Should You Build a Showroom? Leslie Shiner on the Business Case Most Integrators Skip

Ten years ago, an arts and community worker in Brisbane swiped right on an electrician. On their first date, they got talking about what we owe each other, and how to use privilege for good. Eight years after that conversation turned into a business, Give Industries has given more than a million dollars to charity. Kat Dekker is one of three co-founders of Give Industries, alongside her partner Calvin Baker and their friend Jeremy Chirpaz. Give operates as a commercial electrical contractor across Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Melbourne. It's triple ISO certified, a national NECA Gold Medal winner, and Master Electrician accredited. It's also structured as a registered charity, so every dollar of profit at year end is committed to giving. In this conversation, Kat walks through what a social enterprise actually is, how the profit-for-good model works in practice, how the team hit their first million dollars donated at the end of last year, and why the impact side of the business cannot come at the cost of the electrical side. She's honest about the pressure of running a business where the stakes are bigger than yourself. And she puts an invitation on the table for someone from another trade, the same kind of crazy as her co-founders, to help build the next branch of Give.

Almost every integrator carries insurance. Far fewer are actually covered for the work they do. Insurance runs on occupation classifications, and the integration industry has never fit neatly into one. Call yourself an electrician, an IT contractor or an AV installer and you have described a fraction of the job, which is exactly the fraction an insurer will hold you to when a claim lands. Daniel Webber co-directs Webber Insurance, a general brokerage that deliberately niches into construction and technology. Over a series of conversations with Master Integrator, he helped build what Webber believes is the first insurance package written specifically for Australian integrators, general liability, professional indemnity and cyber in one place, with the insurer involved from the ground up rather than a generic policy relabelled after the fact. This conversation is the honest version of a subject most integrators avoid. Why the cover you hold may not describe your business, the gap that opens between a public liability policy and a professional indemnity policy, the claim general liability will never pay, why cyber is the threat that can shut you overnight, and how to find out whether you are protected before you need to be. It is a launch, and neither Daniel nor Paul pretends it is finished. It is a starting point for an industry to finally be insured for what it actually does. In this episode: • Why insurance has never fit the integration industry, and the problem of occupation classifications • Where an integrator's risk actually sits, spread across general liability, professional indemnity and cyber • The gap that opens when you stack a public liability policy and a PI policy that each exclude the other's territory • General advice, personal advice and no advice, and why the way you buy insurance decides who carries the risk • Why the aggregator sites that hand you ten quotes are not doing the job you think they are • What professional indemnity actually protects, and why an industry built on design services cannot go without it • Three ways to find out whether you are covered, including where AI helps and where it does not • Why cyber is the threat that can shut a business overnight, and the first party cover the other policies do not give you • Inside the new package, general liability, professional indemnity and cyber, built from a technology base with room to ramp cover up or down • How to get a quote, and the one thing that will make or break the scheme

Master Integrator is evolving. What began as a podcast is becoming a dedicated industry body for residential, commercial and AV integration professionals across Australia and New Zealand. In this special announcement, founder Paul Skelton explains why Master Integrator has been created, who it represents and what it intends to deliver. The episode explores the challenges facing the systems integration industry, including limited recognition, fragmented representation, workforce shortages and the need for stronger education and career pathways. You’ll also hear about Master Integrator’s work across: Industry advocacy and government engagement Systems Integration qualifications and the next stage of securing government funding Professional standards and consumer recognition Business support and practical member resources Industry research, including the State of the Integrator report and Manufacturer Channel Report Card Events, education and professional development The Founding 50 and how to become a member Master Integrator is only just getting started. A substantial program of work is already in development, with several exciting announcements coming throughout launch week and beyond. Membership is now open to integrator companies, sole traders and industry service providers. Find out more: https://www.masterintegrator.org Become a member: https://www.masterintegrator.org/join Complete the Industry Survey: https://masterintegrator.org/resources/report-card/ Follow Master Integrator on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Contact: [email protected]

The integration industry is full of technically gifted people who find the business side of their work uncomfortable. Selling feels like a word that applies to someone else. Marketing means spending money they are not sure they have. Leading a team is something they will get to once things settle down. Daniel Grozdan has spent most of his career watching that play out. After years in retail, national account management and a senior role at Samsung, he now manages marketing across 12 brands at Canohm and writes for Connected Magazine. His view, developed across a long time on the distribution side of the industry, is that the integrators who build good businesses are rarely the ones who know the most. They are the ones who have figured out how to talk to people. This conversation covers the part of running an integration business that nobody trained you for. What AI is actually useful for, and where it gets in the way. How to think about sales when the word itself makes you uncomfortable. What a discovery conversation should do that most integrators skip. How to find your ideal customer when your instinct is to say it is anyone with a house. What marketing actually costs, and what it costs you not to do it. What metrics matter when going viral is not the point. And what the one thing an integrator could do this week to be more human in the way they run their business. In this episode • What Daniel means by the human element, and why he thinks AI makes it more important rather than less • Whether sales can be taught, and what happens when you take the sales element out of a sales conversation • The ideal customer profile, what it is, why most integrators think their customer is anyone, and how to find out who it actually is • Finding common ground before you try to find common business, and why that order matters • What marketing is, and why most integrators mistake it for advertising spend • Where to start with social media if you are time poor and have never done it • What metrics actually matter for a small integration business, and why going viral is not one of them • What to do if you will not use social media and do not want to • Whether old school marketing, print, letter drops, physical mail, still has a place in 2025 • Common mistakes Daniel sees in how integrators approach sales and marketing • Reverse engineering a business goal, and why writing the number down changes how you think about everything else • The one thing an integrator can do this week to be more human in how they run their business

For years, the Certificate III in Custom Electronics sat on the national register and looked, from a distance, like a pathway. Up close it had no registered training organisations delivering it and no students enrolled in it, and on those numbers alone a Jobs and Skills Council is obliged to remove a training product from the register.