The ability to inspire, innovate, and drive meaningful impact defines true leadership. As we look towards 2025, a new generation of business leaders is emerging, demonstrating exceptional vision and a commitment to creating positive change.
Collaboration, creativity, and giving team members a voice are central to the leadership style of Michael Broyles (CEO and founder of TSN Visual Communication Solutions). He recognizes that his team works on the front lines, interacting directly with customers and resellers. Integrating their feedback into tangible product improvements has been crucial.
He strives to be genuine with his team, getting to know them and their families, recognizing their value beyond their employee status, and supporting their personal and professional growth. By understanding the interconnectedness of his company, adjacent influences like vendors, and, crucially, his customers, Michael has molded TSN into a valuable and continuously improving product. Invest in your people, but expect the same investment in you. It must be a two-way street.
Beyond the Bottom Line
Michael Broyles believes that business success extends beyond traditional metrics like revenue, profit and loss, and sales. While these elements are essential for sustainability, he emphasizes the importance of a broader perspective that prioritizes investment in people. This includes not only his direct team but also customers, vendors, integrating companies, and investors. He believes in fostering collaboration with everyone connected to the company and its product, both directly and indirectly.
Michael stresses the importance of actively seeking input from these stakeholders and ensuring they have a voice. He emphasizes that these individuals should not just feel important but understand their integral role in improving the process and the end product, ultimately contributing to the company’s overall success.
Acknowledging that he doesn’t have a traditional “tech background,” Michael Broyles draws upon his upbringing in West Texas, specifically in his home town of Lamesa, TX, to inform his leadership approach. He applies the lessons he learned in Lamesa about building friendships, working within teams, and making people feel valued to create a stronger company and a better product. The willingness to grind through adversity is something that his West Texas upbringing has instilled in him. He strives to translate these foundational principles into a business context, fostering a collaborative and inclusive environment.
Digging His Heels In
Michael Broyles emphasizes the importance of his core team. His chief of staff, Casey Hawkins, and COO, LeAnn Stewart, are described as invaluable assets, sharing a passion for the company, its product, and its customers. This dedication permeates the entire team. Michael’s early realization that hiring talented individuals and empowering them to excel in their roles has been instrumental to the company’s success. He focuses on providing resources, ensuring a clear vision, and fostering an environment where his team can thrive.
Forged Through Adversity
Michael’s professional journey is unconventional. Growing up in West Texas in a farming family, his early years were rooted in agriculture. This experience instilled in him a deep understanding of hard work, perseverance, and overcoming challenges. These foundational lessons proved invaluable as he transitioned into other fields.
After college, Michael worked for a fencing company in Central Texas, an experience that provided insights into various leadership techniques, highlighting both effective strategies and those he wished to avoid. In 2010, an idea sparked the creation of what would become TSN. At the outset, Michael readily admits he lacked a clear roadmap, navigating the early stages through trial and error, learning on the fly, and demonstrating remarkable resilience in the face of adversity. His path to this point, he acknowledges, was almost accidental, but ultimately shaped through opportunity and a vision to fill a need.
Michael Broyles credits his supportive family as a crucial element of his success. His wife has been an incredible source of strength, and he has had the distinct pleasure of sharing professional milestones with his children. His daughter currently works alongside him, a deeply rewarding experience, and his son completed a summer internship with the company while in college. Both of his children provide him with a great sense of pride and inspiration. His parents provided him the foundation of self-belief and strong work ethic and they continue to support him today.
TSN’s User-Friendly Platforms
TSN Visual Communication Solutions positions itself not merely as a digital signage provider but as a visual communication solutions platform. The company differentiates itself from traditional digital signage, which is a commodity, by recognizing the distinct needs of various industry sectors. While traditional platforms are often used uniformly across diverse settings like schools, banks, dealerships, and restaurants, TSN acknowledges that these sectors have vastly different organizational structures and target audiences.
To address this, TSN has developed specialized platforms tailored to specific markets. They offer distinct platforms for K12 education, higher education (colleges and universities), and business/government sectors. This targeted approach stems from the understanding that each sector has unique structures and communication needs.
For instance, a bank with 50 locations across a region might have a centralized communications team of one to three individuals managing all information dissemination. In contrast, a K12 school district involves multiple layers of communication, from district administration and the superintendent’s office to individual campus principals and counselors. This can result in hundreds of individuals accessing and distributing information across a single district. TSN recognizes that this dynamic requires a significantly different application than that of a bank or car dealership.
This sector-specific approach allows TSN to simplify the product for end-users. The company emphasizes three core principles in its development process: use case, user base, and audience type, with a primary focus on simplicity. TSN prioritizes ease of use, aiming for minimal training time, typically around 30 minutes, for end-users. The company’s core philosophy is to simplify communication across any industry or business sector.
The Learning Curve
Michael Broyles conceived the initial idea for his platform. He collaborated with a friend to develop its first iteration. While living in San Antonio, Texas, he established a small network of approximately 90 businesses using this early version. However, he acknowledges that the platform had limitations in both its technology and its overall vision.
