Manufacturer 1-on-1: First Choice Building Product’s Mike Murray

At the current pace of technology advancement, 20 years can seem like an eternity within any industry, but especially in security which has undergone a complete technological shift across multiple product segments. Companies in the market have likewise had to adapt their businesses to meet the needs of customers whose equipment demands have subsequently evolved with the times.

No one knows this better than First Choice Building Products, an Illinois-based manufacturer of door hardware solutions. The company, which its celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year, started out primarily providing emergency egress devices and accessories for businesses with aluminum store fronts but their product range has now grown to include a wide range of exit devices as well as electric locks that they sell to customers across the U.S. and Canada.   

SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) recently caught up with Mike Murray, the Founder and President of First Choice, to discuss how technology trends and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic have impacted his company and the industry overall.    

SIW: How would you characterize the current market for security and access control products? 

Murray: The need for security, perhaps unfortunately, has grown exponentially over recent years and that includes our products and a lot of the new accessories for our products, like alarm systems and access control items. We’ve seen quite a bit of growth in those product areas. The building trade and actual building construction has been steady until recently and we haven’t actually seen too much of a decline in that even now, but the real growth we see is in the retrofitting of existing facilities with these new higher security requirements. We’re seeing these new products that have electric access capability, so we see a lot of growth in that and have in recent years.   

What would you say is your key differentiator from a product perspective? 

I would say our flexibility and commitment to quality. We respond to customer requirements very quickly and innovate our products to match them. Just the recent changes we’ve made with the new product we’ve introduced, Access8, to give a kind of a DIY-type of solution for access control… that flexibility along with reliability is really where we’ve stood out. 

What kind of impact has Covid-19 had on your business and that of your customers? 

In our particular business, perhaps the single biggest thing is making sure our team members here stay safe. All of the Covid protocols that have been needed  – safety measures here at the shop, allowing for flexibility with the staff, working from home and things like that – have all been put in place. It has also been a big issue to manage the supply chain with all of the different Covid-related issues among our suppliers and making sure that enough material comes in and things stay on track. As far as our customers are concerned, retrofit work has even increased a little bit with the need for them to control access to building during Covid, but we haven’t seen a very striking change in demand or in who needs certain kinds of products.  

As you look at the market landscape, what are some of the biggest trends you are seeing currently and how do you expect those will evolve throughout this year and beyond? 

We definitely see security continuing to be a strong issue. We are seeing demand for exit devices remain strong and having them work well with other products on the building as part of a total security solution. We also see a lot of code-driven things – hurricane impact approvals, blast approvals, etc. – as well as energy use and products that help companies meet their LEED targets. 

A lot of smaller facilities are also looking for solutions they can install themselves and we’re seeing more facilities, like daycare centers, clinics and places like that looking for these smaller, more tailored systems and that is what we have been trying to focus our more recent product developments on.  

How do you see the industry, as a whole, coming out of this pandemic? 

I think the big question is; how are people going to want to congregate to do business in the future? How are people going to want to go to an office and work as a group? We think most people like working nearby other people, so this current paradigm of working from home in isolation really is sort of a temporary thing. It is going to take solving the pandemic to get any kind of normalcy back, but I do think once the pandemic is solved, we will see people return to offices, restaurants and all those sorts of things. But, some of the things we’ve learned – how to be more efficient with things like Zoom meetings, virtual training and things like that – those trends will stay as will additional flexibility and letting people work from home now that it has been proven that it will still give you good results.