What have you done internally as an organization to ramp up new technologies and services?

DePREE: We’ve done two things. The first is we’ve leaned heavily on the manufacturers. Developing relationships to the point where we can provide the feedback directly to them. We’re not the ones creating the new technology. We’re the ones who understand what the customer needs, and it’s our job to get that for them.

The only way I’m going to get that for them and bring it to market is going to the manufacturers. Making sure they know what we’re hearing and seeing in the marketplace and saying this is the technology being asked for.

How do we get it? That’s for the forward-thinking technology, what’s going to break soon.

For right now, the technology that’s out now, we’ve doubled down on training. We’ve got to get our technicians and frontline people to make sure they know the full capabilities of all the technology. It doesn’t do us any good to put a really capable device in the field if our technicians who are installing it don’t know the full capabilities of it and don’t know how to train the end user on what we’re putting in. To me that’s what we’ve done internally to make sure we’re taking full advantage of all this new technology coming out.

REHMAN: Internally within the organization we’ve worked with all our teammates. We worked with all different departments. We’ve gone through our office and literally started to ask questions on what we needed to do. What are our clients asking us? What questions do we get stumped on or what questions do our salesmen get now? We sat down and evaluated the idea of, ‘This is the issue we’re seeing out there. How do we overcome it?’

Overall, we’ve hired more than six people in the past year-and-a-half, all from outside the industry with fresh minds. For a small company, that’s a lot. All together we were able to come to the conclusion that we need to move into the next decade of technology and how do we deliver it.

How do we satisfy our customers’ needs? Of course, cost and everything else comes into play but then we sit down with manufacturers. We go over how our ideas are helping them come up with beta testing on new products, saying what we feel as far as what the industry needs to start providing us.

At the end of the day, it’s a collaboration of everybody in the industry, from the association level to the manufacturers, to the dealers, to the mom-and-pop locations. It all starts from realizing what we have. I’ve always said that you have to ask the right questions to get the right answers. If you keep asking the same question you’ll still keep getting that same answer and feel content. If you ask the right questions, then you’ll definitely know.

FEW: What every company in this industry needs to do is listen to and poll their customers. One of the biggest issues with security is you install an account and then that customer starts paying you every month, and unless they have an issue – service related, battery related or event related, whatever it is – you don’t hear from them. That worked for years. Everybody built these beautiful businesses. Then new players come in and it’s a different mindset. The cable companies come in, the telco providers come in, distributors come in and your traditional security guys are saying, ‘This is a threat.’

It’s not a threat because they have the ability to offer the same products as the next company. That’s how security companies win other accounts from different security companies because they come in and say, ‘This is what we have to offer,’ and the customer is saying, ‘Wow, I can’t arm my system remotely. I can’t see who is at the door and let them in. Yeah, I’ll take it.’

Then they call their existing company to say, ‘I’m leaving. Why? Because this great company came out and told me that my alarm could be backed up by a radio.’

It’s about communicating with your customers. Listen to them. Constantly poll them. Today with Survey Monkey, it’s virtually free to talk to your customers. What would you like to see better? What are you tracking? How smart is your home? And let them know you’ve got new technology, new products.

The security companies that are doing that are gaining a huge revenue stream. You’re getting back in there and resigning the contract, you’re adding more services. Sometimes it’s an upgrade you take out of your own pocket and upgrade them on a camera or thermostat. All of a sudden they’re reengaged with this system they’ve had for 15 years.

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What aspects of your business keep you up at night?

REHMAN: The fast pace of our industry keeps me up at night. Realizing you have to be on your toes. You have to keep up to par with what’s going on around you. There are some big players that have gotten into this industry that weren’t here before. What are they doing differently? What am I doing differently? Am I on the right path? The mission and goal of our company, does it need to evolve now or can we wait a year or two?

Again, with technology the way it is on a fast pace, we have to be on a fast pace. That requires us to be thinking about what should we be doing now or should we be doing next? What should my team, my colleagues and I be discussing tomorrow? It’s the Internet age. You don’t get a little newsletter anymore that you waited for all month to find out what the industry is going through. Instead, I get 65 E-mails a day from every single different type of organization saying this is what’s new.