For about three years, this initial platform was in use, however it was incomplete and still required development to fill the needs of the market. While it garnered positive feedback from users, it did not achieve profitability or a sustainable business model. After this period, Michael recognized the need to define a niche to differentiate the platform and improve its business viability. He vividly recalls a moment in his kitchen, while his daughter was in eighth grade, when he visited her school’s website and noticed a post about a speaker who had visited earlier that week. This seemingly small observation would prove to be a turning point.
Unlocking Student Creativity
While researching the speaker on his daughter’s school website, Michael realized a crucial communication gap existed within the K12 environment. This realization prompted him to retool his platform specifically for this sector. He then approached Northside ISD in San Antonio, the fourth-largest district in Texas, securing a pilot program with Superintendent Dr. Woods.
From the outset, Michael emphasized a collaborative approach, stating that he would build the platform based on the specific needs of the district’s administrators and principals. To their credit, they provided valuable feedback, guiding the platform’s development. Rather than imposing a preconceived solution, Michael and his team actively listened to administrators, teachers, and users across various campuses, building the platform based on their direct input.
This user-centric approach proved highly effective. After successfully implementing the platform in all high schools within Northside ISD, Michael expanded to Alief ISD in the Houston area, followed by Lewisville ISD near Dallas. This rapid expansion placed him in contact with some of the largest school districts in Texas.
A key element of their long-term success has been the continued focus on user feedback. A prime example of this is the development of the “student creative module.” Recognizing the prevalence of AV and graphic design classes in schools, Michael and his team collaborated with educators to create a system that empowers students to create content, teachers to review and approve it, and the school to easily publish it.
This student-driven content creation has had a significant impact on school culture and safety, two key priorities for superintendents and principals. By involving students in the communication process, they become more engaged with their school environment. They see their own work, or the work of their peers, displayed on campus, fostering a sense of ownership and pride. This approach also reduces the content creation burden on teachers and administrators, who simply need to review and approve student-generated material. This has led to superintendents showcasing student work to community members, further highlighting the positive impact of the platform on school culture.
Connecting the Dots
Michael Broyles applies the same user-centric approach to his higher education and business platforms, consistently seeking feedback on needed tools, content, and system improvements. A notable example of this is the integration with various campus safety providers, such as Centegix, CrisisGo, Raptor, AlertUS, and Singlewire Informacast, on the K12 platform.
While TSN is not a safety and security company itself, this integration enhances campus safety by enabling emergency alerts to override all displayed content. In a lockdown or evacuation scenario, all connected screens will flash and display a full-screen message. This feature was directly requested by schools seeking to integrate their existing safety systems with the TSN platform.
Michael Broyles emphasizes the importance of continuous engagement with end-users. He recognizes that while his team builds the platform, it is the users who interact with it daily. These relationships are crucial for receiving valuable feedback, enabling TSN to make necessary adjustments and improve the product across all sectors. This constant feedback loop has been instrumental in TSN’s development and success.
Removing Barriers to Entry
Michael Broyles emphasizes that TSN’s current focus is on accessibility and affordability for its customers, rather than solely on adding new features. While acknowledging the importance of their partnerships with various reseller and integrators within the ed-tech space in facilitating growth, his primary concern is simplifying access and reducing costs for customers who want to implement and maximize the system.
He prioritizes making the platform more accessible to end-users, particularly businesses or schools with multiple locations spread across a large geographic area. Michael’s goal is to enable these organizations to maximize their existing infrastructure in a cost-effective manner, both during initial setup and in the long run. He recognizes that the high startup costs often associated with traditional digital signage, including the purchase of new televisions, media players, and other hardware, can be a significant barrier.
Therefore, TSN’s current focus is on minimizing these upfront expenses to make the platform more attainable and cost-effective for end-users. New feature development will always be a part of the roadmap. For example, TSN has integrated AI to enhance the content creation process on the creative side, however the current focus remains on ease of access and affordability.
The Importance of People
Michael Broyles advises aspiring entrepreneurs to prioritize hiring talented individuals, acknowledging that he hasn’t always been perfect in this regard, emphasizing the importance of a clear vision and mission. He stresses the need to stay focused and not be easily dissuaded by others’ doubts.
He credits his strong support system, including his family (parents, wife, and children) and his inner circle within the company, for helping him maintain focus and resist external pressures. Find your support system and learn to lean on them, because at times that will be necessary. He would advise anyone to treat your mistakes and losses as an opportunity to learn, to grow and improve. These will occur and use them as stepping stones to make yourself, your company, and your product better.
While open to receiving input and alternative perspectives, Michael Broyles believes in ultimately trusting one’s own judgment and driving one’s own direction. He advises others to listen to feedback but not let it dictate their path. Feedback provides you with an alternate vantage point, a way to see something you may have missed, but you cannot let it dictate your path.
He expresses deep gratitude to the many people who have contributed to the company’s success, including his family, team members, and investors. He highlights the company’s significant growth, particularly in the K12 sector. In 2020, TSN was in approximately 450 Texas campuses; today, they are in over 1,600 campuses across 40 states, with most of that growth occurring in the last two years. Michael attributes this expansion to the collective effort and support of numerous individuals who have provided encouragement during challenging times and shared in the company’s successes. He emphasizes the importance of having a strong support system and relying on it when needed.
