Just because Vistacom president and CEO Jim Ferlino and COO Angela Nolan followed in their father Jack’s footsteps and joined the company he started in 1954, don’t expect them to stick around until they’re almost 100 years old, like he has.
For one thing, Jim Ferlino and his sister aren’t sure they’ll live long enough. On top of that, they say they’re confident the company that also includes a third generation of the family—Nolan’s daughter, marketing manager Lianna Russell—will be in good hands when they’re gone.
And with steady revenue growth, an understanding of the importance of recurring revenue as a key component in their success going forward, Vistacom is uniquely positioned to thrive as their competitors struggle to figure out how to make the transition from leading with installation.
“We’ve approached the last 65 years with one central idea in mind: we want to be a true partner,” says Jim Ferlino, whose brothers, Phil and Dave, were once Vistacom employees but have since left the company.
“This has guided our business through more than six decades and continues to be a core focus area for every team member. This means that from the first contact through the last service call, we aim to approach each and every project as a true partnership,” he says
Like any company, Vistacom is focused on its bottom line, but it’s not the only important thing for Ferlino and the staff.
“Although we are admittedly profit–driven, we balance that with a keen sense of doing right for our clients,” he says. “When we make a mistake, we admit it and accept the consequences and the associated costs.
“We will always place our integrity and reputation above the short-term gains of an unfair decision. In a world that consistently wants more delivered for less money in a shorter time, we resist the temptation to take short cuts,” says Ferlino.
“As tough as business can get, we always try to balance our business decisions with a sense of humanity,” he says.
All in the Family
Nolan was the toughest among her siblings to convince to join her father and brothers at Vistacom but a gentle nudge from Jim was enough to get her to make the move.
“As a teenager and in my college years, I was convinced I would never be part of the family business, but 30 years later, I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she says.
Nolan started her Vistacom career as office manager/accountant before moving to into roles where she developed a marketing presence and built the company’s operations department. [related]
“My father never pushed anybody to be part of the business,” says Jim Ferlino, who studied industrial engineering in college, then joined Vistacom in a sales role. “I really liked what I was doing and wanted to stay.”
Ferlino recruited his sister to join the company as it grew from its humble beginnings because “I knew she was a very smart person and that I could trust her.”
Working with family members certainly has pros and cons, says Nolan.
“There’s definitely a deeper understanding of things you need to take care of on the family side,” she says. “[Jim and I are] very different in our strengths. I’m not suited for sales or business development and he’s not looking to get involved in the accounting.
“Our strengths complement each other,” she says.
“Our father was a little hard on us,” says Nolan. “He instilled in us very high sense of responsibility for our clients and the people working here. It’s not just about our role here. We have to understand the decisions we make affect everyone who works here.
“They’re part of our Vistacom family. They all have a great deal of internal responsibility to see the company succeed. We’re all pulling in the same direction. We’re able to take care of our employees in a way a big company can’t always do,” she says.
Ferlino doesn’t worry about personality clashes leading to issues between family members that could alter the future of the company his father meticulously built from the ground to its projection as a $28 million operation in 2019.
“I can understand where it could go badly, especially if you don’t always agree with what the priorities are, but it’s a lot easier to trust a family member,” he says.
“Our people really care about what they do. We hear from a lot of people who come in here that there’s a different vibe. When we have to get something done, we all pull together and make it happen. We’ll roll our sleeves up just like they do. We don’t just sit in our office,” says Ferlino.
Jack Ferlino continues to be a regular presence in Vistacom’s headquarters.
“I don’t know if I’ll be quite as engaged as he is [when I’m 98],” says Jim Ferlino. “He really just has this thirst to understand where things are going and where things are going.”
Nolan hopes she’s alive when she hits 98 but isn’t sure she’ll still be in Allentown at that age.
“I’d love to be around to have some input and see what happens when the next generation takes over,” she says. “I can’t imagine spending winters in Pennsylvania when I’m 98.”
Ferlino and Nolan says company leaders are talking about who’ll carry the baton for Vistacom when they’re not around, although that doesn’t sound like it’s happening any time soon.
“We have a lot of goals we still want to achieve for the company,” says Nolan. “That’s our main focus right now. We don’t want to leave employees where there’s no one at the helm.”
65 Years and Counting
Originally named the Daveland Company, Vistacom was founded in Allentown, Pa., in 1954 with a staff of six people, led by Jack Ferlino.
