Entry & Exit - Inside the Security & Fire Industry

How Smart Security Companies Scale Past $3M: KPIs, Talent, and Budget Discipline

• Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble • Season 1 • Episode 15

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Most security & life-safety companies don’t get stuck because they lack hustle—they get stuck because they lack measurement.

In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble (Alarm Masters, Houston) walk through their 2026 planning process: how they set revenue/RMR/EBITDA goals, translate them into departmental KPIs, and use actuals vs. budget to decide when to invest, when to cut, and how to avoid “hope-based” growth.

They unpack why so many firms stall around $3M in revenue (comfort + underinvestment), why “Talent Wins” became a non-negotiable, and how to think about emerging trends like AI the right way—starting with a solid tech foundation and the right people before chasing shiny tools.

You’ll also hear the core scorecard metrics they track across sales, marketing, finance, operations, and M&A, plus practical homework you can apply immediately in your own business.

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Stephen Olmon
Collin Trimble


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 Welcome to Entry and Exit. My name is Steven Ulman and this is my very handsome if. If you're watching co-host and business partner Colin Trimble. We run Alarm Masters based in Houston, Texas, and we also are proud to run Entry and Exit, which is a podcast focused on providing practical, tactical advice in the security and life safety industry.

We're gonna jump in. So one thing that I do at the start of every year, which Happy New Year, Steven, by the way, happy New 

Year 

into all our listeners. 

Yeah. 

One thing that I like to do at the beginning of every year is get away usually for one or two nights. My wife loves it, um, and do some kind of business planning.

So I turn my phone on silent and I don't talk to anybody, and I basically do two things. I reflect on, uh, how did last year go? What did we do well? What did we not do well? What would I like to change? And then I also focus on the new year and what we, what goals we are trying to hit, what are the key themes?

And I prepare a little bit of a, um, kind of trickle down effect from there. So I'll, I'll do some goal setting and then I set some KPIs that I then roll out to my individual, uh, managers and directors. And then we'll usually do like a big company all hands. And so the theme behind that is really, hey, if you, if you can't improve what you can't measure, I'm sure a lot of folks have heard that.

If you don't know where the goal is, you can't hit it. Um, so we're gonna talk about some goal setting that we do some things that we think about. We don't have this dialed yet. Uh, we probably will never have it dialed. So if anybody has any good feedback, we'd love to hear what you're doing. Um, but I think that the main theme here is, is you, in order to hit goals, we're not gonna talk as much about what our goals are, but how are, how are we going to track progress towards those goals, uh, and what some of those KPIs look like.

So we can kind of, we can kind of jump in here. Um. I think the first thing, Steven, is what are some goals that we typically set each year? Like some I, you can kind of go all over the place, we'll go to KPIs here at the end, but like, what are some kind of base level goals that we set on a yearly basis?

Yeah. So we think about, uh, the core financial metrics like gross revenue, RMR ebitda. Um, we over the last 12 months have gotten really focused on our average monthly service revenue, um, which. It was shocking as we started to track it more intensely, we've improved. Mm-hmm. Um, average ar, um, those sorts of things.

Uh, those are very, like financial. We're also thinking about things across our team. Revenue per team member, RPE, revenue per employee or per technician, especially in this industry, things like that. Um, those are, that's kinda like the starting point. That's some of the, what I would call like obvious things.

Um, that you should have a goal around and be tracking. 

Yeah, I think that a lot of folks set EBITDA and revenue numbers, um, but I don't think they set some of the other tactical ones. Like for us average, uh, service revenue is a really big one for us. And it's funny, uh, once we started tracking it really tightly and we set a goal that we then trickled down to our service manager and our service techs, that number went up weirdly.

Um, but then we also look at how do we hit that goal? So we're looking at, um, average number of service appointments per tech per day. We're looking at utilization rate, we're looking at return trips. So the point being is like we may have a departmental goal that then has additional goals and KPIs that are set below that.

And I think that it's important to understand that like if you're going to improve in your business, you've gotta have a scorecard and. I think that this is one really like tough thing, especially for medium size security businesses, or, or I should say, small businesses kind of jumping to that medium size, which is, uh, it's not fun to invest in things that don't drive growth.

