The Power of Pilot Projects: How Turned Small Wins into Global Expansion
When bringing new technology to traditional industries, the path from pilot to enterprise-wide adoption often determines success. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brian Lozes revealed how his team turned initial pilot projects into global implementations across Fortune 100 companies.
Starting with the Right Problem
The journey began with a clear understanding of the market problem: “As a country, we spend trillions of dollars every year on capital projects, and there’s empirical data that’s showing upwards of 8% to 10% of that money is wasted every year just due to construction related rework,” Brian explains. This focus on quantifiable waste helped justify initial pilot investments.
The Pilot Project Formula
Their approach to pilots was methodical. “We’ve got now several Fortune 100 companies using our product across the globe,” Brian shares. “And what’s exciting is they all start there’s, typically a pilot project and pilot application. And the success of that pilot every time is resulting in multiplication what they use inside their organization.”
Proving Value Quickly
A recent pilot project demonstrates their approach to rapid value demonstration. Brian describes a scenario involving multiple stakeholders: “You had people at the facility, people in the headquarters, people with the vendor in other parts of the country, and then our folks all participating.”
The results were immediate: “They said that they not only fully recovered the value of that contract, they started bringing additional savings into their organization in one meeting,” Brian notes. This quick ROI became a powerful expansion catalyst.
Breaking Down Adoption Barriers
Understanding that technology adoption can be a barrier, they created multiple entry points. “What we had to do was to create a bridge. And that bridge is what we call our mouse and keyboard or PC mode,” Brian explains. This hybrid approach allowed organizations to start small with familiar tools while gradually adopting more advanced features.
Expanding Beyond Initial Use Cases
Their success in pilot projects led to unexpected opportunities. “We had a hunch that people also wanted to see the site as it existed,” Brian shares. This insight led them to become “the world’s first to actually incorporate the footage from drones and laser scanning gear,” expanding their platform’s utility beyond initial use cases.
Geographic Expansion
The success of their pilot strategy has driven global growth. As Brian describes, they now have customers “ranging from European areas to the Middle East to the Asia across North America.” Each successful pilot created a blueprint for expansion in new regions.
Looking Ahead
The company continues to build on their pilot success. “We’re investing deeply in our product to increase the scalability to enable that, the readiness to enable that, and then to widen the value proposition so that makes sense so everybody will use it,” Brian explains.
Their vision extends beyond current applications: “Three to five years from now, we want to be in every worker’s hands and attributable to a vast reduction in the amount of time people are spending in dangerous environments.”
For B2B founders looking to expand from pilot projects to enterprise-wide adoption, their journey offers valuable lessons:
- Focus on quantifiable problems that justify initial investment
- Create multiple adoption paths to reduce implementation friction
- Demonstrate rapid ROI through specific use cases
- Use successful pilots as blueprints for regional expansion
- Remain open to discovering new use cases through customer feedback
The key insight? Success in enterprise technology isn’t just about the technology itself – it’s about creating a repeatable path from initial pilot to organization-wide value.
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