Falcon Plays To Win

Published for the Week Of July 19, 2004

o Falcon Northwest, customer service is no game. The Medford, Ore.-based system builder—which specializes in high-performance gaming systems—is seeing significant growth in its core business, its executives believe, because it also provides high-end customer response.

“Our goal is 100 percent customer satisfaction,” said Brad Berdelman, Falcon Northwest’s general manager. “Our goal is to satisfy every customer, on every machine in the field. Every contact with customer service, with our tech support line, is viewed as an opportunity to do this.”

That is critical for Falcon Northwest because gamers can be picky, educated consumers and hard to please. But Berdelman said the upside is that once you do earn customer loyalty, it’s hard to break.

That showed up in this CRN Fast-Growth Performer’s 51 percent increase in unit sales to an average of 310 units per month last year. The company said revenue grew 25 percent to about $5 million over the same period.

Berdelman said the 25-employee company could have grown faster, but it declined to jump into noncore technologies and businesses. And why should it? A top-of-the-line Falcon Northwest Mach V system can run more than $3,400 and yield a nice profit to boot.

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“When you buy a Falcon Northwest system, it’s built for performance and aesthetics,” said John Malley, director of marketing at BFG Technologies, a Lake Bluff, Ill.-based maker of graphics video cards and close partner of the system builder. “They are dedicated to being one of the best gaming PCs.”

Malley said the high-end gaming segment has grown in scope and profitability over the past several years as technology, once available only in top-tier workstations, has become available to mainstream system builders.

Now that the pace of change is picking up, that should be particularly advantageous for custom-system builders. “Right now, as opposed to five years ago, product cycles are much faster,” Berdelman said. “That is really our advantage—we can turn a lot faster than [tier-one manufacturers] can. We have the new technology available in our systems, while those [vendors] take six months just to qualify them.”

A quickening pace of change along with strong customer loyalty to its brand should keep Falcon Northwest growing over the next several years.