to grow beyond the United states, into Latin America, into Europe, into Asia as well. So it's sort of a good hopping point, a good starting point for definitely for technology, for technology startups. Yeah, it is. And you talk about it kind of being a breeding ground for innovation. And that's one of the really cool things that I love about, you know, the Canadian companies that we get to work with from time to time is that they're always innovating, right. And there is a cultural expectation that's a little bit different than what I'll call the hard and fast American culture, where if it's try it for 5 seconds, if it doesn't work, get rid of it, throw it away. Some of the best companies that we work with in Canada are known for products or product lines that have been in existence for 20, 30 years because they find ways to tweak it and continue to improve. And that's one of the things that I love seeing as an American. But, you know, drew, I'll ask you this and I'll and one more question after this as well. But, you know, specifically, what are some of the things that you wish us American, whether it's manufacturers or integrators, knew specifically about the Canadian market? You know, when I speak to different manufacturers from the United States and they have very little experience working in Canada, the biggest point that seems to be is they have some expectations as to the numbers that we're going to sell in Canada and we're, you know, 10 times smaller than the United States. And so I basically have to say, OK, well, what are the numbers that you're getting in New York that's going to be similar to Canada all across the country? But we're also going to have to take on that French language component as well. So we've just brought on this new product called sonic cloud, which is it's like a hearing aid algorithm that you load into your computer, which makes speech more intelligible for people who have difficulty. You know, there may be certain frequencies that people aren't able to hear anymore due to hearing damage or age. And just bringing that new software as a service business into Canada has been a very interesting experience. You know, there's some corporations in the United states, such as Boeing and Microsoft, that, you know, they just are huge. Like Boeing is the size of a small town in Canada. And so, you know, we don't have many clients like that in order to go up to so most of the large big enterprise clients that we're dealing with in Canada, they're going to be the same big, large enterprise clients that, you know, they're global entities. So they're going to be cars and they're going to be financial dealerships, they're going to be big oil and gas companies. The other big market would be the Canadian government. So we deal with the Canadian government military, and that's really going to be the biggest area that we're able to sell those types of products into. That's helpful insight even just for me, right. As somebody who kind of tangentially does a good bit of business and Canada. But you know, I'll give you the last word here, Drew. It's been an incredible and insightful interview for me and hopefully for our listeners as well. But what excites you most maybe for the next 5 to 10 years in the Canadian market? Oh, oh, Yeah. I mean, I'm just starting to see this coming down the pipeline in the US. So I'm like, oh, this is great. This is going to be so exciting when it's finally starts hitting here in Canada and it's the whole VR aspect of technology. I envision, you know, in the very near future that we'll be sitting down in a boardroom that won't have displays on the wall anymore, may have a camera on the wall, and everybody puts on their, their technology glasses and they look over towards the wall, and that's where the virtual screen is. And you're looking directly at the camera now. So you've got a better, you know, virtual presence, the whole Microsoft 21 by nine, the new front row that's coming out, that's, you know, that's transformative. That's going to change the way that boardrooms, meeting rooms are going to be designed. You know, it changes how the tables are laid out. The whole collaboration, the hybrid, you know, that's I know it might be a swear word to many people, the hybrid work environment, but I think that is the future. And when everybody finally figures it out, it's going to be transformative. You know, we're going to be way more productive as a society. We're going to be way more relaxed, not as stressed. We're going to have less cars on the road. I think it's just going to be it's better for everybody. So that's the R and especially in one of the previous podcasts that you had done with modus vr, I was very impressed with that. And you know, that is right at the beginning of what's going to happen and what's coming down the pipe. So if any of your viewers are watching this, you should go back to a couple episodes and check out that modus VR. It is absolutely amazing. So that's sort of where I see the future going. You know, you can't plug my show on my show. Oh, I just did. Hey, well, drew, I'll tell you what. This has been incredible. This this won't be the first or. Well, sorry, this won't be the last time we have on. This is the first time we've had on. But look, your insight has been incredible, and I love your enthusiasm. And look, keep listening to the show. Hopefully you get a chance to watch this back because it's been awesome. It's been really, really fun. And, you know, we appreciate you hopping on. But again, we've been chatting with Drew lively over at sensus communications. Drew, Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks so much, Ben. Thank you guys for watching pro TV today. Stay tuned for our next episode.