An AV and integration-focused podcast broadcast weekly

This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features a webinar One Firefly and our partner WAC Lighting co-hosted in July 2026, titled “Lighting for Life: Helping Homeowners Understand the Impact of Light on Health and Aging.” 

As homeowners increasingly prioritize wellness, comfort, and aging in place, lighting has become about much more than illumination. It influences how we sleep, navigate our homes, perform daily tasks, and experience the spaces we live in every day.

During this session, you’ll hear from myself, along with Patrick Laidlaw, Director of Business Development for Integration at WAC Lighting and AiSPIRE.

We cover:

• How lighting impacts wellness, visual comfort, safety, and aging in place — and how dealers can confidently introduce these conversations with homeowners
• Practical conversation starters that help shift discussions away from products and specifications toward lifestyle, comfort, and real-world customer experiences
• How AI can help integrators analyze customer conversations, uncover common questions and buying motivations, and transform those insights into more effective websites, marketing campaigns, and educational content

Visit the episode page on our website to get the audio recording and video of the original webinar. Now let's tune in and discover how thoughtful lighting conversations can help you create better homes and better marketing. Let’s get started!

SEE ALSO: #374: Henri Beaudoin on Building a Luxury Integration Firm the Engineered Way

Transcript  

Rebecca:

Alright. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. As previously mentioned, we've done a couple of other webinars together on FIREFINE at WAC. So if you're returning to us, thank you. And if it's your first time, we're glad you're here. So we are going to cover some really great content today. I'm actually really excited. I've seen this full presentation. The title is Lighting for Life. So we'll be talking about light and how the impacts that it has as you, on wellness, aging, and give some really great tips on how you can be communicating, this to your customers. So today's agenda, we'll start with, Patrick is gonna go through some lighting conversation starter. So this is really talking about how you can talk to your customer base about lighting, especially as it relates to their health and wellness, as people start getting older and looking at settling down into their forever homes. And then we'll move over, and Ron will spend some time talking about the the marketing side of these great conversations that you're having with your clients, hopefully using some of the starters that Patrick is gonna give you today, and how you can be really capturing that content and then using it to improve your marketing across all of your marketing channels. And then we'll leave time at the end for some q and a. We'll do some quick introductions first to get started and a couple of housekeeping rules as well. So I'll start with my introduction. My name is Rebecca Sternlicht. I'm the corporate marketing lead here at OneFirefly, and I have been with OneFirefly for six years. I help oversee all of our marketing initiatives. I'm really excited to be here with you guys today. Couple housekeeping things from me. We are recording this, and I will send this webinar recording out to everyone here. You can look for that in your inbox tomorrow morning, and it will include this deck as well. So there's gonna be a lot of great content. Don't worry if you can't get it all down. I will send you this full deck tomorrow. Our chat is open. Our Q and A is open. Please feel free to leave us comments, questions as we go through this webinar. If we don't answer them live, I will be collecting questions and we'll do a Q and A session at the end. So I'm going pass it over first to Ron and then to Patrick, and then we'll get rolling on this content.

Ron:

Hello. Thank you, Rebecca. Hello. Good to see all of you here. Thanks for taking some time, out of your busy day, to join Patrick and Rebecca and myself. Name's Ron Callis, CEO and founder of One Firefly. I've been in this, space for for multiple decades now. I think going on twenty six, twenty seven years working with integrators and, very proud, founder and CEO of One Firefly. We work with many hundreds of integrators throughout North America and around the world, helping them grow, focused on, products and services designed to help inspire, the growth of your business. And, it's my honor to be here co you know, presenting with Patrick and, his great brand and and products and services and to be partnering with Rebecca. So thanks.

Patrick:

Thank you, Ron. And, I'm Patrick Laidlaw, Spire sales director, WAC Group. No. I'm just joking. I went to the WAC Group. I've been in lighting for forty years. This is actually my fortieth year, Ron. I love lighting. I've never been more excited than I am now because of all the studies that have been done on how lighting affects us as human beings. And we're transitioning away from it being a commodity like a two by four that's included in the house. So it's an incredibly exciting time. I head up the integration side of things where we're doing the control and all the scenes and stuff. It's a lot of fun. So our goal today is to share some information to help people be able to start conversations about lighting, not product, not vendors, not specs, just how do we talk and relate lighting to people so that we can give them a better experience. So thank you for having me, appreciate it. So Rebecca, can I just run? Are we ready to go? Okay, cool. So lighting is more than illumination, That's what the slide says. There's a lot that goes into it. Independence. When we talk about people who are aging, and my father's eighty eight, so we're going through some of this personally. As we age, there's a physiological effect that takes place in our bodies that men or women, it doesn't matter as human beings, we go through physiological changes and a lot of times we don't realize it and people will complain about certain facts depending on where they're at, what the environment is around them, but that's because they don't know some of these physiologic physiological changes that are taking place. So when we talk about independence, who doesn't wanna age in place? Who doesn't wanna stay in their home? And are we enabling them to be able to do those things? It's not just a ramp. There's a lot more that goes into it. Visual comfort. How do we feel in a space? Lighting now, we talk more about how does it feel than how does it perform because we're lighting for the relaxation or the alertness or lots of other different effects. Safety as we age, we lose depth perception. And I'm going to give you an acronym on the next slide, but we lose depth perception. So anywhere we have changes in elevation, we have to be able to address those things so that people can stay in their home safely no matter what age. And even if you're younger people, you're building out your dream home, you have families and friends that come over that are older that these things still apply to. And hopefully, we're doing your design of your home for as you age in place in ten, twenty, thirty years. Everyday living is just how do we function in the space? Are we just lighting the entire home like mashed potatoes, like a a Walmart or an Old Navy or a or a Costco, and we're just blanketing everything and there's no emotion and no mood and no relaxation? Or are we actually trying to decide what we do in each room, what time of the day, what tasks do we perform with which part of our families and how do we like those accordingly. And then wellness. The wellness aspect of it got a lot to do with it now more than ever. If you Google lack of sleep on the body, you will be amazed at the amount of negative effects that happens when we don't get enough sleep. And lighting affects that. The Light and Health Research Center says the three the trifecta is bright days. Get up your day in the morning, start your day with very bright sunlight, a walk outside. Bright days, dim evenings, start preparing yourself for sleep and then dark nights and that contributes to more sleep. As humans, we can go longer without food than we can without sleep. So sleep is very important. So lighting contributes to all of that. So we'll go to the acronym now and I'm a living example of this in a way. The acronym is bald. As we get older, we all go bald.

