This week's home automation podcast features our host Ron Callis interviewing Dave Pedigo. Recorded live on Wednesday, November 30th, 2017 at 12:30 p.m. EST. 

About Dave Pedigo

As the VP of Emerging Technologies for CEDIA, Dave Pedigo’s role is create partnerships with manufacturers, service providers and standards bodies that will proactively address the emerging technology needs of home technology professionals at every level.  

He facilitates easy communication between manufacturers and integrators, and identifies new channels of revenue. Dave previously worked in the satellite industry, as the Senior Director of Education for SBCA and as a Technical Training Engineer at Hughes Network Systems. Prior to working in the technology sector, Dave was a teacher for at-risk youth at an alternative high school in Baltimore. 

Interview Recap

Here are some of the topics Ron had the opportunity to discuss with Dave:

• Dave’s background in the industry and his current role with CEDIA

• CEDIA Expo 

• Technology trends for 2018

• Breaking ground on new building construction

SEE ALSO: Home Automation Podcast Episode #24: A Custom Integration Industry Q&A With Alex Lelchuk

 Transcript:

Ron:  Hello everybody. Ron Callis here with another episode of Automation Unplugged. It's actually episode 25. Can you believe it? So thank you very much for watching me out there in Facebookland. It is Thursday, November 30th. It's 12:38. Dave, my guest and I were fighting some of the computer gremlins this afternoon, but hopefully we have them beat. And let me go ahead and bring in my guest. I've got the one and only Dave Pedigo from CEDIA. How are you Dave?

Dave: I am super. How about yourself?

Ron:  I am doing very well. So we're here just a week after Thanksgiving, so I guess let's start there. Dave, how was your Thanksgiving?

Dave: It was a quiet, really enjoyable, relaxing few days off. So it's the exact Thanksgiving that you would want. How about you?

Ron:  It was very good. Yeah, it was a low key Thanksgiving. My family and I, we stayed here in Florida and just laid low. We're going to do a little bit of traveling for Christmas, so figured that we would take Thanksgiving easy.

Dave: Yep. Any model planes?

Ron:  Of course there's model airplanes every morning. I can't help myself addicted to maybe a bad word, but it's my hour of Zen every morning is to build my model airplanes.

Dave: Well, you are a master at it for sure.

Ron:  I appreciate that. Now Dave. By the way, let me first address our audience. If you're out there watching us live or you're watching us after the fact and with the recording, thank you very much. Please like this video and share this video so that your friends in the industry can check it out as well. And it'd be really cool if you are watching live. If you want to post any questions to Dave directly, I'll do my best to read the comments as they come in and feed them over to Dave so we can see his response. So now that we have that out of the way, Dave I'm imagining some people in our audience are going to know you, but you know, it's also possible some do not know you. Do you mind?

Dave: Not possible.

Ron:  You're infamous.

Dave: Lots of people don't know me and they're better off for it.

Ron:  All right. No, that couldn't be further from the truth. So let's first of all start you are with the trade organization. CEDIA stands for the custom electronics design and installation association and you are the VP of Emerging Technologies. First of all, what does that mean?

Dave: Well, it means a lot actually. So what I really do on the Emerging Technology side, I wear a couple of different hats. But the goal is to identify emerging technology and really business trends and figure out what is an opportunity, what is a threat, and then help create strategies and content curriculum to help mitigate or take advantage of those opportunities.

Ron:  Okay. So I'm going to dive into a lot of those. I'm going to break that down here and try to dig a bit deeper. I always like for my audience to meet the people that make this industry tick. And you are certainly one of those people that are at the core of this industry and I always like to share or find out how did you get here, you know, what's your background? What did you study and how did you land in this role with CEDIA?

Dave: Oh my gosh. So it's really an odd route. My degree is actually in social science and secondary education, which to be honest with you, just talking about my degree for a second, I use a lot of what I learned in college even though I majored in History most of my career. And then I figured out, cause I graduated with like 145 or 150 credits because I had switched majors and stuff. And then I figured out cause it was History and then I figured out if I switched my major to Social Studies or Social Science, I was actually already eligible to graduate. So that was perfect.

Ron:  Ah, okay.

Dave: But so I really wanted to be a school teacher. So for five years I was a school teacher for kids who'd been expelled for violent crimes, drug possession conduct disorder.

Ron:  Was that punishment or did you ask for that? Did you ask to work with those types of kids?

