Written by Peter McGurran
Mar. 8, 2024– I was on the phone with a prospective client the other day, explaining to him about the benefits of working with 2NSystems versus the other options that are available in the market. While discussing with him the advantages of working with my staff, I started to think about all the changes that we have gone through over the years. The tremendous changes that have happened – not just in what we provide to the market – but more importantly the people that we have on staff, the structure that we have set up to support our employees, and the growth opportunities and future that they can build with us – really put me in a place of gratitude for where we are at today.
I started this business 27 years ago. My intent was to build a company that was an expert in the market that we served, provided quick and accurate information to our customers, and sold ourselves to customers with our aggressive pricing and top-notch customer service. After a few years, we were on our way to building a business that would have some good staying power. We had happy, repeat customers, our vendors were clamoring for our business, and we had great people that were working for us. We were engineering solutions that solved problems, gave aggressive pricing for our customers, and delivered products on time.
But then I started to identify a large gap – opportunity! – that existed in our market. It was around 2018 that I started to notice this need and then it became glaringly obvious during the time of Covid. Everything that we did for our customers added a lot of value to them, but the issue was that once we delivered the solution to our customer’s site, our clients needed to work with others to install the solutions that we provided. This was not a huge issue if our customer managed one location which was at the campus where they worked – local trades, local engineers, local faculties people – that was manageable. What about the customer that had 5, 10, 50 locations or more across the county that they had responsibility for? That meant that they had to work with multiple trades, multiple engineering firms, multiple facilities people – all the while staying on top of their responsibilities at the location that they resided. Add in the unplanned emergency projects, as well as Covid where people were being laid off, leaving less people to manage projects – there emerged a large GAP!
These were the reasons why I decided to take the company in a different direction. No longer were we going to concentrate only on engineered solutions – our push was going to be engineering “installed” solutions – we were going to turnkey everything that we sold. We started on the path of establishing a team of Engineered Project Managers. These were team members who could not only engineer a solution but could also manage the project from front to back. We created an onboarding process for electrical and mechanical contractors across the US and Canada. These trades work for us on all our projects, ensuring seamless coordination for our projects. We increased our Asset Lifecyle Management team to handle the influx of requests to help support the UPS and Cooling assets we already sold as well as the ones that now needed to be refreshed. We put more structure around all our deliverables – scoping document, proposed solution, Method of Procedures, Scopes of Work, Close out Documents – working to have this communication be at its highest level. These items, along with many others, have changed the way we operate with our customers and the value that we bring. Are we perfect – not yet but getting close. We have a Lessons Learned process that we do after every project to identify where things have gone better and to applaud where things continue to go well. Our MOP is ever changing – covering anything that could happen along the way. But not all processes are perfect – that is why we have such an accomplished team that can make game time decisions to ensure the success of every project. Grateful to be surrounded by such high performing people!
Why work with 2NSystems today?
– Industry leading products and solutions
– Consistency on implementation across any location in the US or Canada
– The ability to speak both IT and Facility
– On time projects and on budget
– The best engineering, implementation, and support team around!
Why wouldn’t you want to work with us?