Outlier or Outlaw?
Synergy Media Group crossed a long-established line when the Pittsburgh-based integration firm launched consultant firm BrightTree Studios.
As a result it has generated plenty of hate mail from traditional consultants, president Bill McIntosh acknowledges. Design-build integrators can’t act as independent consultants, because they’re not independent.
The fact that they sell products calls into question how objective they’d be in specifying solutions for their customers. That has always been the industry’s approach.
“It’s difficult to imagine a move that’s more controversial in the AV integration industry than an integrator crossing the line from design-build to consultant,” says NSCA executive director Chuck Wilson.
SMG didn’t originally plan to add consulting services to its design-build company. In fact, the decision came about as a result of the integration firm trying to go with the grain of the industry. SMG, along with just about every other integration firm during the early part of this decade, was extremely focused on generating more recurring revenue — and like almost every other integration firm, it wasn’t exactly working out the way it hoped.
“That recurring revenue for us seems to be difficult,” McIntosh acknowledges. “Sure, we get service contracts, but the recurring portion of a monthly fee every month is not happening for us.”
Focusing on ways to find that elusive recurring and service revenue, SMG began to think outside the box, McIntosh says.
“One of those ways is consulting revenue. We have a really good CAD guy in house. We’re capable of Revit and BIM [Building Information Modeling], which is really important in the architectural phases of the project. We have really good designers. We’ve always been a design-build firm, but nobody saw [us] as a consultant because we had actual installers.”
SMG ultimately decided that in pursuing a straight recurring monthly revenue model, it was like fitting a square peg into a round hole.
“Let’s just look at ourselves internally and discover where our strengths are,” McIntosh says. “We had guys that worked for consultants before, and we have marketing people that work with AEC [architectural, engineering and consulting] firms.”
Once SMG committed to the consulting strategy, it also hired “numerous team members from AV design consultation firms, architecture firms and national construction companies,” McIntosh says. In July 2014, SMG launched BrightTree Studios, its consulting wing.
Lesson: Synergy Media Group broke industry tradition to generate a new revenue stream. We welcomed industry debate about whether it was right to do so.
Read Synergy Media Group’s entire CI Profile here.
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