Tech Talk: TV Frame Maker Shares Files

By Elizabeth Wasserman

A business that custom designs frames and mounts for flat panel TVs avoided hiring IT personnel by outsourcing file sharing and management to an on-demand provider.

HD Envy is a business that started less than two years ago in Florida to design, manufacture, and sell custom frames and mounts for flat panel TVs. Sean Thorp, managing officer of the company, tells IncTechnology.com that by outsourcing management of files and servers the company was able to avoid having to hire IT staff while enabling employees in different locations to collaborate and work on the same files.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell us about your business.

Sean Thorp: We've been in business for about a year and a half. We have offices in St. Petersburg, Largo, and Sarasota in Florida where we manufacture, sell, and distribute frames for flat panel televisions. If you want a wall-mounted flat panel TV, and the black frame doesn't match your décor, we make frames that fit right over your screen that allows someone to basically match their television to their décor. It's kind of going back to what televisions used to be when they came in a cabinet and looked like a piece of furniture. It used to be that manufacturers understood this and would try to provide different frames but if they do that now it's more of a hassle. They have to stock one red and one blue of each television in their distribution centers. That's where we step in. We base our frames off the Video Electronic Standard Association (VESA) standard so that they fit right over the television and the wall mount.

Wasserman: You have staff working in a variety of locations. What kind of IT problems did this create?

Thorp: We have nine employees right now working in a variety of locations in Florida and overseas. We're geeks at heart. We understand there were going to be some problems. When we first started the business, we didn't even have an office. We were working from home. So we started using Google Apps, which was a fantastic service that cost $50 per user per year. That took care of e-mail and documents. Then we started looking at Microsoft Exchange servers and Sharepoint. But to use those products we would have needed to hire an IT staff and at that point we didn't have any money. How can you convince someone who needs to be making $80,000 a year to work for free? One of the problems we ran into is we started having these documents in PDF forms with non-disclosure agreements and we had to figure out where we could store those so that we could call them up and access them from anywhere we were. If my partner, Howard Hochhalter, was in Sarasota and I was in Palm Harbor, or if we were dealing with a business partner in China, how could we share these documents that included photographs of our designs? Google Docs couldn’t handle those.

Wasserman: So what did you do about it?

Thorp: At first, we started an FTP server off the domain. We tried that for three weeks and it was a nightmare. We had multiple versions of documents all over the place. So then we went shopping for a solution. We figured we couldn’t be the only people who needed to look for something better. We did some online searches and found Egnyte. It wasn't an FTP server. It was a hard drive that was online. We could access the same version of a document from our different office locations. In a business with a large office, you have a shared document folder. But we weren't in the same office. This also blossomed into a service through which we could send documents to people, such as if I have a DVD and I want to send it to a new retailer interested in selling our products. I can't send an 8-gigabyte file in an e-mail. So I just create a link from my hard drive and share it explicitly with them. They have a download location, but they can't access anything else on our hard drive. They just get to see what we let them see.

Another great thing is that we can create a folder for a vendor such as Best Buy and drop stuff in there when we put new information out and they have access to that information immediately. They can't see anything else. But everything they need is dropped in there in real time.

Wasserman: What have the results been?

Thorp: We haven't had to hire an IT staff. That is the first thing. The next thing is the actual hours we need to spend managing this have been cut down. When we were using the FTP server, we were spending at least two hours per week each doing file management. That added up to four hours of wasted time a week when we should have been focusing on running our business. We operate very lean because we want to keep our prices down. This has enabled us to offer our products at a low cost because we don't have to pay for an IT staff and don't have to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.