Gallagher Group is one of only two New Zealand companies to pick up a prestigious Stevie Award in 2020.
Its Security Health Check gained a bronze award for Innovation in Business-to-Business Services.
Global general manager for security Mark Junge says it is great to get the recognition. “What it does is give us positive marketing and increase opportunities and credibility with potential customers.”
The awards are divided into regions, with Gallagher competing in Asia-Pacific, taking on competition from 20 countries, including Australia, India and the US.
“It’s nice to see little old New Zealand can foot it with the best,” Junge says.
The security health check is available free to anyone who has a Gallagher licensed site, and Junge says uptake has been good after an early 2019 launch. It is an audit solution that provides an automated method to check a security system for potential risks. A script is run against a client system, looking at vulnerabilities which could be as basic as someone using a blank password, and generates a graphical report for the customer that prioritises the risks.
“We keep a record of each instance of them running that report, and then we can show them their improvement over time.”
The innovation arose out of a broader initiative. Junge says Gallagher has been pitching as the most cyber-secure physical security solution globally. “We talk about the security of security – there’s no point having your access control system as tight as you like if someone can walk up to the server that it’s running on and gain access.”
Junge, who has been with Gallagher since 2006, says one of the company’s long-standing strategies is to focus on being the high-security solution of choice in the Five Eyes alliance countries – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US and the UK.
He says in Australia they have invested in type 1A intruder alarm systems at government level, and in the US they have invested heavily in the federal government personal identity verification standard, which means their solutions can be employed in the federal government across their civilian and defence sectors. Also in the US, they are on the approved products list for all buildings in the General Services Administration, which is the largest landlord to federal agencies in the US and also administers a lot of federal procurement and related standards.
“There’s a reasonable amount of competition [in the US]because obviously the government market is well funded and lucrative, but we are pretty well known for our service orientation and we can differentiate ourselves very well against the global behemoths.”
In the last couple of years, they have been turning their focus to the UK, where they have the National Grid as a major customer.
Junge sounds confident about their ability to deal with Brexit. “The main concern that we’ve had with Brexit is the ability to get our imports from New Zealand over the border, just because of the volume of stuff that’s been coming from Europe which has flowed through previously – so the bottleneck that creates at the border.
“It’s been good to see that the government has been working on a free trade agreement with Britain,” he says. “We haven’t seen anything that’s too much of a threat to us.”
More immediately, they have been dealing with the impact of Covid-19, including a week-long shutdown of the factory during uncertainty at the start. They were helped by being deemed an essential business, both in security and animal management.
And an average looking March became a stellar one as it became apparent in New Zealand and Australia that lockdown was looming.
Junge gives a McDonald’s outlet as an example. It had to shut down and had never been unstaffed before, so wanted to put in an alarm system. Also, when the police, who are a Gallagher customer, commandeered a building in Wellington they needed a security system, he says. “So we were back in the next morning shipping that to them and it just ramped back up from there when it became apparent that we were essential and needed to keep the wheels turning for people.”
Gallagher has ridden out global supply chain challenges with few disruptions. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has had an impact. Junge took over the global general manager role in March 2019, and saw 25 percent revenue growth in his first year, from $99m to $125m for the division.
“Since then, of course, the world has turned quite a bit. It’s not been terrible for us, but we were definitely well below the average that we’ve had for the previous six months. So we’re just slowly climbing back into it.”
Research and development spending is continuing unabated as they take a long-term view, and they are continuing to hire.
“As we go forward now, we are having to to make sure that our investments in people – and we are starting to invest in more people in key areas – are rifle shots of investments whereas prior to Covid, we had a bit of a shotgun really, because we had been growing so strongly with security.”
Gallagher has made senior appointments to support its security arm in both its existing enterprise business and the newly growing area of small businesses. Rachel Kelly joined from Nyriad as chief product officer in Enterprise Solutions on 30 March, and was followed by Meredith Palmer, from Smartrak, who started as chief solutions officer in Small Business on 14 April.
The latter is an area of opportunity for the company, which has until now focused on larger enterprises, including government, with its security offering.
An intruder alarm for small businesses was launched in Waikato and Auckland last year, followed by access controls, and with video about to roll out. It gives a business owner the capacity to do everything remotely via an app, including setting the alarm and monitoring possible incidents.
“It’s gone from, when we only had an intruder alarm it was an expensive intruder alarm system, then it becomes a pretty cheap access control system and when it’s a video it’s got some real compelling commercial value.”
They hope to be installing in Australia by the end of the year. “That’s quite exciting. And it’s at quite a different scale than our existing enterprise business – we’ve spent 25 years getting 15,000 sites in enterprise. What we need is 30 or 40,000 sites in four or five years for this end of the business. So it is quite fundamentally different.
“It’s about evolving and maintaining global relevance.”
