In 1998, I worked at The Buttes Resort in Arizona.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a beautiful property. It’s owned by a hotel chain now, but when it was built, it was one of four boutique hotels in AZ known for using the natural landscape as part of the architecture. It is nestled into the rocks off of the I-10 freeway near Tempe.

I waited tables in the main restaurant, The Market Cafe, and I worked breakfast and lunch there often. The Buttes hosted a group of engineers from Volkswagen, who stayed at the hotel while they were doing desert testing on some of their vehicles. Every morning they would come into the restaurant at 5:30 a.m., with the Gutschein für Frühstück (breakfast voucher).

The vouchers were navy and white and were always placed on the table upon arrival, so our German guests were fairly easy to spot.

As a fun fact, I took German in high school, as well as my first two years of college, so I used these mornings as an opportunity to practice a little German.

Fast-forward to 2014

Years later, I found myself doing the same thing again… just in a different language.

In AV, CTS became my new “Guten Morgen.”

First the CTS. Then CTS-D. Then CTS-I. Every certification expanded my vocabulary.

Suddenly I could sit in different rooms. Have deeper conversations. Understand the constraints engineers were navigating instead of just selling into them.

As the technology became more complex, from mounting systems to imaging, signal flow, projection, and video processing, those certifications created trust faster.

I’ve renewed those certifications three times now, not because my role requires it, but because I’ve learned something important:

Fluency keeps doors open.

 

I laid down a dual certification challenge here on rAVe in 2014, and if you’re looking at the dates above, you’ll see it took me a while to get it down, but I said I would, so I did:) But why?

It was a passport to new conversations.

CTS-D and CTS-I gave me fluency, and as an AV salesperson looking to get more engineers to specify more of our products, it gave me an extra level of credibility that opened more doors for me. As I moved from Chief, to Da-Lite, to Vaddio, the products got more technical, and I needed that credibility in signal flow and imaging. When I moved to Barco, and the world of high-end projection and video processing, those certifications were increasingly important for earning the trust of customers and integrators.

I was granted back door access to almost all of my dealers offices and I was given VIP access to end-user sites as well to share my thoughts on how to tackle difficult installations.