I know many of you are in larger cities, so this may be moot, but I'm in a mid sized town in a fairly rural state. When I started in this industry over 15 years ago, we went where the business was. Typically chasing bids for camera systems: pd's, schools, jails, airports, etc. Most jobs were over $50k (some many times that) and very profitable. We thought nothing of driving 150-200 miles for a job/project that might take weeks and involve several thousand $$ in lodging and meals while on the road.
Of course then they became your customers and you had to service them. A school district with 100+ cameras 150 miles away becomes an issue to go troubleshoot a single camera out, but we did it, when it called for it. It was just a cost of doing business, and we seemed to be rolling along just fine.
But then a few things happened: Prices dropped and projects therefore got much smaller revenue wise, techs got tired of the road and quit, and most prime customers more or less got "camera-ed", (meaning the large scale projects got fewer and far between).
What I've evolved to is a reluctance to even consider an opportunity that is over 50 miles from our base, and we've drastically lowered our internal head count. I've relinquished many of the formerly large installations that were just too far to service properly, and I rely much more on contract cable pulling, with us handling the connection/installation and integration.