April Fools’ Day was the worst day of Vanessa Ogle’s life.
The 49-year-old Latina is the founder and CEO of Enseo Inc., a leading provider of tech services to hotels.
By the end of March, those hotels had been mostly shut down by the pandemic. More than half of Enseo’s customers couldn’t pay her everything she was owed.
As her business cratered, Ogle’s girls, 13 and 11, fell ill with raging fevers and difficulty breathing. Their family doctor, dressed in protective gear that he made with materials from Home Depot, tested the girls for the coronavirus in his office parking lot.
The tests were inconclusive, but their doctor was certain his young patients had COVID-19.
Within days, Ogle was seriously sick, too.
She dealt with their coronavirus via telemedicine. “I became quite adept at using a pulse oximeter [used to assess lung disease] and an oxygen concentrator,” Ogle says.
So on April 1, Ogle struggled with every painful breath as she held three Webex meetings — one for each Enseo division — about the company’s survival strategy.
Her youngest daughter lay behind her on a beanbag with a cannula in her nose, breathing concentrated oxygen while doing her fifth-grade homework.
Ogle told each of her 106 staffers whether they still had a job or not. Among those losing their paychecks were her brother and sister.
“I was a tearful mess and not the pillar of strength that I’d hoped to be,” she says. “I laid out the stark realities of the industry and the company and told them we were determined to work hard, find new income streams so that we could bring as many of them back as soon as we could.”
PPP to the rescue
Enseo had started 2020 with great expectations.
The company, which posted $60 million in sales last year, is the backbone technology for in-room entertainment, high-speed internet and touchless controls at nearly 2,000 hotel properties, including Hiltons, Marriotts and Intercontinentals.
Watch Netflix or other on-demand video services in your hotel room, listen to iHeart radio or order room service on your TV, conduct business on your laptop, close your blinds, adjust the room temperature or turn off lights via remote control, and you can thank Enseo for the guest-room convenience.
Ogle’s company has made Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies for the past four years. And major deals in the pipeline at the beginning of this year pretty much assured that Enseo’s 20th anniversary year would be a five-peat.
COVID-19 drove a stake into those expectations.
As Ogle struggled to figure out what to do next after those painful meetings with employees, she got an email from Frank Medrano, managing director of J.P. Morgan Chase’s tech and disruptive commerce banking team, offering a lifeline.
She was especially touched since J.P. Morgan is not Enseo’s primary bank, which wasn’t doing Payroll Protection Plan loans. “It didn’t feel like a form letter. It felt like a genuine outreach,” she recalls. “So I turned around and made the genuine outreach back.”
Ogle was among the first companies to receive a PPP loan, which meant she could call everyone back to work for two and a half months.
Talk about a short timeline.
“I let my beanie propeller head go into full-speed mode, and we started creating new products,” says Ogle, the lead inventor on nearly 40 issued patents and on a dozen more that are pending.
Craig Smith, Enseo’s director of engineering, says that he and his team have been working in overdrive for two months, but that it’s not much different from normal.
“Vanessa comes up with ideas and will bounce them off of us. They’ll either go somewhere or they won’t,” says Smith. “Brainstorming, coming up with ideas, is right in her wheelhouse. This just kicked her up a notch in what she does best.
“And then she gives us the resources to do what we do best. I hope we get out of this and that I can work here in perpetuity.”
J.P. Morgan’s Medrano says he’s pleased that he and his team had a hand in keeping Enseo alive.
“We worked around the clock to process hundreds of thousands of applications,” Medrano says. “We did our best to keep business owners like Vanessa informed along the way.”
Her PPP money is about to run out, but Ogle thinks the company is stable enough to brave the uncharted waters ahead.
“The PPP lasted just long enough for the customers who had gone away to start coming back and, more importantly, for our engineering team and the inventors among us to use all of our brainpower to create return-to-work solutions,” Ogle says. “We’re going to be able to keep the team.”
No-touch luxury
Enseo is about to pilot new offerings that allow hotel guests to check in at a virtual front desk or use their cellphones to see whether their rooms have been thoroughly cleaned.
“I’ve got a new saying: ‘My touch, not high touch,’ ” Ogle says. “Luxury hotels used to be all about high touch: How could you have as many people as possible say hello, shake your hand and have face-to-face interaction? We’re going to see a very different set of scenarios where guests say, ‘How do I get the touch that I want, not the touch that you’re trying to give me.’ ”
Enseo has an energy-saving device that turns a room’s electricity off and on when guests check in and out. That was a gee-whiz novelty when hotels were packed. It’s a selling point now that most rooms are sitting empty.
“We’re doing some UVC products that disperse and get rid of viruses and other biological agents,” she says. “I see so much on the technology side and I’m reading so much in the medical journals that I know there’s plenty of technology to allow us to be safe.”
Peyton Wimmer, chief cultural officer, says Ogle likes to hire people who have been CEOs.
“Vanessa likes to employ people who carry a lot of personal authority into whatever position they are in. We've got a lot of chiefs who get along very well.”
But she also makes it clear that the final call is hers, he says.
“During all of this uncertainty, only one employee has left the company for another job,” says Wimmer. “We’ve all been working remotely and getting a lot of work done. Everyone feels really good about that. We’ve all done our best, but we don’t know what’s coming.
“We’re willing to take the gamble.”
Never say die
This is the third time Ogle has been seemingly down for the count, only to rise from the mat for another round.
After graduating from the University of Texas with two bachelor’s degrees in 1991, Ogle went to work for her dad’s company, STB Systems, which sold multimedia system products to the high-tech manufacturing community. She developed a quirky little division selling technology to TV Guide, Reuters, the stock exchanges, Bloomberg and other companies with trading desks.
