Bruce Smith

by Twister Marquiss

Bruce Smith has an eye for creating opportunities. From his early entrepreneurial moves at Texas State University to his phenomenal career as founder, president, and CEO of Safety Vision LLC, Smith has shown a remarkable ability to see a path forward and set things into motion.

Now he’s creating opportunities for McCoy College of Business students to see the world.

In 2023, Bruce and Kelly Smith made gifts to Texas State totaling $1 million, with $750,000 going to the McCoy College of Business Foundation to establish the Bruce and Kelly Smith Global Scholars Endowment, supporting scholarships and grants for students participating in an internship abroad or education abroad program. The gift also established the Bruce and Kelly Smith Scholarship Endowment in Professional Sales, which supports students enrolled in a degree program with a sales concentration.

Bruce Smith’s generosity toward his alma mater is one of many grand moments in a story arc that is both inspirational and extraordinary. A 1987 graduate of what was then Southwest Texas State University, he earned a BBA in finance.

His vision for opportunity has always made him a man in motion — and setting things in motion.

“I was born in Santa Monica, California,” Smith says. “Back then it was kind of like Texas is today. It was very entrepreneurial. It was beautiful. It was fun. We’d ride dirt bikes. My dad worked for Honda and we would cruise them up in the National Forest. It was just awesome. And then he transferred here to Houston, and I've been here ever since.”

Smith attended Stratford High School in Houston, and he moved back to the same area after his career began. In between, he attended Texas State. His choice of colleges came down primarily to cost of attendance.

“I had a certain budget,” Smith says. “Quite frankly, I was probably one of the poorest kids in my high school class. I had been working since I was 12 years old. Single parent. It was financially challenging. So I went up to San Marcos and looked at it. You’ve got a beautiful river running through the middle of town, and you've got these beautiful buildings. And you're close to Austin. Everything about it just screamed, ‘This is the place you need to be.’ I applied and was accepted early.”

Although he says that choosing finance as a major was “a bit of a guess,” he clearly saw the opportunities it would present for his future.

“I knew I wanted to be in business,” says Smith. “I thought finance would really be where I would learn the most about business. I thought that [finance] was more rounded towards what my goals and objectives were once I left college, even though I wasn't sure whether I was going to run my own company or not. But that was in the back of my mind the entire time.”

Lessons Learned at Texas State

Smith says that college was his first opportunity to take on responsibility and to get involved in organizations.

“What I found out early on, as a freshman, was that if you get involved in an organization at any level just a membership, or even at leadership level, you're not going to get fired, right?” he says. “There’s no downside to it. You may make some people upset or some people may disagree with you, but at the end of the day, you're learning. You're learning how to work with others. You're learning how to accomplish goals. You're learning how to collaborate. So I just started grasping at everything. I was president of my fraternity. I held multiple positions in my fraternity.”

Smith was also president of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, Campus Representative for Miller Beer, help multiple positions in the Interfraternity Council, and was involved with the University Judicial Board.

He says that the most impactful thing he learned from involvement in campus organizations is building a consensus is hard — not everyone is going to agree with you.

“When I became president [of my fraternity], I had all these grand ideas and all these things I wanted to accomplish, and I just felt like I was so right,” Smith says. “Looking back, I now realize I'm talking to mostly 18- and 19-year-olds. They don't really care about the more long-term and strategic things I was thinking about on how we become better as a fraternity. I thought everyone was going to agree with me. Like, ‘That's right, Bruce. Let's go get it.’ And when I started to encounter pushback, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, but this is a wonderful idea. What are you talking about?’ I learned early on that if you're if you're getting better than 50 percent agreement, you're actually doing well.”

Smith says that was “a big wow moment.”

“I finally came to grips with it and realized, ‘Okay, I'm not going to appease everybody,’” he says. “So how do I appease enough people to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish and at the same time not damage relationships long-term?”  

He learned to be diplomatic.

“That was a big learning experience for me that I still apply to virtually everything today,” Smith says.

At Texas State, Smith met hundreds of people who he still keeps up with today.

“They're just lifelong friends,” he says. “I'm sure a lot of colleges are that way, but especially San Marcos, it was just such a friendly place to be.”

The Restaurant Business

San Marcos was also the place where Smith started his first company.

As noted earlier, he has worked since he was 12. Throughout his time in college, he was always in the restaurant business, because, as Smith says, you can be a waiter or bartender easily and make good money.

“And that's what I did,” he says. “The restaurant I was working at, Jorge’s, it was a Mexican restaurant that had really strong margaritas, and they had locations in Austin and one in San Marcos. They eventually went bankrupt. As things started to head south, and I'm noticing that this isn't going to work, and I'm hearing the rumors, I'm looking for my next job because I've got to pay my bills, right? I'm living paycheck to paycheck.” 

He says that one Saturday evening, he and his wife were sitting at a restaurant that had previously been a Denny's. There were customers at just five of the tables.

