Swissphone

Regional Product Manager, North America

2009 – 2014

Swissphone, founded in 1969 and headquartered in Samstagern near Zurich, designs and manufactures critical messaging and alerting systems covering the complete alarm chain: personal alerting devices, radio alarm networks, and software for resource management and incident response, used by fire services, EMS, law enforcement, hospitals and industry. Its North American subsidiary, Swissphone LLC in Windsor, Colorado, brought its digital and analog emergency alerting and radio communication products to fire departments and EMS agencies through certified dealers.

As Regional Product Manager for North America, Chris owned the region's emergency alerting and radio communication product portfolio and executed the business objectives to grow Swissphone's North American footprint, competing directly with Motorola. Together with the global engineering team and the CTO, he designed and engineered base station alerting networks, and with the sales manager and the executive management team he ran and maintained a dealer network serving more than 2,000 customers. He provided tier 1 and tier 2 technical support across the product line, tested and coordinated delivery of the Firefighter Response System responder-availability portal and smartphone app, and project-managed two ERP implementations (SaaS and on-premises) spanning accounting, inventory, sales, CRM and shipping. He also led the regional office's IT, maintaining its software stack and cybersecurity.