Tod Puetz, Insane Impact

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by   trailer.

My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers.

Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up.

I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months.

We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging.

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TRANSCRIPT

Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa. 

Des Moines. So you're in flyover country?

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. 

It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right? 

Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south. 

Nice. How long has the company been around? 

Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December. 

You are a founder? 

Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO. 

So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs. 

So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back then, and were able to utilize that for a number of years after that initial introduction.

What was it back then? What was the technology back then, early LED? 

Tod Puetz: It was an SMD, It was an early 8x8 millimeter SMD back then. I refer to it as antiquated, but back then, it was pretty fresh and new. But yeah, just the idea of being able to drive this thing up to the driving range, the wings folded open on this thing and, within minutes we're plug and play and just really, fell in love with that concept. , 

Yeah. So did you buy the business from him or just get something going on your own?

Tod Puetz: Did not. We utilized them. It was a kind of a one man show there. It was more of a hobby for individuals, and they used it for four or five years. But they weren't interested in scaling this thing. As my career with TaylorMade progressed more and more, I ended up working with other companies, just trying to understand the LED business. So I branched out and helped a few other smaller LED niche companies to try to generate some business in the sports space. We just had a lot of relationships with the golf business and yeah, really just took the concept and I knew there was a different mouse trap here with that type of opportunity to scale it, that's where we started things in late 2015.

So the idea is just at its bare essentials, and I think most people understand this anyways, but just in case, is you've got a foldable all in one LED display that's on a trailer and your customers are rolling it out to different locations, whether they're entertainment events, sports events or something else, and finding power, plugging it in, open it, and driving a signal to it, and you've got a big display where it needs to be for three days or three weeks or whatever it is, right? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. By no means, does Insane Impact claim to be the inventor of mobile LED. Obviously, that has been one man for a very long time. Our business, Insane Impact, started up on the rental side. We designed, fabricated and engineered a handful of units, just to service what we thought was gonna be a Midwest boutique rental business and very quickly became a national presence.

And what we found was that the same people were renting products two, three and four times a year, and really, our thought process was, why don't we just own one of these things, and we can use it 365 days a year, if we want? And again, there were already customers out there, there were common trucks that were selling trailers, but it wasn't popular and we really started working back in 2016 to develop a plan where if you own the product, we can certainly start to feed your business as well, you can be part of our rental network and that's really what kind of, put the fuel on the fire. Each year, more and more units in the field, more and more customers from parks and municipalities, armed forces, college, university, all of the usual suspects out there that use these things on a regular basis, really became the traction for rapid growth in this endeavor. 

So your company, it's an interesting kind of mashup of different competencies, so to speak, in that if you are manufacturing rolling stock with lots of heavy-duty metals and wheels and everything else, that's one thing. And then at the polar opposite, you've got fairly sensitive electronics. So you're doing both sides of that, right? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. We take a fully engineered and manufactured trailer. These trailers weigh anywhere from 3,500 pounds on our smallest unit up to 18,000 pounds on a triple axle gooseneck. And they've got real high end LEDs permanently. We've approached it a little bit differently. We're putting a fixed product on it. So something that's used to and withstands the elements pretty much anywhere, including the road, and then obviously everything else on the unit is fully protected from shock, from absorption of weather. Everything's IP67 through the components side of things, and IP65 on the trailer, fully powder coated system. 

So we've really built, tried, and tested a product that's gonna last and withstand the elements going up and down the road at 75 miles an hour in any extreme environment. 

I'm guessing that you, in your early years, had some lessons, whether they were hard ones or whatever. 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, absolutely. It wouldn't be any fun if we didn't. Our first major lesson that we learned, Dave and I think this is really what sets us apart is that we did the hang and bang modular cabinets on our product for the first, probably two and a half years and we learned the lesson real quick that those just aren't designed to withstand the long-lasting road and weather, wear and tear. At the time, that's what everybody was using it and that's kind of where we were at. It took a lot of headaches, blood and sweat, for those first two years to figure out what product really made sense. For the last four and a half years, we've really been rock and rolling on a specific product, chassis, and stuff that just really outperformed, in a big way.