Uh, well, immediate growth, so like, oh, I'm hiring a sales person, but like hiring a fractional CFO, uh, investing in some technology that is gonna give you more visibility into your numbers, um, is a super important investment. We talk a lot about technology. Ideally you're investing in some type of technology that is going to be able to expose, uh, these metrics that you're trying to track.

And so one thing that we're really spending a lot of time on is, um, kind of our financial goals and then making sure we set up the dashboarding within our technology to support those goals so that we have a monthly look at these. And it's kind of funny, we have not done a great job, uh, in previous years of, we look at our financials every month and we review them together, but we've not done a great job of.

Setting a really tight budget and then holding that budget. Steven, wouldn't you say like, we haven't really spent a lot of time going every month, say, okay, well we spent, you know, $15,000 in technology this month and it was supposed to be 12. We haven't really done that in years past. We've looked at things more just from like a bottom line and I, and this year that's gonna be a big initiative for us.

That's right. Yeah. Basically budget, uh, actual to budgeted and uh, basically recasting that on a monthly, quarterly. Type basis. And a lot of that's just us growing and maturing. And so we don't nec it's like the, you know, the artist is kind of ashamed of their work from the past three, five years, whatever, and, and is proud of what they're doing now.

It's like, well, similar in business, right? Like in ways businesses are. Yeah. And so, uh, I think we knew some of the things that we needed to do. We just didn't necessarily have the bandwidth or the prioritization of it. And so. That's one of the things that as we've started to continue to grow and grow up in this business, in this industry, yeah.

Is we, we have to do, and that's actually one thing I'll say is like truisms that aren't necessarily specific to the security industry. Some of this is just pure, like SMB growth and management that is applicable to lots and lots and lots of industries. We will touch obviously on some things that are really specific to our business and our industry.

As well, but a lot of these are just like age old business truisms things that you've gotta be tracking and, and you like, you have to know your numbers and like you alluded to oftentimes you can't actually really know your numbers and, and all of that detail in near or actual real time if you haven't invested in technology and infrastructure to be able to see it.

Mm-hmm. 

Get access to it. 

Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. I wanna touch on something that we've, we've, we've talked about in the past, but I think is sort of a, um, it's kind of a funny thing. It's a topic that's not been, that does, is not really talked a lot about in the s and b world, in particular in security, which is this idea that a lot of security companies get stuck at the $3 million revenue.

And they have a really hard time getting to that $5 million. And then ultimately 10, 10 plus million. That's, it's really hard for a lot of security companies. Like if you look like, if we look at the majority of businesses that we've seen sell, they've been lower than 10 million. Actually most of them have been lower than 7 million of total revenue that that we have looked at.

And some of that's just our buy box. But we're also looking at like everything that's out on the market just to kind of get a sense of what's going on. And I think this is more philosophical, so I'm just gonna zoom out for a second. One reason that that is, is because it is hard to build a business. And a lot of these operators have owned these businesses for a lot of years.

And so what happens is they get comfortable making X number of dollars. You know, they make $150,000 salary and then they make another 200 K in distribution. So they're at three 50 a year all in, and they're like, man, I don't ever wanna make less than that. And so what that means is they're not really allocating a lot of money to, um.

Growth initiatives. And so it's like, hey, if you're not gonna allocate more resources, you're and you're not gonna reinvest in your business, your business is likely gonna stay pretty flat, even if you're a world class operator. I mean, like even for us, I feel like we're really good at growth. We're having to spend money.

Steven and I make decisions every day about, Hey, that could go into our pocket now, or that could go into our pocket in five years from now, or whatever. So I think that one thing that's really important, and I want to call this out because I think this is important. You have to get tied on what you need to make, and then you've gotta set your budget from there.

So if you say, I've gotta make 350 K, and you know, I'm gonna take 150 K in salary, and then I, that means I need to make another 200 K in distributions, and you want to invest a certain number of dollars, let's just say you wanna invest another 400 K into your business, that means that you need another 400 K of cash.

So you would've to add that 200 plus 400, which means you're making 600 of net income. What you then have to do is you have to say, okay, if I'm making that amount of net income, how much did I average last year in gross profit and net income margins? And you need to run that from the bottom all the way up your p and l to really determine what you're gonna be.

