Building a solid foundation for business growth

North American Report: Joni Lampinen

Establishing a presence in North America is not something that can be achieved overnight. It has taken a lot of groundwork to get iLOQ into a position where we can truly start daily business operations stateside. We are now in a good position to serve North American customers and channel partners, and expectations are high for the coming years.

Diligently doing the groundwork

To give ourselves any kind of chance of success and meeting customer expectations, it became evident early on that we needed to build a physical presence in America to do business there. In 2023, we started to operate under legal entity of iLOQ USA Inc and we have made key sales team recruitments for several regions around the country. We are now able to operate locally and do business as an American company.

We have also recently opened our very own distribution center in Dallas, Texas to ensure smooth and timely deliveries to our US-based customers and channel partners. Our US operations are showing the way forward for much of our global organization as we shift to a new regional business approach where decision-making is no longer dependent on whether it’s during European business hours in our Finland HQ.  

Concentrating our efforts

In North America, we continue to concentrate on big cities and areas of dense population with our solutions for multifamily housing, student living and education. We also sell our solutions to critical infrastructure clients across the US and Canada. We now have a team of 11 serving the US with our own salespeople serving the metropolitan New York area, the Southeast (Atlanta and surrounding areas), Chicago, Texas and Southern California. We also have a dedicated team of four serving the Canadian market.

We anticipate growing the headcount of our sales team through recruitment and actively expanding our partner and distributor networks to broaden our reach even further. Our Dallas, Texas, hub can also already provide some local product and customer support and service. We will continue to build our operations to establish a solid presence in the US and Canadian markets according to our strategy.

“It has taken a lot of groundwork,
but we are now in a good position
moving forward with business in
America.”

Matching technologies to consumer markets

In terms of our technology, the US market entry forced us to change our approach from that which works in Europe. The American urban consumers are already accustomed to mobile access management and access sharing solutions, whereas their European counterparts still view it as something of a novelty.

The value proposition we lean on in the US is the unique battery-free, easy to retrofit  low total cost of ownership and offline aspect of the locking solution itself, making it more sustainable, efficient, secure and reliable. We needed to make sure the user experience was on par with the established competition. iLOQ announced the arrival of the iLOQ 5 Series + at the ISC West trade show in Las Vegas, which delivers new features and user functionalities to our already competitive technology platform.

The focus has been on improving the user experience and 3rd-party integrations in particular. We expect the new developments to speed up business in the multifamily housing and build environment sector. There are approximately 50 small to mid-sized properties, including several student housing locations, currently either already using or testing our solutions. Converting these POC’s into business will help open doors to more opportunities.

Securing critical infrastructure as always

At the same time, we have continued building our presence and pipeline in both commercial premises and the critical infrastructure sector. Success cases, such as the waterworks in Mount Pleasant, North Carolina, or the telecom tower network of Everest Infrastructure across the US are paving the way for many new customer projects  and negotiations.

We are seeing interest from a wide range of industries and applications ranging from EV charging networks and logistics and distribution operators to mass transportation, with projects in progress with several potential new customers. In applications where long distances, harsh environment or high numbers of key users are at play, our solution is especially attractive in terms of usability, reliability and especially security.

Setting up for the future

It has taken some time to get iLOQ into the position where it has the capabilities and portfolio to really go after the North American market as a credible and formidable player. But the sheer size of the market, paired with its hyper-commercialized and fast-paced nature, means that there is a lot to be done and plenty of fast, on-the-run learning to do. Smart and well-targeted marketing efforts will be needed to boost brand awareness and amplify our message. Also, networking and finding the right spokespersons is way more important in America. We will continue to push forward and, through new success stories, we anticipate the floodgates to eventually open. But before that happens, we need to be actively putting in the work and building our business through active sales efforts together with our channel partners.