“I'm thinking, this guy [the owner], there's no way he's going to make it,” Smith says. “We're sitting around talking. Thirty minutes go by. Forty-five. An hour. I asked the waiter, ‘Hey, where's our food?’ An hour and a half later, it shows up. I'm kind of putting two and two together in my head. I think this guy doesn't have any products in stock, and he's going over to H-E-B and buying it, which I found out later he was.”

Smith asked if he could talk to the owner.

“I walked up, introduced myself and told him about my concept, which was basically a knock off of Jorge’s,” he says.

The owner said yes.

“Yes means one of three things,” Smith says. “Yes, means I hear you, I understand you, or I agree with you. He kept saying yes to all my ideas and concepts. And I kept thinking, ‘All right, man, we got a deal. We're going to do this thing.’”

Weeks went by, and Smith continued to meet with the owner, but without a job, Smith needed the deal to close before the restaurant failed.

“I said, ‘Look, I'll make a deal,” Smith says. “‘If I don't have a line wrapped around this building the first night we open, then I'll leave you alone. You can take my business plan. You can take everything I've given you so far about what I want to accomplish. And you can do whatever you want with it.’ I don't think he had really much of a choice but to say yes. And so, sure enough, we had a line wrapped around the building.”

Smith says that he realized that college students are always looking for the next bargain at local bars and restaurants.

“We're all looking for a better deal,” he says. “But what I did differently is, I would get bands. I’d put a band in the corner of the restaurant on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. They were inexpensive, if they cost me $100, then I wouldn't charge a cover. If they were a couple hundred dollars or more, I would charge $1 or $2 cover, it was nominal. Football players were my bouncers; my waiters and bartenders were my fraternity brothers. And then I'd hire other waitstaff from the university.”

How did it work out?

“We crushed it,” Smith says. “I mean, we absolutely crushed it. We had this thing rocking, and people would stay to listen to the bands. That was a great experience. For two-and-a-half years I ran that restaurant and bar, put myself through school because of it, made damn good money. Well, damn good college money, I should say. That was my first entrepreneurial experience, dealing with employees, having to make payroll, buying inventory.”

Early Career

As his college experience came to a close, Smith sought out the placement office — today known as Career Services. He says that it really helped him hone his interviewing skills.

He was hired by Beecham Products. The company moved him to San Antonio, but he didn’t want to stay there. A friend of his was at Motorola, and they recruited him — within nine months, he left Beecham to work for Motorola.

“I stayed at Motorola for five years, and I did really well there,” Smith says. “I did too well because they wanted to move me to Schaumburg, Illinois, which is outside of Chicago, where the corporate headquarters is located. That's where I realized I need to go find something else.”

That realization led to the biggest moment in his entrepreneurship.

Safety Vision

“I didn't really know what I wanted to do yet,” Smith says. “I’m looking around for opportunities, and you know the old adage, sometimes being prepared and being lucky at the same time, that's where you find your opportunities. I'm at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and it's the last day, it's the last hour of the day. I'm looking at all these cool products, all this neat stuff and things that you and I will consume in two to three years — prototypes and that kind of stuff. Just to give you an example, a flat screen TV almost 32 years ago cost $800,000. That was the only one there.”

Smith was almost done wandering through the show when a man caught his attention.

“He's got this product, this camera,” Smith says. “He's banging it on the concrete floor, and he's dipping it in this fish tank while it's still plugged in. He's talking about how durable the camera is. But really it was designed to put it on the back of a truck for rear vision.”

As Smith notes, most of us today have a backup camera on our car. But back then, nobody had one.

Smith saw an opportunity.

He thought of big commercial vehicles, such as garbage trucks: “They pull into a Jack in the Box or 7-Eleven — all these places and they pick up those front-loader bins, and they dump them and they back out. And when they back out, they can't see behind their vehicles. They would run into people all the time. Sometimes people would get hurt, sometimes they would perish, and of course sometimes [the trucks would] cause property damage.” 

Smith struck up a conversation with the man with the camera.

“I told him what I was doing and I asked him, how are you going to market?” Smith says. “He said, ‘Look, I'm direct right now, but I want to be indirect. I'm looking for dealers,’ and I said, ‘Well, look, I don't know if it's right for me or not, but let me introduce you to a couple of my key accounts. Let's see if they like the product and the concept or not. So, I kind of tested the waters first, and I took them into Exxon — which is Exxon Mobil today — and it took him into Browning Ferris Industries, which was the number-two waste hauler in the nation at the time, behind Waste Management.”

Within 30 days, they procured somewhere close to $600,000 worth of pilot equipment to see how it performed in different environments and to determine whether it reduced backing accidents.

“Of course, the answer was it performs very well and it does dramatically reduce backing accidents,” Smith says. “As a matter of fact, it almost eliminates them unless you're not paying attention. I said I wanted a multi-state area and I'm going to start a company.”

That company is Safety Vision LLC, which is now a leading global supplier of mobile video surveillance solutions.

“I literally started that in my apartment,” Smith says. “My roommate was moving out, so timing was just perfect. I had a two-bedroom apartment, little mid-rise on the 9th floor on Memorial Drive in Houston. I started Safety Vision and I started selling backup cameras. It was new to everybody.”