And then on a monthly basis, you've gotta say, okay, well in order for me to get paid and reinvest in my business, I need to be making X and spending X. And if, and you've gotta really look at that and like, if you don't have that set up. You're gonna have a tough time growing. I, I remember in the early days, we would always say, and even some last year, man, can we spend this money, Steven, our, like, can we invest in this employee?

I don't know, is this the right time? And that some of that was 'cause yeah, it was the right time sometimes. 'cause I didn't know what our goal was. So I would say, Hey, if your goal is, let's just say in this example is 600 K and you're on track to do seven 50. Then you've got some money to work with to reinvest.

So the answer to that binary question of can I invest? The answer is yes. If your goal is 600 and you're tracking for 500, then the goal, the answer is no. And the answer is, I need to cut additional out of my business. And I think that it's important to understand that like, don't settle for 500. If your goal is 600 net income, go do what you have to go do to get to 500.

Also, conversely, your goal is 600. Then I would say it's, you don't really need to be focused on trying to hit seven 50 that year. Like you should seriously just go reinvest that cash in your business throughout the year. Because what a lot of owners have told me is, well, yeah, I knew I was gonna go over.

But then what I do is I do is sweep at the end. I grab some cash out at the end of the year, and then I also go take those dollars and reinvest at the start of the next year. Well then you just missed an entire year of compounded growth on your investment. So I would say be tracking this on a monthly, if not quarterly or quarterly basis, if at the very least, so that you can make a, you can make an investment.

Like if you could hire a salesperson in March, that person is going to drive a lot more value for you from March until December. Then hiring somebody in December and waiting to ramp them and do all the things right. So I just think that's an important concept to really be to think about a lot, especially for owners that have owned their businesses for a lot of years.

It's like, figure out what your EBITDA number is. And then hit it. Like, do what you have to do to hit that number. And, and that may mean you've gotta make a decision about your own net income or your, your own personal income and how that relates to net income or that may mean, uh, you know, going and investing in different areas.

Yeah. And you have to have discipline and, um, kinda like pre-decided criteria for what you're gonna do in both scenarios, if you're like over or under. Yeah. So if you're under, 

mm-hmm. 

What's kind of your predetermined playbook for where you're probably gonna go? Cut? Is it your own? Yeah. Personal income. Is it, Hey, we're gonna lean out our, you know, technic from a technician perspective, we're a little heavy.

Is it, we're gonna pull back on marketing spend or a mix of those things, whatever. Also, if you realize that you're one or two quarters through the year and you're having, oh, best year ever. Like, we're gonna be, we're gonna blow away like our kind of net income projection. Well, what, what are you going to do with that?

And the fun answer, the easy answer might be, well, I'm just gonna make a lot more money this year. And that's neat. But that is a very narrow, short term view. Maybe that's part of the equation. But you need to have like some sort of rules in place for how you might start to utilize additional free cash flow.

Um, and if you don't have a plan, you're gonna do weird stuff. You're gonna like sponsor a local bowling team. Like 

Yeah. 

You know, 

bro, those big ROI, big, ROI on the local bowling 

team. Yeah, no, you're gonna strike out, uh, punny, um, baseball bowling. Nice. I dunno. Um, so, uh, yeah, you, you have to know your numbers, but you have to like, know what you're gonna do from a, um, like net income surplus or deficit.

As you go throughout the year. 

Mm-hmm. 

And so that's another thing early on in the year to have a plan around, I think is important. 

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great, I I think that's a great, uh, concept, which is like, what is your plan out some various scenarios of how your financials could look mid-year.

And you've gotta determine now as you're planning, what are you going, what decisions are you gonna make? And if you really want bonus points, find an accountability partner in your network. Or in your, you know, whether that's your personal network or in your professional and say, Hey, I wanna, I wanna make sure.

Like, I think that that's another really big concept here. That's, that's one huge advantage that Steven and I have, which is that as business partners, we hold each other accountable to what are the ultimate goals of the business. And so we always think about how, how do we make decisions that align with that?

And so sometimes I'll tell Steven, I want to do something, and he'll say, I don't know if that's consistent with. What we had talked about or what you had talked about or set goals for yourself. Um, you know, we had an employee that frankly wasn't great for culture and wasn't super talented, but they were just good enough.

