How the Best Security Integrators Hit $10M and Keep Growing

Welcome to Entry & Exit — the Owned and Operated series for builders in security & life-safety. Hosts Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble lay out exactly how they’re scaling Alarm Masters past eight figures after buying it at ~$2M revenue — growing to $6M+ in ~24 months through 4 tuck-ins and a 50/50 mix of organic and inorganic growth, with 50%+ RMR growth in Year 1.
 From face-to-face selling to buying RMR accounts and mining your install base, this episode is a step-by-step operating manual you can copy.

✨ What You’ll Learn

• The 3 revenue pillars (Install, Service, RMR) — and how to think about target margins
• Why fire-alarm monitoring is the best land → expand wedge (opens doors to 5 scopes: cameras, access, fire, intercom, PA)
• The coffee/taco drop: a $5 in-person touch that creates pipeline and stickiness
• The metric that matters: 7–10 face-to-face meetings = ~90% win rate (vs. <7 = steep drop)
• Buying RMR the right way (typical RMR multiples and how to turn one contract into projects, service & managed services)
• Building a B2B sales process around relationship & information: BANT, anchor pricing, and sequencing meetings

🔗 Connect

 Stephen Olmon — http://x.com/stephenolmon
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy

John Wilson — https://x.com/WilsonCompanies
Owned and Operated — https://www.ownedandoperated.com/

Owned and Operated

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Chapters

• 0:00 Starting an Alarm Company: Sales Strategies
• 0:40 Meet the Alarm Masters: Company Background
• 6:03 Scaling to $10 Million: Key Hires and Strategies
• 24:20 Starting the Sales Cycle: Opportunities and Strategies
• 36:41 Key Metrics and Technology for Business Growth

Transcript

E&E EP 2

John Wilson: [00:00:00] If I wanted to go launch an alarm company, how would I go sell stuff? 

Collin Trimble: I build my sales process around what I think the indicators are for winning a sale. How do I build relationship with the customer? And. How do I get more information than any of my competitors are gonna get through the cycle? 

John Wilson: Is this gonna be knocking on doors?

Is this like networking meetings, 

Collin Trimble: calling customers and saying, I would like to come by and drop off a $5 Starbucks gift card and meet you face to face. The easiest sale to get is the one from the customer that's already paying you dollars.

John Wilson: Welcome back to Owned and Operated Today we are with the entry and exit podcast guys, Steven and Colin, welcome back to the show guys. 

Collin Trimble: Thanks for having 

John Wilson: us. 

Collin Trimble: Thank you. 

John Wilson: This can be, uh, this is gonna be fun. The first episode we dove into the story behind Alarm Masters and what you guys are [00:01:00] doing down there.

Uh, and it was a lot of fun. It reminded me a ton of like, early, you know, like me buying stuff. And, uh, today we're talking about how to, like, what's the blueprint to scale past $10 million of revenue, which I think is a, a really big hurdle in your industry, right? There's like not many people above. 10 million.

That's right. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. Very few. 

John Wilson: Very few. Very few. Um, well cool. Let's, let's just recap some of the highlights. Uh, we will give a link to our first, uh, interview in the notes, but if we wanna give a couple of highlights, can you guys like reintroduce us to Alarm Masters, sort of the, you know, two minute version of what you guys have been up to.

Collin Trimble: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, we purchased, Steven and I purchased Alarm Masters in 2023, uh, through a relationship, uh, from mine when I was back in the industry, a guy that I knew, he was second generation, um, of owning the business. His dad started it. It's a 40-year-old business. Um, we did not have the [00:02:00] traditional searcher kind of route we did.

One, interview one LOI went all the way through, purchased the business, um, and started the business with, you know, 10 or 11 employees with Steven and I doing all the things and scaled it through acquisitions and organic growth. Uh, and, and now we're on a path to, to scaling even faster. Both through, both through organic and inorganic machine.

John Wilson: Yeah. Awesome. Uh, and you guys, uh, like how much of that growth, I'm sure I asked this last time, but how much of that growth is organic versus acquired? Do we have a good sense of that? 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. It's been about 50 50. Okay. Um, yeah, we've done, um, a lot on both sides and specifically in our industry, recurring revenue is, um, kind of the, the golden goose.

Yeah. And so we really quickly scaled, um, what we call RMR, not MRR for my software friends. Yeah. Yeah. About. RMR, um, really on the, uh, organic side really quickly. 

John Wilson: Yeah. [00:03:00] I was out to, uh, I was out to lunch on Monday with, uh, like someone I went to high school with and his brother just bought like an industry adjacent business, which I thought was, it reminded me immediately if you guys, it was, um, it was just the badges I think, but it was the badges for, uh.

Like getting in, what's that called? Access control. Like, so access control. Yeah. So it was like access control badge printing or something. And it was like a 

Stephen Olmon: mm-hmm. 

John Wilson: Kind of a good sized business. Yeah. Like it was big enough to be bought. Um, and I thought that was like, interesting. I, I don't know who their clients are.

I don't know, but it just reminded me of you guys. I, I feel like there's a lot of different ways you can go in this industry. 

Collin Trimble: There is. Yeah. That's kind of a funny niche business that actually we have taken advantage of because you have to buy a printer to print these badges. Yeah. And so a lot of customers, uh, don't want to buy a $7,000 printer to print 25 badges, so they go online.

Yeah. And they buy 'em [00:04:00] for $15 a pop and you know, it costs the person printing them 20 cents or whatever. Yeah. Um, yeah, there's a lot of that kind of spinoff, especially on the professional services side. Yeah. There's a lot of spinoff. 