In 2000, STB was bought by a large venture-backed Silicon Valley company that had no use for her odd duckling.
That’s when Ogle formed Enseo — pronounced in-SAY-oh and Latin for “to think and to do” — taking the division’s technology, patents and small staff with her but less than a million dollars in business.
A year later, Enseo was an $8 million business on an upward trajectory when 9/11 happened.
“Our primary business was the financial services industry, ugh, and travel business, ouch,” she recalls.
In today’s vernacular, Ogle pivoted the company into making digital signs for movie theaters and big-box retailers like Target and Walmart. “We took the technology that we had and flipped it just a little bit,” she says. “That became our new business that funded us to be able to stay in business.”
Then along comes Sept. 29, 2008.
Ogle, who was 37, was at the conference table of her Richardson headquarters about to sell her company to a large European tech firm when the buying team abruptly left the meeting to take calls.
“Never a good sign,” she says.
It was Black Monday, and the deal was off.
She shifted the company into providing the technology for in-room movie rentals. “It didn’t matter whether they were cruise ships, big hotels, small hotels, fancy hotels, cheap hotels, we were the technology backbone provider for all of those big boys in the space,” she says.
In 2012, she couldn’t convince her movie-provider customers that the future was in digital and streaming services — i.e., Netflix.
So, like the Little Red Hen, she did it herself.
“It seems so obvious now,” she says. “We had this meteoric growth from zero hotels in 2012 to almost 2,000 hotels in different places all over the world last year.”
Among the early adopters was Plato Ghinos, president of Shaner Group, who took a chance on Ogle with his Courtyard by Marriott in Madeira Beach, Fla., in 2014.
“It was a brand-new technology, brand-new system, but she convinced us. And thank God she did,” says Ghinos, whose company owns, develops and operates hotels primarily franchised under Marriott International brands. “We have about 60 properties, and at least 30-plus of them have the Enseo system.
“There are a lot of people in this space, but her personality, her presentation and the people she surrounds herself with make the difference.”
Ghinos was one of the customers who needed price concessions during the past three months.
“From March 15 through March 30, all we did was shut down hotels,” he says from his headquarters in State College, Pa. “We could not pay bills, and she worked with us. But we’re going to open up three new hotels by the end of the year, and all three will have her system.
“Vanessa is a class-act person, great business lady, mother and mentor. She sees the future. She’s adjusting to what the consumer and the industry demand.”
Health enhancements
Ogle had especially high hopes for Enseo’s MadeSafe employee safety system. It’s an emergency button worn on a lanyard that alerts safety personnel to an exact location if a hotel housekeeper or schoolteacher feels threatened or is in distress.
The majority of Enseo’s hotel clients and several school districts had plans to implement the system by the end of the year. But those plans were delayed by COVID-19.
Ogle hopes health enhancements will return it to the frontburner.
“There’s a new definition of safe in the workplace,” Ogle says. “So we worked with a partner to create industrial temperature-taking of employees as they come on shift and teachers and children coming into the school.”
Parents will be able to see through a portal that their kids’ classrooms have been thoroughly cleaned.
The company is betting that other types of companies will find this technology useful. Senior living centers, factories and car dealerships have expressed interest.
Enseo has new headquarters in Plano, but the staff has only seen videos. They continue to work remotely as the layout and room usage are modified for social distancing.
Ogle has considering turning some of the collaborative space into family zones so that parents can bring their children to work if necessary.
Like most CEOs, Ogle’s agenda in these pandemic times includes a steady stream of virtual meetings. But her day ends with something unusual: a cannot-be-moved Zoom meeting every evening at 6, when she reads a chapter or two of Harry Potter to the children of Enseo’s employees.
“We have a whole mosaic of little faces who are cheerfully talking to each other, listening to the book and hopefully staying out of their parents' way for an hour while I keep them busy.”
She and her daughters still battle occasional scary bouts of troubled breathing. “But the good days are outnumbering the bad,” Ogle says.
If there is a bright side to this horrible time, she says, it’s being able to spend more time with her husband, Paul Bullock, who is the chief technology officer for strategic accounts at Ciena and lead guitarist of Infinite Journey, a popular Journey tribute band.
They have four children — ages 11 to 28 — from previous marriages.
“But I realize we are very blessed,” she says. “Even though the company was in dire straits and could easily have had a different turn, we weren’t worried about putting food on the table. As much as I talk about having this time to be the best me, I realize that it’s a rarity, and we need to find ways to help give back.”
She believes keeping her people employed is a good start.
AT A GLANCE: Vanessa Ogle
Title: Founder, CEO of Enseo Inc.
Age: 49
Born: Oklahoma City
Grew up: Richardson
Resides: Fairview
Education: Plano Senior High in 1988; bachelor’s degree in business administration with a double major in international business and marketing, and a bachelor of arts degree in Spanish language and culture, University of Texas in Austin, 1991
Personal: Married for three years to Paul Bullock, chief technology officer for strategic accounts at Ciena and lead guitarist of Infinite Journey. They have a blended family of two sons, 28 and 18, and two daughters, 13 and 11.
Enseo Inc.
Headquarters: Plano
Founded: 2000
Ownership: Private with Vanessa Ogle as majority shareholder
Employees: 114 including summer interns
Main business: Provides technology for in-room entertainment, high-speed internet, energy management and room control and the MadeSafe employee safety system.
Customers: Nearly 2,000 hotel properties and a growing number of private and public K-12 schools
Website: enseo.com
SOURCE: Vanessa Ogle
