Exec Interview: How Bold Group Plans to Amplify Its Value Proposition
From alarm monitoring to financial management to security intelligence solutions, the Bold Group is the industry’s new power player.
What are some of the unique features Bold’s security solutions offer pro installing and monitoring security companies?
Narowski: What makes Bold Group and our offerings unique is our extensive experience and knowledge. There’s not much we haven’t seen when it comes to legacy and new technologies ― so our experience allows us to work with both. Many central stations are faced with technology that is 30 years or older.
Our team can address all of the problems that happen in between the older technology and newer systems. Thanks to the longevity and experience of our team, we are able to implement solutions to meet this breadth of needs, making us stronger than anyone else in the industry.
From a software perspective, we have taken a very different approach than other providers in our industry — we have offerings at every level. From the beginning we have completely separated the back office from the alarm monitoring so we can build from the ground up the best of both worlds. Each application has its own design teams and world-class support that gives our customers a competitive edge.
The separate systems are tied together with a robust and ever-improving integration to bolster our customers’ ability to have data at their fingertips, reduce data entry and decrease labor costs. We have multiple applications to choose from to fit any size customer and complex business model.
Bold Group is laser-focused on maintaining the established excellence and legacies of its foundational companies while leveraging the combined competencies to bring more unified and innovative products to the marketplace.
What are some of the practices and mechanisms in place to support Bold customers’ success?
Narowski: By early Q4 we will have consolidated all divisions onto a single customer management platform. This will give us far greater insights into how the customers are using our software as well as to provide an effective method to manage all divisions. One of the biggest changes is adding KPIs to every department and then managing the teams according to those numbers. Every quarter we evaluate the KPIs to confirm we are measuring the correct information and then make changes based on our objectives and key results.
From these metrics we continue to make changes in the organization as a whole, optimizing some areas and adding resources to others. This is allowing us to quantify improved performance for each quarter. By bringing the whole group together, we can offer everything from financial solutions to alarm monitoring solutions and everything in between at any size.
Travis Papay: That’s very much so and getting to that point and solution which a lot of our customers like. They don’t want to shop around for little individual pieces of parts to feed into their very boutique or specific situations, or problems to fix those. The Bold Group is helping that end-to-end solution continue to morph into what our customer base needs.
Part of that is ultimately driving the dealer from an accounting or financial solution where they’re prospecting, they’re onboarding the customer, etc., getting the quote in their hands, scheduling the service to get the job, to doing the installation, wiring up that work, feeding it all the way through the alarm software to understandably test the accounts, do your walkthroughs and then get that into the monitoring station’s capability to protect the customer that they sold to.
An innovative piece our focus is on right now is just how the three tiers of an integration feed from the dealer to a central station or from a dealer to a central station who’s monitoring and billing on their behalf, all the way to an individual central station doing the accounting or the billing for the dealers and/or running their own service company within their organization. Having that data flow from start to finish is the biggest piece we’re putting together. It’s exciting to see it materialize.
Polley: There’s a lot of things that come out of it that you’re looking for as a dealer, operational efficiencies, where all these things come together. Because you’re ultimately trying to serve the end user, your customer, and just streamline data entry, give dealers one portal, support and service. A lot of times when you have disparate systems you’re working from it leads to errors in customer data and customer support. The more that we can bring that together as a software company for dealers and end users, that’s where we’re going to see success for us and our own customers.
What are some R&D practices employed by Bold and how is innovation balanced with customer input and vetting?
Papay: We are focusing on R&D as a key initiative with more formality and budget later this year. We do market research to understand customers’ needs and we also employ a steering committee ― a group of customers that meet to provide feedback and input on our products. This also enables us to have access to beta testers, gaining that feedback necessary to help refine our products and features further.
When it comes to innovation, though, it really is driven and incubated by strong leadership that creates a healthy environment for innovation — from culture and workspace to investing in the time it takes for innovation to happen. Today, we dedicate a period of time at the end of each quarter for our developers to focus on R&D. It’s protected time for them to think, be creative and generate ideas.
Finally, our agile framework promotes continuous innovation ― creating the drive to push the envelope for our software, new technology, more efficient processes, training and certifications, but it’s the collaboration of all the touching pieces within our company and with our customers that make innovation come to life. Over just the past six months it’s been exciting to see the transformation of our development processes and surrounding departments converging on a combined strategy around product. It feels like a single cohesive operating entity and that’s where we want to be.
How does Bold Group handle cybersecurity hardening for its products?
Papay: Our software is developed using OWASP methodology, and penetration testing is done by the internal team as well as outside of the company. We have implemented numerous security countermeasures in our Cloud environments and will also be working to implement multifactor authentication across all our products. Cybersecurity is also embedded into our DevOps products and processes utilizing the tool chains and add-ons that being a Microsoft partner brings to the table.
SedonaOffice has long been one of the leading business management solutions for installing security systems companies and monitored services providers.
We also have a suite of security intelligence product offerings that provide cybersecurity services to small and medium-size business through the Network Navigator, and to large and enterprise business through the backStage manager platform.
Our vCISO services include quarterly network vulnerability scanning and managed firewall services, and were just recognized with an ESX Innovation Award. All these services help protect our customers from today’s threats.
With real-time monitoring and regular assessments, security integrator customers are proactively alerted of threats within their networks. As our customers’ ecosystems change, our assessments provide recommendations to further secure their environments or make them aware of holes they never knew existed.
With this proactive approach our customers will minimize any damage from an attack and most likely avoid them all together. Much like an alarm system for your building, we monitor the cybersecurity of their environment and dispatch help at the first detection of trouble.
What do you see as a few promising technology-enabled opportunities the next couple years?
Papay: First is in telephony and how it will be used in the future, specifically in the way we implement call systems. Another is the shift toward containerization and microservices. The latter is autonomous areas of applications broken down into smaller, independent bitesize chunks so if one aspect becomes faulty it doesn’t impact other components or services. Containers, on the other hand, help isolate those applications and the underlying infrastructure, in effect adding an extra layer of protection. Both of these pieces help create better scale, delivery and reduce disruptions to businesses.
When thinking about our products, we are working toward deeper integrations among them to provide additional efficiencies at all levels for our dealer/integrator partners based on their need. There will be an expansion of things that are monitored ― from thermal units to personal monitoring devices like those being used to reduce prison populations, etc. If there is a technology that provides an output that causes an event, we can monitor it.
Narowski: What will be interesting is how dealers come up with new ways to generate business with these technologies, feed that back into a monitoring platform and ultimately bill for it. Because of the full suite we have, there are many exciting opportunities that can be generated. But people on that side are going to have to be creative as well. We’re here to help facilitate that.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine
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].
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