Security Sales & Integration April 2021 - 29

them grow, so they build the resume. It's strong
for our company, but it's also very strong for
our clients to have those technicians who don't
just learn something once and then retry it 20
times over their career. We do that with our
sales team as well. They become vertical market subject matter experts, digging deep into
solutions we can provide to our clients, fit their
regulatory or internal needs, for HR or legal or
whatever it may be.
Executing a repeatable commercial model
is more challenging than in residential.
How do you deploy a uniform approach
but still deliver tailored solutions?
Frasier: We try to be disciplined in having fewer

customers. I would rather have 15 great new customers than 100 just for numbers sake. We want
to be very selective who we work with. Half our
employees are embedded. This is overused, but
we are true partners with our customer base. I'll
never forget when I was going through this process, somebody said, " We have over 2,000 customers. " I said, " Do you think I want to know
that I'm 2,001? " That doesn't make me feel good.
In being selective who you work with, you tend
to focus a little bit more on the process to remain
customizable versus being cookie-cutter. We're
wired to be that partner that has an embedded
employee who knows more about that organization than the customer themselves probably
does. We're an extension of the customer.

Nemerofsky: One of the things we feel makes

us a little different is with these embedded clients that we have, it helps us innovate and bring
them new technologies to solve problems. When
we get embedded in a client, we get to understand both their security and business operations.
Recommending innovative technology makes it
a lot easier for everybody because they know we
understand their program and what could help.
One of our differentiators is that we train our
people to work on deter versus detect. What
does that mean? Our competitors are selling
gunshot detection, we're selling weapons detection. We want to know before that gun or
knife gets in the facility, not that you're firing
a gun inside our client's facility. We sell fullheight turnstile revolvers. Our competitors are
selling half-way turnstiles. That doesn't prevent
piggybacking, that detects piggybacking. We
talk to our clients about duty of care. If you're
protecting one facility this way, you really have

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SS2104 pp26-30 SAGE Integration.indd 29

a duty of care to your employees to protect all
your facilities in the same manner.
Things like that help us innovate, whether it's
keeping our clients on the cutting edge and upgrading their access to protect them from cyber
threats or innovation around gunshot detection,
anti-drone detection. Innovation is how we're
trying to help our clients protect their facilities
and people. Then to install those, obviously, leads
us into the operational excellence piece of it.

Leadership says SAGE goes
" beyond boiler-plate solutions to deliver best-in-class
solutions " and brings " creative
ideas and on-the-ground
support to prepare for and
mitigate integrated challenges. "

Little did anyone know as you ramped up
to launch in early 2020, a dark pandemic
cloud was looming. How did you adapt?
How did it alter the rollout?
Frasier: We started the massive undertaking of

rebranding SAGE in 4Q 2019. Our goal was
to roll out at ISC West. I was in California on
a Sunday night and set to leave Monday when
they announced Las Vegas was shutting down.
We adapted. We didn't stop the rebranding
by any means; we became a virtual company literally overnight with our employee base.
We rolled SAGE out virtually. As Mike Tyson
has said, " Everybody has a plan till they get
punched in the mouth. " I'm an optimist and
what happened in 2020 presented us with an
awesome opportunity to test our business model in the most unique time. You get punched in
the mouth and guess what? You get a chance to
test your plan pretty quick.

Nemerofsky: As a leadership team, we were
virtual for a period of time but our field personnel were essential, especially our embedded employees. We hired 12 new employees
and didn't let go of any, due to the increasing
workload from existing clients. If we had everybody working together and one person became
APRIL 2021 Security Sales & Integration

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Security Sales & Integration April 2021

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