Security Business: Marketing and Ops for Ambitious Alarm Companies

This is my rule of thumb for how much money an installer can do. This is for commercial installs with our technicians working in teams of two. The exact numbers might not match your business. Adjust them as necessary. But find out what your numbers are, so you can make better predictions for your company.

We were picking our next training session and disagreed on what would be the best approach. In particular, we had two types of systems we wanted our guys to know: an older technology that we consistently install or a newer technology that we had sold for five or six projects. Which do we choose? Find out how we made the decision by following our thought process for these five questions…

I try to take advantage of the activities I do at work to improve my life skills. It doesn’t have to be related to security. Try improving your eye contact when you talk to customers. Build your typing speed on the job. Grow your network. There are all sorts of opportunities when you frame your day to day as a growth lab.

Holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day purposely always fall on a Monday. What happens when the days off don’t line up so well… especially when you work in the field, like our security technicians and sales professionals?

If you have a Company Policy for your security dealership, you should probably stick to it. If you need to change it, go ahead, but don’t just have it to have it and change it whenever a decision gets difficult.

We offer 24/7 service for our customers, but our security technicians don’t work 24 hours a day. Here’s how we manage this to make sure our customers get the best service experience while keeping it fair and easy to handle for our team.

And zip ties. Did I mention zip ties? This is the list of equipment, materials, and tools that our installation and service technicians keep on their company vehicles. Oh, and did I mention step bits?

When I first started in business, I didn’t realize how important it was to communicate throughout a task. I thought when someone assigned it to me, I was just supposed to do it. Here’s what one of my mentors taught me instead.

Getting hired can seem like a mystery. Submitting applications. Tailoring your cover letter. Updating your resume. Following up. Here’s some how we actually found our most recent sales person (hint: he found us).

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses with high-ticket products, like security dealerships, is that they typically don’t get enough traffic to their website or even ads to be able to properly test variations. Here’s what to do about that.