John Wilson: Yeah, this remind, you know, I'm just, I'm not trying to go in tangents, but it, it was reminding me of something else.

I, I'm working with my, um, we're like looking for a different type of insurance and, uh. Uh, so we're talking with, uh, we work with like a, I don't even know, like a consolidator of insurance options, basically broker where they own like broker health, like health insurance brokerages and property and casualty brokerages and like direct insurance.

And it was kind of interesting. And then I ended up talking to my accountant as well. And he works like it's a big four accounting firm and they have like, everything under the sun. And, and it is kind of interesting, these, uh, professional services. Like I, I think we talked about a lot about this last time, but like, how do we establish a relationship with one thing [00:05:00] and then how do we like, sort of build out all these other things that can get a dollar from that customer at some point?

Even if it's like small, like Id printing, right? Like I wouldn't have thought of that as even a business, uh, but it would probably like work pretty well inside what you guys are doing. But yeah, it would, it was, it was interesting. 

Collin Trimble: We think about that a lot in terms of how do we generate more recurring revenue, um, through things like managed services agreements where you come out and you do maintenance or even like managed access control and managed administration.

Yeah, so there's a lot of these spinoff services you can add, uh, that have additional RMR, uh, and, and candidly, a lot of folks don't take advantage of them. Uh, but it, you don't need 100% adoption from your customers. You need. 5% adoption. Mm-hmm. You know, like, so offer it to every one of them and five out of a hundred are gonna do it.

And if you have a program set up, like there you go, you've got five out of a hundred that you didn't have prior. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It, it [00:06:00] was, uh, it was interesting. Okay, so today we're talking about the 10 million Blueprint. Some of it's probably gonna be like, Hey, how do we, like, you know, grab onto other opportunities.

So I'm sure we'll cover that a little bit. But, um, first I wanna talk about like, hey, we, we started, uh, it, it was $2 million when you guys bought it. Is that right? It. Alright, so like, that's right. Pretty in the weeds, right? Like, probably not like out and about in the field, but I'm sure you're doing accounting, you're directly managing, you're potentially picking up the phone, like you're in it.

And obviously that's not the case. Uh, or maybe as much anymore. I'm sure it still is. But, um, can you walk me through that transition from, I'm in this every single day. I'm pushing really hard. I'm the one pushing hard to now we have a team. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, absolutely. You're, you're a hundred percent right. We were doing all the things.

Mm-hmm. We were answering the phones, we were selling, we were project managing, we were purchasing, we were handling employee HR [00:07:00] issues. Um, and, and the way that we thought through how to scale was where do we add bodies that will unlock growth for us? Yeah. Uh, within the business. Sometimes that means freeing me up from doing something that's not quote my highest and best use.

And sometimes that just means doing something that like I simply am, I don't even really know what I'm doing. Mm-hmm. Like a project managing large deployments of fire alarm systems. Like I didn't really know. I just was kind of faking it till I made it. Um, and so we did a lot of that and, and for me, and, and for me it was a, a lot around getting rid of some of the operational stuff that.

Took more brain power for me to kind of figure out how to do it well. And some of that was just enabling existing folks in our team and elevating them, saying, Hey, you've been here for 15 years. It's time for you to take on a bigger role. We're gonna give you a little bit more, um, responsibility. Mm-hmm.

You know, and kind of give them the process. So I'm very process driven and process oriented. So giving them the SOPs and the playbook to do it [00:08:00] and let them run with it. That's kind of where we started. Yeah. Uh, but our philosophy has always been. Let sales and marketing be the, you know, be the tail that wags the dog, if you will.

So we have always said, how do we position the business in such a way that we're always investing, whether that's in technology or in bodies or in people or whatever, uh, to grow the business organically. So that's, that's our first thought forward. So it's like, okay, if I can get some operational folks doing the operational things, then that frees me up to focus on growth and go-to market strategy.

John Wilson: Yeah, that makes sense. I, I know we touched on some important hires last episode, so I, I don't wanna like rehash too much of that, but the two things I wanna double click on what you just said, one, like, what were the big hires? Uh, again, we, we don't have to like, go crazy on it 'cause we did cover this, uh, in our first one.

And then two, like we talked about sales and marketing, like wagging the dog. I'd love to hear about how you built new systems to do that. Like that's interesting. I don't really know how to build like a B2B sales [00:09:00] process, so I, I would just love to hear what that looked like. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, the key hires for us, um, which is kind of funny because one of them was the VP of sales that we hired, and I thought that would be the last sort of leadership role we would ever hire.

Um, because I am, that's my whole background in history and kind of experience. Mm-hmm. And what we found was because I'm holding so many different directions, I couldn. Hold accountable the team to the process that I know is what we need to follow to scale. So what was happening is we, we were not hitting the numbers we needed from a process perspective, not from a revenue perspective.

And so having that, uh, kind of VP of sales to be the quarterback, if you will, that was running my playbook, was a massive unlock that I just wasn't expecting. Yeah. Um, and then the other one was. Uh, the director of operations. So he's managing our, uh, installation side and our service side and really taking off all the project management, taking off a lot of the customer service responsibilities that we're, we're landing on my desk ultimately.

Uh, and that freed me up to do a lot more [00:10:00] strategy. So, so I would say those are our two biggest roles and I know it's kind of an easy answer 'cause it's front of office and backup office. Mm-hmm. But truly it was a huge unlock for us. 

John Wilson: No. Yeah, I mean, I believe it. Um, and on the sales side. Well, and I feel like we, we can hit that for a second.

