I AM CEDIA - Tom Ryan, Director at Ryelec Automation & Energy

What was your journey into the smart home industry?

I started off as an electrician about ten years ago. During my apprenticeship, I worked on a large waterfront home project that required cabling for a C-Bus system. An integrator turned up and started programming the house from a laptop and I was blown away. I thought, ‘this beats crawling on the floors and going into insulated roofs to pull cables.’ This led me to learn about the smart home industry in my own time.

Once I completed my apprenticeship, I started doing some manufacturer training with companies such as Clipsal and Dynalite—this allowed me to learn the basics. At this point, I set up Ryelec and my first project was a commercial pub, which provided me with the foot in the door. Thankfully, it was a very slow job and provided me with the time to learn on the job. From here, I started working on lots of little homes and now, seven years later, I have grown Ryelec to a team of 12, focusing primarily on high-end smart homes, but still having an electrical arm to the business as well.

With the background that I have, I wouldn't say that this industry is for every electrician out there. I agree that it’s a great step with transferable skills, but you have to be genuinely interested in this path and be patient and willing to learn a lot, because it is like learning a whole new craft. I will say that my past experience is extremely handy. For example, if you are on site and there’s an electrical termination fault inside the control panel, I am able to fix it instead of having to call the electrician to work out the issue.

How has the smart home market evolved in Australia since you started?

The market has consistently grown since I began. We currently have around twenty jobs lined up—with more in the pipeline—and the demand continues to rise, especially in the high-end residential sector. While other electrical markets may be experiencing slowdowns, the premium home automation market remains robust here in Australia.

Could you share some insights on your involvement with CEDIA and the how you utilize some of the member benefits?

We've been CEDIA members for about four years. We initially joined as it simply seemed the right thing to do—why wouldn’t we be a member of our trade association—but we didn’t know about all the benefits that CEDIA provides. Four years later, and we are proud CEDIA members and utilize as many of the member benefits as possible.

The most valuable benefit to us has been the online education portal. We have used this for training our staff and transitioning our electricians to move into the integrator side of the business. It’s brilliant to have this massive pool of information right at our fingertips.

The CEDIA Smart Home Awards is another key program for us. As a niche market, I think having award recognition is invaluable. We have been lucky enough to win a few CEDIA Awards and believe that including this in our sales pitch has gone a long way with clients. It has enhanced our credibility and has also helped in marketing our services.

Thirdly, I think CEDIA allows us to be part of a community where we can interact with like-minded business owners. It is great to get attend local CEDIA events and network with this group of people.

Talking about the CEDIA Smart Home Awards, what do you think has led to your repeated success in the Excellence in Business category?

We have been awarded Excellence in Business twice now and are aiming for our third win this year. It’s such a brilliant award to win and we think that a key area that has contributed to us winning is our approach to marketing and client engagement.

We developed an interactive form on our website that helps clients specify their automation needs. It can be difficult to explain to a client what home automation is and to decipher what exactly they want for their property. With our interactive form, clients spend 15-20 minutes filling it out with all the key information we need, and this streamlines the quoting and sales process for us. I think that this innovation, along with our consistent focus on quality systems, likely contributes to our recognition.

You have a showroom in Sydney—tell us a bit more about this facility.

We designed and built our showroom three years ago. As well as including a front and back factory, where we pre-build all our builds and racks, we have a customer facing element upstairs where we have turned the whole mezzanine into a fully automated one-bedroom apartment.

This space is fully automated and allows potential clients to experience the integration in a real home-like setting. We are based 40 minutes south of Sydney, which is a great central location for us. It means that we get customers who are either looking to add technology to their primary homes within the city, or their holiday homes on the coast and inland within the countryside.

The showroom has significantly boosted our client confidence and facilitated smoother project closures. Before having this space, we used to send out quotes on email and now, this process has been transformed.

You are now a volunteer for the CEDIA Workforce Development Group. What interested you in this role?

I decided to volunteer with CEDIA primarily because I wanted to give back to the community. I saw a call for help from Paul Skelton, CEDIA’s Regional Development Independent Consultant for Australia and New Zealand, and being in a position to free up some of my time, I wanted to assist.

My background as an electrician made the workforce development group particularly appealing, as I believe that I can contribute meaningfully from this angle. Additionally, I recognize the importance of nurturing young talent in the smart home industry, which I feel would benefit businesses like my own by streamlining the process of training apprentices as integrators.

What advice would you give to integrators who aren’t CEDIA members?

If you're serious about integration as a career, joining CEDIA is a must. It offers ongoing education, recognition, and a community that can support your growth. As CEDIA gains more recognition outside of our industry, being certified will become a major differentiator in the industry—if an architect has to choose between two companies and one is a CEDIA member and the other isn’t, they will obviously lean towards the member company.

What current or future technology are you most excited for?

I'm particularly interested in Matter and its integration with KNX, which promises new possibilities for appliance connections. On the business side, I am interested in the use of no-code automation and AI. It has already transformed our automated handover document process, which is saving us significant time and resources, so I’m excited to see how else we can deploy this.