CE Pro September 2024 - 4

From the Editor
by Arlen Schweiger
Don't Ignore All the RMR
Opportunities Out There
Of the CE Pro
100 members,
who are among
the highestrevenue
and
most profitable
dealers ... just 14
out of 100 earn
10% or more of
their revenues
via recurring
monthly revenue.
CE Pro has been preaching the benefits of
RMR for a long time now. It helps generate an
additional revenue stream for your business;
it can keep your company afloat during
rough economic times; it enables many more
touchpoints with your clients to elevate the
post-installation customer service experience;
those touchpoints can create potential
upsell opportunities; and RMR is a multiplier
when it's time to sell your business.
These days, RMR can be accrued in a
variety of ways - service contracts, network
management, energy and power management,
remote diagnostics and troubleshooting,
video surveillance and alarm monitoring,
entertainment content curation, cybersecurity,
and others. You'll see plenty of examples
at the CEDIA Expo and Commercial Integrator
Expo (CIX) being staged at the Colorado
Convention Center in Denver this month.
Of course, service contracts are the
most common method CE pros use to earn
the extra revenue. Whether they collect
monthly or annually, many integrators
set up tiers that offer varying degrees of
service call response time, equipment and
solutions covered, exchange programs for
upgrades, and more.
" Those service contracts I think are
Arlen Schweiger is
Editor-in-Chief of
CE Pro. He can
be reached at
arlen.schweiger@
emeraldx.com and
@ArlenSchweiger
on LinkedIn.
vitally important to the overall health of our
customers. When you look at the security
side of our business, which is highly tied to
monitoring and lots of heavy RMR, there's
a ton of upside from a service perspective
in the commercial AV side of things, " says
Cynthia Menna, general manager of Pro AV at
distributor ADI Global.
" As well, as understanding how to create a
contract, how to write a contract - making
sure that you don't over-commit, that you
don't give a 4-hour window of being on site,
when, in fact, it might be 24 hours. So, being
very realistic about what you and your business
can support from a support perspective
4 | CE Pro September 2024
and what areas you want to support. "
Despite all the options for gaining RMR,
the custom integration industry is still
catching up after all these years and pales
in comparison to the security industry. Of
the CE Pro 100 members, who are among
the highest-revenue and most profitable
dealers, security giants ADT and Guardian
Protection - respectively Nos. 1 and 2 in
the rankings - skew the numbers. Overall,
however, just 14 out of 100 earn 10% or
more of their revenues via RMR. The ones
who have added it tend to be bullish on
RMR, but may echo the caveat from Menna
about not over-committing.
" We're not an alarm company but we've
been diehard into RMR for probably 11
years now, " Total Home Technologies'
Keith Harrison said on the recent monthly
CE Pro VIPeer-2-Peer call. Harrison's company
employs a unique RMR strategy that
CE Pro has covered - they lease equipment
to the homeowners. " It represents
probably 35% of our annual income. "
He also points to research that has
found homeowners have a quickly declining
disenchantment with their systems within
the first five years of ownership. Plus, when
it comes to installing technology that sees
rapid advancements such as Wi-Fi networking,
there's a possibility that systems can be
hindered but it gets delicate going back to a
customer if they're not on a service plan.
" If you've done a big badass Wi-Fi system
for a customer a year-and-a-half ago, it might
be Wi-Fi 5, maybe Wi-Fi 6, and most of us
wouldn't have the courage - myself included
- to call that customer up and say, 'Hey,
you know that $25K you spent for Wi-Fi?
Well that's Wi-Fi 5 and now we're on Wi-Fi
6, 6e, and 7, so you're three versions behind
in the year-and-a-half that you purchased
the system, how would you like to give us
another $25K?' "
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CE Pro September 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CE Pro September 2024