So that was a very painful lesson because you're a year into this thing, and you've got issues, and those are hard to come by as a startup, but we were able to weather the storm and find what really worked for us and I think that really separate us from most right now is we just, we're putting some of the best products out there on the market on these trailers.

And you not only have to make it bulletproof, but I suspect you have to do it down like crazy, because this can not be something that takes 45 minutes and has a checklist, like launching a rocket or something. It's gotta roll into place and find power and open the hinges, lock them down, and get a signal in, right?

Tod Puetz: Yeah, you nailed it. I think one of the things as we built this thing out, Dave, is that the single most important part was customer focus and customer friendly, and I will tell you that you yourself, or even my 18-year-old daughter, can get this thing up and running in less than 10 minutes. We pride ourselves on delivering a turnkey functional unit to our flagship product, which is our Max 1710. You can pull in, and it'll take you longer to unhook it than it will to turn it on and set it up in some respects. We offer a generator-powered option or a battery-powered option. We've got a fully self-sustained, lithium-ion pack that is performing at an incredible level right now, which we're really excited about. 

So we worked with a major organization probably about 18 months ago, in the Armed Forces space, and we worked with them to design a fully self-sustainable battery pack solution and were really excited about that. We can talk about that a little bit more here, but at the end of the day, our electronics cabinet is an IP67 rated rack that basically opens it up, and as you know, with everything, we run Nova Star. So everything is just a straight playback video. So just hit the breakers, hit the power switch, and you're off and running. So we really did wanna make this thing turnkey. They come fully self-sustained with audio as well. We wanted to make sure that anybody and everybody could operate this thing very quickly. 

Is there a media playout box in there, or do you use an external feed and then just plug it into an HDMI or whatever it may be?

Tod Puetz: Plenty of different options. Most often our customers, like your Park and Rec municipality, the people that are using this thing to play movies and stuff, they're just streaming it off the laptop. But we got an IO box that they can drop in, SDI, fiber, anything else if you're running or whatever it might be. But yeah, anybody can bring us any signal within, within a minute, and we're up and running. So really trying to get in that turnkey facet of this thing to make sure that we're in a good spot. 

Okay, so you're sourcing the trailer from a third-party manufacturer as opposed to bending metal and doing all that yourself and you're sourcing the electronics, and you're basically doing final assembly, right? 

Tod Puetz: Correct. Yep. 

Doing it the other way would be very complicated. 

Tod Petz: We did that when we first started this little venture, we hired engineers, we bought the welders, we were buying cut parts and building them ourselves, and we realized very quickly that in a 4,000 square foot facility that when this thing takes up, it’d be impossible to keep up. So we were very fortunate to find a local vendor that was in the trailer business already but they took a liking to what we were doing, and it really has just been a wonderful partnership and relationship with them. They build a fantastic product, best-in-class warranty around it, and it's really the fit and the finish from premium laser cut, premium powder coat finishes, all the details that are there, and certainly, we work with some of the best engineers out there in the marketplace to create the best product so really exciting to have that partnership.

On the LED side and the electronics side, we're taking the trailer and we're taking the electronics and we're putting the fit and finish on it and making it function and delivering a finished product. 

I assume you have some sort of a contract manufacturer or a finished goods supplier in, whether it's China, Taiwan, or somewhere else you’re sourcing from.

Tod Puetz: On the electronic side, yeah, we do. So we actually just made an announcement here yesterday. We are partnered with DVS (Dynamic Visual Solutions). We've been working with them for almost six years now. 

Obviously, Chinese based, but we got in touch with the owner and the CEO of the US business almost six years ago and kind of started to understand what it meant for us and what it meant for them to be a partner and really have our hands on the technology, help them with some of the design elements that we needed within the product to make sure that it was gonna pass the buck and make sure that it lasted and, almost six years later.

But, yeah, we just had a nice press release announcing the partnership. We got a huge opportunity with them with the craziness that’s going on out there in the space. But great company, wonderful products, best-in-class warranties, and we've had the ability to shape what that product needs to be on our trailers. 

