Today’s Best Advice Q&A comes from Joe Nuccio, president of dealer partnership at ADT and a member of SSI’s editorial advisory board. He shares the best advice he’s ever gotten, offers tips for security industry folks on the rise and points to who has helped him advance his career in the sector most effectively.
Security Sales & Integration: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Joe Nuccio: The best advice I received was early in my career. When building your company, it is very important that you don’t focus on what your competitors are doing, but focus on what you are doing and stay focused on your plan.
All too many times, companies focus on their competition and take their eyes off the prize: containing costs, superior customer service and your business plan well-capitalized driving overall long-term values.
A perfect example is your competitor lowers their price to get more business and then you feel like you need to lower your price too. The reality of it is you need to sell value and, if you decided to lower your price but not lower your cost structure … that, my friend, is the definition of bankruptcy.
SSI: What advice would you give to those looking to achieve success in the security industry?
Nuccio: The best advice I would give would be: you have shareholders, customers and employees and all should be treated equal to maximize future success. Without loyal employees, you have no company and without customers, you have no company and without proper capitalization, you have no company.
Stay to your plan and build your core competencies. Any vertical you might add needs to be only complementary to your core or you will get caught up in taking your eye off the ball and waste resources, time and money not focusing on your core competencies for long-term viability and success.
SSI: If you could point to one person in the security industry and tell up-and-comers, “Make sure to listen to what they have to say,” whom would you pick and why?
Nuccio: That’s an easy one: you point to yourself and develop a best practices approach to building your business. If you’re an acquisition company, learn from why one company does it better than another and adopt the methodology. Building culture, merging companies together is the single most important thing you can do. Everyone needs to understand the mission and what defines success.
If you are just building your company without any acquisition, the same applies on building the right culture and best practices approach. Learn all you can from so many talented people in our industry and rely on yourself to master your success. Stay humble, focused and true to yourself every step of the way. In the end, everyone needs to march to your beat and you must lead by example for a successful outcome.
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