'cause the, uh, it, it is interesting when you go. Like I, a conventional philosophy is higher, like where you're weak. Um, and so I, I agree with you. That would be sort of like, huh, that's odd that I'm having to hire where I'm strong. Um, I think the reasoning totally makes sense, but that is kind of funny. Uh, we.

I've tended to hire where I'm weak, uh, or like I look for like a personality that offsets whatever, you know, deep ingrained flaw that I have or like whichever one, whichever one we're talking about that, that day. And, uh, but it, it is, it is interesting when you hire this, um. Like person that [00:11:00] you do know what they're supposed to be doing, and like, you have to help drive that.

So like, what's that interaction look like? Like, you know what you want it to look like. You, you live it. Like how do you, how do you like work with someone that's like, has to execute such a clear vision that you have? 

Stephen Olmon: I, I, I want to answer that because the, the funny thing is. We actually had the good fortune of knowing both of those hires for a long period of time.

Oh, that's nice. And the, the funny thing that you just called out is on the director of ops side. That person is very different from Yeah. Colin and myself. Yeah. Especially different from Colin. And it was the, you know, hire where you're weak and someone that is kind of your, your opposite in a way that we're grateful for.

But on the VP of sales side, it was almost like trying to hire another Colin who is also aggressive and a go-getter and, [00:12:00] um, so that the strategy that we want to roll out, he's already kind of built for. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does make sense. And sounds like you were successful in it. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, it's been great.

Also, I mean, my philosophy is like, hey, if, if you have a strength in your business. Um, and, and it's where you are strong. You should double down there. Yes, right. You should double down on the area where you're gonna make the biggest impact. And where I make the biggest impact is in sales and growth. And so if I believe that, then I'm gonna throw more resources at figuring out how to do that.

Um, yeah. And, and have a person that I know and trust and is gonna think like I do to be able to run the playbook the way that I would run it. 

John Wilson: A lot of that comes with, uh. Time from just how I've lived through this and maybe you guys knew him, uh, you know, for so long, which is awesome. But, you know, we've got this, I've talked about this on our show before.

We, we have the [00:13:00] senior leadership team, and this is the first time I really feel like we have a senior leadership team that's like, like they're moving the needle. Uh, they're taking on big projects like business changing projects, and like they're running, they're doing it of their own initiative, and they're like, thinking of it the way that I would probably think about it.

Like, there's obviously some course corrections, there's some coaching, all that stuff. But, um, it, it's been really interesting and I, I think about it, uh, what I've noticed is it tends to be time, like how much time have I had with this person? So like Brandon, my partner, he, like, he and I, we've worked together for six years now.

Um. Like I know that he, he and I are aligned and like if he makes something dif a different decision, like he's probably right. 'cause he might have more context. Uh, and I think, I think it's kind of interesting versus like, where I noticed [00:14:00] that we tend to struggle is like, oh, I've only worked with this senior leader for like a year and they're just not totally aligned yet.

Or like, we're not totally like synced. Uh, the way that, like, I know that we will be one day. Um, but yeah, it's, it's been interesting. So, so do you think like you were able to shortcut that because you knew them? Were you working with them professionally prior, or like how did you get immediately to, to where I am with Brandon, but after six years?

Collin Trimble: Yeah. I think key senior leadership positions, um. Do best when they're folks that you know are in your network mm-hmm. Are folks that you have exposure to, whether from a past, um, work experience or from your personal friend network. Um, we have a lot of really great results from that. Yeah. I think that some of it has to do with like understanding who they are and how they communicate.

Um. Because there's this learning curve when you hire new employees to figure out how they're motivated. Yeah. How do they like to communicate? What's the right amount of feedback? What's the right amount of, you know, verbal [00:15:00] affirmation they need whatever. Yeah. You know, whatever the mix is and you kind of.

Jump past all that when you hire somebody from your network, it, there is risk to it too. I mean, there's no doubt risk hiring from your personal network. Yeah. It can impact friendships. Yeah. And whatever. Um, but I think if you find the right person and you spend the right time kind of, um, developing that and nurturing that relationship over time.

Like we, the, the guy we hired for our VP of sales role, uh, we'd been friends for 15 years. Yeah. And so I, when I bought the business, I was like, dude, one day. Get ready, I'm gonna call you. We're gonna hire you in. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna hire you. And that's exactly the narrative we've used for the last three years.

Yeah. 

John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that's cool. That's cool. I, um, I was reading something, uh, and it was, it, it sort of talked about this and I think you, like, that's why I'm so fascinated by this, uh, sort of connection. Um, I'm trying to remember what the book was. It was talking exactly about this. It's like, look, if you're gonna hire something that [00:16:00] like, like where are you gonna spend your time?

If you were gonna do nothing inside the business, like if you were just like floating through the business, where would you be magnetized to? And like, you'd probably be magnetized to sales. Like I would probably be magnetized to either like accounting or like, like deal flow, the finance side of the business or marketing like, so that's where I would just naturally flow to.

Um. And the book was all about like cautiously hiring that person because you will be magnetized to what they're doing because that's just like who you are at your core and you, you just can't do like very much about that. Like that's just who you are. So like someone has to be ready for a lot of scrutiny because that's where you're going to look.

Almost all the time. Yeah. Is the thing that, you know, the best, you'll always be like, ah, I don't know. It's true. I don't know about that decision. Yeah. Yeah. I, I find it that way with, uh, marketing and I have to like, I have to really intent, like I will just [00:17:00] naturally gravitate towards it. Um, one 'cause it's important and too, 'cause like I, there's some strength there and, uh, yeah.

It, it's been. Like Jesse and i's working relationship, it's good. It's just like funny, like he's learned how to like bend when I walk in 'cause like that's how that works. And I've learned to like, give him as much autonomy as possible, but takes a long time. Yeah. Let's dive into this sales process. So we developed a sales process.

