Every few years an outsider walks into a settled industry, looks at it with fresh eyes, and says the quiet thing out loud. In the smart home, right now, that outsider is a company called Daisy.
In under two years an American start-up, founded by Hagan Kappler, someone who had never run an audiovisual company in her life, has raised tens of millions and built dozens of locations, chasing a billion-dollar valuation in a trade that had never produced one. The industry press cannot stop writing about it. And for once, the attention is deserved, because Daisy has understood something most of our industry still refuses to.
Let me say plainly what they got right, where I think they are taking real risks, and the very different path we are carving in Europe.
What they got right, and it is big
The old way in our trade has a name I use for it: sell and run.
You win the project, you send the invoice, you walk away. Too often you even leave the last five percent on the table and write it off as the cost of doing business. Customer happiness, retention, the lifetime value of the relationship: rarely the real goal. The real goal was to front-load the invoice and move on to the next one.
And to be fair, this is not villainy. It is simply how our whole world grew up. The building and development trade has run this way for generations: build it, hand over the keys, move to the next plot. We all inherited that reflex. Context does not define us, but it shapes and conditions us, and unlearning it is genuinely hard. Most days it feels like a salmon swimming upstream. Which is exactly why what Daisy did deserves real credit. They chose to swim against the current.
Because they saw what the pest-control and lawn-care industries worked out long ago. The one-time job is only the start of a relationship you can keep for years. So the install wins the customer, and what comes after keeps them.
That is the single most important shift available to our trade, and most of the industry is still leaving it on the table.
But here is the subtlety many people get wrong, and it matters. The opportunity is not the service plan. It is not a care package you upsell. The opportunity is the ongoing relationship, and actually caring about the home and the family in it, for years. The plan is only the wrapper. The caring is the product. Sell the plan without the caring, and the client feels the difference within a month.
Two other things they understood are worth taking. That a trade of small, brilliant, independent professionals lacks the support a platform can give, so be the platform they do not want to leave. And that building the category, namely making people understand and want what we deliver and do, matters as much as building any single company. On all of it, they are right.
Where I think they are taking risks
Here is where I part ways, and it is not about the insight. It is about how it is being built. I see three risks.
One, the vehicle. Daisy is a Unicorn. A venture-funded land grab: raise big, buy fast, plant a flag in every city, race toward a billion-dollar valuation. That can work. It can also stall the moment the funding cools. And capital is fickle. Today the great magnet is AI, pulling money toward the newest, shiniest thing, and when the herd moves it can starve perfectly good businesses that only needed a little more patience. A model built on outside money is exposed to fashions it does not control. A machine that has to keep raising fuel to fly is only as safe as its next tank.
Two, the partner. This one is human, and the words matter. Daisy is the franchisor. The independent integrators who join are the franchisees. And in the agreements, Daisy, the franchisor, keeps the right to operate inside a partner's own territory. Over the years I have learned to read a contract less for its clauses than for what it quietly says about the relationship. A clause that lets the franchisor compete inside your own patch tells the partner, in plain language, what this is expected to feel like in three years. Charlie Munger had a rule for exactly this. Do not win the negotiation and lose the partner. In a trade built entirely on trust, how you treat the people who join you is not a footnote. It is the whole thing.
Three, and this is the hardest of all, the culture. A fast roll-up is very good at buying companies and very rarely good at building a culture of care. And care is not a department you bolt on later. It has to be in the DNA from day one, or the whole business case quietly falls over. To be fair to Daisy, from the outside it looks like Hagan sees this risk clearly and is working hard to build that culture from the inside, and she may well crack it. I hope she does. The companies that win for decades are the ones that did exactly this: Apple, the premium car makers, Thermomix, Dreame. You cannot acquire your way to it. You have to mean it.
The path we are carving in Europe
We have been building toward the same destination, and we have chosen a very different path to reach it.
Not a Unicorn. A Camel. Self-financed, profitable, patient, built to cross hard ground without a fresh tank of outside money every few miles. We are not racing to buy the trade. We are building the platform that makes the independent professional win, and want to stay, because they are genuinely better off with us than without us.
That means the things a fragmented, brilliant, under-supported trade actually needs, offered without ever taking their independence: the buying power of a group, shared training, a name that means something, and the shift every serious professional is ready for, from the transaction to the relationship, from sell-and-run to the lifetime of the home.
And there is a reason Europe cannot simply be handed the American playbook. Europe is not one market. It is twenty, each with its own language, law and handshake. A model that signs up a founder in an afternoon of US paperwork would need a different playbook at every border. So the European answer will not be a copy of Daisy. It will be a platform that makes local professionals stronger, not a chain that absorbs them. That is a fundamentally different build, and it is the one we believe is worth doing.
Here is a detail I find telling. Daisy and we run on much of the same technology, right down to the same remote-monitoring backbone that lets a professional watch over a home from anywhere and fix things before the owner even notices. The tools are not the difference. The difference is whether you use them to care, or to bill.
What I would love to think through, out loud
This is bigger than any one company, and I would genuinely love to double-click on it with others looking at the same dynamics.
In a fragmented trade, the winner is almost never the one with the best box. The box is a commodity, and commodities lose. The winner is the one who redesigns the business model. Who sees that the value moved from the product to the relationship, from the sale to the service, from the shop to the platform, and builds for where the value went, not where it used to be.
Daisy saw that, and bet a fortune on it. We see it too, and we are building for it the durable way, one partner at a time.
And I will be honest with you. If I had built this in America, with that kind of capital within reach, I might well have taken a road much like Daisy's. This is not a claim that our way is the only right way. It is the path we have chosen, and it is the one built to keep going when the ground turns hard. And in this trade, the ground always turns hard.
So here is the honest question, and I would like to hear the answers. If the future of our trade is the relationship and the platform, not the product and the transaction, who else is actually building it? And are they building it to last, or just to sell?
Let's make WOW the standard. Together.