Starting with the installation of the first intercoms and background music systems in local businesses, Vistacom started to grow with the quickly changing audio communications industry.
The company installed the first paging systems in town in the late 1950s, set up the city’s first and only public air raid system in the 1960s and in 1980, installed the audio system in Veterans Stadium, the former home of the Philadelphia Phillies and Eagles.
Vistacom added video to its installation capabilities in 1989 and works today in corporate conferencing and training spaces, teaching spaces, public display solutions, specialized healthcare solutions including telemedicine, and command and control centers.
The company relies on four core business units—managed services, unified communications and collaboration, command centers and AV integration—as its backbone, and take pride in growing the company organically since its inception as mergers and acquisitions are more commonplace.
“We’ve really carved out a niche in the control room market, which has shown a tremendous amount of growth over the last 10 to 20 years,” says Ferlino. “We’ve seen so many customers in the government, education, healthcare, utilities and transportation sectors begin to shift operations into a centralized command center model.”
Strategic Transformation
Vistacom struggled for a few years after the recession in 2008 to get the employees who were left behind to understand what they needed to do in the new reality that included layoffs of some of their co-workers.
Although Vistacom has had some form of managed services and recurring revenue in place for about 15 years, it’s become a much more refined offering in the past five years, says Jim Ferlino. But that shift in approach also led to some confusion among employees about what to do.
“We have to understand the decisions we make affect everyone who works here. We’re all pulling in the same direction. We’re able to take care of our employees in a way a big company can’t always do.” — Vistacom COO Angela Nolan
“We found we weren’t progressing the way we should with the talent we have,” says Ferlino.
Vistacom’s board of advisors urged management to be much more clear on its strategic objectives and to make sure those objectives are communicated to the team, then to trust that they’d deliver what was expected without micromanaging.
“It forced us to reevaluate a little bit, understand what we were doing well and what needed to change,” says Ferlino. The overhaul, for which Vistacom won a 2019 NSCA Excellence in Business Award for strategic transformation “took a good 3-5 years to smooth itself out,” he says.
“The first key point was on us, but the rest was put on them,” says Ferlino. “It was a learning curve on us, because it was a little different. It’s really allowed us to grow, especially on the managed services side.”
In 2018, Vistacom expanded its managed services offerings to include:
- Training programs that designate a qualified employee as a “certified trainer” and offer ongoing training when clients need new employees to learn how to use existing systems
- A 24/7 help desk, which is a hotline that can be called for system support at any time
- Design consulting, where design services are offered at project conception to clients ranging from large universities to city governments
- Remote management, monitoring, and diagnostics, where Vistacom takes on full responsibility for the health of clients’ technology systems and connects through the cloud to fix, repair, update, and manage them
Last year, more than 10% of Vistacom’s revenue came from managed services – and Ferlino sees the potential for growing it to 15 to 20 percent in the future, if not even more. That offering “helps us stay engaged with the client and complete the cycle, from the project side to adoption and usage,” he says.
Many of the processes Vistacom uses for its managed services offering were borrowed from the White House—yes, in Washington, D.C.—after a former communications staffer joined the team a few years ago.
“There were a few bumps in the road,” says Nolan. “It took some of our long-term managers a little while to understand they were empowered. Once they saw things in motion, the growth was exponential.
“Right now, we’re limited only by the amount of staff and resources we can bring in. We’re trying to be very strategic and only taking on the amount of growth our resource pool can handle,” she says.
“Recurring revenue really helps us to make sure you have a stable, predictable amount of revenue coming in every year and is a foundation for growth,” says Nolan.
“It helps you become an integral part of your customer’s business. They look at you as a partner and they come to you for more than big projects. It widens and deepens our involvement with our clients.”
Vistacom finds more success in incorporating managed services into its mission-critical, but there’s still some hesitancy on the more tradition AV installs.
“I see hesitancy because it’s not as easy as it seems,” says Ferlino. “You need a group of people who are very well-trained who have a lot of efficiencies. If you’re promoting something you offer, you have to be able to deliver on that.”
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Vistacom’s sales teams sell both installation and managed services at this point, but that might change at some point, he says.
“We’re still trying to work out what the best model is,” says Ferlino.
Vistacom sales staffers are urged to include a managed services contract with all sales proposals, says Nolan.
