I am posting this from a long term investor in this company that I have connected with on several times. They do their homework and has reached out to the company over the years. Before discrediting, take the info for what it is. If you don’t believe it, contact the company yourself and always do your own due diligence.
Hello, I have been a strong holder in patriot one since early 2018.
When is the next investor webinar?
The next formal investor webinar will be October, currently the 20th, after the Board and auditors approve the FY2022 financials. We have been moving from the strategy of the prior executive team where they provided all sorts of questionable references to customers testing, and demo's etc which only served to frustrate investors, to a format that is much more aligned to how all publicly traded organizations announce quarterly results.
From time to time, our CEO may choose to do more fireside chats to provide his view on the market for investors.
I feel like currently, things have been going VERY slow and many of us long holders are losing faith in the company's ability to deliver. What have you been doing?
It may appear slow, but is has not been. Quite the contrary. We have never been busier and the types of engagements are very meaningful. 16 or 18 months ago we were stumblign around with a couple of crappy 3rd tier casinos. Now, we are averaging two demo's pilots with major sports teams, and F500 companies. We are attending key trade shows and events (GSX, NCS4, VenuesNow). The inbound interest right now is very strong and perhaps the percieved quiet is that all attention is on customers, customers responses, and more. As an analogy, 90 days ago we might have recieved one or two inbound enquiries per month from schools or healthcare specifically. Now we are recieving about 5 to 7 per week. Each of these is strong opportunity, but they require responding to RFP's since these are publicly funded organizations, which then demands about 5X the attention. In the past 7 days we have: completed installs of lanes for 2 venues, run a pilot at an NFL team, secured some contracts, wrapped a major month-long pilot at a school district, attended the GSX trade show which has lead to dozens of opportunities, scheduled demos for 3 more locations, and installed 2 lanes for another customer. Whew!
I see contracts rarely such as Tech CU Arena. These have been good grabs but why are we not seeing these weekly or daily? Why are you not scaling?
We wish that we were closing contracts daily....doesnt everyone? But the reality is that is not how the world works, how many people are buying, etc. Everyone thinks that just because there is a growing weapons issue in the US, our products should be flying off the shelf like cold beer on a hot summer day. That is not reality. This is a security product, and as such, it is often never budgeted and has to get budget (which is a long process), and frankly sometimes everythign is perfect, and then the CFO blocks it. Also, many of our customer refuse to allow us to publish their security strategy in an announcement since they are then worried that someone with malicious intent could use that information to try to bypass discovery
Why should I hold? I'm down %80 and it's been 5 years.
First - We are not an investment advisor, so it is always best to talk to your advisor. It is down. But the entire market is down. Micro-caps stocks are down 70% on average in the past 3 months. Patriot is down, but not that much. Why now? Frankly, the first three years of your investment were probably tied to a vision and a pitch that had nothing to back it up. No product, customers, operations.
in the past 12 months we have gone from no customers to over 3 dozen, from less than $1M of real, quality pipeline to over $63M. From being unknown and having a bad reputation as a product, to being highly respected and in every conversation by every team. We have a CEO who is getting daily calls from the CSO's of organizations such as the largest automakers, entertainment organizations, and even our competitors customers where previously we could get anyone to pick up the phone.
I invested in microwave radar used to detect weapons. Whatever happened to that being your main push?
Microwave radar is an interesting concept and product, and still part of the portfolio. But it is not easy to productize into a form factor that can be pragmatically deployed. Prior engineering teams struggled to do that. Our portfolio is delivering the outcomes customers are looking for with a combination of technologies.
I think STS is a phenomenal product and question as to why you don't have a specialized team pushing that as its own entity. You have been selling "weapon detection suites" but you're limiting your customer pool dramatically by doing this.
Frankly, it is a terrible product. Good concept. but not viable as a product. If it worked, every TSA point would have it already.
Why not invest in selling units ready to go? Instead of having to customize our products around their goals and buildings, let the customers customize their goals and temporary walls around our products, we can scale much better that way.
The units are ready to go. They are not "customized" for each venue. You are misreading the story. But, they way the units are designed they can be wide or narrow, indoors or outdoors, permanent, or portable, we can tune the AI to ignore some items so that operations doesnt have to change (Kia loved this) versus others who told Kia "well you have to change your business model to use our product!"
Also - recognize that most buildings will nto re-build their walls around our product. It doesnt work that way.
Instead of saying here is our MSG let us set it up for you and install everything, why not make it so they (the customer) can set it up on their own? I know there is noise so these units have to be tested. But, if you can sell them with video instructions to set up, install, test, program ect. we can get this share price off the floor.
That won't work for us or any product. Too often we find that unless we work with the customers and set their expectations correctly, then they have the wrong expectations. We tell them not to set it up in an emergency room entrance, and what does the uninformed president of the hospital do? Say "I am worried about guns on people in car accidents coming into emergency. move those thinsg over there!" And then they alert with every wheelchair and Crash cart that goes through.
If MSG is not capable of this type of sale, due to its complexity, approach that issue and fix it.
Not sure how to respond to that statement other than "no sh*t". When our CEO got her e and looked at the product 16 months ago he realized it was not anything that could be sold. HE got out with customers to find out what they wanted, what they liked about Evolv and hated, how their business needs should inform our product development. We delivered an entire new product - The SmartGateway in record time. About 7 months. Where the prior executive team couldnt deliver a solid product in 5 years.