Who you gonna call when your property needs protecting? Asheville’s Security Camera Warehouse, that’s who!
With digital hacking and lax cybersecurity currently the international bogeyman du jour, it can be easy to forget that criminal intrusions in the real world remain an ongoing concern for the government, businesses, and private citizens alike. What are your prevention options? Hire a security guard, of course, or a professional security company to install and set up motion sensors and/or cameras, then subsequently monitor the property around the clock. But have you looked lately at the going rates for licensed/bonded security guards or contracts with monitoring agencies?
Security Camera Warehouse (SCW), then, at your service.
The Asheville-based company sells high-quality cameras designed to withstand all weather elements, provide such standard features as Line Crossing, Intrusion Detection, and Face Detection, and be scheduled for 24/7 continuous, motion, or event recording. The cameras have video content analysis software designed to automatically upload images to your FTP server or send them to you via an email alert whenever a potentially suspicious event does occur. And Security Camera Warehouse also sells its products direct to the customer, providing easy, intuitive set-up instructions that do not automatically require a professional installer, thereby cutting out the middleman and significantly reducing the overall cost of the system.
“Our security camera systems have innovative features, can be watched remotely, are built tougher, and warrantied longer,” says the company’s CEO, Matthew Nederlanden. “The security camera industry is currently in a race to the bottom, with production quality and cybersecurity often being sacrificed in pursuit of lower cost products. Most other companies in our field view their service teams as an area to cut costs: outsourcing labor and paying low wages, but this usually means talking with someone who doesn’t know the products.”
Nederlanden, who is also a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council, originally started with SCW as an independent marketing consultant to help market the company’s website. Then, after about six months, he learned that the original founder of the still-young business (it started in 2010) had been engaged in some very questionable practices—essentially taking clients’ money for product that was never delivered. Explains Nederlanden, “He emptied the bank accounts, abruptly quit, and moved to another state. Later on the FBI even got involved. The company was in debt, its customers were angry, and I really didn’t know much about security cameras at the time. But I had a firm commitment to what had to be done: I refunded everyone’s money who was a victim and also sent them the products they were trying to order free of charge.”
Since then, by focusing on product quality over making the cheapest product, and offering the kind of customer service that brings people back and gets them to spread the word, SCW has earned an immense amount of respect within the security industry along with the loyalty of its customers, ultimately scaling to a multi-million-dollar e-commerce company more rapidly than anticipated.
Along the way, SCW took part in the Discovery Channel show Garage Rehab, bought a building in Asheville’s River Arts District, introduced a new product line, and, in 2017, launched a new local installation service for the Western North Carolina region. Nederlanden is quick to point out that one of SCW’s ongoing goals is to “improve the employees’ lives. Each month, each employee gets a portion of the profit that the company generates as a bonus. Our commitment to profit sharing, and to a salary you can actually buy a home with, means that we pay salaries one-and-a-half to three times that of the average full-time WNC wage. We’ve recently launched some new innovative benefit packages, like taking the traditional 401k matching program and saying that if you have debt, you can use that same matching percentage for debt repayment. We also launched company wide financial counseling and budgeting classes through OnTrack (a WNC nonprofit).”
Going forward, Security Camera Warehouse is preparing to launch a new line of cameras and a new alarm product, putting the final touches on their first in-house software solution (currently, the software is leased), and expand the services that their local installation branch offers—possibly even going into a second city.
“Our core identity is in doing the right thing,” says Nederlanden, proudly. “We like to say internally that we don’t sell security cameras, we sell support—what we bring to the table is expertise and customer service.”
Visit Security Camera Warehouse online: https://www.getscw.com/
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