We've brought on this awesome team member who's, who's helping you deliver it like. Tactically, what is the sales process like? What is it? How does it work? If I wanted to go launch an alarm company. How would I, how would I go sell stuff? Is 

Stephen Olmon: this a, is this a four hour podcast? I was gonna, are we going Joe Rogan, the Late, the podcast?

Is that 

Collin Trimble: where we're going? Because I think that's what we gotta 

John Wilson: do here. The people need 

Collin Trimble: to know. Yeah, the people need to know, man. Yeah. Um, I, I, here's what, here's the struggle that I'm gonna have. How do I, how do I summarize this so that we don't take [00:18:00] three hours? Uh, the answer is I, I build my sales process around what I think the indicators are for winning a sale.

Um, and so for me, when I think about winning a sale, I think about how do I do two things? How do I build relationship with the customer, and how do I get more information than any of my competitors are gonna get through the cycle? Yeah. And so how do I build relationship well in this world, in my industry, but even just really in this world, in B2B sales, everything is done over phone, text, email, and virtual meetings.

We have doubled down on face-to-face meetings. It is wild the impact you get from a single face-to-face meeting with a customer where you see them and you kind of get skin to skin contact with them. And the, the way that that shifts Yeah, your entire position with them, you, it, it doesn't become, it goes from being.

Um, negotiator and you're negotiating with this [00:19:00] person and it's like you versus them. Yeah. Too. You are their consultant and they rely on you and you get to a text relationship much quicker. So I doubled down on that and I'm building a sales process that includes a lot of face-to-face meetings. In fact, we have metrics that show if you get greater than seven face-to-face meetings in a sales cycle, you have a 90% chance of winning that deal if you get less than seven.

Uh, face-to-face meetings, you have a 30% chance or lower, uh, to win that deal. It's, it's pretty binary. So we're building a sales cycle that incorporates a tremendous amount of face-to-face. And also we're, we're setting that expectation on the very front end of the cycle. So we don't say halfway through, Hey, we'd really like to take you to lunch.

We tell them, Hey, here's what to expect. We're gonna meet with y'all a lot. Mm-hmm. We're gonna take you to lunch. We're gonna come out on site. We're gonna do a readout of all the things we discovered. We're gonna do technical validation. You can expect seven to 10 face-to-face [00:20:00] meetings, and then that moves the Meet the needle.

The other thing we're doing is we're really trying to get information. So I wanna understand, no, no customer on the first call is gonna answer the question of what's your budget? Right? They're not gonna say, my budget is $15,000. And that's not always because they're trying to hide it from you. Sometimes that's the case, but a lot of times they don't know.

And, and I'll be first to say this, uh, even as the owner and CEO of the business. Sometimes I'm purchasing things and I don't know what my budget is because I don't know what to expect. Yeah. I'm not sure what, how much is this thing I'm buying gonna be a thousand or $10,000? Yeah. So I can't tell you what my budget is.

So it's the responsibility of the salesperson to uncover their appetite around budget, through the sales cycle, and not just in the first meeting. And we use a lot of anchor pricing at the beginning of the, uh, of the sales cycle to say, Hey, you know, if you want a camera. With a, you know, fully cable, the camera, the labor, everything installed.

It's gonna be about 1500 bucks a camera, maybe a little less, maybe a little bit [00:21:00] more. So if you've got 10 cameras, you're looking at 12 to $15,000 for a particular solution. Mm-hmm. And, and we, we pause. We wait and we see how they react to that. And if they react negatively, then we know we need to resolution or we need to get tighter on our pricing.

If they act positively, we know we're going down the right path. And we may be able to push the scope of work a little bit. We're always trying to uncover what we call bant criteria, budget, authority, need, and timeline. We're trying to uncover that in every step of the sales cycle. Mm-hmm. So we're trying to find out ways to uncover that information to then impact.

What we're going to bid, how we're going to position it, what solution, what pricing we're gonna use. Do they want to go more of an operation, an opex expense, or do they like CapEx expense? All those things are things that we're trying to find. So, um, in an effort not to tell you about every single step of the process to bore you, the idea is how do we build a sales process that increases relationship through face-to-face meetings and increases information?[00:22:00] 

John Wilson: Yeah, I think that sounds, I think that sounds right. Again, just like 1 0 1 ground level tactics. Is this gonna be knocking on doors? Is this like networking meetings? Is this, um, like maybe both. Are we, are we DMing on LinkedIn then showing up? Like what does that and like first contact look like? 

Collin Trimble: The way that we prospect is by starting with our existing base.

So our whole strategy at ALARM Masters from the very beginning is we combine inorganic growth we purchase accounts of from other companies. Mm-hmm. And then we send our sales team to call on those accounts. The easiest sale to get is the one from the customer that's already paying you dollars. Yeah. So all we're really doing, and there's really no magic to this, it's, it's so simple, is we're having our, uh, inside sales team and our field sales team does a little bit of this for strategic customers.

Calling customers and saying, [00:23:00] I would like to come by and drop off a $5 Starbucks gift card and meet you face to face and get to know you guys and see if there's anything we can help with. And that and that two outta 10 times results in us generating pipeline. Closing a deal. And uh, and, and that's all the magic is, is we are calling existing customers or customers we recently acquired to say we want to put a face to a name and, and nobody, you get some people that are busy, but generally speaking no one is opposed to that.

Yeah. And, and also you, you're not cold calling them, you're just, you're, you're a quote their account manager. 

