How Far Out Are You Booked For Installations?

What region (US NE, SW, Europe, etc) are you in, and what markets do you typically serve? Are there outside factors (weather, local economic concerns, population shrinking, etc) that could be impacting available opportunities? Does your integration rely on net-new customers? It sounds like you may not have a solid base of recurring revenue from your existing customers, through maintenance contracts, SMAs, etc. 

I'm not trying to be too pessimistic, but as you mention, with a growing economy and a growing surveillance market, if your business was even at the same revenue as previous year's, that is a sign that something is broken.

Your region is quite important.  Here in Seattle, customers contact 5-7 vendors and are lucky if they get 1-2 answers.  Seattle has been booming for quite a while (not sure of the stats most likely top 3 in the nation).

Install backlog here is 6 weeks.

The verticals integrators service can affect this too.  The US Government fiscal year (2018) ends in a couple of weeks, so a lot of budgets are sucking wind right now.

Schools are getting back in session, so they aren't really spending money on capital projects with class room and hallways full of kids.  But the holiday breaks/ Spring Break  '19 windows are still on the horizon.

Being an integrator can seem feast or famine many months.    Either you're starving, or you're drinking from the firehose.  

We are booked about 6 weeks out right now, possibly longer. I haven't put everything on the calendar. I finally hired a 3rd guy.

We are a small startup, almost 2 years old. I guess soon I won't be a startup. We do a lot of marketing and we focus on a vertical that has multiple locations and are always acquiring new locations. Since we are small, this may not be an accurate measurement.

What size projects are you doing? What verticals? Any suspicions on why the pipeline is dry?

The market here in Seattle for techs/installers is booming.  $35/hour is too low, near 30 current techs and can't find anymore. 

We have hit an odd slump starting mid-August.  It is week to week right now.  There are large projects on the backlog but many are a couple months from starting due to construction.

Our demographic: Midwest and primarily servicing automotive, industrial, utility, and multi-tenant retail spaces with surveillance and access control.  We do not touch educational or government work.

We're a small (or midsize, depending on your point of view) shop of about 2 dozen people in the Southteast, commercial only. We're about 4 weeks out right now. Some municipal contracts have done really well for us, even though the margin is low. But we expect to see another year over year increase for past 5 years.

For medium-sized projects, we are out about a month right now. Residential we are still doing same day since our business model allows for that. We've brought more accounts online this year than any other year in our companies history. 

60% of our business is retail and manufacturing. This side of our business is growing but not as fast as our residential side. 

We had to make some major changes to our business model to see this growth this year. I can say with confidence if we had kept doing what we were doing for the last 30 years we would not have seen the growth we saw this year. 

Earlier this year, we had too many projects on the burner for this summer/fall season. 

Our largest customer, a public funded non profit hit cash flow problems and the yearly budget got axed. They still have some new construction/smaller projects, but they cut nearly six figures out for the year. 

Our next largest client has yet to pull the trigger on a multi site install that was slated for early summer, but is way behind on the approval process. Seems as if it may be due to cash flow as well? They were very eager early on. 

And another restaurant chain has been kicking the can for six months now. Was only a $30k project, but they asked us for a strict install timeframe, so we have kept them penciled in to accommodate, but it’s still not a done deal.

Since we /had/ a bunch of projects upcoming, I decided to pass on some smaller jobs earlier this year. That is looking like a bad decision now. 

Moral of the story, take the work in front of you today. Pipe dreams don’t pay bills. The beginning of the year was unicorns farting rainbows, but it really just looks like horseshit now. 

Couple of random thoughts: I'm in the SouthEast and it's much slower for us.  The worst part is the price deflation in video.  It's essentially all labor now and that's the tough part. 

I'm reminded of another industry story, a local restaurant owner made a bunch of money and sold his restaurant and got into building cell towers about 20 years ago.  Now he wants back in the restaurant business.  I'm assuming the build out got mostly done and there's just not much going on right now.  Somewhat similar in surveillance. Go-go years early 2000's when digital recording became the norm and prices were sky high.  Now it's primarily upgrades and new construction.  Couple that with price deflation and you have to shrink your footprint in terms of geographic area served.  We used to drive up to 200 miles for a job. Not any more.

In 2011, we had one of our largest revenue years due largely to a couple of large jobs, $250k + to correctional facilities.  I subbed out the cabling to one of those jobs and paid them handsomely because we were booked up installing the first one.  Cameras were $400-$600 each or more with PTZ's, Dell Servers, Racks, Software licenses etc.  Those days were good. 

Amazon: had a school principal ask me to come out and spec a system upgrade.  He's 100 miles from anywhere but referred by a good customer so I had to at least go by.  Large school building about 12 cameras, he wants 16-20 and wants it done more professionally. During the walkthrough he confides that the previous vendor quoted him $8500 but he checked prices on Amazon and could buy hardware for $1500.  See last sentence of 1st paragraph....

Within our sector in the UK (Grade A fit-outs City Of London), any lead time is a luxury. Typically the $400k job range will have been tendered and the security specialist engaged at a very late stage (PO received). The electrical contractors will expect you on site within a week or so to first fix and the whole program is dictated, so any thought of lead time or our program goes out of the window. It's the nature of the beast which you can either bitch about or work with. The reality is that first fix isn't a show stopper and we are able to mobilize pretty quickly using sub-contracted labour - the bigger issue is that the design won't have been developed since tender so once engaged - it's like re-inventing the wheel because the consultants will only have cut and pasted the spec, leaving the integrator to redesign from the ground up in days. But that's what makes us who we are and why we can say we are a professional integrator, but it would be so much better if we were engaged from the prime contract award and a consultant actually did their job for a change. The one thing that is universally true is NEVER to think that a consultant actually knows what they are talking about and has actually done any work at all in developing a specification. They never check the door types, ceiling types, client/landlord splits, comms room BTU or any tempest threat to the installed primary cable routes. Hey ho....

Currently were full for the next six weeks. 

We are approaching 90 days out...please send help!

Seriously though, if anyone is available for prevailing wage work in the NYC area please PM me.