The Internet has changed everything. Everything is more on demand. It’s at a click of a button, and our clients want on-demand and click of a button as well. We have to know exactly what service is it today that the client wants. That service doesn’t stay the same. It changes and evolves every day.

FEW: Th
e U.S. government, regulators regulating businesses they shouldn’t or putting in needless legislation. I would sleep much better at night if we could go to every state with a model legislation that covers background checks, fingerprints, continuing education credits. Those are things all states should have.

When I get up in the morning, I check my E-mail and find out these four towns have decided that we’re not going to send the police department. That keeps me up. As great as guard services are, it’s not the police department. So making sure we’re doing all the right things to stay connected with the police and fire departments, making sure we’re doing everything with our customers to make sure they’re trained on our system so that if they do have an alarm event it’s because somebody tried to break in.

At any given point a state, a city, a town, a borough, could just turn off a switch and wreck your business. We are in the security business. We are there to respond to alarms. It’s more legislative than it is industry trends. One of the big passions of this industry, especially for the [ESA] Young Security Professionals group, should be to get involved locally to make sure we are protecting our businesses on that front.

DePREE: Most of my concern is employee-based. Are we providing employees with the right training so they can take good care of our customers? I can wake up and worry about our customers all day long. Why are we going to lose them? Did we take care of them?

But I’m not going to answer the phone. I talk to very few of our customers. Our team talks to a lot of customers, every single day. So are we providing them with the knowledge? Are we going to keep the good ones around? Do we have them in the right position to be successful? HR management at our office has not been fantastic. We’re not a huge organization. We don’t have an HR department. We have managers who wear that hat and deal with all the payroll and that sort of thing. But taking good care of our employees so the good ones stick around, finding better employees, those are the things that keep me up at night.

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Do you charge additional recurring revenue for interactive services delivered through mobile devices? Or is that simply considered a value-add to offer the customer?

FEW: I think on principle you should be able to charge for every additional value. If you were adding value to the customer’s life, you should be able to charge for it. At IntelligentHome we don’t. We go out at one flat rate, whether you have one camera, six cameras. We do charge extra for storage, but we go out with a flat rate.

DePREE: There are a few things we think are vitally important to the alarm system that we do not charge for. Every residential system we put in we include a smoke detector, every single one, and it’s monitored 24/7. If somebody is going to get a security system there are a couple of main reasons they’re going to get it. No. 1, they’re going to say, ‘We want to protect our family.’ What better way than adding a smoke detector at no charge to protect your customer’s home, and that’s monitored 24/7?

From there, though, I agree with what Robert said. If we’re adding value, we should be able to charge for it. So we do charge for the connected home services we provide. One thing we do differently is we roll in all of the automation and everything into one price.

When you get into connected home, theoretically you could say, ‘OK, you want this piece added on? That’s a dollar. You want this piece added on, OK, that’s a dollar.’

We have a base monitoring rate, including the monitoring for the smoke detector for a residential system. Then connected services is a price. Then video would be a price. There is a bit of a tier to it but it’s tiered just based on what services you’re getting.

REHMAN: We follow something very similar to Collin. Our business is the same way, where we’re not charging per device. We’re really charging for what the use is, as far as if you’re going to have connected home, you’re going to be charged a flat rate of X amount of dollars. Same thing with base monitoring. Also, as well as if you’re doing any type of specific reporting or extra reporting we have to charge you for it, and that will be a flat rate. It’s not depending on how many alarm signals you sent or anything like that.

The reason it’s like that is because the manufacturers have given us the opportunity to keep it that way, where some of the manufacturers don’t charge us per product. Some of our very big competitors, that have billions of dollars to spend in advertising and we don’t, they do charge by how many devices you have. It gives us more of an edge on competition sometimes, even though we may not have a big marketing pocketbook or expense, but we’re able to spread around the fact that we’ll do a flat rate.

The best word is word of mouth. It’s not physically word of mouth today, it could be Angie’s List, Craigslist, or whatever review site, Yelp, they’ll put you on. Google+ is where it spreads for us, especially us small guys.

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