Commercial Integrator October 2022 - 22

COVER STORY
TIPS FOR
MAINTAINING
PROJECT
PROFITABILITY
Leaders from NSCA
offer in-the-trenches
perspective on how to
ensure your business
stays in the black and
your projects remain
profitable.
By Dan Ferrisi
AT A TIME WHEN INTEGRATION
businesses are being buffeted by unprecedented
challenges, maintaining project
profitability is more important than ever before.
As Chuck Wilson, CEO of NSCA, said
during a recent Commercial Integrator/
NSCA webinar, " We don't do anybody
any good if we're out of business. " That
presentation, entitled " Preserving Project
Profitability in 2022, " attracted more than
200 registrants on August 16, all of them
eager to learn best practices about how
to keep their business in the black. Kyle
22
Habben, president of Electronic Contracting
Company, and Mat Hennings, formerly
the vice president of finance with Communications
Engineering Company, joined
Wilson for the one-hour webinar. Although
the program is available for download now
on CommercialIntegrator.com, we'll here
summarize some of the key advice that our
presenters offered.
Integrators Should Be Choosy
The panel kicked off with unanimous
agreement that integrators must be much
more selective as regards the projects
they undertake. " It's a hard concept to say
no - especially for the salespeople in us, "
Wilson acknowledged. " But it just doesn't
make sense sometimes to have that risk/
reward proposition be out of whack. "
That's likely to be the case if the customer
views integrated AV as a mere commodity
and expects your firm to work at razor-thin
margins. " Low-margin work, right now, in
this market, is not healthy for the business, "
Habben said forthrightly. " When we
take low-margin work, especially with the
shortage of labor right now, we're robbing
Commercial Integrator OCTOBER 2022
resources from more profitable work and
putting them to projects that don't have
the [same] amount of profit in them. " And
when otherwise highly profitable projects
are starved of resources, their profitability
can similarly drain.
Hennings articulated a point that NSCA
has made for years: Integrators should
recognize the value of their work. " We
don't take as much pride sometimes in the
product that we're offering and our value
that we're bringing to this partnership, " he
lamented. It's equally important, however,
for clients themselves to be mindful of the
real value that integrators deliver; that
thought underpins Habben's view that
integrators should choose clients whose
goals and vision align with their own. Or,
as Hennings put it, it's not only about the
right job but also about the right customer.
And then, when you've found a client with
whom you can build a real relationship, the
goal should be to " get sticky " with them.
Hennings described this as " a lifetime
value conversation. " That's a very different
approach from trying to " buy " a
low-margin job on the bid market.
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Commercial Integrator October 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Commercial Integrator October 2022