And Steve, you know, one thing that we have around here is talent wins. So we like to find the very, very, very best people. And I was letting this boy kind of hang around and he was like, Hey man, this isn't consistent. Like you're letting this person hang around. Yes, there's gonna be some short term pain from letting them go, but like.

We talent wins. And so I think that that's one thing that a lot of solo operators or operators and their wives, they don't have that structure set up where they can say, Hey man, hold me accountable. Or Hey, you know, miss, hold me accountable to what I'm trying to do. You know, like these are my goals, is what my decision making framework.

And I think that's really important and I think this kind of jumps into our theme of talent wins. Steven, talk, talk a little bit about this because we've had a transformation on this over the last kind of three, three and a half years. Talk to us about talent wins and why we kind of got there. 

If you are going to try to grow and scale, there's two issues with trying to do that cheaply or, or, or what I'll say maybe affordably in key areas from a talent and cost of talent perspective.

One is, um, the. The quality of work and your reputation and the pain of managing like B and c and D players, like all of that is a huge drain and slows you down. Mm-hmm. The other issue is that your A players having to deal with and, and, and overcompensate for your team members that are subpar, you're gonna burn them out.

You're gonna frustrate them. And they're inherently not going to have as high morale as they could. And so, um, you have to count the cost. Like is it worth it to cut corners and save 20 K here or there on someone's comp or in a roll? And, you know, I, I really think I want to go with the, the young scrappy guy.

It's like, well, 

yeah, 

why are you telling yourself that? Maybe it's a good idea. 

Yeah, right. 

Maybe you're just trying to save a buck in a super key role when you're trying to scale, and that's a huge mistake. And, and you're, you're not thinking about the long term. So talent wins because, um, if, and if you'll pay for talent and budget for it, you're going to do better work.

You're gonna have a better reputation in the market. You're generally speaking, your employee morale and your team. Vibe, which is a technical term, um, is yeah, vibe, uh, going to be healthier. And so as you are trying to grow and scale, you need all those things to be true. Like you need to be out in the market.

You need to have good reputation in the market. You, uh, this is, it's hard work. So like in the midst of doing hard work together, you generally kind of need the. The attitude and the demeanor and the morale to be healthy if you're gonna be able to accomplish significant growth. So count the cost of, you know, justifying, you know, and also in what we see when we go look at, uh, potential acquisitions is people keep people around because they become friends with them.

That's right. 

And in the most loving way possible. Your employees are not your friends. Yeah, Nope. We've actually hired a couple people who were friends and we had to have a very specific conversation to say in the bounds of this engagement together, like, you are an employee and we're gonna treat you as such.

We're not gonna treat you any differently. And I think, I think we've actually really held the line on that. I think you, especially, yeah, within a couple context of a couple relationships. But you know, it's dangerous. It takes a lot of maturity. Um, a lot of good communication, but if you just keep people around because they've been there and because you're afraid to fire them, because they're gonna tell somebody at church, you know, that you, that you're not a nice guy, whatever, you know, the local context is.

Yeah. 

It's, that's bad. That's immature thinking like that. That's, you're, you're not gonna grow with that type of decision making. 

Yeah. Two things I wanna add to that. First one is when we were early, we've talked about this book in the past, but when we were early on with ALARM Masters, we are so process technology driven that we were naively thinking that we could hire people that were C or B players and throw a very detailed process SOP at them.

Sure. And that that would solve any deficiencies. My thinking handedly was like, Hey, they don't really have to use their IQ because they just need to follow this. So p. And that didn't work. That didn't work at all. No. Um, so what I would say is you are the sum of your business and that's, I guess why there's like a whole industry of books out there on like how to hire great people and be a great leader and develop people, I guess, because that means, that's the sum of your parts is like you can't be great without great people.

Um, and so we are learning that and trying to, uh, improve on that a lot. And in fact, um. We, like Steven said, when we're doing m and a deals, we look, we always try to look at employees that we can kind of take from those businesses. And here's why I'm gonna come back to the m and a thing. One thing that I've learned, and I'm gonna put Steven, I'm gonna put a post on this about LinkedIn.

