By Avi Hartmann
Founder & Member of the Board
The transformation, from an operations company to a technology company
In the previous post I described the transition from a technological idea to a company providing a solution, to a meteoric success in a short period of time that ended in the sale of the company.
In 2002, 12 European countries change their currency to the Euro, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in the United States, and we stand at the end of the slide of our lives, look down, take a deep breath and decide to jump and change the business model, the first decision we made was that we did not want to work with end customers, although this The most profitable segment in the chain, but also the most demanding segment and at the stage we were at it didn't seem right to us, we gathered again, spread out on the table what we have and asked ourselves where we can take it?
What we had in hand amounted to technology for locating vehicles, and the know-how to operate a vehicle protection business. We decided that we will move forward with this, we defined that our potential clients are entrepreneurs who wish to provide car protection services, and we are the ones who can provide them the solution that would include both technology and experience. In order to turn the experience into something that can be easily transferred to customers and their staff, we created a large database of procedures that consolidated the accumulated experience in every field,
For example: "procedure for receiving and installing the unit". "Procedure for receiving a vehicle theft call", "Marketing procedure", and many more.
Of course, this required us to be ready with the maps of the whole world and support for different languages and indeed from then until these days the application containing all the required languages as well as support for many maps,
We started our first activity in Moscow where we established Starcom RUS, from there we moved to Panama, and in a short period of time we started selling in about 35 countries. We quickly discovered that the procedures we created from our experience are not suitable for every country and it is necessary to update the procedure according to the country, for example. In my country, as soon as a theft call was received, the procedure was to call the owner of the vehicle. It is enough that the owner of the car would turn on the light in his house and it would stop the theft process and the thief would run away. In Russia, for example, it was a bad idea and even endangered the car owner, so there we changed the procedure accordingly. Over time we discovered that the car theft market is only a part of the great potential inherent in the world for our technology and there is another big market where we can operate. What market is it about and what is required of us in the next chapter.
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