This is a great question. Public Safety Group has only been in business since the beginning of 2016.  Why would an agency choose us over other, more tenured consulting firms?

To answer that, one must first understand what we do.  We are not the typical consulting firm.  For over 17 years, our owner sold public safety software to agencies, often with the agencies getting help from consultants.  Many times, the consultant had very little experience managing a public safety software project and typically didn’t know how a software company operated.  Many came from public safety and were very sharp when it came to the needs of a product or product set.  But that is very different than understanding how to negotiate, knowing the stability of the company they were choosing to buy from, what to look for with terms and conditions of a software contract and many other things involved with the public safety software business.

At the same time, the software market had become very volatile.  With our owner having a lot of thoughts of what he would do if he were assisting agencies buy and implement software, he decided to start his own company to do just that.  With that in mind, software consulting is over 90% of what National Public Safety Group does.  We are not a consulting firm that says yes to everything.  We say no to many consulting requests to ensure we stay within our areas of expertise and do a great job at whatever we take on.

NPSG claims they mainly focus on software.  What does that look like?  What is different from other consultants?

We don’t just say we focus mainly on software.  We highly focus on the public safety software industry, it’s products and providers.  Besides over 90% of our work involving public safety software consulting, we internally have training to help our consultants understand the industry better.  We teach them how to continuously stay up to date with information they need to be a successful public safety software consultant.  We also have three different tools we are building to help our employees and customers directly understand the differences of the providers in the market.  They are:

• NPSG Rating – This is a comparison we have been building for a year which is a side by side comparison of the most prominent public safety software companies using criteria such as sales process, pricing, implementation, project management, support, upgrade methods and costs, organically hosted or client/server architecture, ongoing costs, how they treat customers ten years and older, and many other criteria.
• YouTube Channel – we have launched our YouTube channel and have a few videos on there, but more exciting is the video interview series we are about to launch.  In September, we will have our first official interview with a public safety software provider, which will be done using a professional studio and production crew.  These interviews will have a specific set of questions to bring nationwide awareness of how the companies are approaching the demand for more hosted solutions, their technology road maps into the future, how they plan to improve their implementation and support processes, and much more.

These tools are being launched with no cost to our agencies, but they will help position us as the company offering tools that help agencies make smart decisions.  Though our company is new, our staff is very tenured in the public safety software industry.  Sharing that knowledge is our best way to help agencies make better decisions and avoid many common pitfalls.  By helping all agencies, we hope to benefit by becoming the ‘go-to’ consulting firm for public safety projects.  All of this work helps us to fulfill our mission for our customers and that makes us a success.