LEVATAS CRANKS OUT DATA SCIENCE IN GARDENS
And Ryan Gay’s Levatas is thriving in areas of big data, artificial intelligence.
PALM BEACH GARDENS — Over the past decade, marketing agency Levatas has grown from a garage startup into a thriving firm with more than 100 employees.
Chief Executive Ryan Gay proudly shows off his company’s offices on the second floor of Downtown at the Gardens. The decor includes features that have become nearly mandatory for tech employers.
Superhero figurines adorn one wall. The lounge boasts a ping-pong table, an espresso maker and a fridge stocked with microbrews.
Beneath the fun vibe, Levatas is doing serious work in the fields of big data and artificial intelligence. IBM, Dell and Cisco are among the firm’s clients. So is Duffy’s, the Palm Beach County-based chain of sports bars.
Hometown: I was born in Santa Barbara, California, then I moved to Colorado when I was 7. I moved to Palm Beach County when I was 14. I wish I could say I was a Palm Beach County native. I feel like a native. I live in Palm Beach Gardens. I have a wonderful wife and three kids. They’re 8, 6 and 3.
First job: I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart. The first time I made money was when I sold my lunch in high school for profit. Then I started a computer company as a sophomore in high school. My first actual job was at an internet service provider doing customer support. I’ve always just loved entrepreneurship and technology. I went to business school at Florida Atlantic University, and my dad and I built a family construction business, building homes in Port St. Lucie.
About your company: Levatas started in the garage 10 years ago. Chris Nielsen is the founder. We started as a design agency, doing designs for brand work, websites, marketing collateral. We decided we didn’t just want to be a design agency. We wanted to help companies solve hard problems. Now, we’re a digital-transformation company. We use technology, data science and artificial intelligence to enhance customer experience for the brands we work with. Digital transformation is a fairly broad term, kind of buzz wordy. It really boils down to three main areas. One is understanding the consumer experience. How do customers interact with the brand? The second component would be the technology piece — the technology stack, CRM, e-commerce platforms, websites, mobile apps. The third, which is our favorite, is the data science and emerging technologies to help brands build a better customer experience. We use artificial intelligence, data science and data engineering, and we do a lot of machine learning and predictive analytics, all centered around helping brands build a more engaging customer experience.
There’s push back against companies using big data to predict behavior. How do you use big data and predictive analytics without being creepy? Brands obviously have to be responsible with how they use the data. What big data, and particularly predictive analytics, use are large quantities of anonymized data. So we’re looking for trends more than what a specific person is doing. Those trends are then leveraged to improve the consumer experience. When done correctly, it doesn’t infringe on people’s privacy, and it actually creates overall a better experience. Instead of getting an advertisement for something you don’t care about, you’re getting a highly personalized experience.
Best business advice you’ve ever received: Business is about people. We’re an agency, so we don’t have a widget. We don’t create an actual physical, tangible product. We have a great culture here. We do a staff survey, and we have 99 percent of our people who are happy working here, which is pretty unheard of. We have a culture founded on kindness and equality.
Best business book you’ve ever read: I like Peter Drucker. I know he’s old school, but I like timeless business principles. I also enjoy reading Seth Godin. We’re very action-oriented, and David Allen’s Getting Things Done has been very helpful for the team. Your question was which is the best book, so Jim Collins’ Good to Great is probably the one that has helped the leadership team the most.
Biggest mistake you’ve made in business: Early on in a business model, it’s hard to know what to say no to. It’s probably been the best and the worst thing we’ve done: We’ve always said yes to new work. While that’s really helped us to challenge ourselves, to build new capabilities, to step into the unknown, the resulting challenge sometimes is chaos.
We’ve made a couple mistakes in that arena, but somehow we’ve always come out on top. That’s evidenced by the fact that we have long-term clients, including HSBC, IBM, Dell, Cisco, PGA of America, Duffy’s, The Breakers. All of these brands we’ve had anywhere from two to nine years.
Biggest challenge: Customer behavior is changing. Technology is changing. We’ve had to stay well ahead of brands’ understanding of engaging customer experience. I try to put myself in the shoes of a CEO of a consumer brand, and it’s just impossible to keep up. There are new technologies coming out every day. In 2011, if you were a chief marketing officer, there were 130 different marketing tools. In 2016,
there were 3,500. There are whole new categories of technologies that brands have to understand. Our big challenge is hiring the right people, and particularly because we’re growing so fast, hiring enough of the right people. We probably get 25 percent of our people from out of state, but we continue to hire the majority of our people from right here in Palm Beach County. We’re continually impressed with the people we find here.
Most important trait you look for when hiring: We have 12 values. The first of those is kindness. There’s table-stakes stuff like they have to be good at their job, and have a skill that brings value, and have a good reputation. But we’ve built truly a culture of kindness. That results in close relationships with co-workers, where you actually work with your friends, and it results in great relationships with clients.
How do you measure kindness? Reputation and references have a lot to do with that. If you truly are a kind person, your references will reinforce that. And we spend a lot of time with our candidates. It’s not just a phone screening and a job offer. We have multiple levels of interviews with multiple people. Or we’ll give them test projects to see how they handle stresses and how they work with other people.
What you see ahead for Palm Beach County: We love Palm Beach, and we’re here for the long haul. We’re recruiting from the cold Northeast, and from California, where it’s rather expensive.
We see Palm Beach as a destination, where we can have happy clients and be happy ourselves. That’s our ethos, and the lifestyle here is a big part of that.
Palm Beach County is still kind of early in the tech maturing process, but we’re part of groups like Palm Beach Tech. There’s not a lot of venture capital here yet, but we’re hard at work.