Tag Archive for: ControlBright

ControlBright Names Barbara Stinnett President

After raising $500,000 in capital in recent months, ControlBright is set for growth and has chosen veteran technology executive and private equity trailblazer Barbara Stinnett to lead the charge. Stinnett’s role as President began on 3/15/2022.

Barbara Stinnett is a highly respected industry executive who brings a wealth of global leadership experience in high-tech organizations. Stinnett served and led operationally in the C Suite at Hewlett Packard, Sybase/SAP, Oracle, & Cisco where she was directly responsible for global sales, services, and support groups. She was also the first female CEO for one of the largest global Private Equity firms. In 2008, she founded Timmaron Group, based on her passion to work with companies to address their strategic desires by applying technologies to be the best they can be.

“Barb brings unparalleled leadership skills and a deep skill set in technology,” says ControlBright Founder Chad Behling. “We are excited to have her join our team. With her industry acumen, financial expertise, and extensive connections, we have no doubt that Barbara will position ControlBright for considerable growth.”

Stinnett holds degrees in International Business and Management Information Technologies, Applied Technologies, and International Studies from the University of Wisconsin. She is a National Association of Corporate Directors certified fellow and seasoned board member serving on over 15 public, private, and non-profit boards.

Over the next year and beyond, Stinnett and ControlBright will work to build out their team to scale up production and sales. With Stinnett in place, Behling will be able to shift his focus to spending time on the company vision and areas of the business he is best at.

ControlBright

Traction Capital has invested $500,000 in a Duluth, MN company that is innovating within the industrial lighting and controls industry. The Minneapolis venture capital firm is excited to take the lead on ControlBright‘s first round of funding.

 

ControlBright is a hardware/software solution that enables remote access to a building’s lighting, HVAC, alarm, and automation systems. The company utilizes a Football (4G LTE device) that exists onsite and connects back through the cloud via ControlBright’s proprietary platform. This allows technicians to perform many of their service and maintenance duties from their home or office.

 

“Our main customers are large OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) because our remote access solution saves them significant amounts of time and money,” says Chad Behling, founder of ControlBright. “But the real beneficiary is the technician who no longer has to travel long distances – sometimes across multiple states – for on-site service or maintenance checks that are often on minor or routine issues.”

 

The OEMs ControlBright sells to supply lighting and other industrial controls solutions to many of the largest retail stores, hospitals, office buildings, warehouses, factories, and multi-residential buildings around the world. The OEMs provide the technical support to most of the systems they sell, so remote access solutions like ControlBright deliver significant value to their service departments.

 

Many other remote access solutions do exist in the market. However, ControlBright offers one additional feature that sets it above the rest. ControlBright’s key differentiator is their ability to connect to multiple remote systems without configuring unique IP addresses for each system.  This is a powerful feature that makes deployment and management of systems in the field a breeze.  Large deployments no longer need extensive ongoing planning and IP address management.

 

Over the next year and beyond, Chad and ControlBright will work to build out their team in order to scale up production and sales. Traction Capital will support ControlBright through this process and believes the key to the business’s success will be to bring in the right people for the right positions and get Chad spending more of his time on the vision and areas of the business he is best at.

 

“What Chad and ControlBright have accomplished already with a small team is certainly impressive,” says Peyton Green, Sr. Associate at Traction Capital. “We are excited to see how much faster they can go with this investment and a couple of key hires.”

About ControlBright

ControlBright is a Duluth, MN based company selling hardware and software that creates remote access solutions for industrial lighting, HVAC, alarm, and automation suppliers. ControlBright’s solution allows for these suppliers to reduce costs and increase efficiency by enabling their technicians to manage, diagnose, and solve more issues remotely.

For more information, please visit: https://controlbright.com/

 

About Traction Capital

Traction Capital is a Minneapolis venture capital and private equity hybrid fund on a mission to help entrepreneurs get what they want for the greater good. The principals at Traction Capital achieve this goal by making investments in and acquisitions of companies in the “capital gap” – a place where funding is often vital, but less available. Traction Capital uses its entrepreneurial approach and investor base to better connect with its portfolio founders as they work together towards a common goal.