THE BOTTOM LINE MAY 2020

What was your main area of focus when you launched Fenix?

From our inception, we asked ourselves: what kind of business do we want to be? We knew we wanted to offer an alternative, but we didn’t want to be different for the sake of being different! We identified some of the main issues Installers faced and the ‘pinch points’ that could be improved. We created an agile management team, who are always open to conversations, allowing us to develop an industry niche in integrating new equipment and developing bespoke monitoring services. We like to consider ourselves a nursery for new ideas!

Our management team have extensive knowledge and experience of installation and compliance processes. They appreciate how heavily regulated (rightly so) our industry is. However, the red tape, standards and approval processes can be very time consuming for Installers, eating into their time when they could be making money. We wanted to offer more flexibility when issues arise, enabling Installers to get their service back up and running, and deal with the other issues (such as pricing) afterwards. As we evolve, these issues will continue to appear, and we will keep moulding our business to deal with them.

What does the future look like for ARCs?

I believe it will be more focused on Alarm Management and not just Monitoring. We believe a partnership must exist across the entire supply chain, offering opportunities for open discussions for us all to learn and develop systems that work for everyone. If the end-user understands their system, they can educate their people to see issues and report them before anything goes wrong. Conversely, the Monitoring company can then feed information back down the chain to allow the Installer to perfect the set-up.

Proactive partnerships work for the benefit of the entire value chain. Things can sometimes go wrong and inevitably in our industry they will with our always-on services. We try and minimise these occurrences, with due diligence beforehand. This provides our customers with confidence in us, knowing that we will resolve this for the next time. We prefer to demonstrate our passion and desire to improve, rather than claim to be perfect! New people who join our business must demonstrate these qualities and this has helped us to build a
fantastic team. It has been important for us to build our business through trust. The desire for an aligned result has allowed us to cement solid partnerships with honesty and transparency of service.

How important are the latest technologies in terms of providing a better service to Installers and their customers?

We are always looking to our supply partners for ways we can improve the service for the rest of the chain, whether this is with increased reliability or reducing false alarms. One example of this is the Smart Reporting feature available with the new DualCom Pro range from CSL. This “holds” a single path failure if it happens when the premises are closed and will only report this once it opens or if an alarm signal is sent. This avoids the unnecessary phone calls we are forced to make during the night to an end-user, to tell them about something they cannot action. This undoubtedly will improve the service we offer.

In addition to this, we are excited about the opportunities in the Fire Monitoring market. Today, only 5% of Fire systems are monitored and we believe this will drastically change when EN54 signalling products like DigiAir Pro Fire are available to the market. Using Digital Communicators for fire is no longer acceptable, especially when a better alternative exists! It doesn’t cost much more to add Fire signalling to a system and we always encourage Installers to consider it.

YOU SAID IT

“First Class Support. Always willing to go the extra mile and have some very skilled technical people who are always willing to help in any situation. Couldn’t recommend any more highly. Great reliable equipment with straight forward installation”

Francisco Branco (Eagle Security Solutions Ltd) – LinkedIn post – 7th February