Matthew Nemeth is the Managing Director at E+E Elektronik’s US subsidiary, where he oversees the introduction and expansion of the company’s high-quality environmental sensors in the American market. Since January 2021, he has led the US team to greater market penetration by highlighting the brand’s European manufacturing, accuracy, and product reliability. Matthew is adept at recognizing niche market opportunities and strategically positioning E+E Elektronik’s sensors to industries requiring robust and precise environmental measurements. With over 20 years of experience in factory automation, Matthew brings a wealth of industry knowledge and a track record of growth through enhanced awareness and application-based selling.
Entering the US market is challenging for any international company, especially in the competitive tech industry. What strategies can help ensure success and establish a strong brand presence in such a vast and diverse market?
According to Matthew Nemeth, a seasoned expert in market expansion and automation technology, the key lies in building brand awareness and providing reliable, high-quality products. He highlights that many European companies may be well-known at home but are often unknown entities in the US. Matthew emphasizes the importance of a strategic, targeted approach to marketing, leveraging unique selling points like in-house manufacturing and superior customer service to differentiate from competitors. This method not only helps in gaining initial traction but also in sustaining long-term growth and customer loyalty.
In this episode of America Open for Business, host Cameron Heffernan speaks with Matthew Nemeth, Managing Director at E+E Elektronik, to discuss their strategic market entry into the US. They explore the challenges of building brand awareness from the ground up, the critical role of high-quality environmental sensors in automation, and the competitive landscape of the US market.
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Narrator: 0:03
Welcome to America Open for Business, where we talk with high-growth entrepreneurs and leaders who have found success in one of the world’s most important markets.
Cameron: 0:15
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of America Open for Business. I’m Cameron Heffernan with your B2B Marketing, and I’m excited to kick off another episode of the show. We are the sponsors of the program your B2B Marketing and I’m excited to kick off another episode of the show. We are the sponsors of the program your B2B Marketing. We’re a truly global marketing agency and we help mid-market B2B companies overcome some of the typical challenges they face as they enter new markets or expand across borders, and we do handle end-to-end marketing, from execution to the strategy piece. That allows our clients to have the freedom to focus on growth and new customer acquisition. You can learn more about us at yourb2bmarketingco.
Cameron: 0:54
Some of the past guests that we’ve had on the show that I’ve been very proud to have on and join us, include Brian Smith, the founder of UGG, the Australian brand of sheepskin boots and slippers, multi-billion dollar brand. Ben Tija, who is the CEO and founder of Earthly Wellness, a $21 million plus e-commerce brand that’s trying to change healthcare. And then recently, jean-arthur Regibeau, the ambassador from Belgium to the USA, and I’m very happy and proud to have on the show today our first client join us, which is Matthew Nemeth, who is the Managing Director at E plus E Electronic based here. Well, home office is in Austria, but Matthew and his team are based here in the United States. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matthew: 1:40
Thanks.
Cameron: 1:40
Cameron, really good to be here with you, great, fantastic. So rather than me trying to describe E plus C and your products and what you do, I’m going to do a short screen share and let you do a little bit of MC, as this is up on screen, to talk about your products, the markets that they’re in. I’m showing on screen some tags, some icons describing different production environments. Maybe you can walk us through some of these, just at a high level, on your sensors and what they’re used for.
Matthew: 2:11
Sure, yeah, we primarily focus on environmental sensors. At E-Plus E-Electronic, we’ve been around since the late 1970s, really been manufacturing sensors since about 1990. Manufacturing sensors since about 1990. We’ve been in the US market as a subsidiary since about 2010, 2011. I’ve been at the company since January 2021. And what we focus on is really providing the most accurate, robust and reliable type of environmental sensors that you’re going to find, so we can stretch across a broad range of markets. So there’s some HVAC that we do, but mainly our focus is on more of the higher end, robust, industrial grade type humidity detection, air velocity and even CO2. So, like you can see here, with air velocity, co2, dew point flow, humidity, moisture and oil pressure temperature, it seems like a lot, but the reality is that there are only three elements that we actually manufacture that get used in all of those. So we manufacture our own NDIR type CO2 sensor, which is simply an infrared bulb going through a very small tube. I actually have an example right here as well.
Matthew: 3:23
We manufacture this device in-house that goes into other types of components and we monitor the actual CO2 levels and we do various types of compensation temperature, pressure stuff like that. We do this from the ground up in-house to make sure that we have a reliable manufacturing process and that the product itself is good enough for us to put our name on and put it out into the market. Similarly it’s a small example. This is another example of a larger type of high-end or really robust humidity and temperature sensor. These get used actually in dry kilns.