Every business I've ever been a part of where o operators say, or owners and their scaling their business, like, yeah, I've got this super detailed process, like this lead comes in and it's, it falls to this person and then this system handles it and this person and they fall and like there's a super tight process.

I don't even have to look at it. Every successful business I've seen that's been sub a hundred million has one, two, or three, like gap filler key people, ride or die employees that the business kind of sits on the backs of that are like ownership mentality. Gap filler does what it takes. When that lead comes in, it doesn't exactly fit.

They know what to do and who to hand it to, and I. Think that that's a hidden truth in a lot of these businesses that say, oh, I've automated my whole business. I use international talent, like I use technology and ai. It's like, no, you have somebody on your staff. It could be an international employee, it could be a full-time, you know, local employee domestic.

That is the gap filler for you. Everybody does, and that gap filler is your a person. They are your varsity starting quarterback person you need on that team, and so. We've realized that and we have realized the lift that we have gotten from hiring really great people. Um, and obviously you've gotta do some budgeting.

You can't, we talk about all the time here, about things you should invest in. You can't do it all. Yeah. You can only do what's within your budget. And so you have to make meaningful decisions around that. And that might mean getting more from less. That might mean figuring out how to let go of a few underperforming employees and pay another employee more.

That might mean giving somebody your A player, an impro race and getting rid of some other folks and putting more work on that A player. Sometimes you have to do that and like those are decisions that have to be made. Going back to the m and a thing, Steven and I just quick update Alarm Masters. We closed a deal last week and we're about to close another deal hopefully in the next 30 days.

And we're gonna be bringing on two technicians and one thing that we always are looking at is. What is the quality of the talent in that business? Um, and so we're really excited about exploring that and, and trying to figure out how that works. We're also, y'all are gonna hear more, we'll give you more updates as we go.

We're about to close our first, uh, our, our, sorry, our second platform and other business outside of Houston. And so we're gonna have to kind relearn employees and how they do things and evaluating talent and really starting from scratch in that business, not from scratch, but rolling our playbook out from scratch, I should say.

Um, so we'll have more updates on that as we go. But that kind of speaks to the talent win thing is like, we're not gonna make the same mistake before. We're gonna go in, we're gonna evaluate the talent, we're gonna keep the A players. Uh, and that's nothing to do with like cost cutting. It's truly just like find the A players double down on them, hire more A players I.

Yes. And amen. 

Yeah, and I think, um, I think I wanna transition here as we're kind of doing planning. Um. I wanna transition to like, there, there are some key themes that everybody really needs to be aware of if they want to get, if they want to keep up. And I think that, um, the best type of planning happens, Steven, when you are looking at a five year goal and then you back that up to a two year goal and you back it up to a year goal, and then quarterly and then monthly, and then weekly, and then daily.

I think that's the best way to do goal setting. And I think that there are some trends that are happening in our space, but just in general in the service space, that if you're not keeping an eye on and incorporating those into your planning, you're gonna get left behind. Um, and you don't wanna make the mistake that we have seen where we had a business that was crushing it.

They did not invest in the themes and or the, the new trends that were coming out. You know, an example is they didn't go after cloud-based technology. Fast forward 10 years, they're selling, no, their business is now cut in half of what it was worth, and that's because they didn't pay attention. And now they're selling their business for 50% of the value of what it was, and they should have sold it either 10 years prior or invested in the trends.

They didn't pay attention. They just didn't want to, they were stubborn and they wanted to just do what they were comfortable with. Yeah. They didn't care. Yeah. And so I think there's some key themes, and I think one thing, if you haven't listened to our episode with Leo Dess, he talks a lot about some themes to be looking at.

And I would highly advise you as an operator, you go to go listen to that. Um, it was a great episode. Um, and that was a lot about being kind of a, a systems technology integrator versus a security company and the sort of. Uh, total addressable market that that opens for you. So go, so go. Listen, I'm not gonna spend any more time on that.

One thing that everybody's talking about is ai. Uh, that's a key trend that if you do not have a strategy, you're gonna get left behind. Um, and here's, here's what I mean by that. And we don't have to spend a ton of time on this. We can kind of each give it a couple sentences. But like my, my broader point on AI is AI should enable you to have better, more impactful personal interactions with your customers, not less.