John Wilson: Yeah. So I mean, that, that makes a lot of sense. So, so this face-to-face sales process. Would it work in like a, Hey, I'm a part of A BNI group, I'm going to send my salesperson Jeremy. Like, is it, would it be the same process or is that like totally different?

Because right now you're, you're farming your own fields. How do we plant new seeds? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, we, um, [00:24:00] the sales process would adapt to what we would call our install base, our existing base of customers, or a new logo. Um, when we're talking about prospecting and lead generation, that's how we go and do pro a majority of our prospecting and lead generation.

But once you get the customer into what we would consider an opportunity, so an opportunity is something where there is an existing need. And there's a compelling event. Yeah. And there's some amount of budget. Yeah. Uh, for a, a security solution, that becomes an opportunity. That's when we start that sales cycle.

That sales cycle is agnostic to install base or new logo. So yeah, absolutely. If they're at a, if they're in a B and I group, or they're at whatever, the Rotary Club and they meet somebody that, uh, has a, has a business that they need cameras, our cell cycle's gonna be just the exact same. Um, but the way we go and prospect obviously is different for install versus.

New logo. 

John Wilson: The, the line that you said it is probably the most important line of like, if someone once paid you money once, like they're very likely to pay you [00:25:00] money again. Um, th that was a key learning and like we're B2C, but that was a key learning for us too, of like, how do we activate these leads that we've already paid for?

Like, I bought this lead, it was a hundred dollars, I bought it three years ago. Uh, ideally we get ROI on that first appointment, but what. Like how do we continue to achieve like ROI over time and like continue to activate that customer account? And yeah, it has been, um, like it's worked, but I would imagine on B2B it could be even more like significant because, you know.

It could be someone paid you $500 once and that could turn into 200 grand. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. That's one of the most important metrics when people are looking at acquiring is reoccurring revenue, not necessarily recurring. Mm-hmm. But reoccurring, whether that is through an additional project service, managed service, um, just the additional revenue you're pulling through.

Yeah. Through the lifecycle or lifetime of that customer relationship. Um, [00:26:00] so you know, that's a. The main focus for us. 

John Wilson: Yeah. And the way that would look, just so I can like, think about that, that metric is how many times did we do more than one invoice per customer? Like is it that straightforward or is it by service type?

Like, hey, I did, like 20% of our customers has done, uh, two different like departments of work. We did some construction, we did some like monitoring, like which of those two. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, we would, we would think about it on, uh, our scopes of work. So we offer multiple scopes of work. Mm-hmm. There's kind of four core scopes of work.

So we would say, Hey, if we're currently just doing one scope of work for them, which is burglar or fire alarm monitoring, how do we go and get number two, three, and four? And so we would evaluate every customer's propensity to buy. Mm-hmm. Based on how many scopes of work we already have with them. And there's a little bit of a tipping point, right?

So like you have to kind of keep track of the numbers. 'cause if they're doing two, that means they're buying 50% of their services from [00:27:00] you. And so they're likely to buy the third. But if they've already bought three out of four, they may not be in the market for the fourth service. So you just kinda have to keep track of the numbers.

But we have found like, hey. If it is a fi, like the magic sauce for us is a customer that only does fire alarm monitoring with us is the greatest propensity to buy customer signal that we have. Interesting. Uh, so if they don't, they don't have any other scopes of work and they only do fire alarm monitoring, they're most likely to buy one of the other three scopes of work, 

John Wilson: huh?

Collin Trimble: Or one of four. 

John Wilson: Okay. 'cause 'cause it's recurring, it's like, it's a big relationship. They've signed an ongoing contract, they trust. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. And it's, it's heavily regulated, right? Yeah. So like the switching effort and switching costs is pretty high. Oh, interesting. To move from, from a, uh, one fire alarm company to another, and you, you really like this isn't, Hey, if I don't have the right person that's monitoring my burglar alarm, okay, it's down for three or four days.

Hopefully no one will break in versus if you're down for a single day on your fire alarm, the fire [00:28:00] marshal could come in and say, Hey. I'm shutting you down. Yeah. I mean, that's a drastic example, but, but that is reality is if you don't have a fire alarm actively monitored 24 7, you're theoretically not supposed to be open.

John Wilson: Yeah, yeah. Fire law, um, they don't mess around. I, I don't know what it's like in other municipalities, but like where we are, like there's like the government. Right here. And then there's the fire marshal and, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's kind of wild. It was a real learning curve for us because we had, um, we had moved from a city where I think the fire marshal probably did have a big presence, but we always like flew under the radar.

Uh, so they just, like, they had bigger fish to fry, and we moved to a city that did not have bigger fish to fry. And yeah, the, uh, there you go. It was a ramp up of, uh, expectations, which was like. Shock. Shocking for us. So sales and marketing we're mainly gonna be pushing like, uh, [00:29:00] deeper. Is that the land then expand, right?

Like that's the, that's the yeah. Concept there. Um, exactly. And like out of our journey from two to $10 million, right? Like today we're talking about the blueprint of $10 million. How much of this sales process versus like buying, or is it them together that we think gets us there? How, how do we bring this back to let's get you across eight figures?

Collin Trimble: I think I, I, I truly believe the magic is in both is when you are buying accounts, you are then creating a fresh batch of accounts that your team can go and call on and generate more scopes of work. So I, I believe at least our strategy is doing both. But, but, but hear me on this like. Many cust, many other security integrators and alarm businesses have existing base of thousands of customers.

Yeah. That they have. Whether or not they monitor them or have done service for them or some installation. And they're not calling on them today. So even if you're a [00:30:00] security integrator that's out there today, and you're, and you have no desire to purchase additional accounts, you have a, you have a base of customers right now that are waiting for you to call them and to sell them additional products.