Dave: Well, it's funny cause what happened was, I did an internship, a student teaching and did it at what's called a Stop program, which was like a stop gap to stop kids from getting expelled. And found that I was good at it. And so, I graduated, I actually graduated in January and so I was immediately hired for a short term position through the end of the year. And then in alternative center opened up and they're like, you're perfect for this. And so, I took it, it was the first year of the program. So I was at that place for four years and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. You know, most of these kids are not bad kids. They have really horrible home lives and they make bad decisions. But I left because I couldn't afford to raise a family. I had a small kid and well two of them at that point. And so I left and got hired on at Hughes which was making set top boxes for DirecTV. I was a decent teacher at the time. And after a few years they laid off the whole training department.

Ron:  So you were brought into Hughes on the training department side?

Dave: I was, I was brought in as this clinical training engineer with no engineering understanding at all. And the funny thing was I was like a fish to water. It was all of a sudden I had found my calling. And so I spent three years there. Then they laid off the department and I was really solid in the satellite world and SPCA at the time had a certification program. And so I found that job three or four days after I got laid off and went and worked there for a few years and then I was teaching at a CEDIA event on behalf of SPCA and was asked if I would be interested in ever working for CEDIA. And at that point I was driving five hours a day, about three hours in the morning, two hours at night, everyday to work.

Ron:  That sounds crazy. Where were you driving from? You're driving somewhere in Indiana to Chicago or something?

Dave: No, this is in Maryland. So I was driving from Germantown, Maryland to Alexandria, Virginia.

Ron:  Oh so you were driving through traffic?

Dave: Oh yeah. It was only like 40 miles, but it was just hideous. So I took the leap of faith and went to CEDIA, moved to Indianapolis, and I really found like, Oh my God, everything that I'm doing makes sense to me. I get it. And so it's been a really circuitous route. I started as a technical trainer there. And then after a few years, took over the technology council. And at this point I've kind of raised up through the ranks. Now. I oversee quite a few things and I've loved every second of it.

Ron:  So you have a background in education, you were hired in for education. So let's, if you don't mind, start with education at CEDIA and you know, we just came out of, the CEDIA 2017 event in San Diego. It was spectacular. I know that my company, we had a great time at the show. The city's amazing. And the show went off pretty flawlessly. Great. It was really, I'm looking forward to going back to San Diego next year and I know a lot of my staff are, they're all now vying to see who gets to go to the show and work the show.

Dave: Yep. For sure.

Ron:  How was CEDIA education at the show and how is maybe it different this year than in years past. And what were some of the highs and or lows that you experienced?

"We as a technology council actually had recognized years ago that the biggest threat to the industry was the lack of business acumen for a lot of these dealers."

Dave: Well, I thought the I thought the education went great. I'll tell you a low real quick was, this doesn't have much to do with anything, but they didn't turn the air conditioning on for the first few days of set up. So it was about 115 degrees inside. They're getting all the racks set up and poor Luke Amos, who is our Senior Director of Content and Development probably lost about 20 pounds of sweat there. The education was great. And so I always, I'm a metrics kind of guy. I like to look at how things are. And when I actually looked at our average evaluation scores, and I don't know, don't quote me on this number, but we probably had somewhere between six and 7,000 butts in seats. So, you know, if you took four classes, you count as four butts in seats, but if you do that when we do the evaluations and about 50% of the people who take classes do the evaluation and we averaged a basically a 4.5 out of five in our median, which means that 50% of the evaluations was like 4.65. So, I mean you're talking about our median score was over an A and so, of course there's always going to be, when you do 150 sessions and we really had added more sessions. We normally do about 110. I wanted to give it a shot and do more. So we did 150 this time and other than maybe a couple of classes that, you know, weren't that great. Overall, they were incredibly well attended. We did a lot of hands on a lot of rack building classes. We had to offer our rack building class three separate times and it was sold out every time. So it was great. I will say we'll probably scale back a little bit, the number of sessions next year. It was just a trial. But it's just with the size of staff that we have, putting on 150 sessions in four days. We just water things down maybe a little bit too much. So we'll probably reduce the offerings just a little bit. But I mean in general, our education has been great. A couple of trends are that we see more business classes being taken at this point in time than we do technical classes. There's very little difference in the at least perceived quality of the technical versus the business classes. But I just think at this point in time, there's not as many technicians that are brought to the shows that were in years past, but we'd really like to see that change. But you know, we as a technology council actually had recognized years ago that the biggest threat to the industry was the lack of business acumen for a lot of these dealers. And that's not a knock on them. These guys and gals are great people, amazing at what they do, but it gets to be really difficult to juggle running a business and being ahead of the curve on technology. And so I'm really proud that over the last three or four years we've seen those increase in business classes and I don't think it is any kind of chance that not only as business doubled, which we probably don't have much to do with, but the amount of profitability has doubled as well. So the average profit margin has gone from just over 4% to just over 8% in the last three to five years. And so that actually means four times more net profit when you've doubled the amount of jobs and you've doubled profitability. And I think a lot of that has to do with the business training. And I can only attribute that to the amazing business volunteers. Well, not just business, all our volunteers whether it's our business working group, the technical working group, their professional development advisory committee and all of our volunteers, they are doing such a damn good job. Sorry for the language, but it's the only way to put it. Our members be more profitable. And that's exactly what a trade organization is supposed to be. So I'm very proud of where we are. Are there things that we can improve? Of course. We have to work on ways like pathways as an example to get a starting technician to get all the way up to where they are, mastered their task, where like, we've got lots of different areas. But it's not like this seamless joined pathway. And so we'll work on those. But right now when it comes to expo I'll put our record against anybody. So the education I think has been for a long time certainly for better part of a decade.

