How many mousetraps? The Siren song of choice

Recently a good friend of mine, who is considering starting his own A/V company, asked me how many manufacturer dealerships he would need in order to get started.  My off the cuff answer was three... one from a major switching/control/audio company (Crestron, Harman (AMX), Extron), one larger IT distributor (Ingram Mico, Almo, Synnex) and one general purpose distributor (BTX, Tecnec, Anixter, Greybar) and you could do a vast majority of commercial, Pro AV projects. 

This got me thinking - if this my gut reaction and what I would counsel someone just getting started, why do I seem to consistently counsel my clients to use differing product lines?  As a part of a monster A/V organization (AVI-SPL) we have a huge diversity of choices and a long line of companies that would love to do more business with that aren't doing very much today. 

What it comes down to is the Siren song of choice.  As industry pros, my sales engineers and I want to deliver the best value to our client.  To do this, we have to balance client preferences and bias, what existing products are in use and/or have been "standardized" on, pricing and special programs, technical expertise of our own teams, product availability, and a myriad of other things.  Thus we are getting tugged into different directions, trying to put together the winning proposal whether we are the only person they are talking to or in a crowded field responding to an RFQ.

We are also all creatures of habit... we did a room "exactly like this (except a little bit different)" just last month and we can duplicate it (well, mostly) and voila! This job is easy.  Despite this frequent situation at all A/V companies I have ever worked for... I have yet to seen a company that consistently delivers standardized systems on a regular basis.  My own company has a huge initiative around this... management communicates this and pushes for use of this kind of approach, but somehow it still is the exception. 

The idea "mass customization" was delivered to our team by a brilliant speaker at our Global Sales Summit, inspiring us to imagine ourselves being able to deliver consistent quality with standardized offerings while still allowing for choice.  The idea of being the Starbucks of the A/V world where you can have 10,000 variations to suit your taste but it all comes out of the same two or three core offerings of coffee or tea or whatever goes into a Frappucino sounds both plausible and profitable. 

I step back to think about it and I'm like "Of course we can do this!" But then we get back to work and do things like we have always done - we create a new BOM from scratch and start writing a narrative scope just like the last one.  This is where I think we get into trouble yet again... we have choice AND only limited accountability.  There is a carrot and no stick, so status quo remains status quo. 

What I see coming at some point in our industry is a company that does this thing right.  This company will figure out how to reduce the number of choices but still give clients an exceptional experience by delivering quality solutions that are adaptable, cost effective, and have a consistent user experience that is easy to use and allows them to work they way they want and need to. This company will instill this approach into it's workforce and culture like excellent companies do throughout our modern corporate system, like the aforementioned Starbucks or Enterprise... 

The question for me is, will this company be a large established entity in the industry such as my own, a startup or smaller business that gets this thing right and launches, or a corporation that comes into this industry from the outside and shows us how this is done... We have many new (or relatively new) and large players in this industry including Google, Microsoft, and Cisco that could figure this out...  Recently a Haworth furniture, a large player in the furniture industry, joined this industry by offering a product they developed in house because they wanted a better collaboration experience, and it is pretty impressive (Bluescape). 

There is an opportunity for leadership here, and I am thinking through how I can be the change rather then waiting for the change to occur.  My question is, whether you are my best ally or fiercest competitor, are you also willing to stay clear of the siren song of choice, focus on a limited set of solutions, and try and reap the benefits of mass customization.  I want to feel the effects of Jim Collin's flywheel (from Good to Great, on my Mt. Rushmore of business books), and I think this may be a way to get my own personal flywheel cranked up, if only I can find the discipline and inspire my support team to get on board, as well as make some solid choices about who I want to go to battle with.

This is my 3rd LInkedIn post (keeping track is easy at this point).  I welcome your thoughts, feedback, challenges and critiques so please feel free to comment at will.  I hope you enjoyed!

- Brad Orme