"The Company The Industry Always Feared Would Arrive" Is Here

Good luck installing in Residential houses. As they state, if you cannot access sofits and areas to hide the wiring, your goose is cooked and you make no money.

I'm not afraid. We gave up on small jobs a long time ago.

Vendors that don't understand the true costs of an installation business; vehicle depreciation, health insurance, lost time, difficult installation conditions, etc. think it's a good idea to fix bid an install without pre examining site conditions. They work real hard and earn very little.

For mid and large sized jobs it won't work due to complexity.

We call those guys Trunk Slammers and there's plenty of them in SoFLA.

Residential customers are the worst. They are the most picky for neatness of wiring, the installation wiring is usually more difficult (for a finished home than a commercial space with T bar ceiling) and residential customers need the most hand holding and tech support. They are also the first to complain and ask for a discount or refund if anything goes not to their liking. Good luck to you sir.

So my question is, I pay alot on an annual basis for insurance, state licensing, employee licensing, background checks, continuing education, etc... remind me again why I and every other legitimate company pays for all the above?

Let it backfire on them...indeed residential customers are picky and I doubt this company will pay its installers for return visits. They will quickly learn to hate it just like auto techs hate warranty because they get screwed when it comes time to pay.

Another Attempt to be the middleman and make money for nothing

only truck-slammer type company's will put up with this and they after being broke will eventually side step this company and work on their own capacity driving more work from these references.

I see this already happening in the industry and I just stay out and overprice myself so they dont want me to work for them .

There is no clause for error, installation, insurances, piping, extra's

The Bottom line is that the consumer pays the price for the cheep , unprofessional , drops that any monkey can do as they don't, fish walls, don't run attics, and crawls

This will turn into the trunk-slammer type installs like dish, direct tv with out of car installers with limitation s on what can and cannot be installed.

Remember you always get what you pay for. and that's what you will get

unprofessional , quick , down and dirty techniques

I am thankful for all of the comments here (even the haters!) as we learn from everyone. I don't think a national installation model is of concern much (referencing the poll) as we're creating incremental business for installers vs. trying to take any from an existing pie. There's a huge growth window coming with the changing end user demand paired with the changing technology. Hopefully we can be a source of new revenue, profit, and overhead absorption for the installer base. We should be incremental revenue, not anything that will interfere with the existing revenues.

I have to ask, who would accept an 8 camera installation, blind, for 1100.00? The building could be built like a fortress or it could have no way to run cables from point a to point b without conduit. Then what??

High-end COMMERCIAL IP Video, Access Control and minor Electronic security is where I want to be and will stay, Thank you but No thank you.

This reminds me of my AV days when Circuit City and Tweeter tried to take a custom install business and make it cookie cutter. It didn't turn out so well for them.

Also a couple of years ago (it could still be in use) Walmart tried to do something very similar where they had fixed install prices for mounting TVs and installing surround sound systems. The money wasn't worth it from a installer standpoint. Atleast not for anyone who had experienced or knew what they are doing.

I used to do a lot of residential installs and they are hard to do right while making the customer happy and still make money. That was doing AV work and I think CCTV is even harder and takes more time for residential. Residential customers are VERY demanding and want everything for nothing. Good luck as I want nothing to do with this.

In my opinion this won't radically change the industry. It's simply another play on the same business model that's been used by many of the national integrators and organizations like PSA - subbing work out.

Back in my national integrator days our Ops group had a very large network of subs, our rate to them was $55 per hour, with our estimator for hours needed to complete as the basis. We'd send them the job and it was up to them to accept, reject or counter. In some areas where work was heavy (or union was required) we were paying more. I won't be surprised if David finds himself in this same scenario

As for what will truly disrupt our industry model, there's only one thing I see on the horizon that could/would do it - a true wireless cam solution that works. When that finally appears all bets are off

David,

HD analog vs IP - what do you prefer / think your target end user would prefer? I see you are leading with IP but I would think HD analog would be cheaper and more conducive to less sophisticated installers, yes/no?

