A united force in a-v

Imagine an a-v systems design and installation company with a turnover of EUR2.5bn (£2.1bn) and more than 4,500 employees.

Impossible? Probably, especially given the scarcity of merger funds available in the current economic climate, but the AV Global Alliance – originally instigated by British company AV Machines (AVM) – is, in essence, such a company, with 24 partners operating in 160 cities and 29 countries.

The principle behind the alliance, which AVM chairman Sandy Macpherson describes as a preference club, is straightforward. Member companies have clients on their roster who want work done overseas. If one company is unable to do the work, it can turn to another alliance member to do the work on its behalf or directly for the client rather than turning the work down and risk losing an ‘in’ with the client. No money changes hands, but everyone – the clients and the partners – benefits.

‘Everybody in the club has earned the place to be there because they are well qualified, so they are the kind of people with whom our clients would be happy to do business,’ says Macpherson. ‘We are all preferring one another. It is not exclusive – if someone can’t do the job then we will go somewhere else – but by preferring each other we are a reinforcing society. It is all about having mutually compatible abilities.’

Standard bearers

The slow, but real process of setting up international standards by some of the key manufacturers and by trade bodies such as InfoComm has helped, because both clients and other partners can readily assess their potential colleagues’ accreditation levels. But Macpherson stresses that the alliance doesn’t want to become a trade association.

And although videoconferencing has become a tool of the global corporations that are the alliance’s major clients, the work it is doing is not just about videoconferencing.

‘I don’t think there are many jobs we do that are pure videoconferencing – it is too narrow a medium,’ says Macpherson. ‘But by definition, the multinational clients are all over the place, while the a-v market in terms of integrators like us is still incredibly fragmented, so there is a real mis-match between the size of our clients and the size of a company such as AVM.

‘One way to overcome that mis-match has been to set up the alliance. Users need to know there is the same quality of work available to them in Singapore as there is in London and that is what is driving the alliance.’

The pay-back

Macpherson and his colleagues first proposed the idea of the alliance in 2007, and it started out with a handful of companies meeting at the InfoComm exhibition in 2008. But he is keen to emphasise that the alliance has no formal financial implications or involvement by the companies concerned: ‘We facilitate the partnership, and because of the way that the partnership agreements work, we control who comes to the party. But although it was our idea, we are not getting more out of it than anyone else.’

So what are the alliance members getting out of it? ‘First of all, we can say to our clients “yes, we can look after your needs, wherever they occur”,’ says Macpherson. ‘Second, by feeding work to and from the partners we are likely to be the first port of call for customers. We are now able to bid for work that we would not otherwise be able to bid for and we are passing on work that we would have to pass on anyway, to someone we trust.’

Clients, he adds, are recognising the value of being able to go to an alliance of well-qualified companies. And clients are shrewd business observers in their own right, who ‘see how fragmented the market is and recognise that someone has taken the effort to start putting it all together’.