How We Grew an Acquired Business 60% in Year One
episode
Entry & Exit - Inside the Security & Fire Industry
16 min
2 speakers
5 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Why did hiring the cheapest talent backfire for Alarm Masters?
I want to give a warning that not everything we did worked. Fall of 23 through 24. A lot happened in that year. Good grief. Hiring internationally for a long time got a bad rap. There was kind of this funny Western pride of, oh, you know, people that are offshore. And it was kind of this negative thing. We were trying to find the cheapest option for whatever we were hiring for.
That's right. And totally changed this, which is talent wins every time. It raises, it's like rising tides raises all ships. Go hire the best person and stretch to pay that person or don't hire them. And when we did that in some critical roles, whoo, 25, we looked really good.
Welcome back to the founder's story from Colin and I at Alarm Masters, where we're kind of sharing our journey up to this point. We are about three years in. And so if you haven't listened, go back. We kind of did the initial interest all the way to close, talked about our first 90 days. And today we're going to talk about our first 90 days.
We are talking about first full year of us at Alarm Masters in seat and really kind of starting to put our own DNA, our own imprint on the business. I want to give a warning that not everything we did worked and not everything that we thought was a good idea is something we're doing today. That's true. Made a lot of changes, did a lot of things. This is sort of... we're calling it the first year. It's really like there was sort of a three to four month period of when the old owners were still involved and that kind of coincided and ended. So really it's like, Kind of our first year and a half, really, because we're thinking about it like after we were fully independently running the business. No, you know, no help from the old owners, etc. Fall of 23 through 24. A lot happened in that year. Good grief. I mean, one of the things I would say is we transitioned away really in this first six months of the year of us owning the business, really six to nine months.
we started transitioning from Colin kind of doing all of the day-to-day roles, Steven handling the kind of back office and holding that down. I was running with basically the original team and transitioning to replacing some of the original team members and, uh, upskilling and hiring new people and hiring. So we hired our first salesperson the summer of our first year. So it was kind of, you know, six months into the first year. That was a big step up for us. And it was something that I was sort of nervous about because I was running sales in a very specific way that I wanted that to be run. What was kind of interesting though, is I was still doing sales. I was still the enterprise rep running enterprise deals. And then I had the salesperson kind of running mid-market deals and everything that wasn't an enterprise deal. And so again, that really happened. We hired that salesperson a year after we closed on the business, but that in our kind of storyline, it kind of happened about six months. And
How did the founders transition from day‑to‑day ops to strategic roles?
And so that was a big hire. That was somebody that was outside the industry. And that was interesting because I was also running multiple roles still in the business. So I was still project managing, running all of ops, basically running customer success and customer service. We did end up hiring a customer service director that year to kind of help run all of the billables, all the customer interaction, anything with a customer calling in, asking for a service call, any of that really existing customer stuff was being handled by the director of customer service. And that was starting to peel layers off of getting me enabled to do more work. And I think one thing that's really, I want to just word of caution. I think we actually balanced it pretty well, but I think too quick people that acquire businesses want to get, this is how about this people that acquire businesses are trying to too quickly get out of doing tactical, not highest and best use activities and people that found a company and are building it from the ground up take too long to get out of those roles. And,
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why did hiring the cheapest talent backfire for Alarm Masters?
0:00–3:09
2
How did the founders transition from day‑to‑day ops to strategic roles?
3:09–6:27
3
What lessons did they learn from their first sales hire and sales playbook?
6:27–9:24
4
How did moving to international talent and Salesforce transform growth?
9:24–12:59
5
What were the record‑breaking projects that drove a 60% revenue increase?
12:59–16:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Entry & Exit - Inside the Security & Fire Industry
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