Ron:

Men Is this an official acronym, Patrick?

Patrick:

did you I made it this morning, Ron. I was actually preparing for this presentation. This is the honest to God's truth. And we cover basically lenses thickening and yellowing. We lose our balance as we age. Adaptation is our eyes. We lose elasticity in our eyes. So when an older person gets up and goes in the bathroom and flips the light on at three AM to use the facilities, they can't see. They're blinded for a much longer time than a young person is whose eyes are elastic and adjust quickly. And then depth perception, we talk about those changes in elevation and I was looking at these as I was preparing and I said, know, there's got to be an easy way to remember these. And bald as we age, again, I'm living evidence, we go bald, it's easy to remember. Our balance, we start losing our balance. Visual cues with lighting. So horizontal lighting above door frames, vertical lighting for visual cues, toe kick lighting, all help elderly people maintain balance. Adaptation is again our ability to adjust our eyes and as we age we start losing adaptation. So that's why this is important and we'll get into some of the questions about how to lead into these conversations in just a minute. But that adaptation, are we transitioning from one space to another? Is it easy or is it bright to dark or dark to bright? Our lens is thicken and yellow and what that means is yellow lenses as we age, we need more light. Two to three times more light in our 60s and 70s than we needed in our 20s and 30s. But the thicker lenses means glare is a problem. So we can't have the light directly in our eyes. We have to use toe kick lighting which also give us those horizontal cues, under cabinet lighting, above cabinet, cove lighting, lots of fill and chandeliers should be decorative and they should be dimmed down with functional lighting or workhorse lighting actually lighting the space. And then depth perception really I relate it to when you're driving down a two lane highway and you see an older person pull up on a side road and they look right at you and pull out in front of you anyways. There's a reason. They're losing, we're losing their depth perception as we age. So depth perception is important when we have let's say a sunken living room. We step up into the dining room or into the hallway or kitchen. We want to either light that change in elevation or change the flooring from a lighter to a darker or vice versa so they see there's a visual change there. So remember, we all go bold as we age and if you remember talking about these things, it's we're not selling product, we're not selling brands, we're selling the concepts. So go ahead Rebecca, let's get into some of the questions we can talk about. These are things homeowners are going to say to you that hopefully will trigger cues in you when you're talking about lighting. It's hard to read. When I sit down I can't hardly see the pages. Many people will be able to relate to restaurants, especially nicer ones. I can't read the menu. It's too dark. The kitchen feels dark. I have to walk around with a piece of paper to try to find a light to stand under. The room feels cold. Is it the wrong color temperature, or is the light too far in from the walls where the walls are dark and it feels like a cave? You know, we're talking about lower levels. And then the lights are harsh. That's usually glare. They're shining in my eyes, and everybody's been to a bar restaurant. I don't wanna I'll I'll say Applebee's, Chili's, know a lot of those bar restaurants people clean, the lights get knocked around and pretty soon you're sitting in a booth and the light shining straight in your eyes and not where it needs to be. So these are things that people will say to kind of talk about bad lighting but not really be able to relate the concept of I have terrible lighting. So some of the ways we're going to get this out of people is to talk about questions leading with curiosity. Again remember we don't sell product, we don't sell aperture size or regress or how many lumens, They really don't care about that. We sell experience, the experience of being in their home and in their room. We sell solutions, how we're going to make it better for them than what they've had in the past, and we sell convenience. You get up in the middle of the night, your feet hit the floor, motion sensor turns on amber light under the bed, and then you walk into the bathroom and a motion sensor turns amber light on under the toe kick of the vanity, you can use the restroom, go right back to sleep without disrupting your circadian rhythm. Those are the things we sell. The wonderful experiences, great convenience and not necessarily lighting product. We sell solutions. So let's get into some of the questions and we'll talk about some of these things. You won't remember all these but again Rebecca's going to send this deck out to you and I'm sorry that I'm talking fast but I want to cover a lot of information in a short time here. So number one question I think this is the number one. Can I ask you who's handling the lighting? Who's supplying the lighting for your project? I wanna be sure the controls package or the control system is gonna be able to do what you're expecting it to do. So I need to talk to whoever's providing the lighting. Sometimes people in larger projects lighting will come from Europe, it will come from a home center, it will come from the internet. They all have different dimming protocols but the real goal of this question is to be able to find out if anyone's providing the lighting And if not, you know that we do lighting and we do lighting design or work with lighting designers. And so by doing this upfront, we're not gonna slow your product project down. We're gonna make sure the dimming is right. We're gonna make sure that things dim smoothly. So it's a way to find out if anybody's providing the lighting, who it is. If it's the interior designer, let's go talk to them and say, are you just doing the decorative? Hey. We'll supply the workhorse lighting so the decorative looks beautiful. If the electrician say, hey. This client wants to plan for aging in place so we're gonna do a little bit better lighting. How can we work together? And if it's a lighting showroom, again, you can have that conversation of saying what are they gonna provide because we wanna be sure there's different types of dimmers and the dimmers work with the lighting. So that's a number one question I feel we should ask right out of the gate. And then a couple of other things as we go forward are questions that lead into that bald, you know, situation, the physiology of lighting. So go ahead, Rebecca. Thank you. So this is a great question if it's an older client. Do you plan on staying in this home as you get older? I haven't met anybody yet who says, oh I can't wait to go to a nursing home or an elderly care facility. Of course we want to stay in our own homes. Who wouldn't? That's our comfort zone. Well do you know that as you age, the L, the lens is thickened in yellow. You need two to three times more light but we can't have glare. There's going be another question that comes up about glare that we can ask people but if you plan on staying, we should talk about layered lighting and filling the space without the light shining in your eyes because this is what happens to all of our eyes as we age. That's that's a problem.

Ron:

Question there.

Patrick:

Yeah. Go ahead.

Ron:

What is the typical source of glare? Like, when bad lighting is done in a home, what where typically is that coming from?

