technologyreseller.co.uk 29 a project management overlay, doesn’t have an engineering stack to be able to put the engineering designs together. They’re essentially a freelancer who might buy a few screens and install them. The trouble is, once Gary’s installed those screens he’s gone, and when the display breaks he’s nowhere to be seen. If you’ve ever tried to get back in touch with a freelance plumber, you’ll know the scenario.” Gore adds that IT resellers diversifying into AV sometimes make the same mistake with bad outcomes for clients. “Lots of IT channel resellers are trying to diversify into AV because they get the markup on the hardware. They’ll then hire ‘Gary and a van’ to install it. Speaking candidly, they completely mess it up 99% of the time. They might have buying power on the equipment, but without the engineering expertise that sits beneath it and the ongoing service proposition, all they’re doing is bringing in ‘Gary and a van’ and stepping away.” Gore admits that in its earliest days, SPOR too was a ‘Gary and a van’ operation, before its prospects were transformed by DITAM. “Once we started deploying the DITAM model and we articulated that to our salespeople and we integrated it within the business, we were much more successful. Our message is: we will design, we will integrate, we will train. We’re now very well established as a design and build AV company.” A design and build AV company with big ambitions. “One of the things we’re looking to do is acquire other companies that fit the individual letters in that DITAM model. I’m just about to sign off on our first acquisition that fits within the ‘D’. Then we might look to acquire companies covering the ‘I’, like HVAC, CCTV, access control, so that we become a workplace group as opposed to just an AV company,” explains Gore. Watch this space. www.wearespor.com business, whether that’s fully remote, a hybrid model or having everyone back in the office full-time. Whatever choice they make, they need to get the technology right. If you have a hybrid policy and you’re asking your staff to commute and spend £50 pounds on the train, when it’s really hot and there’s no air conditioning on the tube, they’re already stressed when they arrive at work. If they then walk into their first meeting at two minutes to nine, press start on the camera and the camera doesn’t work, completely messing up their client meeting, pitch or interview, your hybrid policy will have failed. Your employee will walk out of that meeting thinking ‘I’ve just spent two hours on a train. I’m hot, I’m bothered and I’ve spent £50 of my own money when I could have started my meeting at home and it would have worked’. You will have lost them. Proactive monitoring and maintenance is vital for hybrid working because it ensures the meeting room technology will work when your people come into the office.” Monitoring meeting room usage will also help organisations gauge the success of a hybrid working policy and identify areas where things aren’t working as well as they should. If Fred books the 12-person boardroom at 2 o’clock every Wednesday because he needs peace and quiet, you need to be able to measure that. Gore estimates that 70% of SPOR’s business is generated by office moves. “That’s when we become a design and build company for AV. We work alongside clients and design their office move technology stack. We provide all the equipment, we install it, and we onboard it onto our SPORTrack asset management and remote monitoring system. The other 30% is made up of retrofit installations when clients will essentially say ‘This stuff’s five years old. It’s starting to get a little bit glitchy. Can we consult with you on a proposed solution?’. We retrofit everything for them, decommission everything, recommission everything and get rooms back up and running with brand new kit.” Gary in a van Quite often, clients will come to SPOR after a bad experience with a less capable provider. “With smaller projects, businesses can end up hiring a freelancer, a ‘Gary in a van’, who doesn’t have team. We created SPOR Group to target that market,” says Gore. “Our basic premise in 2019 was standard meeting rooms, doing projects of up to about £250,000 and rolling out standard meeting rooms, with the same technology. That was our business plan. Since then, we’ve grown and become well respected for doing the full design and build of meeting room technology. We still do standard meeting rooms with video conferencing capabilities, but we also do boardrooms, we do large LED rollouts, we do experiential projects, we do auditoriums and town hall spaces. Whatever we do, the key is getting early engagement with clients and architects, doing the AV design alongside those people and doing the integration as the project progresses.” Service contracts Today, SPOR Group employs 30 people and has over 200 clients. Crucially, it also manages more than 1,500 meeting rooms across the world – the A (asset management) and M (monitoring) of DITAM. “In the early days, when we were just installing standard meeting rooms, we’d basically say to a client ‘If there’s any problem, give us a call and we’ll come and fix it’. That was the service contract. We’ve now progressed and matured as a company and offer remote monitoring and management. We can onboard client’s devices onto our proprietary platform (SPORTrack) and see the status of each one, enabling us to proactively monitor those devices and make an intervention whenever (and wherever) an issue is detected.” Not all customers want proactive monitoring – some are nervous about third parties monitoring their devices – so SPOR also offers reactive service contracts with defined SLAs, putting the onus on the customer to call a helpdesk when they have a problem. Gore estimates that 99% of customers choose a service contract, with a 50:50 split between the two options. Hybrid working He adds that a service contract, in fact the whole DITAM model, has become more important with hybrid working, the success of which depends on seamless, easy, reliable collaboration. “A lot of leaders are trying to work out the optimum working model for their AV Work Isn’t Working is available now in Kindle and paperback editions through The Endless Bookcase (https://theendlessbookcase.com/ books/work-isnt-working/) and Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/ dp/B0H2BRDVXC).
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