Getting to Know the Roundtable Panelists

August 07, 2011 Scott Goldfine

Can you please introduce yourselves and describe your businesses?

Jim Henry: I’m executive vice president of Henry Bros. Electronics, now a division of Kratos Defense and Security Solutions. Subsequent to the merger in December, my role has changed to be more in business development and driving opportunities and the expansion of the company as opposed to doing everything that you have to do as a CEO, so the roles have changed a little bit going forward, but it gives me sweet spot of doing what I really enjoy doing the most.

What are the main markets you looking at right now?

Henry: Transportation and the public sector has been traditionally a strong suit for Henry Bros., and that was a key element that Kratos wanted us to bring into their business. They are overall an $800 million company; $125 million of that is in physical security. So you have $600-$700 million worth of revenue that is government DoD military, so that now is a strong focus to bring physical security deployment integration into an existing customer base they already have with that military footprint. In addition to that, all the normal suspects in the commercial industry, such as health care, pharmaceuticals, education are all the strong suits that we’ve had. We’re not very big in retail, but our focus on retail is more on operators and property management than in direct retail end users.

Mike Bradley: I’m the president of Safeguard Security in Scottsdale, Ariz. Our emphasis is primarily Arizona. We have offices in New Mexico. We actually have a number of operating divisions. The company was based originally on guard business — patrol — in the community, such as Paradise Valley in Scottsdale, which is a really nice area. We have our monitoring center; we’re a very RMR-based company. It’s very nice to have the gift that keeps on giving, and we have about 20,000 accounts there. We have a very decent commercial integration business. That includes the fire side of the business and access control, the usual suspects. We also have a communications part of that, which is actually my background, which is doing the professional sound. That’s what I started off doing 30 years ago. We work do hospitals and school communications and data systems and that sort of thing as well. We have a residential emphasis as well, which is where a good deal of our RMR is based. We treat all of those as separate operating divisions within the company.

How many employees?

Bradley: About 360 across all the divisions. Almost all of that is in the Phoenix metro area.

Curtis Nikel: I’m with Contava out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Calgary is our branch office. We’re an IT-based security provider. Our focus is on IT. As a seven-year company, I don’t have a lot of background on the analog security world, but when I began this business, it was at a point and time where convergence was taking place between the IT and the security world. We positioned it strategically with IT people and had great success. We’re in the municipal and provincial governments. We do transportation and facility physical security, as well as oil and gas industry in the utility sector. We don’t do any residential work. Our business is all business-to-business, as we’d like to say. Again, with property managers, we’ll deal with but typically not with any retail merchants. We’ve had very successful growth. We’ve seen 25-percent growth year after year for the last seven years. Sixty-eight people between the two offices. And focusing on IT has proven to be a win-win for most customers. When we come to the table with our team, they see our expertise as not in dealing with old, but taking them somewhere in the future.

Phil Aronson: I’m with Aronson Security Group [ASG]. I’m the president and CEO. We’re located in Seattle and Portland, so we cover the Pacific Northwest. We are a systems integrator. We don’t have any recurring revenue or alarm monitoring business, but we look at other recurring revenue models that we can put together and get closer to our clients. It’s all business-to-business. We focus on verticals and health care. We do a lot with commercial campuses and national accounts, so we have global customers. Most of them are located in the Pacific Northwest, but some of them are in places around the country, so that’s a big part of our business. State and local government is still a large part of our business. Critical infrastructure: utilities, electric, water and then there is a new utility, which would be data centers; the whole infrastructure networking. We have 100 employees. We have the large Seattle and Portland locations, and then we also have locations in Canada. We have project managers located across the country that handle some project management on the national and global accounts, so they do a lot of traveling.

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About the Author

Scott Goldfine

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Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at [email protected].