BCBusiness

October 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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64 BCBusiness OctOber 2014 Ho Kim President and CEO CAMACC Systems Inc. I f you filled up your tank recently, chances are Ho Kim's cameras were watching you. Founded in 1998, at the height of the tech boom, CAMACC Systems Inc. (CAMera ACCess) is one of North America's largest installers of video recorders and access con- trol systems, with more than 200,000 cam- eras and 100,000 remote door locks in gas stations, grocery stores and across Canada. CAMACC—which specializes in full-service, national rollouts of security equipment— designs, builds and installs both its software and hardware for the likes of Suncor, Gate- way Casino Corp. and London Drugs. "We're very unique," says Kim, a 47-year-old college dropout from Victoria who moved to Vancou- ver Island from South Korea at the age of two. "We're one of the very few in our industry to have everything under one roof." CAMACC's headquarters, a 10-minute drive from the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, houses Kim's most valued asset: the company's 24/7 customer support centre. Nine 50-inch monitors line the walls of CAMACC's situation room-like facility, where seven full-time tech support employees can check over 300 live feeds from clients' cameras from coast to coast (with their permission, of course). "In a lot of cases, we can let a client know that there's a problem on their site before they're aware of it," says Kim. While CAMACC now has a dedicated software engineering team for client requests and revenues that top $17 million a year, in the early years, Kim and his partner devoted their working days to signing clients‚ and evenings to building their product: tinkering with the cameras, fixing bugs, loading and testing software. "When you're a small com- pany starting out, you wear every single hat," says Kim. "Manufacturing was one of those hats." —Jacob Parry EOY 2 0 14 w i n n e r I n f o r m a t i o n T e c h n o l o g y

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