Ron:  I think one of the brightest benefits of CEDIA membership, but waiting to only do that at the show. I know in years past there was regional CEDIA trainings and the way that people in various markets, maybe they couldn't fly out their whole team to San Diego. Where does CEDIA stand today with getting the education, whether it be business education or technical education out into the marketplace. And that's not a leading question because I don't know where CEDIA is at with that.

"My strategy over the last few years has been to make our training relevant, accessible and timely."

Dave: That's a good question. First of all, my strategy over the last few years has been to make our training relevant, accessible and timely. And the accessibility part is really important. Some of that is that we have to do online. And our online is actually very good. It's a little difficult to get to, but I think we average like a 4.8 or 4.9 out of 5 on our evaluations for our e-learning, but we are going, you will see the association at the local and regional level. Much more moving forward. The hard part with doing it at a regional level is just after this podcast, I'm driving to North Carolina for a soccer tournament with my daughter. Well, if CEDIA was coming here and I just couldn't be there cause I'm at a soccer tournament and they're not there for another year or two, it's like I was never there. So, that's a problem cause we need to be relevant, we need to be accessible. And so we're finishing up our very long, very thorough, very intense strategic plan. And education will certainly be a big part of that. And we can't educate if we are not also at the local level. So we will be much more, you'll see us at the local level a lot more often. We're going to do things like use iPro. So the the iPro reps that have a location for us where we can go teach classes, we're going to do that. So your reps in your local areas, if you're looking for a class, reach out to one of your reps and have them reach out to us and we can get things going. So there's lots of plans. And we're going to be out there. I mean, it's an example I'm going out and what survey's going out, not next week, the week after. So I'm doing a certification review and emerging trends class and we're going to talk about the Amazon program. So I'll be in Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles and Walt is going to be in New Jersey and I think he's in Florida, and Dallas. So you're going to see more and more of that. We're actually going to be hiring a new technical trainers that can be out on the road. So really at the end of the day, we know that we have to be out there training classes face to face more often. I'd like to see the culture of people also moving towards taking some online classes only because it doesn't supplement the hands on by any stretch, but it's so much more convenient. And fits into your schedule. And to be honest with you, we put a lot of activities in there. So it's not just a person reading voice over PowerPoint. There's a lot more to it at least for the majority of our online classes. But yeah, education is very important to us and we will be doing more next year and certainly in the years to come.

Ron:  Well, I appreciate that. I want to address our Facebook audience out there. Our following is growing, so thanks again if you're watching us live and again, if you're watching us after the fact, still, thanks for watching. If you are watching us live, please post a comment. Let us know you're here. Let us know what you think of Dave's message from CEDIA or if you have any questions for him or I feel free to post that comment here in the comment section. Now. Dave, there are going to be some people watching this episode that are not CEDIA members.

Dave: Sure, yep.

Ron:  They're players in this industry. I can tell you, I come across these people regularly, they in many cases have been in the industry for many years, decades even. And yet somehow they've for one reason or another decided or maybe they are unaware of a CEDIA membership. Could you speak to a CEDIA membership and what an integrator would gain by, you know, its nominal dues. I mean, I don't know what the exact number is, but it's some nominal, I think it's less than well, I don't know what the exact amount is. You can maybe answer that.

Dave: As a home technology professional, it's $500. It's been $500 since the inception of the organization.

