03.05.2007 — It’s mid-October in upstate New York, and though nearby historic Saratoga Race Course closed its 138th season last month, Ambiance Systems president Marc Leidig is still horsing around. He’s showing off one of his company’s integration innovations, radiating a bit like Steve Jobs soon will when he presents Apple’s iPhone to the drooling masses.

Leidig has his hands on a Crestron touchscreen in the kitchen of a house in which his Clifton Park, N.Y.-based firm recently displayed its talents as part of the Saratoga Builders Association’s Showcase of Homes, toured by the community’s mix of affluent racegoers, city transplants and eco-conscious country dwellers.

And this is not your average home, even for a custom installer. Located near the Saratoga Springs border in rural Wilton, it’s the Showcase’s award-winning marvel of green construction, and one of its features is a GridPoint Connect system that intelligently manages renewable energy and backup power—just the type of customizable integration challenge on which Ambiance thrives.

"We want to give the client the ability to customize it without our being involved. It’s a Web-based panel, so we put a direct link to show what’s going on with GridPoint," Leidig says as he begins to access the Internet on the screen.

"OK, so here it tells us that we have 43.4 hours of runtime left on it … just today we’ve processed enough CO2 to save .86 acres of trees, and taken .6 cars off the road … you can filter it to see the activity of the last 30 days … it updates on the hour … eventually GridPoint will be able to post what the power costs are on an hour-by-hour basis, which allows us to do things like hook up relays into the dishwasher and washing machines to prevent them from running during certain periods."

Ambiance is making energy management as fun as surfing YouTube. There’s gotta be a catch for the homeowner, who’s bound to fumble his way around the touchscreen, right? "We’re accessing GridPoint through its Web points," Leidig says. "It’s accessed by signing in, like an online bank account."

Potentially intricate technology that for the client has been made "powerfully simple"—as Ambiance’s tagline insists.

Powerful Combination

Leidig joined Ambiance in 1987, two years after it was started by a former partner as a stereo store in quaint, upscale Saratoga Springs. Much has changed in the custom electronics business over the past 20 years that Leidig has been involved in the industry, but for Ambiance perhaps the biggest impact came in 2003.

That’s the year that a buyout was finalized of Leidig’s partner, while his other partner in life—his wife, Jennifer—entered the business.

Their love-at-first-sight story, as she tells it, began in 1985 when an 18-year-old Jennifer ("a geek who spent weekdays and nights in the library," she says) met a 21-year-old Marc ("a hip DJ audiophile, president of his fraternity") during her first weekend as a freshman at SUNY Potsdam while he attended Clarkson University.

As business partners, Marc and Jennifer Leidig have successfully melded their skills to help Ambiance and its dozen employees grow to $2 million in annual revenues. While company president Marc has always provided the technology inspiration, vice president Jennifer has established herself as a savvy marketing guru and manager. She’s also a self-proclaimed guinea pig for Ambiance’s integration systems in the sense that they should indeed be "powerfully simple" for even non-techie homeowners to operate.

"I’m one of the least naturally inclined technical people you’d meet on the street. I have a graduate degree in philosophy and women’s studies, and I can’t even set my own alarm clock," she says. "I’m the person who looks at things from a consumer’s point of view, because sometimes it’s very difficult for [integrators] to get the perspective of what happens to the general consumer—questions like, how easy is this system to navigate? And if I can understand it, anybody can."

Also in 2003, Ambiance worked with a designer to create a new company logo, the power on/off symbol. It not only conveys the "powering up button" that acknowledges the technology Ambiance provides, the Leidigs say, but also offers a nice aesthetic touch with wide appeal, including the increasing presence of females as the household’s primary purchasers/decision-makers.

Ambiance caters to a broad audience in general. Because of its location, clients range from wealthy second homeowners who spend their summers at Saratoga Race Course (aka The Spa), or scenic Lake Placid, Lake George and the Catskills, to year-round residents of rural upstate New York, nearby Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and Manhattan.

Jennifer says those local year-round residences now include both smaller-town folk as well as upscale clients who commute to New York City. The range is reflected in Ambiance’s wide scale of projects, she says.

