Plotting Your Commercial Product Path
Many residential custom integrators are toying with the idea of exploring new, complementary business outlets to make up for thinner revenue streams in their established discipline. But how do they decide which are safest, which are close enough to what they already do, and which offer an uncomplicated backtrack path, if one is needed?
Gary Plavin, president of projectiondesign LLC, manufacturer of high-performance DLP-based projection solutions for the professional, business and home cinema markets, suggests that those looking to take their first steps down the commercial road be sure they’re cognizant of the “delivery value” of what they choose to begin selling.
“Your whole organization needs to be focused on the value and performance of different goods,” he says. “At the core is making sure you have the ideology in place in your company. If you have to do business a different way, will you be setting up to succeed or fail? If the time you need to invest in a new business disrupts your main business, which business do you want to be in? You need to figure it out.”
With those caveats in mind, Plavin discusses the following growth areas:
• 3-D – “It’s cool, and projectiondesign is all about 3-D (the company released a portable, high-resolution active 3-D stereoscopic projector just last year). But is it for the home? I don’t believe so, at this time, because of lack of content; the only real content out there for the home is gaming; and it has to be one intense gamer willing to spend the money to do it the right way. On the commercial side, it’s about image generation, calibration for a uniform image, color matching—it’s a very specialized vertical. This category is not low-hanging fruit; it has to do, on the commercial side, with very specialized content with complex system integration.” (For more on 3-D, see pg. 34)
• Boardroom/classroom integration – “It can be a good business as long as you know the state and local codes for the areas where you do business, and that the systems you are integrating are compliant with those codes. Appropriate research must be done, and you have to decide if it is synergistic with the way you do business.”