Ron:  That's the number I remembered, but I figured maybe I've been out of touch a little bit and I didn't want to speak if I wasn't, you know. Correct. So how would you speak to that audience?

Dave: Well, you know, the first thing I would say is that there are certainly member benefits the access to education. So basically all of our products that you're going to buy from us, you're going to get for half off. So we charge double the price for any products that we put out there. So you're going to see a significant discount in there. You know, and like any events, like if you go to the show as an example, it's free for you to attend expo. Or sorry, the show now. You can go to management conference sorry, I'm going to get murdered for that one. The business. Gosh, I'm going to be killed for that one.

Ron:  I think you're going to get killed for both of those by somebody, but not by me. So you keep rolling.

Dave: But you know, there's a lot of other kind of contactable things that a lot of people don't see. One of them. I think the biggest is our government affairs. Darren Reman, who is every single day fighting battles to keep our members in business because there are outside entities, basically lobbyist groups that are passing bills or trying to pass bills that would prohibit our members from doing business in their area. So a lot of times what happens is you get a company. Oh geez, well let's use Texas as an example. A couple of years ago in Texas, they tried to pass a bill and it stated that any device, so if you had a security system in the home, any device that could touch that in any point in time, would require that you're a security dealer. So as an example, if you had a security system and you put a TV in and there was a camera and a TV, well then you'd have to be a licensed security dealer to put that in. So or you know, in New Jersey right now they're trying to pass a regulation where you have to be a licensed electrician to install any cable that can carry 10 volts or more. So, it's always put under the guise of life safety, but it's not life safety. It's using regulation or bills to get into a competitive advantage cause they can't win in the market.

Ron:  Dave, let me challenge that thinking if you'll allow me.

Dave: Please.

"I'm going to say less than half, I think it maybe a number much less than that of the people in the low voltage custom integration marketplace are members of CEDIA."

Ron:  And that is that only I'm going to say less than half, I think it maybe a number much less than that of the people in the low voltage custom integration marketplace are members of CEDIA. So there's this challenge of how and why should people that are not members pay $500, get that badge, put it on their website, their business card and leverage that. And all right, so the, the government affairs discussion point, I've heard that for many years and it is clearly very valid. So the question is, if today only a small fraction of all integrators are members of CEDIA. And I'm not saying that in a disparaging way. I'm just kind of speaking factual.

Dave: I know exactly where you're going for this. I've heard many a person say, you know what, they're going to do it whether I'm a member or not.

Ron:  There you go. So my point is if we get CEDIA membership to double and there's that much more money coming into the organization, how is government affairs as an example, amplified? Or how could we be more effective? What changes?

Dave: Well first of all at some point, we're a small organization. Darren Reman is only one man. If any of you have met him, I like to consider him Superman. But there are limited resources and a lot of times we're going up against billion dollar companies and we're successful at it, but we're not as successful as we could be if we had more money in the pot. You're right. So at the end of the day are we gonna fight these bills, whether you're a member or not. No. Is that the right thing to do, to to join the organization to help, you know, especially if you know that you're in a state where there are issues. New Jersey, Texas, California, Florida, New York those states come up a lot. But you know what, you could lose your ability to do a job with a single stroke of a pen. So some people will not say it is a benefit. Some people will say that it is an outcome of the organization and that is probably true. I think it has a benefit. I think it's an amazing benefit. I think it's honestly the greatest benefit to the organization, it makes us more an industry organization than a member organization. But at the end of the day, our job, we are tasked to help ensure longterm member prosperity. And the biggest threat that is instantaneous is regulatory issues where all of a sudden you are no longer able to do a significant portion of your job.

"I would imagine the electrical contractors or the security contractor associations are lobbying hard to put the CI business out of business or take away significant portions of their capabilities state by state."

Ron:  I would imagine the electrical contractors or the security contractor associations are lobbying hard to put the CI business out of business or take away significant portions of their capabilities state by state. Is that a fair statement?

Dave: Oh yes and no. It depends on the bill. It definitely goes bill by bill. Sometimes it is accidental. So you, you might have two very large type of industries. Let's say it's a cable kind of association versus a security association and the cable companies are trying to come in and do security and the security companies see that as a threat and then we're caught in the crossfire. And so it is the law of unintended consequences. And so what happens is Darren, who was amazing at it, has to go and put in things like carve out language so that it says that as long as this passes, it does not affect the people that are doing the business in our industry. And it's almost always for the home technology professional, but not always. We do things at the state level. We very rarely do things at the federal level. We have a great working relationship with CTA who does a lot of the federal stuff, and then they look to us for the state and then we look at them on the federal side. But then there are times where we have to fight federal battles like the California energy commission years ago, which was one of the issues that we were unsuccessful on. I'd put our success rates at about 90%, 95% the waste in Hawaii, those kinds of things.

