How He Grew A Security Camera Business To $1.5B | Fredrik Nilsson, VP at Axis Communications

So back then, you said you had 18, I believe a team of 18 people.

Back in 2003, we had a team of 18 people for all of Americas, and globally we're maybe 300 people.

And we did 18 million in revenue as well, of which four, so a few million were in the network space.

That was really all we did back then.

Gotcha.

And you've gone

from that to over a billion with innovative products.

And you guys...

You guys have always gone through distributors, if I'm not mistaken, not direct to consumers.

So with a new, innovative product, at least new to the market back then, how have you built a billion-dollar business?

That's a great question because one of the benefits with a two-tier channel, which a lot of companies do in the IT space, is the fact that it's extremely scalable.

You have a couple of... large distributors like ADI, Wesco, Ingram, Tech Data, and then they sell to resellers.

And so they keep the inventory, give the credit to the resellers, the resellers call out to the end customers and sell the product.

So that's all and fine if you have a defined market and a large market presence in the brand.

We had none back then.

So how do you educate the market? And we need to remember back then, most security solutions were what we call analog.

It was analog camera with no intelligence, and you need to connect it to some kind of box that was pretty expensive to network and record it.

But the brand names we were competing with were Bosch, Panasonic, GE, Sony, Samsung.

So it was pretty kind of tough to reach out with a very small company called Axis Communications.

So we couldn't buy any ads, we couldn't do any big marketing campaigns.

But what we did do is to focus A lot on education.

We set up educational seminars, very well developed.

We send the two top trainers or one top salesperson and a technical guy to conduct those training for our resellers.

And we also, on the marketing side, we did a lot of PR outreach to tell our story in business.

in different magazines and security and it we were interviewed we actually got a spread on the second on the technology section on the sunday and new york times about network cameras in 2003 full page just by outreach and pr which doesn't really cost anything compared to putting ads and stuff like that so Lucky with the timing, interest in security, good PR company that can help us with the outreach.