Patrick:

Sure. So, Ron, that's a great question. There's several places, but the most common can be a decorative chandelier or pendant over an island if it's not got what what two things. If it doesn't have a glare shield, so if bulbs bare bulbs are exposed, that's always a source of glare. And then if you don't dim it down, because a lot of those bare bulbs or chandeliers, if they're turned up to full brightness and you're working in a space like at an island, it's very close to the person sitting there. They can be very, very bright. So the goal would be one inch or two inch downlights over the island to light the island and dim those pendants so that they can be beautiful. Dim the chandelier, put recessed over the table so that it does the work but the chandelier is aesthetics. And then the other the other place is inexpensive lighting, commodity lighting. Any lighting that is either level with the ceiling plane or comes below the ceiling plane because that means all of that light is in your vision, in your visible space and the next one of the upcoming questions talks about oncoming headlights. Oncoming headlights are terrible as we age because the light scatters in our eyes. And then we're letting, you know, commodity homes or or commodity lighting packages have that light sticking down below the ceiling. So even if you're not looking up, you consciously see those bright spots across the ceiling. So anything we can do to get that lighting up in the ceiling, use indirect cove lighting, things like that, layer it so the space feels wonderful and warm. It's about how it feels, not just lots of glary light into the space.

Ron:

I know it's a bit off script or the deck here but I would make an assumption. These stories, these architecture you're describing, Patrick, in terms of the drivers of good lighting and the challenges with bad lighting, is this I mean, is it true from your experience the best way for a dealer to showcase this? I mean, to effectively communicate this, is it through a demo space? Absolutely. To, like, show glare and then show the opposite of glare?

Patrick:

Absolutely correct. Yes. We we encourage them to have a space where there is a bad light or bad lighting, a flat lens, or a disc lens that drops below. And, you know, electricians, electrical contractors, they kinda get a bad rap. They take codes classes to learn how to wire home safely, but there's no lighting training. And they're very most of them, speaking generally, are utilitarian. So you're gonna have plenty of light. We're not talking about if it's glary light. We're not talking about if it's offensive light. You'll have lots of light and it's easier for them to wire in a junction box and put a general light in than to measure and worry about exactly where the recess goes. Know, it's just human nature to take the easiest path and it's included in the house so people don't know to ask any better. But there's even builders now are starting to take notice saying, wow, this home feels way better. It looks way better when I've done lighting correctly instead of just glare bombs all over and making a uniform mashed potatoes. It's a great question. So go ahead Rebecca, let's go into the next one if you don't mind. Is this your forever home? So this is for the client who's not reached that maturity level. Maybe they're not in their 50s, 60s, close to retirement, in retirement. We need to design your home for today and tomorrow because we can go back to bald. As you know, you lose balance as you get older and adaptation, you know, your eyes aren't going to adjust as easily. Your lenses are going to thicken in yellow. You're going to two to three times the amount of light in fifteen years and you're also going to lose your depth perception. So when we design a home for tomorrow, basically what we may do is use tunable white so that looking out of yellow lenses, can go to a cooler color temperature as you age. We can lower that whole control system to eighty percent. It's going to extend the life of your lights and your lighting fixtures and then turn it up as you age and need more light. There's lots of different things we could do to adjust and plan for your forever home. I wasn't going to mention this but years ago I attended an IES seminar and there was a development in Arizona and they targeted thirty five to forty five year olds. You could buy a lot, buy a little Adobe condominium in this development. And they put switched outlets through all these things, which was perfectly fine for people in their thirty five to forty five age bracket. But when those people fifteen years later, one of the biggest challenges they had with that development was the lighting was horrible and there was no light in the room and people would have to do complete remodels to tear out ceilings and start all over. Was very expensive. So things we can do to plan ahead just make it so much easier. We're still going to do not only a proper lighting, but also proper lighting for you as you age. Go ahead, Rebecca, if you would. Oncoming headlights. This is an easy one. If you notice, these are all questions we want to talk about that relate to people. Without talking about specs. I wanna sell you lights. So this is a manufacturer, you know, whatever. Do oncoming headlights bother you? I've talked to people in their thirties that say yes. Forties. Forties, we start needing reading glasses. Our lenses are really starting to thicken in yellow a little bit more. 60s, 70s, absolutely. They blind us. So, lenses means that instead of an oncoming headlight being a pin spot in the back of our eye, lens thick lens scatters the light, temporarily blinds us so to speak. So it's very hard for people to see. Bad lighting creates the same kind of glare when we put these glare bubbles on the ceiling. Sure it's easy. Sure it's inexpensive, but it's not what really what we need to feel comfortable in a space. So the fixture selection matters as much as the brightness. We want to use regress fixtures that are up inside the ceiling plane, indirect lighting, tape lighting, things like that and lots of manufacturers make great lighting. This is just about how does it relate to us as human beings. Go ahead, Rebecca, thank you. So your conversations, and this requires a level of awareness in your people and you, an elevated level of awareness to start looking, but have you ever noticed how relaxing a great spa restaurant feels? Ask the client, do you have a favorite restaurant? What's your favorite place to go on anniversaries? Why is that your favorite place? Because it feels relaxing? Because you know they have soft music or the it's a relaxed atmosphere, you really enjoy yourself. The spa, the salon, there's all different places that we like to go because it makes us feel different. It makes us feel better and people don't really think about that when they're building a home. We can have all that and it's not that expensive. It's a matter of design in the beginning. So each I've said this for many many years, Ron. Anybody that knows me will know I say this. We don't do the same thing in every room of the house. Why are we putting the same light in every room of the house? So lighting should match how each room is used, the time of day, the functions performed. Dining room tables are an example of a multipurpose space. Anniversary dinners, dinners with friends, homework, paying bills, having morning coffee. We need to consider more than just one light in the middle. No different than if you put one speaker in the middle of your living room. If you sat underneath it, you can't hear anybody else talk. If you're in the kitchen, you can't hear the music at all. So lighting is very similar to sound. We want to make sure we do it right and we want to make sure that we fill the space. An intentional placement matters and every room deserves its own lighting strategy. Another place I always refer to is the bathroom. If you come back, especially my wife comes home at the end of a long day and she wants to have a glass of wine and relax in a bubble bath, she doesn't want to do it in Walmart white. She wants it in candlelight. So if we just have these utility lights through the whole space and everything is light on or light off, we're really doing ourselves an injustice and if she's in there with a disc light or a bright glary light on trying to relax, she's going to go to bed and lay there wide awake because she hasn't prepared herself for sleep. So there are lots of things have to do with wellness and health through just basic questions. Alright Rebecca, if you would. Have you ever been somewhere that you felt was way too bright or way too dark? A lot of people, so I refer to think about retail stores Abercrombie. Hey Abercrombie is way too dark for me. Guess what? It's not targeted for people my age, it's targeted for twenty year olds who can see in the It's not targeted for older people. How about outdoor eating spaces where they use little rechargeable lamps in the center of the table? And while you're sitting there, you know, you can't read the menu. Everybody has their phones out at night trying to read the menus. So good lighting gives you flexibility. It gives you the light where you need it. Every room can adapt throughout the day. Another example of this is when we talk about placement. Think about your bedroom. If you have four cans and a fan like David Warfel always talks about, they'll typically go just outside the blade edges with the light fixtures. So maybe two or two and a half, three feet in from the walls. And you can overcome this with optics in some cases with LED lighting now, but as an average, however far you come out from the wall is how far down the light starts on the wall. So when we move our lights in two, three feet, the bedroom doesn't feel very large because the walls aren't lit. We don't need space at the end of our bed to walk from the bed to the door, the door to the bed. We know unless there's a lot of Legos laying on the floor, we don't need that light. We need the light where we need it around the edges of the wall. So if we come out eighteen inches from the wall, we light the walls, the bedroom feels bigger. But also, in one of our upcoming questions that we talk about closets and things like that, you open up a drawer, you can see inside the drawer. The light is where you need it. So light placement is really incredibly important as we talk about what kinds of lights and things like that. But these again are all concepts to open the door to the conversation. So ever struggle this is the point I was telling you about, about closets and dressers. Ever struggled to tell the black clothes from your navy clothes in the bedroom? I got up one time around, I always tell the story, personal story, got up four thirty in the morning, yeah you've heard me say it and I was sneaking around trying not to wake anybody up in the whole house. I had to be at an early morning show, tabletop show. And I got there and I got my table set up and I was standing in front admiring my schlemeel of product there and I said, wow. I looked down, I had a black shoe on and a brown shoe, both the same style but two different color shoes. That's what poor lighting can do in a closet with socks, blue blazer, black blazer shoes. So we again, better placement, moving those cans to the outside of the walls to the bedroom. Closets are incredibly important to be able to pick out clothes and things like that to improve visibility. So again, these are questions we're asking the homeowner to say. We're not saying, oh, we can light your home a lot better. We're saying, do you ever have problems telling your socks the sock color? You know why that is? Because there's one light in the middle of the room behind you. We're going do this better. So do you stand in your own channel while cooking? Another common mistake, everybody's been in a home who's seen this, you have an island and you have the counter edges. And the lights will be placed in between those two. Like we're gonna put them in the pathways. Right? Well, no matter where you stand, the light is behind you. You're in your shadow at the island. You're in your shadow at the countertops. So we want to do first of all layers of lighting in the kitchen because there's it's used so many different ways. Gathering place, night light if you do tape under the toe kicks, tape under the cabinets, you just leave the tape light on. You can go get a sandwich or a snack if you're watching TV with your friends. So tasseling eliminates the shadows and again proper fixture placement. We put them over the counter edge, not in the aisle. We don't need light to go three feet from the counter to the island. We know that that space. When you go down steps, you look at the first step, your mind fills in the rest. You can navigate three feet from one counter to another without light in the middle. We need the light over the counter, so you open up the cabinets, light spills in. You pull out the drawers, you can see all your utensils. You open up the lower cabinets, light spills in. Task lighting. Not the way we always did in the past with one light behind us in the center of the kitchen. So what's the difference between a basement and a lower level? Only a couple more Ron and I'll hand it over to you. But this is not so big in the South, maybe where they don't have basements. But in the northern hemisphere, what's the difference between a basement and a lower level? I always say, obviously, being finished. A basement may be just cement, but the main difference is the lighting. When people typically basements are lit in the old days, three fluorescent troffers right down the middle. Walls are dark, space feels cold because they're really cold, cool temperature lights. No one wants to go down there. We tell the kids go down there and play. It's like a torture chamber. But the difference is if we light those where we put lights in and we put those lights near the wall, again, eighteen inches out from the wall, we light the walls, the space feels illuminated and it feels warm. In the picture you're looking at, there's cove lighting, so some indirect. The cabinets are lit. The the the shelving is lit. So that space feels wonderful. It feels like the same as the upstairs. It feels like a part of the home. But if we go downstairs, also putting those lights near the edges of the walls, where's the couch? Against the wall. We don't need light at our feet. We need light if we sit down and read or we want to look at the remote. So again, placement is crucial and then the kind of light we put in, not glare bombs, nice quality lighting makes the space feels feel great and usable. A lower level is much better than a basement. Then just two more. Have you ever heard lights that buzz or flicker? Ron, this to be fair, this is less of an issue but most people who've lived through the LED transition of really poor quality and early on to much better quality now have had some sort of flickering experience even with fluorescence and and also buzzing. So using a forward phase, a regular light bulb dinner dimmer on an LED can sometimes cause the fixture to buzz. It's cutting the current in a way that the fixture doesn't like. So if we use an ELV, a reverse phase dimmer, that smooths out the the electricity that that's going through the sine wave, makes the fixture much happier, and there's no sound. Even some of the early LED light bulbs had in rush current problems we called it and so they would popcorn as they popped on which people hate. So incompatible products, inexpensive products, not using things that are designed together, we can eliminate those problems for you. So again, depending on where your comfort level is and what conversations you have with the clients, these are all things that are gonna trigger reactions and emotions from them, negative emotions from them that they don't wanna have again in their new home. Again, no, we're not talking about products here. We're only talking about And then the last one, Rebecca, if you would. Have you noticed homes where lights seem to be different color? This is really common more in retail spaces, hotels, hospitality. I was just in a new hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan not that long ago and they had disc lights. This was very similar to a True by Hilton, except this was a Fairfield property version, and the disc lights everywhere weren't even the same color. Some some were blue and cool, some were yellow and warm. So whether they had defectives and they just swapped them with something similar or they there was no quality control from the beginning lights were different colors. A story I tell of a retired neighbor down the road is he's got six can lights over his dining his countertops and three over his island. When one bulb goes out, if one of the six goes out or one of the three goes out, he goes to the home center and he buys three new bulbs even though they're LED because he can never get the same color. And then he has three different color bulbs or a different color and he hates that because people don't understand lighting. Good quality, new technology, LED lights are designed to last a long long time, years and years and years without and with color consistency and things like that. So a unified lighting plan delivers a better experience, better quality product. So ultimately, the last slide that I'll touch on is just really make lighting more about questioning them, draw out on their experiences so they can relate. Remember when you speak, someone hears but they're basing what they hear and their mental picture on their own experiences. So you're looking in your mind and seeing exactly what you're talking about. They could be talking about something different. So if we ask questions and we have conversations, then we're talking about better lighting in the way they picture it and the way it affects them, not in a way we're talking about specs and lumens and manufacturers, etcetera. Hope this helps. Hope this helps everybody. Remember bald. We all go bald. We have no choice.