I suspect that was a bit of a journey too, finding the right supplier because we've all heard the stories about different companies who make a lot of promises, but what shows up isn't what you thought you were getting.

Tod Puetz: Yeah, it was. So we had gone through probably three to five different manufacturers, three to four at least prior to getting with DVS and it’s very painful on that side of it because you are dealing with somebody over in China, and sleepless nights and figuring stuff out and a startup and all of the fun things that happen around that.

When we were able to locate, DVS was based out of Florida. They really just took a liking to what we were doing and threw all the chips on the table and said, we've got a great modular rental business going, but we're really intrigued about this mobile solution. How can we help? And we really started to dig cautiously optimistic out of the gate because there are thousands of people out there trying to get the business in some respects. 

Could we go to one of the major five or six? Yeah, we certainly could have, but we felt like there was a little bit more of an intimate approach to this. We were a newer company. We took our time getting into what we really wanted, and we felt like we had a little more leverage working with a decent-sized company.

And with somebody who's got an office in Florida as opposed to Shenzhen or Beijing.

Tod Puetz: Correct. 

I don't want to get too deep into what's going on right now, but how are you navigating the tariff situation right now? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, that's the million dollar question and in some cases, multi millions.

When I started this company, Dave, I had two stances that I wanted to live by. One, I was gonna over-index on our employees and make sure that we had the right people in the right seats, and take very good care of them. The other one that came later on, probably after we had established and it was I'm never gonna run out of products. I just know that if we have products, we'll sell them. 

So after those first three, four years, we put ourselves in a position where we've rubber stamped our products, we know who we're selling to, we know what our core markets are, and we've got the right people in the right seats and I just knew that if I would run out of product, then I just make sure that we are collectively chasing the business. That's a really hard thing to do. But fortunately, we've got the right vendors to do this with. 

So back in November, after the current administration was elected or they won the nomination, knowing that this discussion of tariffs was on the horizon, we took a very calculated and risky approach, but we went out and bought a slew of equipment. So we bought basically upwards of almost a year of supply in LEDs out front. We went to our trailer manufacturer. They bought a year's worth of supply of our top three SKUs and hedged the bet with us.

So we're in a little different position than most, again, there are a lot of people out there who probably did the same thing. I'm not the only one out there who took that risk, but we did take the risk, and it's certainly paying off. That kind of gets you an idea of where we're at and how we've run our business. We just don't wanna run out of products. So fast forward to today in reality, I think there’s a blinking that’s happening, there's a stance, and this isn't a political statement by any means. This is just our gut feeling on this is, I feel like it's gotta loosen up a little bit here. It can only go so hard and so fast. But we've been able to weather the tariff storm, internally at Insane, impacted by some of the stuff we did on the front end. We have not been significantly impacted by LEDs. If we're to place orders today on LEDs. Honestly, it's been fairly minimal in the impact. We're seeing some of the expensive shipping surcharges that are happening. But I think there's just buying power that's come with some of the things that we've done with our manufacturer to keep them rocking and rolling, that have helped us mitigate a little bit of this.

But you're not like some of these companies where they're wringing their hands, okay, in order to get something out of a container in Long Beach, California, I need to write a check for an extra million dollars that I had not anticipated. 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, we're not dealing with that. I think where this thing's really impacted, the hundreds of, I'm just gonna call them mom and pop manufacturers over there, whether they're manufacturers or just the days of them just shipping, 12x7s into the States by air is probably coming to an end or they're pricing themselves out of the market a little bit. Either that or they just don’t care. But I think a lot of this is the consolidation in the short-term impact that we've seen in real life. The long-term impact, in my opinion, is gonna weed some of them out, and then obviously you've got all the Chinese entity companies, the larger players in the game that are having to come to market with distribution here in the US, where it impacts us the most.

So they're adding additional layers of cost and it's really gonna open the door from what we're seeing, it’s gonna open the door for us to other markets by virtue of that since we’re already and established US distributor.

