Results of SDM’s Forecast Study coupled with an outlook from leading dealers and integrators, offers a very positive promise for the security industry’s 2014 performance: 12 percent growth.
Sometimes it’s good to be wrong. In late 2012, security systems integrators and dealers forecasted that their total annual revenue would improve only slightly — 1 percent, on average — during 2013. It could have been the dismal economy casting its shadow over their predictions, because a year later, they were proven incorrect. Among the integrators and dealers who participated in SDM’s 2014 Subscriber Market Forecast Study, their total annual revenue grew by an average of 9.9 percent. What’s more, they expect 2014 to offer 12 percent growth — even better performance.
“At the beginning of the recession, when the sky was falling, we had a big company meeting and said, ‘Hey somebody’s got to buy security, and it might as well be from us.’ Our sales have increased every year since then…” says Jeremy Bates, owner and general manager of Bates Security/Sonitrol of Lexington, Lexington, Ky., who attributes such success to being proactive with customers in all ways possible. Bates, featured on the cover of this issue, is one of SDM’s 2014 Forecast panelists who weighed in anecdotally on the Forecast survey questions. His business finished out 2013 with a 17.8 percent advance in total annual revenue, but he does not expect to maintain that rate in 2014 since eliminating some large security projects that added significant revenue to the books, but demanded too many resources, Bates explains. He expects a lesser increase of about 5 percent in 2014.