Bringing Good Things to Life…How GE Inadvertently Helped Me Create My Company
When I look back at my life, “The Story of Jeff,” and how all of this happened, I realize it was all about GE (General Electric).
How a Surprise Referral from GE Launched a Multi-Million-Dollar Business
And it wasn’t me finding them, it was a Hewlett Packard Eastern Regional Sales Rep — that I had never spoken to, nor even heard of at the time — giving my name to Dawn Cocks, a senior Procurement Manager at GE.
Reputation matters and apparently spreads. It’s incredible what this blind referral did to my company, let alone my career. Stating that GE is genuinely responsible for my career success does not bruise my ego. More so, I am proud of it. At the time, they were the largest company in the world!
Way back in 2001, my just barely a year-old company began working directly with Brian Yovine, GE’s Enterprise Relationship Manager – Infrastructure Servers, on building computer servers to his specifications.
Brian was indirectly linked to Dawn, primarily for approved purchases. I am unsure whether he got my name from Dawn or that same HP rep who shared it with her.
Like it matters.
Building Trust with GE and HP: A Story of Nimbleness and Accuracy
All that mattered was that it happened. Brian would send us his system requirements, and we would design a server based on those specifications on paper.
In a very short while, it became evident that BCD had become Brian’s default server builder. Our value-added service to Brian was immediacy and, most importantly, accuracy. He was likely unable to receive the immediacy working inside a multi-billion-dollar company.
BCD was as nimble as Tinkerbell, unlike GE, or for that matter, any Fortune 500 company.
When I met with Dawn in 2001, she immediately phone-introduced me to the main buyer at sister company GE Capital, making it clear that we were her preferred computer server vendor.
Over the course of my career, General Electric and GE Capital purchased $33M of computer servers from me.
In May 2004, Carole Hayward of GE Capital, whom I also had never heard of before, contacted me looking to find some HP equipment that was surprisingly available all through the computer distribution channel.
That one innocent telephone call led me to Hewlett-Packard’s Ron Pope. Pope was amidst an HP system integration disaster and ended up purchasing $14M of HP’s own hardware in six months, through the end of 2004.
In 2006, it was HP deja vu all over again when HP bought over $4M of their own LaserJet printers from us after they also chose to move that product’s procurement over to India. They were experiencing six months of “where’s my order?” syndrome within HP.
And all sitting in stock in U.S distribution warehouses at Ingram Micro and Tech Data. Talk about left-hand and right-hand; HP couldn’t find their own shit!
Safe to say, some $51M later, we thrived in those “where’s my order?” scenarios.
From Servers to Surveillance: How BCDVideo Became an Industry Leader
In 2009, I received a service call from a local GE Capital sales rep about a customer-initiated system failure, which blew the door off my company’s “official” introduction into the video surveillance marketplace.
I say official because it was only then that we realized we had spent the last six years building video surveillance servers for GE Capital, not the typical standard financial or infrastructure usage of standard IT servers.
Our wake-up call was that they were utilizing these traditional servers in a market that had NOT been using technology, rather “a box with parts” to manage the camera streams. Remember that old convenience store video footage? Not on our watch!
Millions of dollars later, I was more than okay with “ignorance is bliss.”
Thus, BCDVideo was officially born. Over the next fifteen years, until my retirement in July 2023, we delivered close to a billion dollars of video surveillance solutions.
I built my company’s success on an unexpected referral to GE. By delivering faster, more accurate solutions than the big corporations could, it led to over $51 million in sales. That journey ultimately transformed BCDVideo into an industry leader in video surveillance, generating nearly $1 billion before I retired in 2023.
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To learn about this entire journey, pick up a copy of 𝙄𝙩 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙙 𝙁𝙤𝙧 𝙈𝙚: 𝙈𝙮 𝙇𝙞𝙛𝙚 𝙎𝙚𝙞𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙊𝙥𝙥𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙪𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘽𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙎𝙪𝙘𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨 today!
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