Ron:

We all go

Patrick:

bald. If you live longer, you're going bald.

Ron:

I I think there's a lot of people watching that are hoping they don't go bald. But we'll we'll roll with that. Patrick, you guys have at WAC Group, you have been recording educational content in webinar format, and you have it available here on this QR code. Do wanna just speak to that for a minute? Because there's a a wonderful wealth of education that people either attending here could digest or they could share with members of their team?

Patrick:

Yeah thanks Ron. So we partnered with the Light and Health Research Center. This is a leading in North America, is the leading research center on health and wellness and how light affects it. So these people are contracted by the government, by big automotive groups for different studies, but basically they don't endorse manufacturers. There's no, oh, use WAC because they're great. It's all about the science. This is where we learn about circadian rhythm. This is where we learn how light affects us. This is how we learn how to live better lives, how to feel better and sleep better. And so we partnered with them, meaning we're one of their sponsors and they perform webinars for us. We don't talk. They talk. They teach about life, aging, shift workers, all kinds of things that that affect us as humans. The webinars are free. So we did four last year in twenty twenty five. We've done two already this year, and we've got two more coming up. They're absolutely free. You can access the recorded that you can learn more than what I just shared here, but it's the real science. It's not about us as manufacturers. How do we bring the real science to the community?

Ron:

Alright. Love it. Thank you for sharing that. What a wonderful Alright, folks. We're gonna we're gonna take this marketing conversation, hopefully, in a fun and different direction than maybe some of you have thought about in the past. And so I'd love participation here, only so I best understand my audience. And so far you're all still with us here. I know Patrick is very engaging, so thank you all for sticking around. Drop down into the comments and I'm going to ask you about your AI usage because I'm actually going to give you a tactic that is going to leverage a lot of the ideas that Patrick was just sharing with us, but I'm going to tie it into the way you can leverage AI to actually help you design your marketing, your messaging, improve your visibility for your business around all the subject matters that your clients care about. And we know that many of them care deeply about lighting and and the lifestyle they're gonna have in that home. So if you drop in the comments, if you can find the comment section, just if you are using AI, and if so, what what's your go to platform? Do you use Gemini? Do you use Claude? Do you use ChatGPT? Do you use Perplexity? What what do you use? And, you can I think if many of you, there's a chat function right at the bottom of your screen? Rebecca, if I'm giving any poor directions on where that's at, I'd I'd love to know. Right now there we go. Perplexity. Thank you, Sandra, for sharing. There you go. I'm seeing a bunch of you. Gemini, chat, Perplexity, Grok.

Patrick:

Alright.

Ron:

We got a rebel in the crew here. Somebody using Grok. You ever use Grok, Patrick? Oh, you're on mute there. I but you're shaking your head

Patrick:

pretty fast. I am not. Yeah. I'm trying to give you visual and audible cues.

Ron:

Visual and and audible. There you go. Wow. Somebody's name I don't even know what that is. Laidlaw AI. We use ChatGPT, Gemini, company cam. I haven't seen many Claude users, actually. Oh, there's a few Claude. Cheyenne's using Claude. Natalie's using Claude. Okay. So what I want you to to all think about, and we we can we can go forward, Rebecca, is that you and your sales team and your project managers are having the most valuable conversation that you could have if you wanted to extract insights that can ultimately inform all of your messaging that you put forth on on behalf of your brand. And so when I to describe that further, you have a website. Your website has messaging on it. You're you have social media, many of you. You have various social platforms. Many of you have a Google Business profile. Many of you have hope all of you have a Google Business profile. Hope all of you have all the things that I'm mentioning. Many of you are regularly communicating with your clients via email. And you are you or a member of your team or maybe your marketing agency is choosing what to say and how to say it. And what I wanna challenge you to think about, and then I'm gonna show you a method to how to execute this, is I want you to think about how you might capture those conversations, analyze those conversations to truly learn not what do you care about, but what does your customer care about Both during the sales process and over the life of that relationship as you're interacting, maybe as you're going from discovery through a design, through the installation, and the the the total project life cycle. And if you were capturing just imagine. I don't need you to know how yet, but just imagine if you captured every single conversation from every single customer, and then you put that into a bucket, and then you were able to probe and analyze and query that dataset, you would learn so much about what your customers care about. You would learn so much about what confuses them or frustrates them, what motivates them. And you would learn what words they are using, not what words you or your team usually use. Right? We, Patrick and I and all of you, we live in a bubble. We live in the bubble of working around technology contracting clients every day, And we go to the trade shows and we go to the buying group events and we we hang out with each other and and we we're all webinars together and we use certain lingo and lexicon. But that isn't necessarily the words or the lexicon that the consumer uses or the designer uses or the builder uses. And so just the idea is if you put all of those conversations and analyze them, what could you do with that information? So if you're in virtual meetings, let's just first of all get into the how you might go about doing this. When Firefly, for example, our our team of account managers and sales folks, call them account executives, are interacting with most of our clients through video conference, through webinars. We use Google Meet. And so we run this tool called Fathom. You see the icon there in the top left of the screen. But some of you were in a Zoom webinar. Right? So many of you might use Zoom for your day to day meetings or any of these tools. Fireflies is common. Alright? And you can you can then bring in these recorders into these environments. Another example, if you're in Google Meet, you might just simply use the local Gemini embed and and use that for transcribing or recording the video call. Now if you many of you are gonna go, yeah, Ron, but and I meet my clients face to face. We meet in our office. I go out to the job site. That's where most of the real interactions happen. They don't happen over a webinar. So then you use a tool like this. This is called applaud, p l a u d. And applaud has various attachments. Here's an attachment that would let me clip this onto my shirt. So now I can record my meeting that I'm having with you. If you are for example, you see me at an HTSA event or a CD event or ProSource, you're gonna see that I always have my plot on me. And when I'm with you, I'm gonna say, do you mind if I record this conversation? And I'm gonna click, I'm gonna tap plot, and now it's gonna record that interaction. The reason I'm doing that is that I want to be super organized in the way that I follow-up with you Because I want to capture any asks you have of me and any commitments I give to you so that I when I'm when I leave the event and I go home, I can drop that recording into my CRM and I have access to it so that I can make sure I follow through on any commitments that we made together. So what I'm first of all challenging you, and I've given this type of advice from stage for the last couple of years now, and it's it's as weird and funny as it is, it's probably one of the things that I get the most compliments and thank yous for when people see me later. And they say, Ron, thank you, thank you, thank you for telling me to go out and buy applaud. There's now a couple different maybe competitive brands to applaud out there in the wild. But applaud because now right when I leave a meeting, at the simplest level, you're going to be able to quickly generate a summary of that meeting, what was said, what commitments were made, what follow-up is required, and you can very immediately five minutes after you sit in your truck, could actually send that off to the client or to the stakeholders on that job site. So you're already gonna gain a superpower, Right? But remember all of the things that and I'm just I'm connecting this to the conversation Patrick was just sharing with us, and he was talking about all these drivers of conversations that lead to effective conversations around lighting. Right? And and lighting and then insert all the other topics that you all are experts in. And imagine all of that two way dialogue that's happening between you and your customer or your prospect or your biz you know, the partner, the design partner in the industry that you're having. So now I want you to imagine you have access to all of those transcripts. And what I'm sharing with you is that data is one of the most valuable pot of gold that you have, or if you're not doing it, that you will generate. Because when you have captured every conversation or as many as you're able to, I get it. Some of your clients here to go, no. Do not record me. Okay. Then don't record them. But many of your clients are gonna go, no problem. And if you are organized in a way that you are saving all of those conversations, for example, with applaud, I just set my plot. There it is. So on your plot, you go into the app, you convert this recording into a transcription. You have to click a button, and then it gives you all the words. So I'm actually I'm not talking about the summary for those of you that are used to, Fathom or a Fireflies giving you a summary. You bypass the summary and you go right to I want to know every word spoken. When you look at there you can see an example from Fathom. There's a button that says transcript. I want to know everything I said and most importantly I want to know everything my customer said. I want to know every question they asked. I want to know every pushback they gave. I want to know every area they got excited about. Because if you did that holistically, imagine putting a bucket of six months worth of client conversations and now using you guys told me you used Claude and Gemini and Chat GPT and Perplexity. And if you were to put those transcripts into your AI, by the way, a little cheat code, put them in there as markdown files. I'll teach you real quick how to do that. If you're Google users, you could go into a Google Doc and add tabs on the left of your doc, and every tab make it a different conversation. Conversation one, two, three, four, five, all hundred conversations, all tabs. Then you simply can go and export that entire doc as a markdown file. You can create one document called a dot m d file. Why a .md? Because a markdown file is the most efficient file for AI to process. Far more efficient than giving it a doc or a PDF or an image. You give it an MD file because it strips all the syntax, all the code, all the stuff AI doesn't need. AI just needs to see the words. Right? And if I drop that into my AI, I'm going to be able to learn what are the most common questions my customers are asking. What are the most common objections my customers are pushing back on? What is the area of conversation that my clients get most excited about? What do they get the least excited about? Right? There's all sorts of you can imagine the amount of probing and querying you can do against that dataset. Now let's talk about what do you do with that information now that you've gained this superpower. So there's there's two concepts here. One is you have an existing website. You could enhance that website by layering in or optimizing. That's the a term we commonly use particularly in the SEO side of our business here at one firefly, where we are trying to enhance the content on a page to better speak to my ideal customer profile or avatar. Right? You, as a business, are trying to appeal to a certain audience. You should not be trying to appeal to all audiences because all audiences are not your customers. Very specific audiences are your customers. So you would want to optimize the language, the content, and the messaging on any page of your website to appeal to that ideal customer. And additionally, if you want aspirationally to appeal to new types of customers or customers that might be interested in certain categories like lighting, then you would need to create new content on your website or via communications and email or content via social media. Right? So there's the creation of new content, and there's the optimizing of existing content. That's what this new superpower is going to enhance. Let's go to the next slide. So now let's talk about optimizing your website first. One of the secrets of your website better showing up in search, that is search being done through Google and search through this brand new category called AI search, my Claude users here and ChatGPT users, I want you to imagine, can you, does it sound reasonable that some of your prospective clients could be going to AI and asking questions about who they should hire and why? Your head should be nodding. We Patrick and I can't see you, but your head should be nodding.

Patrick:

I do it, Ryan, all the time.

Ron:

You do it. That's right. I yeah. I bought a new coffee machine. I was right inside of my AI. Wait. What coffee what are the types of coffee machines and which one? And then it gave a recommendation, and I went out and purchased it. Right? That is what's so I have seen some yeses here. That is what more and more and more of our society is doing. It is the largest or not the largest. It is the biggest change in buying behavior since the invention of the Internet. K? I'm I'm old enough to remember when the Internet first was born in the eighties and on bulletin boards, BBSs, and then I went to college in the early nineties, and my dorm at Virginia Tech was the first dorm on campus to have an Internet connection. Oh my god. It was amazing. I spoiled it all by playing, gaming and and Doom and, Warlord or Warcraft. So that's another topic for another day. But your customers and your builders and your architects and your designers and the people in their sphere of influence are going online and doing research. So your website should be the container of the questions and your personalized answers to those questions. You can determine the questions your clients are asking by pooling and querying this data set that you start collecting. And there are you will significantly impact not only the search visibility of your website, but the stickiness of the visitor when they land on your website and them ultimately taking an action you want. So for example, Patrick's presentation, I wrote it down here, started with the purpose of lighting is around independence, visual comfort, safety, everyday living, wellness. I'm struggling to read my own handwriting. But I'm pretty sure, Patrick, that's the areas that you covered. You have prospects out there in the wild that are asking questions. Patrick even gave you the cheat sheet by putting a lot of questions in this presentation that they are asking themselves, and there are so many more. And then there's all the other disciplines of service and solutions you all offer. So what we're advocating is developing those lists of questions and you developing the answers and layering that now into your website. Another little technical I'm spending a lot of time on this, but it's super important. When you go into I'm just gonna say Claude. I'm I'm a I'm a Claude fanboy here in the last, like, three months, so I've been going deep. So when you are in, using Claude and you're using OPUS four point eight. OPUS four point eight is a training set. A training set means it was trained on the Internet some months ago, and now they've activated it and turned it on inside of your environment. There will be a Claude four point nine and a Claude sorry. Opus four point nine and an Opus five. It all is about the time frame. It's not the only thing, but it's an important criteria that changes. What time frame did they train the Internet? What time frame did they train it on the Internet? The content on the Internet. Thus, the content on your website. So you by implementing this right now, you're not gonna impact your visibility in Claude Opus four point eight's training sets visibility. You're not. By doing it now, you'll impact the future training sets that get released. K? Last detail there is those training sets are primarily training off your home page of your website, not all the deeper pages of your website. Being very specific. The training set is primarily training off your home page. And so you want to include these questions and answers in some regard on the home page of your website. K? That's the little trick. Just to finish that train of thought, you can still be found in AI search when those AI platforms are doing deeper searches on the Internet, and that's when they are querying the Internet just like Google does today when you type in a query. Alright. Let's let's rapid fire go through the rest of the content. So use AI. Here's you. We're gonna send this deck out. So here's an example of a way to query the transcript to identify those questions. Now you could you could use this exactly as we provided it, or you could go to your favorite AI and say, hey. Help me make an even better prompt. But that's the little superpower of AI. You just ask it for help, and it'll help you do it even better. Next. You also can author this. Literally, single slide in this presentation could become the subject matter of a blog article added to your website. Every single question Patrick went through could be the question and your company's position on an answer. It is that simple, and then if you're juxtaposing that against your recorded transcripts because you have the words from your clients, you can put it in language they will easily understand. When you start operating your marketing at this level, you're operating at a very high level, high performance level of marketing. We're big advocates that that blog on your website then should be linked to from the newsletter. Now you kids follow the school of thought that your newsletter includes all of your content. Nothing wrong with that. An alternative method is that that newsletter simply gives you a teaser and it points over to content that lives on your website. In both cases, everything we've described applies. Google business profile is one of the areas that Google has been injecting the most amount of energy into. It is now in essence your second website. So you want you or your marketing partner should be injecting content, the services you offer and content articles and imagery into your Google Business Profile. And when people are conducting searches, it is one of the best sources of truth other than your website that's going to lead to people ultimately finding your business. You also can use here's an example of a prompt to create brand new content. Again, this is a very simple prompt. You can go much deeper and richer, but it's just giving you the idea. If you choose that you want to write all of your content, that's great. Use AI to help you come up with the concepts. Extract the concepts, you go and write it. If you also want AI to be your writing partner and help you create a first draft that then you go personalize and customize, that's an an additional alternative. The key is producing quality thought leadership content, meaning there's questions your clients have. I'm not asking you to use AI to answer the question, I want you to answer the question. What's your opinion, your position from your company on how that particular topic is addressed, and what value does your company offer consumer or partner in addressing that particular solution. So this ultimately, just like Patrick's side said, conversations relate to better conversations, better insights, he said better lighting, it also leads to better marketing. And you have that access. By the way, this idea of capturing your client conversations and leveraging it for marketing, ask around your office, ask around with your friends in the industry. Today, July twenty twenty six, no one is doing it. So if you jump on this early, you're gonna gain an edge. There you go. Rebecca is gonna take us through our, Aspire program and, our last few slides. And then if we have a minute or two for q and a, we'll take it.

Rebecca:

Alright. Thank you, everyone. I know we're running up close to time. If you need to pop within the next couple minutes, we will wrap up here, and then everyone will get this recording and deck tomorrow. So, OneFirefly has partnered with WAC Lighting to help you guys improve your marketing. We have a credit program. We've outlined the terms here. Silver, gold, and platinum dealers get these credit amounts that are eligible toward any service at one Firefly. And then if you're a new dealer or if you have an opening order with you also get a two hundred and fifty dollar credit with us. So there's a QR code there. I believe it goes to the OneFirefly website. You can just raise your hand and reach out to us directly. If you're interested in seeing how many funds you have and what you are interested in using them for one Firefly services. I also wanted to point out, some great resource we have is automation unplugged. This is one Fireflies podcast. We put out a new episode of automation unplugged every single week. Every week is a different guest or we also, repurpose our our webinars through automation unplugged. So if you prefer to listen to a presentation like this instead of watching it live, they are all on AU. But Ron speaks with someone in the industry every single week. It is a really fascinating podcast talking through. Know, everyone has a personal and unique story to tell about their journey in the industry, different tips and tricks for marketing, business, sales. We cover the whole range of topics here. We also just recently launched a new AI segments. So if you really enjoyed the conversation, that we had today about AI, Ron has been talking with a lot of dealers in this space about how they're using AI in their business. These are so practical and give really, like, actionable takeaways and insights into how you can start using AI. So highly recommend checking it out. It's on YouTube, where you can watch each episode. You can also listen across any of your favorite podcast platforms. Finally, we have a couple of offers that we're gonna put out today. I will run through them quickly. Number one, as part of our partnership with WAC, we are actually giving away a couple of free Aspire brand pages. So we wanna help you if if you do not already have and are advertising this on your website and you want more people, customers to know that you offer this this lightning solution. We wanna help you get a page on your website. So we are gonna do a raffle. We're gonna give away four free pages. I'm gonna drop a link for you here if you are interested. Please fill out this quick form. We're gonna draw four names from this list using a randomizer, and we will we'll reach out. There's nothing that you need to do to get this free page. It's totally free. There's no hidden costs. We're not trying to trick you. We just really wanna help Patrick, Ron, OneFirefly, we we all wanna help you get the word out about, your Aspire solutions. And then the offer up here on this screen, OneFirefly. This is the OneFirefly exclusive offer, and it's also for this webinar only attendees and if you're watching this recording. Ron talked a lot about how about, you know, AI visibility and how important it is today that your brand, your services, your solutions are showing up not only in traditional search, but also in all of these AI platforms that a lot of your customers are using to do research before reaching out to you. So we're gonna offer we are offering free AI visibility reports. Again, no no hidden fees or anything. This is just a totally a totally free report. We're gonna take your brand. We're gonna run it through, our platform, and we will let you know how your brand is appearing in different AI tools.

