Growing Up with an Entrepreneurial Spirit

I’m fortunate to have been born into an entrepreneurial family, starting to learn the ins and outs of being a business owner when I was a child. I grew up in my family’s business, beginning to work the summer after fifth grade. Family dinners were more like executive meetings where our conversations consisted of the daily details of running multiple companies.

I was required to learn all aspects of managing a company throughout my childhood, which in turn set me up for success and has given me an edge in creating startups as I follow in my parents’ footsteps. After 25 years of experience in leadership, building and managing venture startups in marketing, commercial printing, manufacturing, and data management, I felt confident in my ability to develop an emergency management and asset protection company called VuTeur. Creating a startup sounds fun and exciting, and it is!

But being a seasoned entrepreneur, I knew there would be many sacrifices. Startups demand a hyper-focus with long days and nights, exhausting travel and juggling multiple jobs at once. And to top it off, I was transitioning a product into a market I was hoping to disrupt but had no experience in: the security industry.

It’s no secret that soft targets such as schools and stadiums have been the focus of tragic and violent incidents lately, so despite not knowing anything about security, the pure passion and desire to make a change is what pushed me to leap into this market. And luckily, I wasn’t alone: my smart, dedicated and driven core team consisted of accomplished developers and software designers with the knowledge and resources to bring our product to the industry to help solve the problem.

But the primary challenge was in attracting key security industry veterans who adopted our vision and believed in our product. The possibilities that came with such a disruptive technology were a bit shocking to some, but the security industry is made up of an incredible group of people who are open to new ideas and are passionate about keeping people safe. Because of this, we formed strong relationships with credible security leaders who guided and mentored us through the learning curve and introduced us to partnership opportunities.

And we believe those relationships wouldn’t have flourished anywhere better than the fantastic city of Austin, Texas. The location in which you choose to put down roots and build a business is a significantly important factor contributing to your success, and Austin could not have been a better choice! Besides being the top city in America to start a business, Austin is a friendly, innovative technology city with an abundance of talent, low cost of living and high quality of life. We considered the labor force and the speed of the population growth, and we’re fortunate that the technology push in this area has made building and growing our business easier.

VuTeur has created a unique technology that has immediately caught the attention of its audience in both Austin and around the world. We’ve realized throughout this journey that real-time location services (RTLS) technology and open space monitoring are destined to be an added layer of security automatically built into a campus, just as video surveillance technology started off as a hard sell but has grown to be the norm.

The heart of our product was built for schools to give students, teachers and staff extra time in the event of an emergency to run, hide or fight. But the gift that gave back to us was the need for this technology in any vertical, be it a hospital, military base, retailer, government facility and more. With the momentum, we have built so far and the expansion we’ve already experienced, we’re excited to see what the future holds for VuTeur as facilities continue to use our technology to save lives.