Yeah, because they've sold, they've, they've purchased something from you once they're likely to do it again. So regardless of whether or not you plan to go purchase accounts or not, if you have one, you have somebody that you need to be calling on. 

John Wilson: Yeah. So a a little bit of, um, I don't even know that this is pushback.

It's more like, tell me how I should think about this. So, if we're using acquisitions, the way you guys are using acquisitions is like customer acquisition. So if we're looking at a deal, I'm sure we're getting some hard assets. I'm sure we're getting some whatever, but really, like this is cac. The way that you guys are thinking about this, so is, is that how you do this?

Like you're pricing by account, like, hey, you've got this customer list, it's a thousand people, [00:31:00] 50 of them are recurring, a hundred of them are reoccurring. Like, I value these accounts at a thousand dollars cac. And like if that's the case, like my next question is. Couldn't you just go acquire new accounts for less than a thousand dollars?

Because it seems like an acquisition can be a pretty expensive, like source of cac. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. There's uh, a couple elements to that. So just in this industry specifically, a lot of deals get done, not all the larger, the, the deal is the more, it's typically like an ebitda. Based sale, um, but kind of in the, the lower end of the, the acquisition range.

Mm-hmm. That's, uh, that's done on RMR. And so then we think about what we're buying, what the future value of that contract is. The gross profit of each individual contract. But then also the kind of like typical expansion value that we could achieve. And when you're buying them, the, the nice thing [00:32:00] is you're really just buying on a multiple of that recurring amount, not inclusive of the average or standard service revenue.

Yeah. Or potential project revenue you can derive 

John Wilson: so on. If it was EBITDA based, the CAC would be a lot. So let's say it's like $5,000. Do you guys have a good organic like measurement of cac? Like, Hey, this is what it costs me to acquire, like just a net new customer on a thin air. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, we, we spend some time thinking about how to acquire customers from marketing via our paid ad channels and through some of our SEO and we do track some of that, but.

But for us it's, it's honestly, and, and this is like maybe an immature response, but it's gravy for us from a new logo perspective because the way that everything is done, just to double tap on what Steven was saying, is. Most deals that we're purchasing are going to be sold on a, on a multiple of recurring revenue.

And the way [00:33:00] that this would work would be like, hey, if you've got a contract that's $10 a month, you're gonna sell that for between 35 times to 38 times. Right? So you theoretically, when you buy that contract, as long as they stay with you in revenue dollars, you're gonna make that back within three years.

But what comes along with that customer account is installation revenue and service revenue that is not factored into the price of the deal. So I may buy an account that's $10 a month, and then they may do $150,000 of revenue with me in the first year on projects and service. In fact, we did an acquisition at the end of last year and that acquisition in in one year.

We will have made the gross profit on that acquisition returned on the purchase price. Mm-hmm. So like we, we have made more in gross profit than we did outlay for the purchase [00:34:00] price because of the combined project revenue, service revenue, and recurring revenue. So where we're hyper-focused is. When we buy a customer, or sorry, when we buy a a, a new business, we're looking at the amount of service and project work they're doing relative to the recurring revenue 

Stephen Olmon: and to, to go back to like organic cac.

The reality for us is that we are still just drowning in low hanging fruit. Mm-hmm. Because we have thousands of customers. We, we have activated. Several different organic marketing channels, but the amount of spend and budget there that there's just not, um, we, we haven't had to spend in such a way that we're aggressively monitoring cac.

Um. That, that's like starting to become a thing for us that we're, we're, uh, focused on in the future. But the reality is, is that both on the existing base plus every single new account we buy just adds [00:35:00] to like the heap of accounts that we have to go mine for value, which was our thesis at the very beginning.

And you know, as you can tell, we've said it over and over, like, we evangelize, go see your customers. 

John Wilson: Yeah. That's interesting. I, I do wonder if it'll, um, either change or like organic will become like more important over time. 

Stephen Olmon: It, it will, yeah. 

John Wilson: Yeah. I, I remember for us, it, it changed just over 10 million where like we used acquisitions to basically power through to eight figures.

Then it's like, okay, well now we have to figure out organic and then we figure it out organic. But it is totally different. Like for you guys, like one customer could be a quarter million dollars a year, whereas like, that's just not our reality. So, um, 

Collin Trimble: to give you some perspective, sorry, on that is like even a small deal that we're acquiring.

Like we're in the middle of acquiring a very, very small deal in Houston and that deal's gonna bring us [00:36:00] 400. Net new commercial accounts. Yeah. I could put one sales guy on that 400 accounts and it would take him two and a half years to see every one of those customers. Yeah. And to meet them and to really flesh out.

And we're buying accounts even, even smaller or like very small. Like if we buy a very small business where it's just like a. True tuck in. Mm-hmm. It could be, the minimum would be 150 to 200 accounts. So you're right, there's gonna be a point at which we wanna focus a lot more on organic growth, but right now we're outpacing the number of accounts that we can even visit in a given year.

John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a good problem to have. That's awesome. Um, okay. Numbers that matter. I wanna talk about KPIs. I wanna talk about dashboards. Like the, the question here is what are we looking at every day? Like what tells us the health of the business? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, so we look at a lot of metrics. Obviously.

We, uh, we leverage salesforce.com as our kind of operating platform, and so [00:37:00] we have a dashboard for every department that is up in every department's. Mm-hmm. S kind of hub. And what we're looking at on the sales side, we're looking at. Prospecting appointments, we call them coffee drops, a number of coffee drops, number of discovery meetings, which would be the first stage of a process.

