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Cape Town - Capetonian design engineer and entrepreneur Greg Gallagher and his businessman father Roger are the co-owners of Snuza.
Snuza is a portable baby monitor company, which has been awarded three accolades from the American PTPA (Parent Tested, Parent Approved) organisation, comprising 70 000 voluntary product testers.
Fin24 asked Greg to share his journey as innovator and entrepreneur:
What is your business and what gap did you see in the market?
Our company designs, manufactures and distributes portable baby monitors. I saw the gap after learning that no-one else had been able to miniaturise a breathing monitor enough to be clipped onto a nappy.
There have been several patents filed spanning the previous 15 years or so, but the technology did not exist to make it feasible.
I was fortunate to have had experience with microcontrollers at an early stage and had already miniaturised several products through the use of these “programmable circuits” before the opportunity presented itself.
Older style breathing monitors are cumbersome, plugged into mains (therefore not portable), and are practically restricted to the cot.
As every parent knows, babies don’t only sleep in the cot. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (Sids) is the largest cause of death in babies under one year of age in developed countries.
The ability to contribute in preventing this was a great attraction to me.
How did you become an entrepreneur?
When I returned to South Africa after being overseas for two years, I had saved up enough to live on while I developed some of the product ideas I had.
I asked a friend and ex-colleague to join me. We created a company and developed a few products. He eventually pulled out for something more secure, while I focussed on product development.
Slowly income started to be generated from these products, which alleviated my fast dwindling savings account and extended my business’s life expectancy. There were many ups and downs from this point and eventually I had to look for external funding to get a product I had been working on for five years to market.
Thankfully my father looked at the prospectus the day before a scheduled presentation to a venture capitalist and jumped at the opportunity.
With many further ups and downs, several close calls of bankruptcy and the threat and embarrassment of destroying my father’s pension, we eventually got a product off the ground.
Very slowly it gained traction with a very generous share of show-stopping moments, but ultimately, over a number of years, developed into a business that now sells products in 64 countries.
What were the challenges?
There is a very long list, but financial restrictions are at the top. With a very tight budget any mistakes can be the end of the company.
It’s very difficult to operate with a financial sickle over one’s head and when things slip, as they inevitably do, damage control is difficult and often depressing.
Financial limitations also stunt creativity (and therefore innovation), which is a double whammy since success largely depends on creativity and innovation.
Operating in this environment was possibly the most challenging element of starting this business.
Even with these limitations, innovation had to be on a level that had a better than average chance of succeeding. Of course this is a very big unknown and therefore very risky. A competitor with more advanced technology could have come onto the market at any point and sunk us.
There were of course many more challenges including bizarre technical challenges (one of which took over a year to solve due to the obscurity of the problem), regulatory issues, marketing challenges, unethical customer issues, intellectual property protection issues and manufacturing disasters, to name a few.
What lessons did you learn?
I have learned that there is no substitute for hard work and that the short cut is usually the longest route.
I have learned that even the most seemingly simple tasks need to be thoroughly thought out, risks properly assessed and contingencies made if necessary. Giving the ability, it is better to consider all consequences in every decision made.
I’ve also learned that it’s not successful until the money has cleared into your bank account.
I have learned the art of survival which includes making personal sacrifices, often for long periods of time, for the sake of the business.
What are your successes?
We were the winners of the Sabs Design Awards in 2011. We now sell our products in 64 countries, the USA being roughly 80% of our market.
We have won several product awards over the past two years and we were recently granted the prestigious PTPA (Parent Tested Parent Approved) award in the USA for three of our products.
What are your future plans?
Our mission is to be the leader in baby monitoring and safety devices. We are continuing to innovate in this space where we have made significant inroads into competitor market share and are continuing to do so at an exponential rate.
We have plans, through additional innovations, to keep our customers engaged for at least the first five years of their child’s life. This will allow us in the near future to greatly improve the quality of information we provide to parents on the health of their child, specifically breathing related data.
What advice would you give to potential entrepreneurs?
Make sure you have a sound business plan and then be prepared to work extremely hard, sacrificing your own comfort if necessary, to achieve your goal(s).
Develop the ability to roll with the punches and be prepared to improvise wisely when plans go awry.
Make sure you have a healthy appetite for (calculated) risk. Conduct your business in an ethical manner as the principle of “you reap what you sow” certainly applies.
- Fin24
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