Maverick's installation arm makes redundancies following restructure
Firm reveals job losses cover staff in admin, sales and engineering
ProInstall, the installation arm of distributor Maverick, has made a number of redundancies as part of a restructure.
Set up in September 2004 with an investment of £3m from Maverick (CRN 11 July), ProInstall's aim was to assist VARs that were unable to install complicated audiovisual (AV) offerings, mainly in the education space.
ProInstall would not reveal the number of redundancies as CRN went to press, but CRN understands it to be in the region of 16 employees.
Kevin Morrison, managing director of ProInstall, told CRN: "We've made a number of changes across the business - effectively it's a restructure of our overall sales model. I'm not revealing numbers, but it includes staff across admin, sales and engineers. We've not changed our overall capacity – we can still install more than 600 rooms per month."
However, Morrison admitted that previously ProInstall had the capacity to do more installations a month but that sufficient business was not coming in.
"Education spend has slowed down. The fourth quarter was slow in the AV market for everyone. We've got some new products and services coming in this year and we're doing more corporate work than ever before," he said.
Jon Sidwick, managing director of Maverick, told CRN: "The education offering ProInstall started out with has been strong but the corporate offering is getting stronger for us. We continue to do 600 education installs a month but we are now adding a lot more to what ProInstall offers. This year the corporate sector is a big growth area for us, along with PolyVision's Thunder interactive system.”
Darren Lewitt, divisional director at Midwich, said: "If you're going to set up an installation business you need to spend a lot of time focusing on it. We'll shortly be offering some basic installation and set-up solutions for resellers to sell. We'll work with a chosen installation partner and resellers will be able to sell installation packages."