Ron:  If you'll allow me, and I'm cognizant you're actually, when we wrap up here, you're going to be hitting the road for a 10 hour drive. If I'm correct.

Dave: I am.

Ron:  Why are you driving? Why are you not flying somewhere?

Dave: Oh God, I spent my entire life in a tin can, if you can stick me in a vehicle with my daughter and wife, you can talk to me for 10 hours, I'll do it. So I'm kind of forcing to spend family time.

Ron:  It's on the road, but it's family time.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely.

Ron:  All right. Now, quick question. George, George Tucker, we know George. And he posted a question. It actually goes back to the regional training, by the way. He says, fantastic news on the regional training. He says he's very excited about that. He did pose a question and that is, and I'm paraphrasing here, is there a plan for CEDIA to reach out to high schools? And I'm assuming he's thinking from students exiting high school, maybe moving into some sort of apprenticeship or education to get the youth exposed to the CI industry and you know, realizing, was it Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs advocates that you don't have to go to college to have a great career and you could go straight from high school and move into a tech position and be making, you know, $50,000 plus probably in short order.

Dave: So, yeah. Well, you know, the funny thing is, and that's a great question. George and I think some of the things that we'll talk about when the Board of Directors and Tabitha, our COO talk about, you know, where we're moving forward. Some of those, those questions will be addressed. But I would say it's funny because you mentioned Mike Rowe. I'd wanted Mike probably three or four years ago as our keynote speaker and the board says great. Let's go out, look, you know that sounds great. Go tell us how much it costs. And then I came back and it was like, like, I don't know, it was somewhere between 175 and 250 grand. I mean, it was something..

Ron:  Just to speak for an hour?

Dave: Oh dude, we're all in the wrong business. We were all speaking public who are famous that it's on the money. So you know, it's, I just looked up what his fees were, so it's all good. I think all of us realize that workforce development is an incredibly important part of where we as CEDIA have to be. A couple of years ago, we did a study with Butler University and just asking our members about what they really, truly needed. And the one common theme was there's not enough technical people coming into the industry. And so I would just say stay tuned, but yes, that's something that's on our radar.

Ron:  All right, let's try to get one more topic in here. It was really dang hard to get you scheduled on here for this show. So, I want to have you back, but I realize it may not be immediate. Yeah. So the other part, one of the other primary roles at CEDIA is looking at emerging technologies. And can you speak to that? I know that you and Rich Green, I've seen give talks and presentations about all sorts of fun things coming down the road. I'm not necessarily so interested in the three to five year out stuff, but what's . right here, what's on the next 12 months that our audience should be aware of?

Dave: Well, I think a lot of what is in the next 12 months, most people are paying attention to, but I don't know if they see the whole picture. Voice control is going to change everything. It's just the, the fact that everything, I mean really a lot of stuff that we're going to be putting in the homes are going to be thin clients. Voice control is not the end all be all. It is going to be one way to reduce friction in the home between the end user and technology. But it's getting a whole lot better. Couple of other things I would say. ATSE 3.0 is definitely something to pay attention to. If you're not putting off air and tennis and your customer's home, you're probably doing them a bit of a disservice because the products that are gonna come out, the content, the programming is compelling and it's basically an IP stream. It'll be easier to get high quality. It'll be less compressed then you're going to see coming from your satellite or cable providers. And so that's definitely coming in. There's a lot to talk about that in my case is one to really, if you've got questions about ATSE 3.0 he's the guy to chat with. And then the other, I mean the big news was either yesterday, the day before that HTMI 2.1 was ratified. And that is a 48 gigabit per second transmission. So we're gonna start having to look at fiber optic to HDMI. The days of dark fiber are probably over. I'm super excited about HDR and wide color gamut. So the rec 2020, it's really starting to come right now. It's funny cause people are my friends. It's the holiday season and people are like, Oh my God can I buy a TV now? And a few years ago you would've asked me should I buy TV now? And it's like, eh, buy TV now. So if you're getting a TV that's got Dolby Vision you know what, you get an Oled or Qled, whatever, you're probably going to be fine for the next few years. So I think the time is right. It's not a revolutionary time. I think it's an evolutionary time, meaning that we're just seeing small iterations over the next few years and that's kind of a good thing. I don't see a lot of stuff catching us off guard. But God knows we're really starting.

