Integrator of the Month: Sentry Alarm
Each month SSI highlights one of the security industry’s most progressive integrators that has attended the SSI Summit.
SSI Summit Stars is a new monthly department that highlights some of the security industry’s most progressive integrators that have attended the SSI Summit. This exclusive, invitation-only event is held annually in conjunction with the Total Tech Summit, which includes hundreds more integrators from the residential and commercial A/V fields.
This month, SSI hears from Sentry Alarm COO Chris Hill.
Chris Hill
Leadership Statement
I am the second generation of a multigenerational family business that meets the life-safety and intrusion detection needs of more than 6,000 clients in the greater Bay Area of California. Having been raised in the industry since birth, I have used my 30+ years of industry experience, both with my family’s business and with Guardian Security in Seattle, to help steer Sentry into being a strong, viable one-stop provider.
Sentry has recently doubled its number of accounts, greatly increased both new and existing recurring revenue per site and doubled its sales in new installations.
I believe the greatest testimony of how Sentry is performing is that more than 79% of leads are coming from our ever-growing client base. (The U.S. Army veteran and graduate of Seattle Pacific University is married with three kids, and says he loves basketball and travel).
Top 3 Challenges
1. Manpower — Primarily technical. We have successfully developed four of five candidates into competent technicians the past three years and three of them are still with us today. The drawback is it does take time.
2. Attrition — Due to our rapid growth from recent acquisitions, how to effectively and efficiently embrace our new clients into our way of doing business. For example, paying for service calls.
3. Time — To properly develop my team in all aspects, professionally and technically, to be pro-active in all aspects of our business, to continue to develop myself, and to manage daily operations.
Top 3 Opportunities
1. Acquisitions — This singlehandedly is the easiest way to backfill our existing service areas while picking up new talent.
2. Comprehensive fire — This is the direction we have steered our company the past five years which is why we are now over 50% fire and over 50% commercial, and explains why our RMR rate has almost tripled per site.
3. Commercial integration — Brand new to us … having the ability to write AI to allow clients’ operating software to cleanly integrate with their security and access control platforms globally.
For more info on the SSI and Total Tech Summit, visit totaltechsummit.com.
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