"We have an enormous spectrum of needs to accommodate, from the absolute basic necessity to elaborate, obscenely indulgent luxury," Jennifer says. Ambiance can go from making sure a client simply has high-speed Internet throughout his house, to providing a customized aquarium fish-feeding system.

"The big challenge is that not only do we have to have the staff to accommodate a large spectrum, we have to make sure we don’t stereotype ourselves. The kind of attention our company gets is on projects that are James Bond-like, but that stereotypes us as being more expensive as to what we are, and [consumers] are working on an intimidation factor."

A Team Attitude

Although Ambiance works on installations that break six figures, they are trying to reach out to the customer who might be more in the $5,000 to $15,000 range and wants top-quality service and professionalism.

That effort begins back in the office, where, the Leidigs say, employees know their roles and they also know that one person isn’t more important than the next.

"We’re all on the same team, and our business model doesn’t go from top down, it goes from side to side," Jennifer says.

Marc has witnessed the company’s growth first-hand, and is in more of a sales position than he was when the business sprouted from stereo installations. For Ambiance to reach another level of success, he echoes the significance of the regimented office, beginning with the impact of himself and the sales team and flowing into the other positions on the team.

"We’re trying to create a process," he says. "For us to get to that next level of sales, we need people who really know how to sell. They may not know how to put in a flushmount speaker, which is where a lot of salespeople come from in this marketplace. So we feel we need to have that separation of salespeople focusing on sales and marketing, putting projects in the hands of people who really know how to get it done, and having front-office people in charge of other aspects of the operation."

That includes himself, knowing how far to extend his reach as president into the decision-making and technical aspects involved in a project, as well as factors in determining what projects to and not to take on.

"Our marketplace has become the de facto home automation marketplace, and some people in this business just don’t understand it," he says. "For us, it’s coming to revelations like, I’m really good at this and others are really good at that, and you’ve got to make those conscious decisions. I’ve given [my employees] orders to swat me out of the way if I step on their toes."

Of course, finding the right people to fill the roles that Ambiance expects of its employees is always carefully treaded territory. Sometimes it takes looking within the company and offering an already experienced and trusted employee a new task.

Last year the company created a "project coordinator" job and hired employee Stacy Newkirk for the position because she had proven herself in many of its roles in the field. Now she serves as a liaison between Ambiance’s two lead technicians and the office, putting together everything they need for an installation, doing scheduling, progress reports, working with the product coordinator and even ensuring that the company vans are properly stocked and ready to roll. Newkirk also acts as the transition point person for the client following the salesperson, and Ambiance makes it clear that any issues clients have must go through her.

"Lead techs were spending a lot of time in the office. This maximizes billable hours," Jennifer says. "And when you start categorizing people, giving them real expectations of a job description, it allows them to become masters of what they’re doing instead of the jack-of-all-trade, master-of-none that a lot of small businesses have."

Showcasing Their Work

The organization on the main floor of Ambiance’s store in Clifton Park trickles down to the basement, too, where parts and products are neatly organized. The segmentation—prewire area, brackets enclosures, rack shelf extras, projects in progress—makes for efficient testing of equipment and loading of vans.

Marketing of Ambiance Systems begins from the ground up, so to speak, in the basement as well. The company has its name and logo engraved onto inventory such as keypads and racks, creating built-in brand recognition.

The Leidigs say they do not set aside too much money for marketing, though. "We don’t have an established marketing budget—if you asked what it was, my answer would be ‘frugal,’" Jennifer says.

Marc and Jennifer lean heavily on top-notch customer service, local and national press recognition, an improved and evolving Web site and, within the last couple of years, partnering with local builders for the Showcase of Homes.

Jennifer brought seasoned customer relationship and management skills with her from previous jobs, including nights catering to upscale clientele at a five-star French restaurant in Saratoga while she taught women’s studies courses during the day at the University of Albany (a profession she’s eager to return to someday).

"It’s very hard to please people with high expectations," she says. "These are difficult personalities to sell, to gain trust from. But that kind of demographic, if you can gain their trust they’re wonderful to work with."

