TruVision, Now Truvy, Doesn’t Just Survive; They Thrive!
Rebranding the Company in Less Than One Hour
Summary
TruVision Health has experienced a tremendous growth phase recently and several factors have contributed to it. Besides adding more than 100 SKUs to their product line and completely rebranding the company with a new name, they upgraded their direct selling platform to the most powerful one in the industry. It has empowered them to write their own story. See how they keep breaking their own records and why they’re enjoying unprecedented sales in recent months. From reading the stats, that trajectory seems to be set in stone.
Summary
TruVision Health has experienced a tremendous growth phase recently and several factors have contributed to it. Besides adding more than 100 SKUs to their product line and completely rebranding the company with a new name, they upgraded their direct selling platform to the most powerful one in the industry. It has empowered them to write their own story. See how they keep breaking their own records and why they’re enjoying unprecedented sales in recent months. From reading the stats, that trajectory seems to be set in stone.
History
TruVision Health began in 2014 with no more than three products in its quiver. After only six years, a name change and now hundreds of thousands of associates, they boast a product line of more than 100 offerings.
Problem
TruVision was working in an old and outdated environment and their vendor gave no signs of updating it. The vendor was focused solely on the backend without any thought to the frontend where their associates and customers spend all of their time. As a company trying to enroll more associates, it was critical to have a modern look and feel in their Web Office and Retail Shopping site. But the more time and money TruVision invested in the obsolete system, the more they realized their success was on the line.
Still striving for that success, they paid a considerable amount of money to get a custom retail cart for their associates. But when the promised solution arrived 10 months late, TruVision received that all-too-familiar story from the vendor: it wasn’t the vendor’s fault. It was then that TruVision knew it was time to cut that cord.
Solution
Luckily, a member of TruVision’s executive team knew Rodger Smith, DirectScale’s CEO, and so the discovery process began. TruVision was very impressed with what the DirectScale solution offered, but wanted to ensure it was getting the absolute best in the industry, so decided to look for a solution that could at least match DirectScale at its own game.
TruVision vetted several other platforms, but nothing matched the strength and stability of the DirectScale platform and none impressed them as DirectScale had. Their decision to grow with DirectScale was based on:
- the ability to customize the platform’s look, feel and functionality themselves without involving the vendor,
- being able to make edits, create promotions, and the like, internally, so they were in control of the system and their own destiny, instead of the vendor controlling it, and
- the granular capability to focus on a single person in a tree.
Impressed with the ability to augment the functionality of the platform to meet their exact needs, TruVision modified a couple of processes before launching. That development began immediately and the company officially launched on February 1, 2018, right in the middle of TruVision’s busiest season.
Action
According to TruVision, the initial Prep Phase went very smoothly. They extracted all their data from the old system before it was shut off. “A couple of times we were figuring things out as we went. One problem with our data didn’t seem big but turned out to be the biggest issue we had: The old system kept track of every associate’s corporate ID with a different ID for the BackOffice,” said David Raynes, executive director of technology. “DirectScale was mostly under the radar for those issues, but took extra care to help us stay on track and map our data correctly for the migration.”
“We laid out a plan and followed it as much as we could. When we came upon an issue, we took it to the right person at DirectScale and they resolved it. DirectScale was very well organized. We had a short delay because of the hundreds of thousands of associate accounts and data we had to migrate off of our antiquated system, but that was outside of DirectScale’s hands.”
Result
Against the advice from many in the industry, TruVision launched their new DirectScale platform in their busiest time of year, a chance Raynes was betting on. They were told to expect a downturn or wait for a calmer time of year, “but our first three months were our biggest in the history of the company to that date, and for the next couple of months, each month was better than the last,” said Raynes. “On Day 1, we were taking orders and submitting them to our fulfillment house without a glitch.”
Raynes said that first year followed their normal trends but by far had been the most successful year in the company’s history. “Our customizations took just a little longer than anticipated, but we came in under budget, and anyone owning a budget knows that’s most important.”
TruVision—and probably every direct selling company—bases its success on three critical things: having product to be purchased, fulfilling those orders and paying commissions on those orders. “Everything else is just details,” said Raynes. “DirectScale did not miss the mark on any of those. We’ve been able to do all of those on schedule. And we’ve paid all commissions on schedule since then, and we’ve even scaled the business considerably.”
Looking Forward
In May 2020, TruVision decided it was time to update their look and step away from their old branding. They wanted to refresh the company’s image—even down to changing its name to Truvy. Because DirectScale empowers each of its clients to modify, add and implement things in the platform without involving DirectScale, Inc., TruVision was able to create and roll out their new brand identity without the extra costs other platforms require of involving the vendor.
The new branding included all elements of the company that are customer and associate facing, including their custom Retail Cart, all product pages and the Web Office, what DirectScale calls their BackOffice. Raynes referred to the rollout as “new everything,” and that it was far smoother than he had expected it to be. “There was not a single hiccup on the DirectScale side.”
“Most everything we wanted to do to rebrand the company to the new name, colors, logo and layout, was done in only one hour,” said Raynes. “That’s unheard of! Yes, we did a lot of careful planning with several discussions, but we really did—we rebranded the entire company from TruVision to Truvy in a single hour on DirectScale—without involving them.”
Looking Back
“It was refreshing to work with DirectScale. We always had an escalation path for any type of issue we felt we had. And they’ve always been able to resolve the issue.”
Raynes attributes much of the company’s recent success to its ownership; instead of taking the path of furloughs, layoffs or pay cuts that many other businesses took during the COVID-19 downturn, they decided to double down on their employees and take the opposite approach: they focused on helping employees feel secure in their jobs allowing them to work from home, and also helped their associates make more money. Their unconventional approach clearly worked.
They launched a promotional Share Bonus campaign with a kit of flagship product samples they had previously retired. When an associate reached 1,000 points for new volume, they were added to the bonus pool. “The associates latched on to that promotion and because of that, we’ve had a couple of million-dollar days,” said Raynes. “It has really paid off to pay particular attention to our employees and our associates.”
With results like those, that’s a success story Truvy is certainly willing to experience again and again. And at the rate they’ve been going, it’ll be sooner than later.
About DirectScale, Inc.
Based in Lindon, Utah, DirectScale has been setting the standard for social and direct sales industry software platforms since 2013. DirectScale’s powerful SaaS platform boasts fully configurable management tools that are vital to not only running, but to efficiently tracking and growing a business.
With its focus on providing an intuitive and impactful customer experience to both corporate clients and independent sellers, DirectScale has revolutionized the way direct selling businesses can be launched and managed. Through the DirectScale Multisided Marketplace, customers are able to choose from multiple external service providers or opt to integrate with their own preferred providers to extend the power of the platform and even override core processes to exactly fit their own needs.
The platform is fully extensible using REST APIs and therefore, able to meet the custom needs of corporate users and independent sellers. DirectScale is committed to helping both organizations and their distributors plan for and drive growth. Its vast experience in the direct sales and software industries have proven time and again that the company truly understands how to help clients succeed. To learn more or request a demo, visit directscale.com.