When business gets slow it’s time to train your staff

By the time April 2020 came around, we found ourselves at Flower City Communications as perplexed as every other business. Suddenly our customers were shut down or, at best, working from home. The clients we worked so hard to please daily simply had no need for our products or services.

Our staff was sitting around with not much to do and I, as the owner, was terrified of what was to come.  One option, of course, was to shut down and blame it on COVID.  Option two was to try to hold on and weather the storm.

I chose option two.

I decided that if there were no customers to sell to or service, our next best way to use our time was to build on our own skill sets. We put our nose to the grindstone as a team and trained ourselves in new products and skills. Over time, and as our customers slowly returned to work and re-opened, this has proven to be a great investment.

Our business has been focused on the two-way radio industry for over 50 years.  As a Channel Partner for Motorola Solutions, Flower City Communications has had the opportunity to sell and service the best and biggest companies and organizations in Western New York. We work with a variety of public safety agencies, manufacturers, higher education, K-12 school districts and warehouse operations.  All our customers share the need to communicate immediately with many people.

Over the past few years, our primary vendor, Motorola Solutions, has been purchasing best in class companies that manufacture and distribute ancillary products. With 9-10 months and minimum business coming in, we were able to focus on these new products and get trained on them. This past year Flower City Communications became a Motorola Solutions Safety Reimagined badged partner. As the only Safety Reimagined Partner in WNY, Flower City is now able to offer so much more than the two-way radios that have supported the business for so long.

Flower City Communications is currently a certified dealer/partner for Vigilant Solutions (high end license plate reading technology), Avtec Inc (best in class communication dispatching solutions), Avigilon (best in class security cameras that utilize Artificial Intelligence to make monitoring them easier and proactive, along with access control systems), Ava (cloud-based security camera solutions) and Aruba Networking (networking solutions) and, still, Motorola Solutions Inc. We have added additional staff to our team making us more robust with our knowledge base and are now able to offer a more comprehensive solution to our customers.

We have taken this opportunity of having more time on our plate to become a more value-added supplier to our clients and are looking at ways to help them become more proactive with their security and safety challenges. Did I ever think we would come out of the COVID downfall untouched? No, not at all. But I did think we could capitalize on the opportunity, and we proved that could be done.

David Clar is the owner and CEO of Flower City Communications. Clar resides in Brighton with his family and is an active community member. Flower City Communications is a Rochester-based business that Clar purchased in 2015.