On the Mic

From the keyboard to the big stage!

Growing up, I had aspirations of becoming a sportscaster. When I was in college, I took a major step in fulfilling that dream as I called basketball and football games on the school radio station, and even hosted a one-hour sports talk show on Sunday nights.

After graduating, I took my goals of becoming a sportscaster one step further by enrolling in the Connecticut School of Broadcasting in, where else, New Jersey! Unfortunately, if I wanted a job right away after attending broadcasting school, I would have had to relocate to another state far, far away from the northeastern part of the U.S., and I was not quite ready to do that for various reasons.

So I ultimately decided if I could not become a sportscaster, I could become a sportswriter, and I was fortunate to land an editorial job at the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” ESPN. It was a job I loved, and hated at the same time because while I loved covering major sporting events around the country (World Series, U.S. Open Tennis Championships, LPGA Championship, just to name a few), and getting paid to watch and write about sports from the most popular to the more obscure (try writing about the Iditarod and Tour de France on a daily basis), I realized I had no social life working practically every weekend and major holiday while in my 20s.

Flash forward more than 20 years, and here I am as Managing Editor of Security Systems News, with a wife and two kids and a more normal work schedule, as well as the ability to perform my job remotely.

Why am I summarizing my entire career in a security blog? Well, last week I experienced flashbacks to my sportscasting days while attending the Electronic Security Expo (ESX) in Fort Worth, Texas.

I was tasked, kind of last minute, to moderate two panels at ESX. While I was a bit nervous about taking the stage in front of what turned out to be around 35 people at the first session, and a standing-room-only crowd at the second session, right smack-dab in the middle of the Expo floor (no reason to be nervous, right?), the experience of presenting the Bill Bozeman and Integrator of the Year Awards at PSA TEC last month in Denver built up my confidence being at the podium again last week at ESX.

Of course, having some awesome panelists made things a lot easier. I want to thank Matt Barnette, Chief Executive Officer of PSA Security Network; Kelly Bond, Partner at Davis Mergers & Acquisitions Group; and Marc Katz, Member at the Law Offices of Marc Katz, for providing great insight on challenges, trends, and opportunities in the security industry, as well as how security companies have adapted their business models in response to COVID-19.

I also want to thank Rebecca Bayne, President of Bayne Consulting & Search, Inc., and Michael Lavway, Director of Enterprise Security Risk Group Operations at ADT Commercial, for engaging the crowd on the Expo floor in a lively discussion on workforce development and the hiring problems that the security industry is facing these days.

Each one of these amazing panelists made this aspiring sportscaster feel like I was put in a time machine and reliving my college radio days again. Who knows when I’ll get back on the mic again, but I know I’ll be more than ready when the opportunity arises.