Um, number of quotes that are being generated and the number of DocuSign that are being sent. We're obviously looking at pipe gen and closed deals. Mm-hmm. Um, we're also looking at the ratio between one-time revenue and, uh, RMR revenue pipeline that's being generated. So that's what we look at on the sales side.

Uh, and then on the, um, customer success department, we're looking at. A raw count of cases that are coming in. We look at cases that have to be escalated. We look at cancellation requests, we look at number of cases that require a service appointment. Um, so those are numbers that we're looking at constantly.

We're also looking at number, the way that the cases are coming in, so we're really trying to push. Customers onto channels that we can scale. So I would say [00:38:00] chat and text and email versus phone. Um, we then we look at a whole batch of phone metrics. So first call resolution sla. Mm-hmm. Uh, uh, time to resolution.

All our metrics we're looking at on the customer success side. And then on the operation side, man, we have a whole bunch on the project management. Everything you can imagine from estimated gross profit to, uh, true. Gross profit to hours and relationship to number of hours. Mm-hmm. To programming hours, project manager hours.

On the service side, we're looking at number of return trips. We're looking at technician utilization. We're looking at the number of times that a part is purchased and installed on a first trip. The number of service calls that result in a quote request. Uh, so these are all KPIs that we're looking at on a department by department basis.

And, and I would say that the only reason we're able to even see all of that is 'cause we have a single platform. That enables us to have all of our data in a single place so we don't have to go out mm-hmm. To five different platforms. All of our [00:39:00] customer touch points, everything sits on a single platform 

John Wilson: is, so, Salesforce has been in, I, I have a few questions I guess, but, uh, Salesforce has been interesting because it started to show up.

Um. As like a, what's a better way to put this? So ServiceTitan is under fire, right? So like ServiceTitan are a big CRM in the industry and they're under fire from a couple different ways. Uh, some of it from competitors, um, but some of it's like net new competitors, like people that you wouldn't have historically thought of as competition to ServiceTitan, but now suddenly is so one Salesforce.

That one just kind of makes sense. But Salesforce has, uh, uh. Supposedly it's becoming more and more robust field service platform like is that what you guys are on? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, that we use it for field service, customer success, sales, and we use it for billing. So invoicing, payments, financials, all of it. Our phone, uh, VoIP system [00:40:00] is tied into it.

Mm-hmm. So it's totally integrated. So we're using it for e everything. So you, you name a software application and it's tied directly into Salesforce for us. 

John Wilson: Yeah, that's interesting. So yeah, that's becoming more and more of a thing, um, inside, uh, home service where like everybody used ServiceTitan up to a certain point, but now like it's going in two different directions.

So one, uh, all of these like AI solutions are becoming so powerful and so good that you no longer need the giant expensive CRM. And really the CRM is turning into basically an Excel sheet for customer data. So like, why would you pay 30 grand a month for an Excel sheet for customer data if everything else is tied in through like an outside application, uh, that handles some version of ai.

So that's the first one, like net new. I don't think anybody saw that coming like a year ago, but like it is coming fast now that more and more tools are being ripped outta ServiceTitan. And then the second one is like conventional CRMs are making a big [00:41:00] play. I assume it's 'cause ServiceTitan went public.

It's $10 billion now. And hey, Salesforce and HubSpot, like I'm hearing platform level like a hundred million, $200 million. Businesses in my space are transitioning or at least evaluating Salesforce and HubSpot, which I think is like. That's net new news, right? Like that's not a thing in our industry.

Mm-hmm. Uh, I think it, like the technology hasn't been there over there, but I think with ServiceTitan going public, I'm assuming there's a lot more attention on the fact that, hey, this is a real market. Uh, but it sounds like you guys are using the Salesforce field side. Well, does it run like a, like dispatching, does it do all of the things that I would expect out of like a field service software?

Collin Trimble: Yeah. Yeah, it does. So it has a full dispatch console, a full field service console, and then it has, you can do it by skills, you can do it by utilization. And then the technicians have their own, uh, independent, dedicated app field service app that they log into. That's just for the information that's exposed is just their tickets and the things they need to do.

And, and the thing [00:42:00] is, is that all of it is fully customizable to whatever you want for your business. The reality though, is Salesforce has historically been known as sort of. The engagement layer. So they would say, you've got an ERP system that's sort of your master customer record where you do all your financials and all of your marketing and sales should be done in Salesforce.

They're really pushing deeper into being the master customer record for all customer information. And then what they're doing is they're layering on the AI apps or integrating to other AI apps. And so what happens is if all of your data sits on a single platform. Is uniform and normalized on that platform or on that spreadsheet, if you will.

Then you can much easier scale up AI agents and AI applications to go make impact that you want because all of the data is there. The training data set is so robust for us that every interaction we have, whether it's a technician talking to a customer or texting, or it's over chat or email or whatever that is stored in our CRM.

So now our. AgTech [00:43:00] kind of workflows are a lot tighter. 

John Wilson: Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. It'll be interesting in our space to see what that looks like over the next year. I think it's gonna get pretty hairy, um, for ServiceTitan. 'cause they're gonna start losing, uh, like what, what, what's a normal price point for Salesforce?

Because is it by user? Like, what does that look like? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, it's by user and man. They have like. 2000 SKUs, you know what I mean? But, but for somebody that's gonna do it for billing, field service, just as like at a base level without all the like. Super fancy bells and whistles. I would say you're probably looking at 125 to $175 a user per month.

But, but again, that's gonna include your billing, your field service. Yeah. Your, uh, CRM, your quoting, all of it is gonna be your cases. Everything is gonna be on a single platform 

John Wilson: normally. And I'm not trying to make this like a CRM thing, I just think it's gonna be like, that's gonna be a question, like a part of the blueprint for like, how do you get somewhere in 2025 is like, what's the tech [00:44:00] stack?

