Maverick sees healthy turnover rise

Distributor looks back on a successful year and bets on year-end results

Sid Stanley: We decided we wanted to ­significantly strengthen our ability to serve the specialist audiovisual customer

Maverick has revealed that it doubled its turnover ­year on year in the 2009 ­calendar year, and indicated it expects to do the same again this year.

Sid Stanley, UK general manager at the audiovisual (AV) focused distributor, confirmed the claim, but said he was not permitted to reveal the actual turnover and profit figures of the C2000-owned firm.

However, he added that UK staff numbers had grown from 20 to 30 in the past 12 months, with a target set to add another 10 this year. It now has 23 front-office staff dedicated to audiovisual.

“Over the past 12 months, we decided we wanted to ­significantly strengthen our ability to serve the specialist audiovisual customer.

“We added 10 staff members – mainly in frontline field sales, individual resales and in product management of the things most of our ­customers are looking at,” he said.

“We wanted to be closer to our most important customers and start giving them enhanced access to our inventory.”

Stanley said Promethean’s interactive whiteboards (IWBs) had become a core product for the distributor. Meanwhile, Maverick’s AV Academies – three of which have been held since December – are teaching more resellers how to sell AV.

“It might be a bit old fashioned, but we took 30 of our largest customers to Las Vegas for a week.

“We are in this for a long time and the relationships that we build with those 30 customers will help drive results for both of us, so that kind of thing is worth doing,” said Stanley.

Peripherals such as mounts and projection technologies, and the education sector also came in for increased efforts that appeared to be paying off, according to Stanley.

All together, new investment made in the business over the year had probably hit seven figures, he added.

AV industry association InfoComm has launched a study of the global AV market.

“Growth from 2009 to 2012 is projected to be better than growth from 2006 to 2009,” it states in the executive summary.

“Both North America and Europe are expected to see growth of about nine per cent during the next three years,” the study claimed.