When you first got in touch, I didn't know that much about you and thought, you're a rental company, but I was intrigued that, sure, you do rentals, but really, you're a manufacturer and you're selling to companies who are more regional rental companies.

That's accurate, correct? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, it's interesting. So we've really got three business units, Dave. But we started off as a rental company with a primary focus on the mobile solution. We did have modular hanging bangs as well that we took care of some specific customers, but when we kinda uncovered the opportunity, evolved is a great word into the more offside of the business selling video trailers, that opened up a whole other segment of opportunity for us to then really start to take a look at the fixed install stuff. 

Our three business units are really, primarily led by the mobile video solution on the trailers, and other new innovative products coming. Now, by the way, we do the marquees and the scoreboards and the highway signs, the airport conference room takeover stuff. We do all of that as well, and oh, by the way, customers that have video trailers, they become part of our cross-rental network. So this nucleus business unit feeds that we have, one feeds the other and that feeds another.

It’s really that we create a really cool situation here that allows us to have return business from our customers in all of those different facets. Because if you can't afford it, you can rent it. If you rent it too many times, then you can afford to buy it, and oh, by the way, we can replace your scoreboard or we can replace your, your, your classroom or your theater, modular wall, whatever it might be. 

We do all three of them, and we do, we feel like we do them pretty well, and again, we're very lucky to have those three business units that fill the pipeline on a regular basis. 

Is there a rule of thumb as to that point where, okay, we can rent this five times a year and that makes financial sense, but there's a certain break point where it makes more sense just to buy it?

Tod Puetz: Yeah, that's a wonderful question because it really comes down to there's such a tremendous education process. Again, up until maybe, really when we started, at least here in the US, there was nobody else that was mass producing or really proactively selling to the end customer, and when we started doing that, we were very fortunate just to have some relationships where they actually saw the light. “Oh, this makes sense.” 

Yeah, it's a high school or a college, and they're using it for their game day stuff. But what's been more fun for me in this company is to see just the evolution of the education that's had that's happened. Going to a city administrator and telling them, hey, it's not just the three movie nights a year, it's all of your chamber events. It's the community support events, it's the fundraiser stuff. So when they start to understand the use case of these items, these trailers, and that they can turn and burn and have these things up and running, whether it's just mass notification, you've got storms coming, or just any and all of those things. 

Once they understand the full use case of applications that these products can offer, then the light comes on, and then it becomes a much easier conversation for them to take to the stakeholders and say, alright, we really need this. Here are all the reasons why. So our sales team is incredibly focused on the educational side of the business on how this can impact the community, campus, etc. 

I realize you have a number of different sizes and everything else, but, for your primary selling unit, what would that cost? 

And if I wanted to rent it for a weekend, if I'm in Ames, Iowa, what would that cost to rent it for a weekend? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, great question. So our flagship product is our Max 1710. So 17 wide, 10 foot tall, 3.9 millimeters on their turnkey generator operation, delivery, and tech. To rent that thing for a day, in this market, it does vary a little bit based on coast to coast. You get a three-day festival and you're spending $7,500 to 8,000 bucks for a screen that's operated that comes turnkey, that has power if needed. That's gonna turn the lights on and be reliable. So that's a pretty good snapshot of what we offer from a rate card on that specific product.

If somebody wants to buy it, I'm gonna say turnkey trailer screen electronics, generator, audio. If you want the Mac Daddy package delivered to your doorstep, you're in that $150-160k range, which is gonna get you, 10-year parts, five-year labor on LED screen warranty, five-year parts, five-year labor on the trailer warranty, and then obviously an electronics warranty. So you're really protecting the investment there, Dave. 

We're not the most expensive in the marketplace. We're definitely not the least. We feel like we're in a really good slot, and I think our adoption within the marketplace probably supports that. But that gives you a quick snapshot of where we're at from the pricing structure.

So if you're a company that's on the rental side of it, you could see an ROI in a year if you're in a busy market. 

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. Yeah. I think, 1710, and this doesn't factor in your cogs, your travel, your truck, your tech, etc. Sure. But if you get 20 to 25 really strong rental events within your market on a single day's use, you're right there certainly, being able to pay it back. 

