Security Sales July 2021 - 66

Management
2021 Integrator
Exec Roundtable
I try not to
panic in front of
my other
employees but
there were points
in time. When 60%
of the business is
high-rise office
and they are
literally a ghost
town, it's a gut
check at that
point.
- Louis Boulgarides,
President & CEO
Ollivier Corp.
Los Angeles
What are some positives to come out
of the pandemic experience in terms
of operational efficiencies or best
practices that will continue to benefit
your organization moving forward?
Francisco: Prior to the pandemic, we had already
been engaging with and doing a lot more
remote work. We were on Office 365 with Microsoft
Teams, we had the Zooms, we had to
Go to Meetings. We had already had our virtual
machines and everything in the Cloud. However,
we had a plan that had to be sped up and we discovered
some things that we were missing when
going remote.
Instead of doing a pilot program we went
straight into production. We had to make it
work. Everybody on our team rolled up their
sleeves and fully adopted and engaged with the
tools we have. They showed initiative to learn
and figure things out. We still have some internal
software that can't be in the Cloud yet so we
had to find ways to manage that. We continue
to have this innovative spirit and right now our
new thing is monday.com. It's a Kanban-type
project management tool for multiple projects
and my guys love it. We use it to track 50 current,
ongoing projects.
Another bright side of things has been the
strong comradery among our staff. We were
blessed to have such an amazing team that we
probably wouldn't have realized unless we were
all in it together. I guess trauma builds that cohesiveness,
that we survived it together.
Bongard: We've learned that more than anything,
how resilient we are. You always hope
you would be, you always think you would be,
but you don't know until times of trouble. Traditionally,
we have no one working from home
but during the pandemic we had 80%. We
learned that during times of pressure you can
create some very good initiatives. As mentioned
before, we were already going through our
business continuity plans and were prepared.
The other thing was we were really proactive
in meeting about what was happening overseas
before it really hit even the U.S.
We also learned that technology truly is the
backbone of everything we do and utilized it
more than ever. Virtually officing and virtual
communication has become almost the norm.
We learned we can do this remote. We learned
we can get through it. But it still doesn't take
the place of face-to-face and in-person touches.
66
Security Sales & Integration JULY 2021
In long term, has virtualization changed
to some extent the way you may do some
sales presentations or hiring practices?
Bongard: Absolutely, especially some initial
interviews. We had many virtual lunch-andlearns.
We held some mini-conferences with
our customers. It was tough at first to keep
people engaged. We had to shift gears to make
it more interactive and interesting. I think we
all learned as an industry how to get through
that and make it better going forward.
Perhaps some of the skills gained from
that will add efficiencies down the line?
Bongard: Yes, especially training. Traditionally,
we all had to send people off to a different
state or somewhere else. You're incurring costs
and salaries or wages of some kind, per diem
out of the office and hotel. During the pandemic,
a lot of it was offered virtually and it
was fantastic. I'm looking forward to more of
that. It's just more efficient for companies and
for who's offering as well.
Boulgarides: We were already a virtual company
so that part of it was not a big deal, but I
never thought I had to have 1,000 masks or cases
of hand sanitizer in my warehouse. I do now
in case something like this ever happens again.
When this thing hit, we had nothing. I was going
down to the garment district in downtown
L.A. and having them make us masks. This
whole process, overall, as a company we're now
better prepared if this happens again. This may
be the new normal as this moves forward.
We were fortunate as a company in that although
we had some cases of COVID everyone
did a good job following the guidelines to minimize
spread.
The experience reinforced our business
strategy to diversify as you don't want to
have all your eggs in one basket. Thank God
I didn't have all my eggs in the office space
basket or else I wouldn't be doing this interview
right now. Managed services is really important,
and we need to redouble our efforts
there. It was one of the reasons we were able
to get through this. It wasn't enough to cruise
through, but it helped a lot. A lot of things
we were doing were reinforced as being on
the right track; it was a wake-up call to double
down on those things. It added a sense of
urgency because there were a few gut checks
along the way. SSI
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Security Sales July 2021

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