Matthew: 4:00
So next time you’re at Home Depot and you see all the lumber that’s there that was a tree not too long ago that was cut into certain boards and it has to be dried and because wood has so much moisture in it, they go into these large kilns you know, bigger than a house, and they sit there for about 24 hours and they just blast them with heat.
Matthew: 4:20
So if you ever drive by one of these, you see a bunch of steam coming out of the top. These sensors that we have monitor what the actual temperature is inside that and that’s a difficult thing to do when you have a room filled with steam to know exactly what the temperature truly is this sensor survives, that it survives a higher heat Potential, vocs that might get on top of it might coat it. And again, that’s the elements in the system that we build in-house. Same thing with the air velocity sensors, which uses really just a temperature element that we also make in-house too. So all those three types of sensors, we’re able to make really nine categories of products that go out to the marketplace.
Cameron: 5:01
Well, so at the high level, when you’re thinking of the history of the company, now your role in it in the US market, what, at its core, does E plus E electronic do to help companies? What’s your core function?
Matthew: 5:15
Yeah, on the surface it looks like we manufacture sensors right and realistically. A lot of companies can possibly do that. The thing that we do that makes us different is, I would say, two things. Number one we make everything from scratch in-house, which ensures a very high quality control process, and what that amounts to in the end is not only just a reliable sensor, but, I would say, one that tells the truth.
Matthew: 5:43
If you need a sensor in place, there’s a reason. One of those reasons might be you need to chart and record the exact temperature and humidity in your process without having to rely on someone walking around and taking those measurements and writing it down. Not only is that labor intensive, but what happens if someone writes down the wrong value? How would you know that? You’d have to go back and look through. So, in a way, we’re providing the truth out of our sensor because we know it’s accurate. We provide that with our calibration data. Every sensor that comes out of our factory is calibrated, so what people are actually hooking up into their system is a known device that’s giving them an accurate, reliable, repeatable value.
Cameron: 6:28
And also reducing the need for human intervention, right, correct? Which is just getting harder and harder these days, you guys there in Western Europe or here in the US, even China? The demographics of most parts of the world are not favorable for long-term, so your solution is replacing a lot of need for human intervention. How does that translate to ROI for companies in some of these production environments?
Matthew: 6:54
Depends how they would do the calculation. And I’ve had to do that in a lot of cases for companies as well, because there’s kind of some of those things you don’t think about or that companies don’t think about, where, hey, I’ll just have.
Matthew: 7:05
They may say, I’ll just have someone kind of go around write down the values, kind of take a meter a handheld meter throughout it and what I really do is I sit down and I start to talk about well, what is the overall cost of that, and is that the proper usage of that person that you hired in?
Matthew: 7:19
My wife is fond of saying aces in places, so you brought someone into your organization for a reason, and I don’t think it’s to have them go around and write on a piece of paper what the humidity and temperature levels are, and maybe that is your business, I don’t know, but in my case I don’t think it is. I think it’s a misuse of one of our most valuable resources, which is good personnel. So that labor cost alone, I’ve done calculations in the past. If you just kind of take the average wage on what, especially on a higher end industry or one that needs to monitor that data, you’re probably paying them $15 to $20 an hour plus overhead. Whatever their insurance costs might be. It’s probably costing you a lot of money to collect that data. So the ROI I’ve seen as quickly as six months and most cases less than a year.
Cameron: 8:12
Wow. So there may be an upfront investment but you’re recouping that relatively quickly, bringing over the life and time of that machine that’s in operation.
Matthew: 8:23
That’s right, and that’s just for what you may be able to put on paper very easily. On the back end, like I had mentioned earlier, what if they make a mistake and they write down the wrong value? Does that hinder your operations? Does that cost you money then too? So there’s also prevention of some of those longer term issues that might come up because of that.
Cameron: 8:43
And I remember for one of the pieces that my team that we worked on with you was a whole paper dedicated to calculating that ROI and looking at in that example I believe it was a cannabis grow room very much manual work, recording, tracking, introducing error that you can recoup that cost relatively quickly in that environment.
Matthew: 9:05
That’s correct, yeah, and that was a great paper that your team worked on as well, and the way that we were able to kind of break that down was just through some general publicly available labor data, number one. But also having been out to many of these facilities, understanding some of the issues that they run into, and also one of them being yield right. So if we think quality of product or quality of the plant growth, if any of these rooms are growing 100 or 200 pounds and the spot price on the market on cannabis is sometimes $2,000 a pound, depending on what state you’re in a one or a 2% improvement because you’re controlling you’re now better controlling the actual environment. That’s a lot of money that they can actually be earning on top of that. So these sensors it becomes almost a must-have in that sense to ensure that you’re creating the proper environment for cannabis to grow properly.
Cameron: 10:02
So less of a competitive advantage and a good thing to have but necessary for survival, and that’s a very low tight margin. Industry isn’t it.
Matthew: 10:11
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And especially if you have one bad yield you’re talking potentially $50,000 in losses and trying to make that up within the the year becomes very difficult because you can’t um, uh, you can’t, uh, you can’t start over necessarily, right? You can’t just make more widgets, um, now you have a problem. Where can you even grow um as as well as you used to? How do you get past a lot of those other issues? So? So we do our best to help get past that and to make sure that the environment itself, the CO2 levels, temperature and humidity within the rooms are ideal for what they need to grow the most amount of cannabis.
Cameron: 10:55
Right, and your products, your sensors, they’re an investment. They’re also to some extent a knowable fixed cost. I know that California know that California is raising minimum wage again soon. That’s going to be $20 an hour. You know there’ll be businesses that just cannot afford that and a lot of them are turning to more automation and machine intervention just to stay afloat.
Matthew: 11:15
That’s right, and I think when we say the term automation, I think a lot of people think robots and stuff like that, which it definitely is part of it, but something has to feed information into those robotics or to any type of a system that is making changes on its own right, automatically, automated, and our sensors are providing that information to make those informed choices or to help the system make those informed choices.
Cameron: 11:45
Wow, so you’ve been in your role. Now what three years with E-Plus C running the US operation Correct, okay, can you share some? Our listeners are from all over the world and often they’re looking at the US market for entry or doing what you’ve done, working in a US subsidiary of a EU-based or Latin America or Asia-based business. What are some best practices you’ve experienced in the last handful of years of working with a business that’s headquartered in Europe but you’re here running the operation in the US?
Matthew: 12:19
I would say, and especially someone who’s grown up in the US we have by far the most robust and interesting economy, I would say, in the world, and if you think about what we’re doing just from a commercial space standpoint, we actually have products that go and aid in the manufacturing of a lot of that technology. So we do a lot with that. Cannabis, for a long time, was kind of the single place to get it, if I remember correctly, was Amsterdam, and they were doing maybe half a billion dollars a year. Then it came online in the US and we went from nothing to about $30 billion a year in a very short period of time.
Matthew: 13:04
Lumber is an area that we’re very familiar with and that has undertaken a lot of structural changes in terms of the automation side of it. So the thing the US again is very broad, very deep in terms of its economic mobility and being a powerhouse, and so what that creates is a lot of competition out there as well. So companies that are trying to make their way in here need to understand that, yes, your product might be well-received in Europe, it might be well-known, but if you’re coming into the US market, you’re probably an unknown brand and you’re going to have to start from the ground up, to prove what you have and to gain the attention of who you want as clients, and start in that manner.
Cameron: 13:53
Yeah, and just knowing from me and my team working with you and some of the approach and strategy, rather than just jumping right out of the gate casting a super wide net. You’ve deliberately been strategic and been targeted and focused on one or two, whether it’s industries or, in other cases, not necessarily free plus C geographies. Why is that a better approach for you?
Matthew: 14:17
Our biggest issue when I started, and still kind of continuing, is simply awareness. People are unaware of who we are or what we do. I’m sure many of your listeners this will be the first time they’re hearing about us, and that’s really the biggest challenge that I’m attempting to overcome, because once people understand who it is that we are, what it is that we actually manufacture and, at the same time, the superior level of service that we provide, it becomes a game changer for them and they almost can’t get our products fast enough in that sense, Wow.
Cameron: 14:55
Okay, Tell us a little bit more about how you fit into the competitive marketplace. E-plus City now has a presence in the US physical on the ground but it wasn’t always that way. And what was the competitive landscape like when you took over?
Matthew: 15:12
When I took over, I would actually say it was still largely unknown. We had been working a lot with the HVAC market, which is highly competitive. Unknown, we had been working a lot with the HVAC market, which is highly competitive, and what that does is ultimately drive down the price of products, and that’s fine. I mean it’s a good market to kind of have as a foundation. But ultimately you’re not going to be able to grow much from that.
Matthew: 15:35
And my focus, my desire, when I came in was to grow a healthy business. And so, in order to grow a healthy business and so in order to do that, we had to take on challenges that either we didn’t want in the past or that other people are not willing to do. And we have found that Analyzing data. I did that for a while, but ultimately, working with your team and pushing out Google Ads and kind of a wider array, we were able to listen to who was calling us, the stories they were telling, and ultimately decide, hey, we have what could potentially be a niche market for us and so long as we service those customers well, they’re going to keep coming back, and that’s what we found. But again, it’s still an ongoing process where we use Google Ads to drive interest, to drive those phone calls. We pick up the phone and the competitors do not.
Matthew: 16:32
And we also have products that are going to work for their applications. They’re not going to break after so many months in a really difficult environment, and so we’re just doing that over and over and just continuing to refine it.
Cameron: 16:46
Yeah, and is that something that’s unique? I mean, these days it seems like almost everything is here’s a page, fill in a form, hit submit when we’ll get back to you. Yeah, and I think your approach is quite stands out and is unique in this kind of environment we’re in.
Matthew: 17:02
It should not be unique, right? I mean, I think anyone listening to this probably likes making money, probably likes growing their business, and anytime you call up for customer service somewhere and it’s oh, I’ve been speaking to a robot. How long does it take for you to figure that out? We pick up the phone, we actually answer the phone, we answer emails. We have a chat system as well.
Matthew: 17:26
You talk to us directly, we are responsive, and we also care about the reasons why people are calling. So I think, on top of just being responsive, it’s also we want to understand what the application is, so that we don’t just throw out a product and say, hey, maybe this will work for you. We have a very high degree of confidence that it’s going to work, so you don’t have to come back to us to say why is this not working right? We’ve all made that mistake in the past. We learned from it, and what we’ve been able to do is then ask more detailed questions to ensure that what we provide, what we offer, what we sell, is going to be the right solution for our customers.
Cameron: 18:07
Have you found an approach that resonates better with your audience, like a focus on, say, to the business owners and the people responsible for P&L, that kind of emphasis, or to the technicians and the engineers on, let’s say, the speeds and feeds of your products?
Matthew: 18:23
We’ve seen both depending on the application and the size of the company. A lot of times we are working with the person in charge of the P&L, or really the owner of the company, I would say, if it’s Google ad related this is an issue that people are searching to solve, an issue that they already have.
Matthew: 18:44
They find our product, they call us and typically it is more of the maintenance technician, the engineer, the people that are going to be doing the actual installation, the technical specification, and they want to make sure that what they are selecting, or what they’re looking at, is the right solution that will integrate with their existing system.
Cameron: 19:07
Wow, Okay, You’ve mentioned a couple of times, you know Austria-based company R&D manufacturing full vertical integration there. Is that something that’s different? When you look at your competitors, Is there more production happening in Asia, for instance?
Matthew: 19:22
I think in some cases that certainly happens, where they are basically just popping in a sensor that’s made from someone else somewhere else and those we really don’t compete against because they simply can’t withstand the environments that we’re in. The only true competitor I would say that we have, from a form, fit, function, standpoint, so that robustness, even being able to fit into this type of a profile, have a display. There’s really only one other company, and they do their own manufacturing as well, but they target different markets than what we do. They do their own manufacturing as well, but they target different markets than what we do. So we’re here to serve the other markets that are one of the thousands of markets that exist within the robust US economy.
Cameron: 20:10
Which is I think that’s an interesting element to look at from a European perspective. It’s a more our market’s more homogenized, but it’s also just broader and deeper and there are whole industry segments and you’ve mentioned several of them that have more opportunities here just because of the size and the scale, and you can have a very viable, thriving business really targeting specifically in the needs of those kind of industries or subsectors. Correct, Yep, that’s correct. When you look at the differences between the US market and, say, the European Union as a market, what are some things from a marketing or communications perspective that stand out to you as different?
Matthew: 20:58
That’s a very good question and that’s also a good kind of maybe cautionary statement for anyone that is trying to go from the European market into the US. Our marketing laws are vastly different. In Europe, I would say that they have to. My experience has been that they have to tread a lot lighter in terms of what they do. Good example would probably be the opt-in feature for email marketing. You actually in Europe have to get the customer to say, yes, I am opting in for your communications. In the US we don’t have to. It can automatically do that for you. It can give you the option to opt in or not, but ultimately here you’re allowed to just do it automatically and we don’t do an automatic opt-in or anything like that. But it shows some of the key differences between it or between the two regions. So here we’re actually allowed to do a lot more with our marketing than what they can in Europe which means that whatever strategy is being deployed in Europe or globally may not be enough for the US market.
