Editor’s Note: This coverage of ASCII Edge Boston will appear as the Editor’s Note in the upcoming September issue of CI+SSI.
When you read my editorials — or, really, any of Commercial Integrator or Security Sales & Integration content — you tend to see a lot about converging technology worlds. A blurring of the lines between technical trades is, of course, why we brought together CI+SSI as a single print publication. But the technology universe is far larger than just commercial AV and security. It also includes IT and managed service providers (MSPs). That’s why we have a longstanding partnership with The ASCII Group, North America’s oldest and largest independent IT community. It’s also why, last week, I drove up to Newton, Mass., for an ASCII Edge event. The group holds nine such events per year, crisscrossing the continent and drawing hundreds of leading MSPs for two days of education, networking and vendor access.
ASCII Edge Boston Showcases What Unites Us
I know not everyone is “converted” when it comes to recognizing that there’s far more that unites the technology trades than divides us. But, if you had attended ASCII Edge with me, I guarantee that you’d have been struck by what these MSPs were talking about. Many of the issues they contend with are precisely those that AV integrators discuss at InfoComm and that security professionals chew over at ISC West. After all, most integrators fall into the category of small to medium-sized businesses, and that means AV pros, security specialists and MSPs must all be mindful of foundational entrepreneurial strategies to achieve growth and success. At ASCII Edge, there was much for all of us to learn.
The morning’s first session featured Shawn Walsh and Dave Cava from Encore Strategic Consulting, who offered a blueprint for how to scale for success. During their talk, Walsh and Cava echoed a point that Total Tech Summit integrators frequently make during our monthly VIP2P calls — namely, that “bad” customers drag your business down and “good” customers should be your focus. There’s no doubt that it takes a certain boldness to turn away potential business or to “fire” an existing client, but it’s worth the discomfort if it means you’re no longer wasting resources you could put to more productive use elsewhere. They also extolled the virtues of documented, repeatable processes, which empower your team members to deliver consistent results without you having to be involved at every stage. Improvising ad-hoc solutions doesn’t lend itself to operating at scale; documented processes do.
‘Sharing and Working Together’
Later in the day at ASCII Edge Boston, Lynn Williams, vice president of community for The ASCII Group, convened a roundtable to talk about the value of ASCII membership and the unbreakable community that its 1,300-plus MSP members forged. One member said, “We’re blessed to be in an industry where there’s a lot of sharing and working together.” That testament to unity immediately brought to mind the tight-knit community I see in both the commercial AV and the electronic security industries. Our #avtweeps family, for instance, truly transcends anything I’ve witnessed in my 20-year career. Across competitive and geographic boundaries, members of the AV community genuinely love one another, doing everything from supplying monetary support amid disasters to offering words of encouragement amid health challenges. And I’ve seen much the same in the security industry, where everyone is bound by an earnest belief in keeping life, limb and property safe.
A vendor presentation — by Baxter Lanius of Alternative Payments — was equally illuminating. For firms offering subscriptionized services, he espoused the benefits of transitioning away from check and credit card payments all together and switching to 100% automated, electronic (ACH) payments. Lanius broke out the potential benefits across several metrics, including far less lag time in being paid, far fewer hours spent on manual billing and zeroing out credit card fees. The benefits in incremental cash flow alone are attention-grabbing, and I believe they’d have made many of our readers reassess their own billing strategy.
We’ve rounded the corner on July, and we’re sprinting toward the end of the year. Rest assured that both Commercial Integrator and Security Sales & Integration will continue to acknowledge the coming together of technology trades. And we’ll curate the best thought leadership to give businesses like yours a competitive advantage.
