Six Sure Ways to Lose Your Shirt in the Security Integration Business

  

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If you want to lose your shirt in security systems integration here is the quick path to success….

1. Be promiscuous. Sell lots of different products; sell whatever is cheapest at the distributor. Develop the minimum understanding of each product and just bluff through the rest. Your customers probably won’t know the difference. Training and expertise is for doctors and lawyers.
2. Respond to lots of public bids. Why waste time looking for customers when they advertise what they want in bid specifications? Never mind that dozens of your closest competitors will be” throwing a number” at the project, and be sure to ignore that liquidated damages clause in the fine print. Nasty fine print.
3.  Don’t sweat project budgets. Properly estimating your hardware and labor costs so that you can accurately calculate your potential gross margin requires math. Boring! Better just to double your hardware costs and hope things work out all right.
4. Ignore those IT geeks. Those guys are just trouble. With their network protocols and “security policies.” Who cares….we’re putting in real security. Locks and readers and panels—high tech stuff.
5. Don’t sell recurring services. Selling services takes skill and understanding of how they provide value to your clients. Selling hardware and talking about speeds, channels, and disk size is much easier. Don’t worry that your cash flow and enterprise value is mostly tied to long term relationships with your customers. So what if firms with strong recurring revenue streams are worth five times more than companies with just installation revenue. Who needs five times revenue? Selling your installation business at one half of annual revenue will provide an adequate retirement nest egg.
6. Build it and they will come. Forget the fact that companies have invested millions in developing Software as a Service platforms that you can leverage to build your recurring services portfolio. Nah, that cloud stuff is not for you. You can build your own cloud. Isn’t it just a server stuffed into a rack anyway?

- John Szczygiel