Fire & Life Safety
Where are you leaving money on the table?
Many factors affect profitability for fire and life safety businesses, such as increasing local competition, technology advancements, changing / variable regulations, aging infrastructure, and significant M&A activity.
While the industry typically sees stronger retention rates and has more resiliency through market downturns, companies are often facing growing saturation affecting entry pricing / margins, harmful decentralization, ineffective cost-based pricing, labor / skillset obstacles, and misaligned commercial incentives.
Common Challenges
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Margin Mark-up Over Cost
Pricing often set as a margin mark-up over cost, where prices are updated only when costs change
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Difficulty Establishing Differentiation
Often lacking substantial differentiation based on value of services and product specialization (skillset, region, technologies)
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Decentralized Processes
Decentralized processes prevent alignment to a uniform strategy and can lead to low price realization
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Customer Insight
All-in cost to serve related to fees, freight, discounts, warranties, etc. are often not understood at a customer level
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New Customer Pricing
Margin optimization across the customer lifecycle is not fully understood or leveraged to better set pricing for new customers
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Customer Entitlement
Customer programs or volume-discounts are viewed as entitlements rather than to drive desired behaviors
What Opportunities Exist in Your Business?
There is significant opportunity to grow profit that many companies may not even have visibility to.
Fire & Life Safety Market Background
FLS is historically a more regionally fragmented industry that has become increasingly saturated due to:
- Expanding regulation
- Aging infrastructure
- Growing technologies
Retention
Retention is relatively problematic in FLS as there exists:
- High barriers for customers to switch providers
- Higher cost to acquire new customers
- Risk to maintain entry-pricing throughout partnership duration
Business Growth
Growth typically occurs through expanded market share (organic & inorganic), including:
- Expanded services expanded technologies
- An influx of roll-up businesses, which often results in significant decentralized pricing practices and autonomy
- Higher margin and higher realization due to necessity of service
- Market competitiveness and saturation that makes entry-margins significantly low
Additional Opportunity Areas to Consider:
Fire & Life Safety businesses can profitably address discount variation, track the success of implementing price changes and improve price realization by:
- Centralizing quoting systems, processes, and interfaces
- Growing wallet share by implementing easy-to-execute cross- and up-selling strategies
- Mapping competitive positioning to gauge risk and opportunity for pricing and commercial efforts
- Ensuring profitable contract management
- Addressing low-margin contracts
Strategic Pricing Activities for Growth
Fire and life safety businesses can accelerate revenue and profit growth through lifecycle margin management, segmentation, and commercial efforts that balance value-based pricing with goals.
Common Immediate Areas of Focus:
- Identify and Reduce Unplanned Variation: Detailed analysis to locate customers receiving unearned pricing versus peers and adjust outliers
- Address Areas of Common Margin Leakage: Freight, warranties, fees (e.g., change orders), discounting, promotions, etc.
- Differentiate Pricing Across Targeted Segments: Based on customer type, job type, product category, market segment, technician specialization, urgency, inventory, etc.
Margin Optimization Across Customer Lifecycle
Acquiring new customers is critical for growth, yet in saturated markets with highly competitive bids,winning new customers can require low-margin entry pricing. Businesses need clear visibility to marginoptimization over the duration of a customer partnership.
Our Pricing & Commercial Experts
Through market intelligence and deep data mining, INSIGHT provides fire and life safety businesses with stronger visibility to drivers of growth, gaps in existing processes, and opportunities that align with your business’s unique value and goals. We then co-author and implement practical pricing programs to ensure your business is armed with the right tools and processes to enable tangible outcomes.
We’ve spent nearly two decades helping business leaders achieve EBITDA growth. By leveraging databacked insights, we quickly identify and validate growth opportunities that drive both immediate and sustainable profit increases. Our goal is to co-author a strategy, see it through implementation, and most importantly, realize results. Let us help you uncover hidden value and maximize your growth potential.
Andrew Boronka
Andrew is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. He has more than a decade of experience driving pricing excellence and enhancing client experiences across various sectors including manufacturing, industrial, B2B2C consumer, and distribution. He has led price transformation initiatives across more than 25 engagements contributing to over $200M in EBITDA impact through pricing transformation.
Examples of Andrew’s experience include:
- Implemented multiple quoting tools and pricing engines, achieving significant impact in the waste management service sector driving $1M of impact within the first 90 days of the pilot and $50M during the subsequent national rollout
- Execution of many value-based pricing frameworks within global industrial manufacturing resulting in over $70M of EBITDA generation over multiple years
- Reduced Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) spend by $7M through A/B testing for a supplier of residential building materials
- Utilized competitive benchmarking through web-scraping within the ecommerce space to help drive $14.5M in margin improvement through price within the first 4 months
Andrew earned his B.S. in Accounting from The University of Akron and an A.A. in Business Administration from North Central State College.
Gary Gebenlian
Gary is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT, bringing over 20 years of experience dedicated to unlocking growth within the consumer, hospitality, retail, and technology sectors. He co-founded a technology start-up in the dining space, played a pivotal role in the growth of an early online-to-offline hospitality commerce business, and led marketing and e-commerce for a Private Equity-backed B2B enterprise.
