On being a service company …
Simpson: [At the end of a magnificent project] you would have a bit of anticlimax on now what to do next. The sort of people who can keep a site going, who can do the regular maintenance on it are a different breed of person and you have to recognize that. Providing a level of service on a continuing basis is a different thing than the excitement of building the big system and I would say that the main lesson is to choose your staff carefully so that you get the right mix of attributes to be able to offer the broad service that people want.
… I think the more difficult thing and which certainly we’re very conscious of is what services we can now offer? There were services that we could offer which are no longer needed because nobody needs somebody to come and service a 16-millimeter projector anymore. So you do not need those kinds of skills, but the question is what services are needed and identifying new services. Most managed services and things like that, well even they are vulnerable to new developments. The need for some of these services may go away and I think that is what people like us have to be very aware of.
Electrosonic founders Robert Simpson, Michael Ray and Denis Naisbitt in 1974.
Bowie: We provided service to our customers as a separate entity, as a standalone piece of the company pretty much our whole history and what makes us different from systems integrators is we were a product manufacturer so we had to support the customer, we had to have guys in vans go out on calls. We had to have a repair bench. We had to have all of that because we were a manufacturer so what makes us different is that we had that for almost allof our 50 years.
[Our service] business and very well developed, we know each other’s clients, we understand when they scream that we have to run and I think most systems integrators basically try and use the system integration resources to service their client’s other needs and to maybe help them establish contracts for onsite technicians and things like these. They see it as part of their one business whereas we don’t. We absolutely see it as a completely separate thing and has a general manager in each of the locations and we have dedicated staff. I see even very large companies who say they provide service, but they mix the blood and I think that is where they shouldn’t because it is not a business to them.
