Roughly seven or eight years ago, I got a call that would permanently shift the way I think about service.

A strategic partner of ours, one of our most trusted vendor relationships, had just completed a sale of their video management solution to a brand-new cannabis client. But there was a problem. A big one. The system wasn’t working. The end user was furious. And the root issue? They were wildly under-provisioned for video storage and CPU power, and the deployment had been poorly managed.

The partner stepped in and did something bold: they told the client, “We want to bring in our best integrator to make this right. We’ll cover the cost.” That integrator was us.

I remember sitting in one of the dispensaries with the ownership team of the cannabis company and our manufacturer partner, sketching out a rescue plan. Together, we stabilized the system and re-engineered their infrastructure to meet the true demands of their compliance-heavy environment. They were impressed. So impressed, in fact, that they immediately awarded us their next dispensary project.

But it didn’t stop there. They also asked us to take over support and service for all their current sites. That was the real moment of inflection. We quickly realized that we weren’t just dealing with a retail client. We were supporting a mission-critical operation. For them, a single down camera didn’t just mean a service call, it meant regulatory exposure, lost revenue, and in some states, forced store closures. We had to adapt. Fast.

This wasn’t our normal operating model at the time, but we leaned into it. We built out a responsive support framework, restructured parts of our service team, and put the right tools, people, and escalation paths in place. We learned to treat this client the way a utility company treats uptime.

The result? Over the next several years, that single recovery job turned into more than 40–50 retail projects and 6+ grow sites in excess of millions of square feet of cultivation infrastructure across the Midwest and East Coast. And more importantly, we built a long-term client relationship rooted in trust, speed, and accountability.

Here’s the punchline: If we had viewed that first rescue job as just another one-off, we never would have seen the opportunity. But by stepping up in the moment after the sale, when things were messy, unclear, and high stakes, we opened the door to something bigger.

Too often in our industry, integrators view service as a reactive obligation. An unfortunate necessity. A cost center. But we’ve found the opposite to be true: service is a trust engine. It’s where reputations are built, where referrals are born, and where real loyalty takes root.

Today, service and remote support is one of our fastest-growing revenue lines. We’ve formalized SLAs, launched managed service tiers, and wrapped preventative maintenance into multi-year contracts. We still install systems — lots of them! But it’s our service, our response times, our support structure, our follow-through that keeps clients calling us back.

If you want sustainable growth in this space, you don’t need to chase more installs. You need to turn your installs into platforms for long-term value. Because when your service becomes your brand, your next sale starts long before the first job is even done.