Marty is exactly why hik and dahua have gained so much traction. When you go from selling bosch and pelco at 30 points but selling based on value, and you feel you can provide the same value with other less costly equipment, why wouldn't you? I'm sure he adds value ( late invoicing, etc), but the point is, dahu and hik capitalized on and legitimized something that has been happening for a long time. It used to be the oem distributors that could do this stuff (g4/intellicam, unix, cop, etc... anyone remember American Sentry Guard???) Then dealers got smart bypassing those distys, then hik got smart and started branding at the same price point. Point is its not hard to do what marty is doing. Selling hik at high margins is probably quite easy as it has been for us selling other similar products in the past. If you're going to sell that stuff, that's how you should be doing it, high margin with tons of value add. I don't know martys business so I can't say if he is adding enough value to make his margins a decent value proposition for his clients, but apparently his clients think so if he is not stretching here.
The real difficulty lies in going from oem type products to the upper tier products without choking your business. When you're used to 60+ points, having a manufacturer tell you you're limited to 35 or 40 feels like suicide. However, this is exactly what we are doing. (Not the suicide part tho, we will leave that to those are are racing to the bottom). At the end of the day, margin isn't the important metric, because there are so many moving parts. For us we've started looking at profit dollars per device, and we find that even with lower margins, we're actually doing better with premium product. It helps that we don't have to worry about what's on sale and what scandal comes next, and sleeping well at night without having to question my own ethics is also pretty nice.
And no, we won't touch hikvision and have never knowingly sold one of their products.