'We're seeing a massive bounce in business' - SCC AVS boss on why the future is bright for audiovisual

Graham Fry says pandemic has opened new doors for AV and outlines bold plans for growth

SCC AVS boss Graham Fry is confident the company is on course to triple the size of its business over the next five years amid a surge in demand for AV solutions as a result of the pandemic.

SCC AVS was originally known as Avsnet before it was acquired by SCC and rebranded as the reseller giant sought to make waves in the AV sector.

And Fry, the managing director of SCC AVS, lauded the impact of the acquisition on the rest of the SCC business.

That is despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Fry admits held SCC AVS' growth back even though it opened lots of new opportunities for the sector.

"We didn't grow as much as we expected," Fry explains.

"But business was good. It was just different business coming from different places than what we had previously seen. We were doing more in the public sector by enabling technology to help them through the pandemic.

"We did a big project for Central London Community Health, which is basically all the doctors across London, and we got 14,000 doctors able to do patient consultations by video in two weeks, and then started creating meeting rooms but for consultations for doctors.

"We saw a lot of commercial projects slowed down but public sector went right up, as they perhaps hadn't embraced technology.

"And then in the background there was also a lot of home working kits that we were selling like headphones, cameras, webcams, stuff like that, so it was really busy.

"It's definitely not been a bad industry to be in, in what has been a challenging time, and we're now seeing a massive bounce as businesses start to look to get people back into offices."

SCC AVS currently employs 60 to 70 people and recorded a revenue of £15m in 2020, Fry says, up from £8m in a 10-month period the year before.

Its previous offices have now closed, with the company's staff operating from home and SCC's various bases around the country, including the newly updated James House in Birmingham, and Fry believes there is plenty of untapped opportunity to grow through SCC.

This includes by expanding further into SCC's vast client base and using the company's distribution and data centers, which Fry says all give SCC AVS an important edge over its competitors.

"The merger has been brilliant," Fry said.

"We spent the first six to eight months looking at integration and since then it's just been trying to get into as many of the SCC client bases as possible to build awareness of what we do across SCC, and SCC has really embraced that.

"It's really created a very unique differential for us in the market. We're only really scratching the surface at the moment so there's still a lot of opportunity within the SCC client base that we're going after.

"I think some of the traditional audiovisual companies have probably suffered in the pandemic, especially because of a lack of access to the public sector frameworks and where spend was, whereas we had full access to that.

"And now we've got full access to all our original clients plus the whole of the SCC commercial client base to look at how we can help them as we move into what we call the new normal."

Many of these new opportunities have come about as a result of the pandemic changing people's perceptions on how AV can be used in a work environment, Fry says.

Key areas that he has picked out for growth include developments in application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate different collaboration tools, security for home workers, co-ordinating hot desk and meeting room systems in offices and lots more.

And although the surge in home working proved a profitable source of income during the pandemic, Fry is confident that the return to the office as part of a new flexible way of working will contribute to increased growth.

"The interesting thing is that I've spent my life trying to get people to adopt video conferencing and see the benefits of it and, overnight, the whole world picked it up," he added.

"Everyone's got so used to just being at their laptop whereas once you get back to meeting rooms, there's things that need to be done to make those meeting rooms act in the same way.

"That's created a new wave of businesses that are really worried about how this whole hybrid working will work once you've got some people in the meeting room," he said.

"Our pipeline has doubled in the last three months so there's a huge amount of opportunity out there. I think there's a lot of businesses that already had advanced communication tools but didn't use them fully so it's about helping them adopt it."

The increased move towards AV has Fry feeling confident that the business can meet its five-year plan: to triple the size of the company organically, without acquisitions.

But he says the business is open to making acquisitions to help it reach its targets if needed as he sets his sights on a bright future for SCC AVS.

"We're potentially looking at 30 to 40 percent year-on-year growth over the next couple of years and then we're predicting that it's going to tail off a bit, but it might not.

"There's lots of areas of rapid growth. We're looking at whether we can just organically grow to cater for demand that we're seeing within the SCC client base or whether we need to do things around acquisition to allow us to bring in more capability quicker.

"In the collaboration spaces, it's about looking at other complementary businesses that can help us cater for the demand quicker. They could be specialised areas but there might be other smaller, more niche providers that provide a scope to grow quicker in some of those vertical applications and stuff like that.

"It's a really exciting time to be in the industry."