Super-Regional Provider Ackerman Security Systems Shares Secrets to Success

SSI speaks with Ackerman Security execs who lift the curtain on the business’ people, practices, processes and profit strategies.

Super-Regional Provider Ackerman Security Systems Shares Secrets to Success

Ackerman Security’s leadership team (left to right) includes President & CEO Richard Perry, Director of Sales Ryan Jaime, President Commercial Mike Sandes, Director of Marketing Nick Thomas and General Manager Chris Bean. With a focus on organic growth, the company is looking to add to its $65 million in annual revenues and $4.4 million worth of RMR business.

How do you ensure your customer-facing associates are staying up to speed with technology? How do you balance your personnel’s aptitude and attitude?

BEAN: We want to have an attitude of gratitude with all of our customers. We’re focused on providing world-class customer service at every interaction, giving them precious, white-glove treatment so we can create raving fans. And we want to keep it easy for them to do business with us.

So it’s a balance of making sure we have individuals with the right skill sets in the talent pool, and capabilities and experience in the field interacting with the customer, as well as top-of-mind customer service expectation. For example, with our technicians, we keep regular and routine training with them and follow-up with quality control field inspections.

With our sales consultants, security consultants and technicians, we like to hire people who genuinely like technology. They will take the initiative to seek out the product knowledge in the installation and complicated techniques.

But the personality of having a customer-first focus is something that many people have in their DNA. It’s kind of who they are and those are the individuals we want to recruit and onboard into the company. We’re passionate about wowing the customer.

PERRY: We view ourselves as a service rather than a technology company. What we are supposed to be good at is taking care of customers, providing a service to the customer, finding the best-suited technology that’s available and packaging it in a way that provides really good value to our end user. It’s an important distinction, being a service business. When it comes to technology, we want to keep it simple.

How is Ackerman enabling its people to work more efficiently, smarter and not necessarily harder? What are ways you’re adding efficiencies to the operation and empowering employees?

BEAN: Our new proprietary CRM will empower all of our employees in all departments and support the 80/20 rule. We want them focusing 80% of their time on the activities that drive customer-service initiatives and quality of delivery and service. We don’t want our employees bombarded with the minutiae of administrative processes, etc.

So we’re building automation into our own internal processes to free our employees up to be all that they can be in their respective roles.

Ackerman’s 300 associates include those working out of the UL central station located within its headquarters.

 

What about increasing field efficiencies?

BEAN: We have both a manual and automated process to help minimize drive time. We look at it from the customer-service perspective. How can we serve more customers in the same amount of time and, by default and as a byproduct, reduce the drive time by scheduling more customers with a technician in a shorter geographical space?

If we made every decision to reduce our cost, it would in some cases be at the expense of the customer. But the more we seek to serve the customer and provide them better delivery and service it will naturally benefit our business. In this case, a byproduct of helping serve more customers in the same amount of time has helped us reduce drive cost.

What are your top RMR offerings?

BEAN: The core is monitoring. Cellular is by far the most popular option. The remote interactivity with the system is also very important. Customers want the ability to arm and disarm the system, to receive notification and to control capabilities on the system. The other large component would be automation.

Any sort of Cloud automation connectivity, when customers are looking for that as an additional premium. Even though they’re paying extra into the RMR we’re delivering a service that exceeds the amount of money they’re putting into it. It should feel like a bargain to them.

When customers have automation capability for their thermostats, they’re paying a few extra dollars a month for the premium, but the money they save annually in energy efficiency should be equal to or greater than that.

If we can help a customer remotely lock and unlock their doors so they don’t have to return back home, all of those services that provide convenience and lifestyle enhancement to the customer continues to drive the RMR.

Ackerman is deploying a custom CRM interlinking internal systems to exponentially improve efficiencies.

How do you view the competitive landscape? Are you more concerned about local, regional, national competitors, or perhaps those from in the industry?

JAIME: I believe for the industry to continue to grow we will need more players to come into the space. I love the competition. I look forward to the opportunity to compete through better service and greater value to the end user.

At Ackerman we’re really most concerned about competing with Ackerman. We’re concerned about being better today than we were yesterday and being better in 2018 than we were in 2017. As long as we’re focused on getting better every year the competition will take care of itself.

Do you view any areas where the competition might be dropping the ball and leaving money on the table for Ackerman to swoop in and enjoy?

BEAN: The root cause of any company leaving money on the table is the lack of self-awareness and inability to maintain competitiveness and relevancy in the market. If you don’t regularly examine your business to prevent leaving money on the table, then competitors will continue to capitalize on those opportunities.

JAIME: It’s amazing how well Ackerman does in getting back to every single customer. Doing something as simple as getting back to them when they call in and have a concern — what a novel concept! Just taking care of the customers you have is something that as long as we continue to do we have a lot of momentum, a lot of opportunities of growth ahead of us.

What do you see as the leading threat to the business today?

PERRY: The threat to Ackerman or anybody is just not falling asleep at the switch. You have to make sure you don’t put your head in the sand and assume you can always do business the way you’ve done it in the past. That’s not necessarily the case, especially today the way the market’s changed.

It’s definitely changed more in the past five years than in the previous 30 years I’ve been involved in it, without question. Look at DIY and MIY. We’ve seen retailers getting into the business. We’ve got the cable providers getting in, so there’s lots of players jumping in, coming and going because some come in, don’t execute well, and get out.

We just have to make sure we stay ahead of the curve. Any alarm company has to always be thinking about that to make sure they don’t wake up one day and sort of find out the paradigm shift happened, and they didn’t catch it.

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our FREE digital newsletters!

About the Author

Contact:

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].

Security Is Our Business, Too

For professionals who recommend, buy and install all types of electronic security equipment, a free subscription to Commercial Integrator + Security Sales & Integration is like having a consultant on call. You’ll find an ideal balance of technology and business coverage, with installation tips and techniques for products and updates on how to add to your bottom line.

A FREE subscription to the top resource for security and integration industry will prove to be invaluable.

Subscribe Today!

One response to “Super-Regional Provider Ackerman Security Systems Shares Secrets to Success”

  1. Michael Mullis says:

    This article is BS. Bruce Turry ran this company into the ground. The sale was the last horrible decision by Jim Callahan, a long line of incompetent management. The 60M is revenue is a total fabrication and was never achieved. Turry and Callahan go down as the two worst managers in the alarm community. Ackerman was sold under serious distress due to poor management.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get Our Newsletters