It's interesting that the strategy is to get the expert integrators on board with this as a "fill-in-the-gaps" thing.

I can only see integrators being against this type of work since it guarantees that zero money is being made off equipment sales and all of it from labour. A while back IPVM did a poll asking if your business would do labour-only installs and most were against it. We have a policy against installing customer-provided equipment (Costco, Best Buy) because we don't want to be associated with crap. When they have problems down the road people quickly forget where they bought the gear and badmouth the installation company instead.

I don't know that taking the equipment sales (gravy) away from integrators and sticking them with the hard parts of the job (labour) for the worst low-end market segment of cheapskates and selling it as "fill in your downtime" is going to work very well. Any reputable company is going to be run off their feet busy at any given time of the year, but you'll definitely attract the slammers. In the end, you'll get a reputation for poor quality rushed installs, spend a boatload on after install support and refunds and close up shop taking all your investor money with you.

David Happe I spend the first part of my career installing higher end residential alarm, audio, structured cabling, and home theater. I would be devaluing my time/labor to take this cookie cutter work. There is no way we could deliver the quality of work we do now at the prices you're willing to pay. Besides we have more work than we know what to do with. I do know some guys who are looking for work and they would be all over this but I wouldn't let them work on my house if they were the last group on earth.

I have appreciated the discussion and the chance to engage. I will slow down my posts but you all have been awesome. I will continue to watch your posts and chime in if I have anything else specific to add. You guys are the experts, so you likely see the value proposition (right or wrong). I have appreciated the interchange, and hope to be able to engage with many of you down the road. Thanks! - Dave

It's an interesting idea, I just can't see anyone serious working with this. Much akin to the ADT licensed dealer network where ADT brought in smaller alarm companies and used them for their labor (and still do) - as contractors, I see no difference in this save that I think the installers working to do this will be even smaller.

If I were fresh out of High School looking for a venture and had a pickup truck with tools this would probably be a great venture. But for alot of us, who have been doing this for a long time, most of these customers that would be the locations for these installs would be one even most smaller institutions would run from. (unless its commercial)

Years ago when I was an actual physical installer, we ran into some slow / sluggish times and subbed out our labor to some of the larger integrators and while it wasn't great it allowed us to keep our teams going until things picked up, this isn't that far from that concept, save the problem with residential installations and the super cheap and super picky residential owner. I couldn't imagine that part, but if he can find some way to fulfill his market of cheap cameras being installed in homes for a cheap fixed cost, more power to him.

I think the difficulty revolves around getting the alarm companies that can work within this model.

Jon,

I don't know if it would be in Vigilants best interest to allow cherry picking, for 1, how would you know save to look at the area you were to install cameras at?

U11, if I could cast 10 votes I would.

This sounds a lot like satellite dish installs. Just sling in the devices any old way, as fast as possible and hope you make a profit.

I have been selling IP CCTV cameras to the residential market online for over 7 years now. The customer who usually want cameras and want to spend the money over the basic wireless plug in netgear types, usually are the ones who self install as they dont want to pay the extra costs with an integrator. Many customers though are going for the lowest entry point for cameras and just adding them onto their existing home security systems like ADT. The biggest factor we have seen is they want something easy to use, and integrated into what they are already using. I have a cousin that just rebuilt a house and they went with cable companies security and camera package as it was low cost and simple. Not many features but they are not the types of people who are techie.

In my opinion, this model is a long shot for long term viability. In the past we have done over $1million online in hardware sales and this provides very little profit, even with having an extremely low overhead model. Very hard to scale. Honestly I am surprised someone is trying to do this at this point, if it was 5 years ago i could see the possibility of decent revenue, but today it is going to be very tough.

With this in mind, to me anyways, you can make more money consulting for enterprise customers, use the same skills that this type of business would require to try to launch, and make 2-3x the profits.

There will be tons of installations without licensed or insured contractors. End users will accept the cost because it is cheap, and when something goes wrong, there will be one big mess. I see lawsuits abound. These people have no intentions of following the law. Most don't even know there is one, and if they do, they don't seem to care.