Potter Electric Signal Company on Monday announced that it has acquired three well-known product lines in the fire alarm industry, including Harrington Fire Alarm, Evax Systems and CPG Signals.
According to Dave Kosciuk, executive vice president and general manager of the fire and security division at Potter, the acquisition of these product lines will help the company fill in some of the missing gaps within its product portfolio.
“By acquiring the technology of high rise and low rise voice, networking and smoke control panels, it fills the hole that we had in our product offering and that will make us much more attractive to the engineered systems community,” said Kosciuk. “These acquisitions not only expand our footprint from a technology standpoint, but also from a revenue base.”
Harrington Signal Fire Alarm provides fire alarm system products for a wide variety of vertical commercial and institutional markets. Product lines include conventional and addressable fire control panels, smoke detectors, annunciators, duct detectors, and more. Evax provides a wide array of products for use in commercial, institutional, high rise, military and industrial markets. Product lines include large head-end bulk amplifiers, distributed audio, small side-car voice evacuation systems, fire fighter telephone systems and mass notification systems. CPG Signals’ product lines include explosion proof speakers, strobes, horns and an array of other explosion proof signaling devices.
Kosciuk said they would also be sharing technology between the brands to develop “new and better products.” He also anticipates the integration of these product lines into Potter will be relatively seamless.
“Everybody has their channels and we currently sell into the same channels, so it’s pretty much going to be status quo right off the bat. Our Potter salesforce will take over and play the role of sales team for all of the brands,” he said. “On the outside there are multiple synergies for markets that we currently serve, which is both the engineered systems distributor market and the security and fire distribution channel. There are synergies in the markets we serve and in the products we offer and we’re going to be able to integrate technologies to better serve the entire customer base.”
In addition, Kosciuk said that the respective brand names of these products will be retained, but that the Potter brand would also be emphasized. For example, Harrington Fire Alarm will become “Harrington by Potter,” according to Kosciuk, who said that the same type of branding would also apply to Evax and CPG moving forward.
Kosciuk said that 20 employees would also be joining Potter as part of the acquisitions and that the company would be maintaining a presence in Moline, Ill., where Harrington is based, as well as Branford, Conn., which is home to Evax.
“We’ve retained pretty much all of the personnel that supported the Evax line in Branford, so we’re going to continue to support the Evax brand with the existing personnel that came along with the purchase, so nothing really changes there. And the same goes for Harrington and CPG. We retained key employees in Moline for customer service, technical support and engineering,” said Kosciuk.
Although these purchases will go a long way in shoring up their product offerings, Kosciuk said that Potter is always on the lookout for acquisitions that can help broaden their footprint even further in the market.
“By no means are we done. We are going to continue to look at other companies that make sense and are in adjacent markets to what we currently serve and, if something looks good, we’re going to go after it,” he added.