Jennifer has put countless hours into Ambiance’s Web site, which she says has seen increasing traffic and leads, as director of media relations and also pushes the company’s brand into the public eye through articles that can illustrate exactly what Ambiance provides.

In that respect, she says the company might be almost better known nationally than locally. That most likely won’t be the case for long, though, if Ambiance continues to have successful efforts such as the recent Showcase of Homes participation, where thousands of people tour homes over three consecutive weekends. Marc Leidig estimates that "we got at least 75 names on paper" from the tours.

"We did it a number of years back and got into it again two years ago with a builder who was really trying to make a statement with green construction," he says. "We just decided to hit it hard—let’s go in there, let’s market it, let’s create it—and we got a lot of business from it."

Everyone Benefits

Last fall’s Showcase featured Ambiance Systems in two of the nine homes. And those two homes each won Realtors’ Choice Awards in their categories—homes below $700,000 and homes above that.

Ambiance’s presence in the sub-$700,000 home was a unique dedicated theater it created in a second-floor "bonus" room. The above-$700,000 home is where Ambiance integrated the GridPoint and demonstrated more involved home automation and A/V distribution working with Frank Laskey, president of Capital Construction. Laskey is the green builder from nearby Ballston Spa, and he actually bought the home—and Ambiance’s technology—to live in as he works on other green construction in the subdivision that will also spotlight Ambiance.

Particularly in the green home, Ambiance got to demonstrate its full power as an installer, with challenges, along with the GridPoint, like motorizing a set of cupola windows and interfacing the accompanying ceiling fan to have it either force air down or pull it up depending on the season.

"We’re all about the finish, the innovation, the little nuances," Marc says. "We like things to be done stealthy, but done with a purpose."

Working with the green builder also gives Ambiance a source of pride, in both the actual projects (including something as simple as setting max lighting to 90 percent, thereby doubling the bulbs’ lifespan) and the energy management awareness it helps promote.

"By making energy conservation convenient, that saves a lot more energy than any of us care to think about," Jennifer says. "Marc and I are most proud of being on the cutting edge in this industry. People keep forgetting that this stuff is really fun, and to add that to actually doing something to help the environment, that maximizes the fun factor."

While the company can demo in its store, Marc says the green home’s overall integration and the other house’s second-floor theater made for an even more effective model and sales tool.

"I brought a new client, who had nothing to do with the Showcase, here to show him all the things we could do and closed the deal by doing that—and sold them an Audio ReQuest," he says. "[For the home theater room] I had to buy a little bit of the product to build in that room, but the builder gave us keys to the house to go and show; he made no investment in it, but it created a lot of excitement for his house and gives us interest."

Among the interest were calls from three builders about potential relationships, Marc says. And though the majority of potential clients have done some research before starting the sales process with Ambiance, the Leidigs say, projects like green home integration and second-floor home theaters open eyes to unimagined possibilities.

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. It can also be profitable.

Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Ambiance Systems vice president Jennifer Leidig is a big proponent of raising national awareness for the custom-electronics industry. Instead of the "competition," she prefers to call other integrators "colleagues."

In that respect, she’s quick to give credit to others about ideas she’s seen or read about and has borrowed.

"There’s no such thing as an original idea," she says. "People steal my ideas all the time."

One idea she "stole" came from seeing the cover of last April’s CE Pro, which showed Jason Gotz and Cheryle Easton of Genesis Home Technologies dressed in lab coats with their company logo above the left breast pocket.

"I really thought that was a great idea!" Leidig says. So when Ambiance participated in the Saratoga Builders Association’s Showcase of Homes last fall, it outfitted employees in white lab coats with Ambiance’s logo embroidered on them so people knew which company provided the technology in the homes.

"We were in two different homes, and the coats really made an impression because people knew we were from Ambiance Systems when they went from one home to the next one," Leidig says.

In one of the homes, where Ambiance installed a second-floor home theater, the projector was actually mounted in an adjacent walk-in closet and the wall cut into. Company president Marc Leidig noted that he got the idea to use a light can baffle to unobtrusively enclose the projector lens from a builder Ambiance once worked with. "I won’t take credit for that," he says.