Ron:  Never know what's around the corner that we don't know the questions. We're not asking.

Dave: Yeah. The black swans, black swans.

Ron:  By the way, Sean Stermer from URC, he just posted, by the way previously he had said great discussion today, which is pretty nice. But then he also said voice control is requested by 80 to 90% of his customers. Huh. Amazing connect. Can I give a real quick, I, I, I've, I've got to tell this story by voice control pellet speak it brother before, but so, so my father said the end stages of his life and it's just part of life. And so he lived in my basement for a couple of years and not, I had a flood. And so I moved him up into the office that I'm in right now. And it was an office. It's not really a bedroom. And so one night I came downstairs, at one or two o'clock in the morning and I see him using a flashlight to go to the bathroom. And I'm like, dad, what are you doing? He's like, well, I don't have a light switch and it's just a hassle. And so I said, I'll tell you what. So I went out, I got an Amazon Echo and a couple of of Hue lights. And so I wanted to do this as an experiment. Sorry, I bought it. I let him live with it for 60 days to see how he'd use it. And he would just say, middle of the night, he'd say, Alexa, turn the light. The bedroom lights onto 50% or whatever. And that's something people don't think about. As you get older, it takes longer for your eyes to dilate. And so it's harder for you to turn a light on really bright. So it's nice for him to say, turn the lights on 50%. So let him live with it for 60 days. And the first couple of days I'd hear him be like, Oh, Alexa, Alexa. And then, you know, after a while he got used to it. So then after 60 days I said, dad, I've got to take the Alexa back there, the echo back to work. And he's like, well, how much is it for a new one? And I said, well, it's $200 bucks. This was before the doc was out. And he's like, well, I don't really want to spend $200. I'm like, sorry, I've got to take it back to work. So I go to work at taking it out. And by noon he called me, said, I ordered a new one, can you install it for me when it comes in? So yeah, you know, it's like you don't think about it, but I am most excited about voice control for people with disabilities. I had a great, great just yesterday tap the O'Connor and Jody Larson and I were out of Comcast and they showed us their lab basically for people with special needs. And it's just amazing. My next door neighbor had his dad died of Parkinson's and it was a really aggressive form and you know, he was able to use some technology to do stuff. But the leaps and bounds we've just made over the last couple of years are absolutely incredible. And and so voice control, it's not just a gimmick. There's lots of cool stuff and it's also gonna improve the quality of people's lives who need it most.

Ron:  Well, Dave, I completely agree. And I think you have one of the more exciting jobs out there in terms of your being responsible for reviewing what's out there in terms of new technologies and then of course trying to determine how to best bring that and support those, that education to your membership base at CEDIA. So I think it's pretty exciting and I've seen you working really hard for many years now. So from One Firefly as a CEDIA member to you, thank you very much for all your hard work.

Dave: Well it's only work if you don't enjoy it.

Ron:  So..That's right. That's fair.

Dave: Great job. I'm blessed. And it's volunteers like you cause Ron, you volunteer for us a lot too. And actually not just for us, you're a volunteer for many things here. The embodiment of the best things and this isn't sucking up to you. This is the truth, the embodiment of what the organization is about and that is giving back to your community. So I appreciate the opportunity and whenever you want me back, I'm happy to be on.

Ron:  Awesome. Thank you Dave. And we were at 38 minutes here and I know I told you 30 minutes and you've got just this horrendous dry, well, it's not horrendous, right? It's good family time. So you just, regardless, you have some road time.

Dave: I do. Alright, thanks a lot. We'll talk soon.

Ron:  Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. All right, audience. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and Dave, or I know that's bad grammar. My eight year old would correct me and say, Dave and I. So with Dave and I here for the last almost 40 minutes today is it's about 1:15 PM or so on Thursday, November 30th. Thank you so much for joining me. I will see you next week for episode 26. And until then, have a good rest of your week and have fun. I will see you soon. Yup. Bye.

Show Notes

Dave Pedigo is currently VP of Emerging Technologies for CEDIA. His role includes developing partnerships with manufacturers, service providers and standards bodies that will proactively address the emerging technology needs of home technology professionals at every level. He facilitates easy communication between manufacturers and integrators, and identifies new channels of revenue. 

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and Links from the Interview:

• CTA
• Hughes
• ATSC 3.0

You can also learn more about CEDIA at https://www.cedia.net/ Be sure to follow them on Facebook  and Instagram..