Advanced AV has been lucky, says Greene, in that “a lot of our employees take an ownership approach. They think of how what they do affects the company, not just themselves. It’s a culture of family. We mutually respect each other.”
Boettcher says that culture comes from empowering people and hiring those who are smarter than him. “We’re not out driving that cultural message, but you have to guide that process,” he says. “People need to be responsible, and it takes desire and fire to do that.”
Selling Services Before Boxes
In 2003, Advanced AV hired a salesperson to focus exclusively on selling services and Boettcher hired a team to support opera-tion to establish the company’s foray into services. Advanced AV self-insured its services, including its inventory of equipment and spare parts, and established a 24-hour response time policy on all service calls.
“I’ve always had the personality set for a service person,” says Boettcher. “As the company continued to evolve as the market changed, I fit into the right seat on the bus. I evolved from there into my current role, and continue to leverage those service traits even more so today than ever.”
He emphasizes that the services aspect of the business is its key to success. With revenues struggling to break even on the installation side for a couple of years, it became apparent that selling equipment wasn’t going to be a sustainable model.
“We saw service as a potential revenue channel. Aligning that process within our integration efforts ties together our offering,” he says. By making services a priority, “we did things nobody else could do and we had support throughout the organization,” says Boettcher. “It’s become an internal motivator and we talk about it externally in our marketing materials too.”
Since launching its service offering, Advanced AV has gotten more leads from its service department than from any other part of the company, says Greene.
Advanced AV created a separate sales staff for selling services because it represents a different sales model, says Boettcher. “There was too much at stake,” he says. “Selling services is annuity-based, smaller dollars and intangible.”
Keeping Customers Happy
As Greene describes it, Advanced AV focuses everything it does on the philosophy “no meeting missed.” All of Advanced AV’s recent success hasn’t come without a few struggles along the way, in particular in the time around and during the so-called Great Recession in 2007 and 2008.
Those struggles, though, reinforced why Advanced AV’s shift to a more concentrated focus on service was a prudent move. For those following the company timeline, the recession coincided in part with Boettcher being elevated to CEO.
“Like many, we struggled through the recession, but made some hard business decisions to help us through,” says Boettcher. “We refocused our energy on the type of work that fit our strengths, and built up those relationships around that type of business. We now provide everyone financial data to help them make decisions with the company in mind. We couldn’t figure out where to make a profit, except from service.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a company so entrenched in services has one of the more active Twitter accounts in the industry.
The single biggest challenge Advanced AV faces in 2015, says Boettcher, is “thinking outside the traditional AV space. We talk about it constantly, and have created goals around those ideas. That means focusing on IT and convergence issues ,” he says. “Other fads may come and go, but this is here to stay.”
Recurring revenue represents a “huge priority,” for Advanced AV, which takes in about 20 percent of its annual revenue from that area. Boettcher says he’d like to see the company increase that percentage of recurring revenue by 50 percent in the next two years.
Looking to the Horizon
To this point, Advanced AV has been focused on organic growth, but that could change soon, says Boettcher. He realizes acquiring another company brings not only opportunities but also challenges.
“In this industry, you need to be a small niche company or grow into a big company,” says Boettcher. “Organic takes a long time. [Acquisitions include] a huge challenge, but we’re preparing for that.”
That means cultural challenges, system challenges and personnel challenges, among others, he says, adding, “It’s a good time to look for overlap and vet out everybody’s teams.”
