The Early Bird

Phillip King

Everyone is familiar with the old adage, “The Early Bird Gets the Worm.”  Well, the identification and security industry is no stranger to this claim.  My journey in this industry started as a high school student when I laughed at the notion that we couldn’t use our kitchen table to eat because my father was always testing new demo equipment on it.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this would eventually define my core business values and fuel my desire to succeed.  Two years later, I started my career in the identification industry and the rest is history. 

As I take a look back on my career so far, the times that are most memorable are the years just following new innovations in our market.  Fortunately, those times generated some of the greatest profit and growth for our company.  There was the invention of the color ID printer, flat card printing in casinos, hospital wristband printing and first responder credentialing – just to name a few.  All of these events represent defining changes in our company’s history.  Yet, these changes were not so favorable for other companies.  So I have to ask myself, why did some companies, like ours, prosper in the years following these changes while others watched their market share slowly slip away?

To answer this question, we must first understand that all products in our industry go through the same lifecycle.  In my experience, products evolve through four stages: Innovation, Product Release, Market Acceptance, Stabilization and then back to Innovation.  Some stay in the Stabilization stage until they become a commodity and others make it back around to Innovation again for continued development.  Of the four stages, the Market Acceptance stage is where the most products are sold and the very best profits are made.  After all, that’s why companies invest so many millions of dollars in Innovation to ensure they have the best products available. 

The best way to ensure maximum success during the Market Acceptance stage is to get in the game BEFORE a product has reached this level.  If you can get on board with a product as soon as it is released and devote the resources necessary to really succeed with it, you can truly take off with it once it develops Market Acceptance.  As a company, we have not always gotten on board with products as early as we should have. 

For many years, we mastered the patient identification business in our region, providing more than 90% market share in desktop card embossing.  In the late 1990s, laser printed wristbands and labels began to slowly make an introduction into our hospital market.  Before you knew it, hospital customers were falling to laser generated forms like dominos.  At first, we hesitated to accept this drastic change in the way we did business.  Once we realized the market was most definitely heading that direction, we regrouped and found new vendors and products to align ourselves with and ensured that our sales and support staff were properly trained.  In that year alone, our company grew over $ 500,000 in revenue and company profits skyrocketed.  When I reflect on the scenario today, I wonder what those numbers would have looked like had we gotten involved at an earlier stage in the game. 

A better example of a time that we got involved very early on was in 1993 when Datacard first released the color photo ID system.  As a Datacard dealer, we were fortunate to have access to a product long before many people knew what it was or what it would mean to the industry.  As a company, we took a big leap of faith and invested a lot of money in demo equipment, training and staff to support this new product.  We even spun off a completely separate company to focus on this product alone.  The major investment ended up paying off for us, and being an early adopter of this technology ended up completely changing our company’s future.  It taught me that the earlier you get involved when a new technology comes out, the more profitable you will be over the lifecycle of that product. 

What is changing in our market today? Identity Convergence, Tablet PCs, Cloud Computing, Security Convergence, Smartcard Technology, NFC, Smart Devices, Windows 8, etc… The future is now!  What technologies are you and your company investing in?  Align yourself with industry leaders that are changing the game.  If you invest the resources necessary to succeed, you will win big in the long run. 

Phillip King is Vice President of ID Group, Inc., a local identification and security integrator in Mississippi and Louisiana and President of BadgePass, Inc., a developer of ground-breaking software solutions for the identity and security industry.

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