A hundred percent. Would you recommend Salesforce to people starting off in this industry? 'cause I mean, the, the hard the hard reality with Salesforce, it's an enterprise solution and the rep it gets is it's extremely expensive to set up, right? Like you have to bring in outside consultants, you have to do all this different stuff to make Salesforce work.

So like, would you recommend it for someone new starting off? 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, I think I would recommend sh. I think the answer is yes, but I would also recommend you start on any platform. HubSpot has their ServiceNow, they, all of them, even Adobe with Workfront, they're all moving into a platform that is your customer.

Master record. So whatever application you do, it should be the central record for all your customer communication. Yeah. Um, we were super familiar with Salesforce and had a really robust network in Salesforce, so it was a natural fit for us. Um, I would also argue [00:45:00] that your tech stack and getting your customer data all in a single place.

Is arguably the most important thing you can do in your business. Yeah, because the whole adage of like you can't improve what you can't measure. Yeah. Is never been more true in this time. And with all of the kind of AI generated engagement that customers are having, having like authentic engagement with customers that is personalized to their context is so important.

And the only way to get that is whenever I have every phone call from my 65-year-old technician Bill, who is. Talking to the customer about how their day went, right? Like, and then I can get sentiment analysis and I hear that it's their anniversary and there's a flow that then builds that information into the customer's account.

So that's not out of reach. And I would say it's an extremely important investment and it's also something you're gonna do in phases. People have this like notion where it's like, oh, we're gonna budget for technology implementation in a single year and we're never gonna budget for that again. Yeah, we did it one time.

Maybe we have some [00:46:00] managed service. You should be budgeting to improve your technology every single year. The technology is expanding and increasing, and if you're not gonna do it, your competitors are gonna do it. Yeah, 

John Wilson: yeah, I agree. I mean, I think the story of the last five years inside any, you know, skilled service is what's the tech stack?

Um, like the people that grew a lot invested in their tech stack, the people that didn't didn't. And I think that's gonna be even more profound over the next five years as tech stack turn is turning into like real cost advantage or real operational advantage, like much more than it used to be. Like, Hey, I could wipe out 3% of cost doing this, and what can I do with that 3%?

Like the answer's a lot. Alright. What are some lessons, uh, for other home o owners, uh, you know, either contractor owners or folks inside this industry? What are some lessons on that? Like, getting up and, and ramping towards 10 million 

Stephen Olmon: talent wins. 

John Wilson: Mm-hmm. 

Stephen Olmon: Keep saying [00:47:00] it over and over and over. Uh, we've experienced it.

Yeah. Um, you can try to cut corners, save money, um, maybe you tell yourself you're going to train mm-hmm. Really, really junior and experienced people up into this incredible performer and, you know, most of the time it's just not gonna happen. Yeah. You know, there's outlier examples, but really like higher and budget and spend on.

Talent that already exists. 

Yeah. 

Um, and there's something to be said in certain roles. Like I would say for us on the tech side, we want to build a better training program mm-hmm. And hire helpers and get them licensed and train them up and invest in that. I think that. In certain areas of your business that makes sense.

But in others, like I would say, you know, operations managers, yeah. Sales, you know, leadership, key leadership positions, talent [00:48:00] wins, spend on, uh, verified talent and, um, and then those people don't want to really work with others that are, you know, C players. Yeah. They, they wanna be surrounded by other A players.

Yeah. And so we've, we've seen that. Happen even just this year. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, I would, I, I would agree. I actually, I was in this train of thought because I like just leading from the front here. I'm not a great manager. Like I don't manage well. Mm-hmm. I'm not a micromanager. I can't do it. I'm a good leader and I'm great at setting vision and inspiring my team and getting the right people in the right places, but I'm not a great manager.

And I, and, and my perspective coming into the business was, let's find cheap talent. That is good. And let's put the process playbook on their forehead and say, just follow this playbook and do everything it tells you. And we'll be just fine. We can cut overhead through man, through over, uh, through people [00:49:00] because we'll just throw the playbook at them.

And that was a tough lesson that I learned that yeah, you should have a playbook, but you've got to invest in quality talent because it doesn't just elevate that role To Steven's point, it elevate. Everyone around them to be better and to upscale the whole entire organization. So we really see when we hire key players, the impact in the first 30 days, like within the first 30 days, I can see an organizational impact from bringing in a player.

Stephen Olmon: Yeah, I mean, the other two things we've already touched on that I think are, uh, relevant for anyone in. In business period. Mm-hmm. But I mean, especially in this, call it blue collar contractor. Mm-hmm. Home service, anything like that is invest in tech stack, um, and touch your customers. Like those two things, like really those three things have become.

Three of the key points that we say to each other, and we keep reminding each other over and over [00:50:00] because when we, we add on, you know, that that new part of Salesforce, that it's like, oh man, you know, there's a, there's a decent little uplift on that spend monthly, but it's worth it. We believe in it.

Mm-hmm. We've seen it work, you know, and so we just keep preaching to ourselves. Also talent wins. Invest in tech stack. Touch your customers, like, yeah. Over and over and over. 

John Wilson: That's awesome. Thanks guys for the time today. I felt like this was a, a solid, like how do we get into eight figures? And a fun reminder of the path you guys have been on so far.

I am pumped up for the next one. I can't wait to hear what we're gonna talk about next. Let's 

Collin Trimble: do it. 

John Wilson: Thanks for having us. It's been great. Thanks John.