Ron:

So there'll be lighting based searches that we're gonna query. We're gonna query your brand against a luxury consumer searching for someone to help them with lighting design and lighting fixture solutions in their project.

Rebecca:

Yes. Yes. Very specific. Thank you. And if you're interested in that, I drafted a second form. I dropped a second form right here. You can fill that out. I will send all of these offers out with your deck and your recording. So no worries. You will have another chance to enter for all of these. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to drop them in our chat or q and a. I know we're we're right at three o'clock, but we'll we'll take time. I do have, two questions that have popped up. Ron, the first one is for you. And is do you have any recommendations for how often you should be analyzing, your sales calls and recordings for to to be gathering these customer insights?

Ron:

Say that one more time?

Rebecca:

Do you have any recommendations for the frequency of taking your call recording transcripts and analyzing them, mining them for for new insights?

Ron:

I I think for many, this is gonna be a brand new tactic. I I'm assuming. Many, many people I actually, I'm curious if people are willing to share. Are they currently using a plot or a recorder with client meetings? If I was guessing, I'd probably say less than five percent of our industry is doing that. It's probably closer to one percent. There absolutely are some people doing it religiously, and they've been doing it religiously for several years now. I was brought into the idea of using Applied by an Integrator two years ago. So I know there are integrators out there doing it. So I would say really step one is starting to do it today and benefit just from being able to give your audience, your people you are with, a summary of the meeting right after the meeting. So you're gonna get an extra, you're gonna get an immediate benefit, you're gonna look very polished and professional by communicating summaries of meetings promptly at the end of meetings. People are going to say how did you do that? Because it does look superhuman when you start delivering excellent follow ups post meetings, particularly client meetings where decisions are being made that affect timeline or material choices. Then I would probably frankly run that for three to six months and just think of that always being true, and you're collecting those meetings and using them for efficiency and just organization purposes. And maybe six months down the road when you have a nice stockpile of those conversations, mining them for the marketing purpose that I described here in, you know, over the twenty minutes or the second half of this webinar.

Rebecca:

Awesome. Thank you.

Ron:

Beyond that, it's how often it really gets into your marketing plan development. How often what's your routine of developing the subject matter for your website, for your social media, for your blog, for your newsletter. I know when people work with one firefly, we're working with them every month. And we're generally trying to model out, you know, three to six months, and then every month checking in on that, and then just always trying to make sure we have, if possible, a six month or longer runway of a marketing plan. So it would really be very personal for anybody watching, like, what's their current approach to marketing planning within their business.

Rebecca:

Awesome. And then, Patrick, we did have one come in for you. Do you have any tips or recommendations for how to get my sales team training to have them asking start asking some of these conversations and questions consistently during meetings?

Patrick:

Yeah. So a a couple different ways. First of all, we have to raise their level of awareness. We have to help them see the light, if you will. So I like homework assignments, so maybe get together on a Friday afternoon, do pizza at lunch, and say, okay. We're gonna come back in next month. We're gonna do another lunch or maybe in two weeks, whatever the timeframe that works for your businesses and say, I want you to bring three pictures of good lighting and three pictures of what you would classify as bad lighting when we have this next meeting. And you put them all in a PowerPoint, you throw them up and you discuss those. And it starts raising their level of awareness and seeing glare and seeing where different color temperatures are. And when they start seeing the difference and buying into that, same with outdoors. The next month you could do outdoor lighting, bring us three pictures of good outdoor landscape lighting and three pictures of bad outdoor lighting. So those all help when it starts hitting home with them. That's my number one. I think the number one thing is for them to understand it and then they'll feel comfortable talking about it. And also just utilizing these questions and we will be happy to send out if anybody's interested. You can contact us through Ron or Rebecca, but we can get you up. We have a PowerPoint of these lighting conversation starters. And so just reviewing those, maybe taking one a week and hitting your staff with them until they they're gonna pick the ones that resonate with them either through a grandparent or a parent or their own experience, and they'll utilize those. So those are my my top recommendations. It's just we've we've got to get them bought in for them to be able to, you know, really understand it and and utilize it.

Ron:

I would add just to that. If you guys noticed when Patrick talked about these questions, he almost always talked about a personal story that related to that question. Yes. That's a very effective communication strategy and an idea just to jump on what Patrick said, he said go through one question maybe in your sales meeting, maybe do one a week. Maybe a way to do it is bring that question and then go around the room and have everyone think about what's a personal story that relates to that topic. Because if they feel attached to it and they have a story behind it, they're more likely to build that into their lexicon or the the way that they they talk about lighting with their prospects.

Patrick:

One black shoe and one brown shoe.

Ron:

You know? It's a powerful I'm not gonna forget that.

Patrick:

Yeah. I'll never forget it, Ron. I hope I never do it again.

Ron:

You know, it's not that bad. There's worse things.

Patrick:

Yeah. Of course.

Rebecca:

Alright. Well, that's all we have. Thank you so much everyone who attended. If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out to one Firefly or Patrick through the contact information on this slide. We appreciate you guys spending over an hour with us today. So thank you so much. I hope everyone here has a great rest of your day. Thank you, Patrick and Ron. Really appreciate you.

Ron:

Bye, guys.

Patrick:

Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Ron.

Ron:

Yeah. Bye bye.

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:

Show Notes:

Links:

https://onefirefly.com/about/press-and-awards/item/aispire-one-firefly-co-marketing-program-2025

https://brandportal.wacgroup.com/