How Frank Became King Of Mobile Terminals
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday November 25, 1997
As managing director of King Communications Australasia, Mr Frank Eccles exudes confidence in a big way. His company, which specialises in mobile radio, data and satellite communications products and services, has won the 1997 Australia-wide National Business Bulletin Business Star of the Year award as well as the award for Product Innovation.
Not that winning awards is something new. King Communications also picked up last year's NSW Small Business of The Year award. Not bad for a company that began nine years ago in a small Sydney office with a total staff of three.
Now it's an international enterprise with more than 90 people on board and a thriving export business. So far as Mr Eccles is concerned, growth has no limit. "Three years ago we had a turnover of about $4.7 million. We expect we'll turn over in excess of $30 million this current financial year and we firmly believe we'll be in excess of $100 million in the year 2000. We're in a very successful growing industry, the wireless communications industry, and there are rapidly changing technologies. Digital technology, for example, is now on our doorstep, and it will be great for organisations that require fleet dispatch - like emergency service organisations, your ambulance, your police, fire brigade. And utilities such as water boards and other governmental instrumentalities, the taxi and courier industry, the transport industry generally. It just goes on and on.
"It's more and more important that people who run these organisations get better use of their field staff. They want greater efficiencies and to get that you need more accurate and rapid information; we can achieve this by using the new era of mobile data technology."
Mr Eccles was an independent consultant in the radio communications industry when he decided in 1988 to take a gamble in Las Vegas, Nevada. But the flutter he had in mind wasn't in any of the castle-of-dreams casinos but at the International Wireless Communications Expo held there that year, and he came up a winner.
The American-based Bendix King company was then producing one of the most advanced portable radio units in the world and it took Mr Eccles only 48 hours and a handshake to secure exclusive Australian distribution rights.
A Las Vegas jackpot worth multi-millions. And not just a stroke of luck.
"I was the right person in the right place at the right time," he says. "And I had an insight into the communication needs of niche markets in the Australian industry that were not being satisfied. In other words, I knew what I could do with the Bendix King product in the Australian market."
Success followed rapidly but Mr Eccles and his partner Mr Bob Geaghan again created their own luck by working 80- and 90-hour weeks.
"First of all," he says, "the Bendix King product gave us the major entree into the intrinsically safe marketplace, a portable radio designed to be used in hazardous environments, in petrochemical plants and oil refineries, grain elevators, coalmines.
in the right place at the right time. "So all those people who want underground communication or above-ground radio communication need a product that has been approved and in 1991 we became the first company to have a multi-channel synthesised portable radio approved to the new or revised Australian standards."
Another early customer was the NSW Police Force. The portable radios its officers were using were all very well but changes were needed. Mr Eccles talked Bendix King into changing its software while he pledged to pick up the cost of the alterations.
It was a sock to the company's pocket at the time but resulted in the sale of more than a thousand UHF purpose-built units. Sales of UHF or VHF portable radios followed to the NSW Fire Brigade, Victorian Police and West Australian Fire Brigade.
And then there was the Royal Australian Navy. It decided in 1994 to re-equip every ship in the fleet with updated radio communications facilities.
"It was a mammoth job," Mr Eccles says. "We spent eight months redeveloping another manufacturer's radio, completely stripping it down, changing more than 60 components. We built our own batteries, manufacturing them here in Sydney. It was a contract worth about $2 million to us, and we completed it 14 days ahead of schedule.
"And of the 720 radios we provided for the Navy some three years ago, to the best of my knowledge there has not been one electrical failure."
The company client list was looking pretty good by 1995 but the Eccles-Geaghan partnership decided it was time to reposition the firm. Bendix King in America had come under new ownership and this caused some heartburn.
"During the transition period," Mr Eccles says, "we could only take delivery of 314 Bendix King portable radios and this nearly sent our company broke. We lost a potential $3 million worth of business.
"So we suffered. But Motorola came to the rescue by banging on our door, saying we want you guys to be distributor of our product. So we signed a premier dealer agreement with them and also signed an exclusive agreement with Nokia, which has the lion's share of the MPT (truck radio format) mobile system in the world.
"And then we signed an agreement with Westinghouse to be its representative for sales marketing and service support of its mobile set products, which work on the Optus network.
"At the same time, we were actively developing our own mobile data terminal, which provides a logical extension of the customer's in-house computer system to vehicles in the field. It enables field units to receive text messages on a display screen which are accurate and suffer from less channel congestion."
King Communications now had its Sydney head office and branches in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra and Mackay.
It has an American facility with a head office in Orlando, Florida, and branch offices in Kansas and Las Vegas.
It's also listed on the Vancouver stock exchange. "It's the mobile data terminal market that has set us apart from anyone else," Mr Eccles says. "We are the dominant supplier in Australia" but he has his sights on the world.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald