Tod Puetz, Insane Impact

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

If you go to big outdoor sports events, concerts in parks or even political rallies, there's a reasonable chance that what's happening is going to be relayed on a portable LED display that was wheeled into place by   trailer.

My local footy team uses one and it is old and looks terrible. But that's not the norm, and certainly not for a Des Moines, Iowa company that is very specifically in the business of making and selling great-looking and bulletproof on-the-go LED trailers.

Insane Impact has been at it for eight years and now has almost 500 units operating, mostly but not only in the United States. The flagship product is 17 feet wide by 10 feet tall, using 4mm LED and pushing as much as 7,500 nits. It's been designed to roll into place and be up and running in 10 minutes or less - even if a doofus like me was told to get it lit up.

I had a really good chat with Tod Puetz, who started the company after first being a user, when he was in the golf equipment business. In this podcast, we get into a lot of things - including how he had the foresight to get ahead of the tariffs turmoil and pre-ordered enough electronics and hardware to hopefully ride out these uncertain months.

We also talk about use-cases and probably the most curious application to date - drive-in funerals when COVID was raging.

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TRANSCRIPT

Tod, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Insane Impact does, where you're based, those kinds of nuts and bolts questions? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, appreciate it Dave. Insane Impact, primarily focused on LED as a business, but we are an audio video integration company based out of Des Moines, Iowa. 

Des Moines. So you're in flyover country?

Tod Puetz: Absolutely. 

It's actually very handy there because you're like two hours away from the East Coast and two hours away from the West coast, right? 

Tod Puetz: It really is. Just in proximity here in the central part of the US, where our corporate office and warehouse location is about 65 seconds from the airport Des Moines International, so very easy to get in. All the major interstate throwaways between I-29 North and South and I-35 North and South, and then I-80 West. We're pretty much within minutes of getting anywhere we need to go east, west, north, or south. 

Nice. How long has the company been around? 

Tod Puetz: We started up in 2015, flipped the switch basically late December, 2015 and have been going rock and roll. So we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary here in December. 

You are a founder? 

Tod Puetz: I am, yeah. Founder and CEO. 

So what compelled you to do this? What did you see in the marketplace that said, okay, this is what I should do? 

Tod Puetz: Yeah, really the CliffNotes version, my former life was in the golf business. I was a manufacturer sales rep for TaylorMade Golf, and I was introduced to a gentleman here locally in Des Moines that had an older video truck and basically saw an opportunity to utilize that as a sales tool to help me sell more golf clubs. 

So we took this video truck out on the driving range here locally in Des Moines, hooked it up to the launch monitor and, gosh, that was almost 18 years ago. Back then it was a big deal. Not a lot of people in your run of the mill average daily golfer really ever had an op opportunity to do that. They'd seen it on tour. But we brought the bigs out to the little team here in some of these country clubs, and again, larger than life. They were able to see their stats up on the screen and really fell in love with the technology back