Has anyone went to training, recieved product or become a dealer. After CEDIA it was a hot topic but I havn't heard anything about them ( other than there promotions in every trade mag. ) in quite a long time.

Went to traiing. No products at all yet. That is all I will say on a public board.

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We met with them at CES. Verey interesting, but I think we can wait to invest in training until they can ship. They seem to have a cool product, but no need to get trained on ALL prototypes.

I've had my fill of vaporware training...

Now, we wait for the in-field beta-testing to be done by others, and if the reviews are good, then we might try it.

You don't ALWAYS have to be the first on your block...;)

I spoke to a rep for the company as we had preliminary interest like anyone else and he told me that they are looking for dealers to be doing 100 homes per year with their gear. If I ever end up doing 100 homes per year TOTAL I will be looking for a differenct line of work!

Did they really say that? Did you give them Best Buy's phone number?

We just glanced at it at Cedia. Didn't quite understand what the fuss was about since the system wasn't complete without the prototypes.

Seems the biggest problem with automation are the a/v toad codes. Some client always insists we integrate some oddball TV, stereo or combo and then everything begins to turn into a time consuming workaround. That would be cool if someone had a magic bullet for that...

Was it Skypix or DirecTV that played a laserdisc into the TV instead of receiving a live broadcast at CES 8 or so years ago. That was pretty funny.

Of course we're all interested in what's going on with the company but with more of a wait and see attitude. I know I'd like to find out as much info as I can but I've seen too many things that don't work out the way they're promised, and even if they do work out there's some unknown "surprise" that pops up a couple years down the road. Hope they make it, but not ready to put my business on their ability to deliver and last. I guess we're all viewing to see if anyone else has taken the plunge...

Control 4 says they are looking for dealers that will install their gear in 100 homes a year? Wow. Do the math.

Let's say you're that prospective dealer. You do Control 4 product in fully 50% of the homes you do in a year. That means you're doing 200 homes a year, or one every 1.25 or so business days. I would guess that the average project that Control 4 goes in would be 20K plus, let's say 25K as a mean average. The other 1/2 of the jobs you do would be smaller and bigger, let's say smaller for the sake of discussion; 12.5K. That's yearly project volume of $3.75 million. Add in other service revenue not associated with new projects and you're really talking about $5M companies, and up. Let's say that the Control 4 guy was aiming high on his dealer requirement, say by half. That's still a $2.5M company he's looking for.

They are looking for big boys, that much is clear. That's OK with me, really, I'm not a big boy in this industry. And, given that I did not do Landmark but did do Frox, I'll let someone with more resources iron the wrinkles out of this new brand. Maybe I'll get big enough in the mean time to have them come knocking on my door. :-)

I sat through their CEDIA traiining and have read on AVS their marketing VP's statements. From these you can deduce that their average job will cost around 3-5k with perhaps upper end around 10-15k-- but that would be a monstrous home. If their claims about price and programming a true it would be possible for a large firm with multiple crews to do 3-5 installations per week. If you own a small firm you could perhaps do 1 to almost 2 per week. Assuming 7500/week gross and a 50 week work year that is 375k in control systems. That is gross most small businesses could easily achieve although I do not know if the gross profit would be sufficient to survive.

The dream of this industry from a manufacturing and marketing point of view was to capture the retro-fit market. 75-80% of homes fall in this category. Equally important is this typical consumer is "value" conscience and will not spend large sums on a project. But a control system that costs 3k including touch panels! That can be installed and programmed in 1-3 days! This is a radical product which, if it ever comes to market and lives up to the hype, will transform this industry and yes, make Best Buy, Circuit City and Walmart automation competitors. This also assumes that their promises become reality and that their dealers become proficient at marketing to retro-fit, "value" clients. But Best Buy and Walmart have already perfected this and have the capital to fund 8 crews per store.

Alan

An excellent point, and one I overlooked.



Thanks for scaring me to death. I'll start looking for a new line of work if they do in fact get into it.