Where Are They Now? GENESIS (May 2007)
By The Business Solutions Network
When it comes to all the articles I've written for Business Solutions, one of my favorites goes way back to May 2007 with GENESIS, a point of sale solutions provider. In the article, Driving Grocery POS Sales, Terry Selkirk, VP of sales and co-owner of the company, shared a lot of detail on how his company is succeeding in the grocery vertical. While Selkirk and I see one another each year at BlueStar's VARTECH, we haven't really talked in detail about what's been going on at GENESIS, until now...
How has your business fared since we last spoke with you?
Selkirk: The next year after our magazine article, we started getting calls from a few dealers across the US with interest in our products. We also started working with Hobart Corp. and its staff to roll out a complete method to allow their sales group to sell our products. The Hobart process soon fell to the side because our products being technology based were hard to adapt into a group of hardware-centric order taking sales mentality. A few years later, we started working with more POS companies to allow seamless integration of data which was a better fit. The VAR groups, associated with these POS vendors, better understood the need for knowledge and how to sell technologies. We now partner with VAR groups because the training is faster. We have also worked toward selling warehouse groups, which then in turn filters to the store levels with solutions and sales. The warehouse method has worked very well. Presently, we have leads to over 10,000 mom-and-pop grocers in the US and Canada that need our complete grocery solutions.
What has contributed most to your success since we last spoke?
Selkirk: Our partners in POS and hardware have driven GENESIS-POS into more unique solutions that we did not have before. Our security solutions and new POS partners have helped in making our own perishable software, a more broadly excepted answer to tighter budgets. It is because we have our own software and other company-owned products we can differentiate GENESIS from other VARs just selling part of a solution. The goal of being a one stop shop has vaulted us to becoming larger in the VAR/VAD world and not just a POS software and equipment providers.
Are there any new technologies/solutions you're offering which are impacting your business?
Selkirk: Our relationship with Panasonic and its Retail Solutions Group was one of our most fruitful decisions. We now have Security hardware and a better POS hardware partner today as a result. We have also worked closely with Star Micronics and our weigh scale partners to provide longer term answers for our clients. We have also ventured into handheld solutions and other products currently in the development stage. GENESIS-POS is not just a POS provider but has become a complete development company in software and hardware solutions with the aid of our partnerships.
What challenges did you overcome in the past 5 years?
Selkirk: Did we fail along the way? Yes, with spending money and efforts on partners that just were not on the same page as us. It was a hard pill to swallow when our trusted scale partners just could not see that software technology would keep clients longer than hardware would. We saw once we took that back from the hardware vendors and return it to our VARs and our groups sales quickly returned. We also worked closely with other vertical companies to help defer our overhead.
Are there any other tips/tactics that are contributing to your success?
Selkirk: The old standby of work hard is true today like always, but bouncing it off others has been great. Talk with other VARs and share leads and even sales with others has over the long term been better. Remembering that some money is better than no money is always better!