And it goes back to that education process. When we sell a customer a unit, we don't guarantee them any business, in terms of what we can bring to them from the cross-rental network. We're very forthright about that. But what does happen is if you're a proven, vetted, rental partner out there in the marketplace, you can bet, you're gonna get some help with monetizing this thing. That's the unique part about this business relationship with our customers on the trailer side is: we're gonna help you guys monetize the unit over time. 

I have season tickets to the local Canadian Premier League soccer team that does very well here. They pull 6,500 people to games, but it's at a somewhat temporary stadium, and they have an LED display, it looks like maybe a 17x10 on a truck. 

I severely doubt it's yours because it's a piece of crap. It's not very bright, it's not very crisp or anything, but it's something, so I gather that this can be all over the map in terms of what you rent. If you're an end user, you have to pay attention to the specs. 

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. We prided ourselves on being the leader when it comes to what products are out there on mobile products, in and of itself. But it really comes down to the screen at the end of the day. I guess we will probably take it a step further. We do take a lot of pride in the physical trailer itself, the metal that this thing rides on, because that's as important to me as it's the LED. 

But at the end of the day, having something that you can put up in direct sunlight and have the most quality, crisp image, is what we've over-indexed on that in a good way. So what we come to market with is a 7500 nit, 3.9 product, competitively in the marketplace. 3.9 from our core competitors are in that 4500-5500 nit and it just overpowers everything. 

So again, if you're rolling up to the game for a little pre-game watch party, you're gonna get the best viewing experience possible, with some of the product. But we do pay a lot of attention to the spec, the physical components, the quality, and that's very close to our chest, so we don’t take that for granted.

So you're doing lots of sports and entertainment events, probably some corporate events. I'm curious, what's the most unusual one that you're aware of? 

Tod Puetz: It was interesting. You look at Covid and the impact that it had on the industry, and all of these companies out there that have stages and rigging and modular and everything else, they took a little bit of a bath at the onset of Covid, and really, what allowed us to squeeze in and continue to, I would say, entertain, but take care of customers that had to continue to engage, whether it was employees or crowds or whatever. 

So we did everything. But this leads up to your question, doing drive-in funerals was probably one of the most unique things that we've done. They couldn't get into the churches, so we were pulling up to large parking lots and they were streaming the funeral from inside the church out to the streets. It was really wild, but I bet we did anywhere from 50 to 60 funerals in late 2020 and in early 2021 until the restrictions relaxed a little bit. So we had funeral homes. We probably have three or four customers that actually own these, as a result of Covid, and they continue to use them for different settings in the church and funeral space.

That would be the one that comes to mind, honestly, is that kind of the most bizarre one that you never really think about? Yeah. 

How many units do you have out there, roughly? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, so we shipped the first unit in January of 2017 to a gasoline company in Texas. By the end of this month, the end of April, we delivered right around 495 units into the marketplace all around the US.

We've got some army bases and navy bases over in Japan. We've got a handful of units over in Europe, a good chunk over in Hawaii, obviously I know that's US, but largely, 95 to 97% of what we've got is here in the lower 48. We do have a few up in your neck of the woods as well, but, yeah, we've been very to lead the charge there as it relates to the go to product in the marketplace.

Super interesting. If people wanna know more, they just find you at insaneimpact.com? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, InsaneImpact.com. They can learn a little bit more about everything we do, but it's an exciting time for us. I know there's a little bit of uncertainty and doom and gloom, but we're just keeping our heads down. We’ve got customers that want the product. They may want it, but how do we get them to realize that they need the product to continue to advance their business, regardless of the sector, and I think if they get in touch with our folks, we're putting ourselves in a good spot to provide really good information and provide a great solid starting base for our conversation.

I'm impressed with the advanced planning that you did. I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who were sitting around this week and saying, I didn't see that coming. 

Tod Puetz: Head on a swivel constantly, there's no question. 

Alright, Todd, thanks very much for taking the time. 

Tod Puetz: Dave, I appreciate you. Take care now!