Matthew: 22:09
You may have to actually spend more or spend in different ways to gain attention, to get those repeated views, to ensure that your product is coming out on top of search results or ad buys or anything like that.
Cameron: 22:25
Yeah. So the challenge still remains of we don’t have GDPR here. We’re not limited by that, and that’s something I’ll often say to European companies or heads of marketing I speak with but you still have to be interesting. Maybe here you make the argument that the noise is even greater. So GDPR came later, but it’s a symptom of people getting fed up with just being spammed with crap and too much stuff that has no value. So it’s symptomatic of that. We may be heading toward that in a decade or so, california has that. Canada implemented that a few years back. And you still have to be interesting, you still have to be engaging, you still have to be trustworthy.
Matthew: 23:05
Correct Yep, yep. So yeah, and until that happens, if we ever get to that point, we’ll make sure we continue to be interesting.
Cameron: 23:11
Yeah, I read a quote last night I think it was on LinkedIn from Alex Hermosi, and I will get the specific. It’s not exactly right, but he said something like I just sold a $46 million business recently. Here are the eight takeaways, and I love when people distill that down. It was like a 10-year experience, a $46 million sale. Here’s the eight key things that I learned, but one of them was your brand is your value Above all else. You have to have that. You also have to build it, and you don’t build a brand in two weeks. That’s what Brian Smith talked about when I interviewed him on the show is his book is called the Birth of a Brand the analogy between a brand and a child and his book went through chapter by chapter. The company is three years old, it’s like having a toddler at the house and the phases that you go through you can’t just push the create brand button overnight.
Matthew: 24:03
Yeah, I think that’s a really good analogy and essentially that’s one of the assessments I had to do when I came on board here is determine where we are in that phase, what is our brand known for? And again, it was just largely unknown. We’ve improved our awareness, but every day I wake up and come into work my assumption is that people still don’t know who we are. So we have to fight for that mind share, essentially to make sure that people understand that E plus E is here and we provide truth in measurements.
Cameron: 24:39
Yeah, and I think, just like within a production environment, the desire is to get repeatable results, almost to shift it to a math equation. Right, the goal is to beat the predictability of inputs and outputs. Well, good marketing, that’s also what we’re aiming for, so that X dollars or euros spent, we know the yield with, you know, predictability that we can optimize, hopefully to see what is this going to bring us at the end of the campaign or the outreach, or the strategy. Correct, yep, and it’s something to shoot for, but it’s harder.
Matthew: 25:14
It is harder I would say the majority of my time because we have an excellent team that is running the operations or doing the day-to-day part of the operations, excellent team handling that. So most of my focus now is on the marketing side of it. How do we gain that edge? How do we find customers that don’t know about us still in the markets that we know we operate well in?
Cameron: 25:40
Right and introducing, maybe for the first time, and the selling point of European union-made products high quality R&D, consistency and reliability is a good card to be able to play Correct. Before I ask you one last question, I’m going to reintroduce listeners to our guest today, Matthew Nemeth, who is the Managing Director of E plus E Electronic, based in Austria. Matt runs the team here in the US and thanks for coming on to the show your crystal ball and think about May of 2034 and think about what does the sensor environment the automation environment for production.
Matthew: 26:32
look like at that timeframe. That’s a really good question. I’ve been in factory automation for 20 years now. You know I started off selling, you know photoelectric sensors to automotive manufacturers that still weren’t certain if that’s what they actually needed. And then, you know, 10 years after I had started it was, you know, the response became oh, of course we need these. It’s a question of how many. And then you know, now we’re 10 years beyond that and we’re seeing adoption of sensor technology in industries that before didn’t really think that they needed it. So 10 years from now, it’ll be again more sensors monitoring more conditions that people at this time don’t think are vital and providing good data into centralized systems that will analyze it on the fly and make adjustments with limited human intervention. I believe that’s, in 10 years, what it will be, which means that there’s going to be more of our products out in the marketplace.
Cameron: 27:40
Wow, well, that’s fantastic. It sounds like a good future to work toward.
Matthew: 27:45
We’re here for it.
Cameron: 27:46
Matthew Nemeth from E plus E Electronic. Thank you so much for joining us on America Open for Business.
Matthew: 27:52
Thanks, cameron, really good to be here.
Cameron: 27:53
Take care Thanks.
Narrator: 28:00
Thanks for listening to the America Open for Business podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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