Initially, Smith held every role in the company: “I was the accountant. I was the marketing guy. I was the sales guy. I was accounts receivable. I was everything for almost an entire year. I was by myself completely and we did almost $1 million in business and the gross profit margins were close to 70 percent. I was 27 or 28 at the time.”

The next year, the company did about $3.6 million in business at 70 percent gross profit margin.

“I think you can do the math,” Smith says. “I was a millionaire.”

He says that the company had two employees at that time: “It was a lot of work, but it was fun. I mean, I loved it. I was working 16 hours a day. I couldn't e-mail market. I literally had a modem. I would make a flyer on my computer. I would get fax numbers from people. Sometimes I'd buy lists and I would fax stuff out to different market verticals. It may be EMS, it may be money in transit, it may be garbage trucks, it may be a variety of market verticals — and that's how I would market.

Smith would go to trade shows and demonstrate his products to get leads, and that diversified the business into K-12. They started providing cameras for school buses, and then moved into mass transit.

“Then we started capturing the metadata and we started creating the software that would give you the ability to manage your fleet by looking at your computer monitor in your office,” Smith says.

Today, all of Safety Vision’s cameras have artificial intelligence.

“You don't have to watch [footage] yourself,” Smith says. “The cameras will tell you what's important and what needs to be addressed. I can go back and look at the video and see it.”

Distinguished Alumnus

In 2022, Bruce Smith was named a Texas State University Distinguished Alumnus, the Alumni Association's most prestigious award. Recipients are recognized as distinguished in their chosen business, profession, or life work on a national or international level, and they must have received previous recognition from their contemporaries on a national or international level.

Award recipients are graduates whose leadership serves as an example to all members of the Texas State community. The first Distinguished Alumnus was Lyndon B. Johnson, who was recognized in 1959 and later served as the 36th President of the United States.

Smith was stunned when he was notified that he would be named a Distinguished Alumnus.

“You know, honestly, when I got the phone call, it was kind of like, ‘You sure you got the right person?’” Smith says. “What does this mean? Now I know more about it. I know what an honor it truly is. The more she explained it to me and told me about the small number of people over the last 100 plus years — and LBJ, being the first one — I was incredibly humbled, of course. It was a big deal.”

Smith's entire family, as well as a lot of college friends, attended the Distinguished Alumni Gala and the homecoming football game, at which he was recognized on the field during a special ceremony.

“They showed up in support and it was humbling,” he says. “To go out there on the field and to be at the gala and get the actual award it was surreal. I guess when you look back from the time I graduated, I guess I've come a long way. I guess life has been incredibly fortunate to me. I've been blessed and it's just humbling.”

Opportunities for McCoy College Students

The Smiths’ $750,000 gift will create opportunities for McCoy College of Business students by supporting scholarships and grants for participating in internships abroad and education abroad programs, as well as a scholarship for students enrolled in a degree program with a sales concentration.

“When God's giving you something, you want to know, ‘How do I pay it back, how do I pay it forward, how do I help others?’” Smith says. “Life is not an ‘I’ thing. It’s a ‘we’ thing. You want to give it back, you want to share it. You want to just tell people who have big thoughts and big dreams to go after them, and if it doesn't work out, give it another try, dust yourself off. Don't give up. Keep trying.”

He says that tenacity is what he loves about Texas State students. Many of them are first-generation college students. Most of them pay some portion — if not all — of their college tuition.

“And they don't have this entitlement,” Smith says. “I hire a bunch of [Texas State graduates], and they do incredibly well because they just have great work ethic.”

Smith didn’t just want to be a “check-writer” when it came to making a gift to the university.

“I wanted to be engaged and involved,” he says. “I got involved into the McCoy College of Business as an advisor, and then I got involved in a couple of other organizations on campus. The more I started to hear about how things operate and function, I started realizing there were some gaps that I could help fill. One of my thoughts, studying abroad was really a great way for somebody to really learn about the world.”

Smith started taking his own children to other countries when they were about five and eight. The Beijing 2008 Olympics was their first international trip.

“It was a long one for small kids,” he says. “But man, they loved it.”

Smith ties that experience to his generosity in providing international opportunities to McCoy College students: “I just felt like I've been given a lot, and because of that, a lot is expected of me. I wanted to get these students to go see other parts of the world and get an education there. I found out how inexpensive it was. I thought I could sponsor at least 20 [students] to do that every year.”

“That's what I wanted to get behind,” he says. “I wanted to get behind helping the students. I want to get behind helping the college get the recognition it deserves and really get the lift that it needs.”

What’s Next

Smith says that there are no big changes on the horizon, personally or professionally.

“It’s just such a fun business with a lot of runway,” he says. “Not a lot of competition, good high margins, and it's just something I don't want to sell. I think I'd be selling myself short if I did that.”

“What I've been doing lately is trying to mix up work and travel,” Smith says. “We've been traveling quite a bit seeing some places I’ve never been before.

Perhaps he’ll bump into some of those McCoy College students — whose lives he’s changing by creating opportunities — somewhere out there while exploring the world. ✯