How To Organize A Growing Security Integrator?

Finding good project managers is an important part of scaling.

The tricky part is that a good PM will typically be a mediocre engineer while excellent engineers often make terrible PMs.

I found that the temperaments were different. The best PM hire I made was when I hired these 2 guys out of college who were friends. One was clearly far stronger on technically skills and he did well in an engineering role. However, the other one, who was solid, but not exceptionally technical, became an excellent project manager. What made him so good was that he was very organized (it wasn't taught, it was just how he was) and had a very even temperament. This made him very effective working and coordinating with lots of people from sales to engineering to customers.

I have to strongly agree with Brian (and John as well) on all of his points, but most importantly that engineering and sales should be separate. I strongly advocate separating sales and engineering.

Like Brian, I too have seen the effect of mixing sales and engineering many times. On paper it sounds like a good idea: generate technically proficient sales people, have them engineer/estimate their own projects, and you have just condensed your payroll substantially. What you typically end up with is either a poor engineer who can sell well or a poor sales person who is a fantastic engineer. This limits what this person is most effective at by dragging them down with items they are not proficient in.

Mixing sales and engineering is a recipe for disaster IMO. Eventually the company de-evolves from a company selling product into a company that is just servicing legacy engineering disasters until the warranty expires. Alternately, the really proficient techs will burn out as they remedy engineering mistakes in the field on a constant basis.

In my opinion a growing effective company in the integration industry will target the following roles. Too much beyond this is just generating fancy titles.

• Executive management
• Sales personnel (also marketing)
• Accounting personnel
• Engineering -- Ideally the engineer should be the person that is making everything work together by cleaning up estimates, field remedies, supporting technicians, etc.
• Estimation -- Determines and haggles the cost of product down to arrive at a COST of the project. Sales and/or management determines the margin. This role is frequently merged with engineering.
• Project Management -- Adequately covered by Brian above.
• Operations/service -- This role is different than project management but this seems to be the most common misconception. Projects are unique, have a finite end, and produce a finished product or fail. Operations tasks are items like staffing, service calls, and other repetitive, recurring tasks.
• Technicians -- This one is obvious but it cannot be said enough that nothing happens without these folks. A good one is hard to find and even harder to keep.
• Service technicians -- These personnel allow the techs to focus on items which generate significant revenue while avoiding being entangled in "putting out fires".

As a small company it would need to have enough budget available to fulfill those roles so I would prioritize if the budget is not available. I would start with sales, engineering, accounting, and techs. Project management would be next on my list with operations, service techs, and estimation roles being items I would add as the company grows and has the need to turn out more estimates/bids, service work, etc.

Finally, to conclude my filibuster, I would recommend looking at software and processes to tie together the company as a whole from A to Z. If not done already, this would be one of the first purchases I would recommend. The longer no unified software or processes are in place the harder this knot becomes to untangle. Thousands of Excel spreadsheets and manual data re-entry into many different systems does not equal success.

Brian

I totally agree with you on the engineer part. Organizations with a large number of sales representatives or those that work on larger complex projects would do well to employ a "sales engineer" dedicated to assisting the sales team from a technical standpoint with system layout, equipment selection and proposal generation. This is probably the guy who's a great engineer and an average (at best) salesman. (Full disclosure: I was a design engineer that was tired of running AutoCAD and estimating software all day and went into sales for the money and struggled at it, spent most of his time helping the other sales staff, and discovered he was a better sales engineer than a sales rep.)

I disagree that a PM is an NCO. The guy on the front line telling the grunts where to point their rifles should be a superintendent or a working foreman that reports directly to the PM. Unless it is one really large project, most PM's are managing multiple (literally dozens) of projects. A PM's primary function is dealing with project schedules, procurement, change orders, compliance issues, job cost accounting and most importantly making sure the pay requests and invoices go out properly and on time in order to get paid. The PM is not an NCO, he's the company commander.

A suggestion I can offer to anyone growing an integration company:

1. Be prepared to invest in personnel, training and resources, this won't be easy or cheap.

2. Hire experienced quality people and pay them a better than average wages. Don't be afraid of hiring quality leadership from the outside over propmoting long-term employees, take caution not to make some other company's disgruntled managment your disgruntled management. Know up front your best tech won't necessarily be a good service manager, your best salesman will likely be a poor general manager. When adding new installers or technicians, hire for attitude and train for skill - skill can be taught, attitude is inherent and can seldom be changed.

3. Give your staff the resources and training required to provide excellence for your customers.

3. Let your employees do their jobs and gather experience. Don't micromanage or meddle in small details unless absolutely necessary. Manage from 10,000 feet and mentor always.

4. Given all of this, if your employees don't perform move them along elsewhere (or in a different position within the company) hire someone else who will.