Pro A/V’s Blossoming Opportunity: Life Sciences Vertical
The biotech market is red hot, flush with cash and looking to expand, which presents a great opportunity for the pro A/V industry.
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., a biomedical research organization, is a client of AVH Technology Partners and one example of the booming life sciences market.
How to get your feet wet in the life sciences sector
Given this very attractive opportunity to partner with an industry that never seems to be out of cash and invests in state-of-the-art facilities, integration firms should consider aggressively targeting the life sciences industry.
Do your homework and be ready to answer questions. Biotech executives – and even their end users – are researchers by trade and will have done their homework when sourcing audiovisual technologies, so you should be just as prepared.
According to Grace, biotech companies will take your offerings and look at the market for alternatives if they think there are better solutions out there.
“You don’t want to be caught in that position, so do your research,” Grace says.
Since many of these companies are backed by deep-pocketed investors and routinely win grants and tax benefits from federal, state and local partners, integrators don’t have to restrict offerings to cost-effective solutions.
Instead, these organizations prioritize performance, reliability and service.
“They will spend the money,” Grace says.
Another angle to take is partnering with real estate investment firms that are capitalizing on the biotech goldrush and building large lab and office space and then leasing to smaller biotech companies, Grace says.
According to Sharib of Inspired Technology and Communications, becoming a trusted technology partner of the life sciences community isn’t all that different from how an integrator should approach any other vertical market: building trust.
That step alone will help your integration firm win more projects in this industry because of the close-knit nature of the relatively small life sciences community. Once you let one company know you can work in their space and solve their communication technology issues, landing more biotech clients becomes easier.
Sharib again pointed to the firm’s biotech customer that got its start in a small incubator space in a Cambridge basement.
“They’re now flying us everywhere,” Sharib says. “That relationship helped us form synergistic relationships with people that knew each other.”
Zachary Comeau is Associate Editor of SSI sister publication Commercial Integrator. This article first appeared on CI’s website.
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