Gary is passionate about growing businesses by integrating science (data, algorithms) with art (change management, effectiveness) across industries. He excels in pricing strategy, growth strategy, and general management.
Examples of Gary’s experience include:
- Led discovery for an environmental services business, identifying and implementing opportunities to drive a 10% incremental profit, actions included addressing peer-price-index outliers, improving fee/surcharge realization, enforcing list-prices in advantaged areas, establishing analytics capability, and implementing governance/cadence for sustained gains
- Led assessment and implementation of customer-specific repricing of lists and discounts and pricing quick-wins for a multinational transportation and logistics services company, targeting $45M of incremental profit
- Led assessment and implementation of target inflationary price adjustments, margin floor implementation, measurement and reporting structure and capability for an industrial equipment manufacturer, generating mid-single-digit impact for core products and double-digit impact for parts.
- Led design and implementation of a segmented margin-target model for a transportation services business with nationwide operation, generating 8% revenue impact to the bottom-line during the pilot phase
Gary earned his MBA from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management and a B.S. in Engineering and Computer Engineering from McGill University.
Evan Schriner
Evan is a Director on the Transaction Services team at INSIGHT2PROFIT, with over 8 years of experience in consulting and price management. He specializes in supporting the Transaction Advisory Group by providing buy and sell-side diligence services to the firm’s private equity clients.
Evan’s expertise spans various industries across Business/Technology Services, Industrials, Residential Building Products, and Commodity-Based Manufacturing. He led clients through setting price strategy, freight optimization, change management, and the implementation and execution of quoting applications.
Examples of Evan’s experience include:
- Provided buy-side diligence support for a data warehousing provider, identifying the financial impact of changing the business’s pricing strategy from project-based to SaaS focused
- Offered sell-side diligence support for a food service distributor, highlighting a history of price realization and a future state roadmap to drive incremental margin improvement across each purchasing channel
- Provided diagnostic support for a services-based systems Integrator, quantifying the opportunity of centralizing the pricing function across more than 50 branches
- Led the price strategy and implementation for a commercial lighting manufacturer, resulting in over $50M in price gain over a 3- year period
- Led the modeling and implementation of a North American customs brokerage through a complex outlier model employing linear multivariate regression to identify target pricing, generating over $20M of incremental impact
Evan earned his BBA in Finance and Marketing from Grand Valley State University, Siedman College of Business.
Ryan Kane
Ryan is a Vice President of Private Equity at INSIGHT2PROFIT, leveraging over 15 years of experience as a seasoned business leader. He consistently drives measurable positive margin impact through strategic development and the implementation/execution of pricing and other margin-enhancing initiatives.
Ryan has led over 75 engagements globally, demonstrating expertise in commercial pricing structures, analytics, modeling, and price measurement and execution. His proficiency extends to working knowledge of Business Intelligence (BI), Margin Management, Contract Strategy, Market Assessment, Competitive Assessment, Communications, Strategy, Business Development, and R Studio.
Prior to joining INSIGHT, Ryan spent a decade at Booz Allen as a Management Consultant working in strategy and design as well as in a “price to win” capacity within their business operations practice.
Ryan earned his MBA in Change Management and a B.S. in Marketing/Marketing Management from North Central College. He completed advanced coursework in Advanced Business Analytics from Indiana University, Kelly School of Business.
Shelton Evans
Shelton is a Principal at INSIGHT2PROFIT. Shelton has over 5 years of experience leading and supporting clients in revenue management, profitability strategies, and execution. He has led engagements with more than ten clients at INSIGHT, spanning across more than 7 industries, including aerospace parts distribution, telecommunication services, field services, and consumer packaged goods. His expertise encompasses diverse channels, including B2B, B2C, and B2G. While Shelton prioritizes the establishment of meaningful pricing and profitability strategies for his clients his primary goal is to deliver tangible outcomes that provide significant ROI. Shelton has driven over $100M of margin improvement during his time at INSIGHT and led engagements spanning North America and EMEA.
Examples of Shelton’s experience include:
- Led a $50M+ margin improvement for a leading field services provider with more than 40 locations through a differentiated price increase, new pricing architecture, and enhanced leakage management
- Drove improvement in product adoption through the development of a go-to-market subscription and bundling pricing and product strategy for a telecommunications provider
- Delivered a 5% improvement to gross margins for an advanced materials company through net price increases, refined pricing architecture, price-performance management system, and the support of the development of a pricing function
Shelton earned his B.S. in International Business, Finance and Accounting from Baldwin Wallace University.
Quick Wins, Foundation for Value, and Centralized, Sustainable Pricing Capability
2.5% price impact in Y1; Additional 1-2% projected in Y2
Positioning for Sustainable Growth in a Competitive Landscape
Identified $1.9M in annualized quick wins
Scaling Success: A Data-Driven Approach to Pricing and Profitability
Centralized pricing strategy and quoting solution across multiple locations unlocking $40M EBITDA growth
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