So for us, we're using AI to automate a whole bunch of work that's back office so that our employees can have great interactions with our customers. Like we don't use, lemme just give an example. We don't use, uh, AI for voice. We do, um, human beings that are all employees of our business because that interaction and touchpoint with a customer is so valuable to us.

And I think that it really does drive value. So what we did is we took off a whole bunch of workload off of our CSRs by outsourcing it to AI so that they could focus a lot of their time on being excellent at customer interaction. And so, Steven, do you have any other, any other thoughts on that as it pertains to the AI stuff?

I, if you are skeptical of AI and hesitant to try to learn how it might help your business, uh, I would. Like you to have a conversation with yourself. Yeah. Um, there are ways it is represented that are not real or kind of overblown. Yeah. There's a lot of marketing, there's a lot of marketing out in, in, in the world related to ai that's half truths and exaggerating.

But if you are so set in your ways and you're kind of refusing to at least explore, utilizing, I'll just say. Uh, emerging technology, better technology to help your business mm-hmm. Then that's foolish. Like you, you need to go ahead and start to go down that path and, and learn and understand how it might be applicable to your business.

Um, so for us specifically, the two ways that we're currently thinking about it, one is, um, better customer experience. Two is improving gross margins like we expect over the course of time to. Very directly positively impact our gross margins because we are implementing better technology. I'll just say that We don't even have to use the, the two letter, you know, curse word that everyone's using.

Mm-hmm. Um, so that's, that's kind of our take on it. But I just think if you are hesitant and kind of standoffish saying, you know, I'll, I'll check in in 2028 and see if that ended up being real or not. That's a mistake. 

You brought up a really important point. I want to bring this up because I just talked to a friend about this.

Another, uh, local operator, um, small business, similar size as mine. And he said, Hey, one of my goals for this year is to implement ai. And I said, that's great. And he said, can you tell me how you're doing that and what I should start with? And I said, I'm not gonna start there. I'm gonna ask you what technology you're using and what international talent are you leveraging.

And he wasn't using either. He had some very custom, homegrown built piece of tech that was. Very old, not flexible, not giving a lot of, uh, automation, not giving a lot of integration, um, to other platforms. Like he didn't have a VoIP system integrated, didn't have his email integrated, didn't have his bookkeeping, was very siloed and he wasn't using any international talent.

I said, dude, you, you're, you, you don't have your, how your foundation built. You can't build on add-ons a second floor when your foundation isn't there. And I think that's a huge thing that people are missing. Listen. If you are not using solid technology and you don't have international talent that you're leveraging to help with some of the back office stuff, you are going to light money on fire trying to use ai and I don't mean Sure.

Get a subscription to chat GPT and let that Right. Emails for, I mean, there's some basic stuff you can do that's like, that's not gonna really move the needle. It may save you a little bit of time. It's not gonna move the needle, but like. Don't go build a quote agent. We are just now building an AI quote agent because the last two years we've had an international employee that we layered on top of incredible technology that moves really fast to make it even quicker.

And the AI is just automating and speeding that up even more. And the only reason we were able to build the quote agent was because we knew what we needed from doing it within an international employee and, and the technology stack that we had and the technology stack we had. Has the quoting agent stuff built on.

So it wasn't like some massive lift from a development perspective. It was more of like a process lift. So I just really wanna highlight that because I think that if you are, if you are trying to throw more of yourself, Mr. Operator at your business, uh, in the new year to try to grow that strategy is not gonna work.

You are not going to get more out of you. This year. That's right. You can get incrementally better, but you have to figure out how to duplicate yourself through technology and people. And there's three places you can do that. You can either do that with technology, you can do that with international talent, or you can do that with domestic talent.

And our strategy has always been hire amazing. But a few, a small number of domestic employees hire amazing, really great international talent. That follow our process and then layer on technology that makes everybody efficient and allows me to track what they're doing. And then I think if you've got that foundation built, then you can build on the sexy AI stuff.

Do you have any thoughts on that, Steven? Anything else? 

No, it's perfect. I just, I hope people listen 'cause we've, we've gone through pain and kind of arrived 

at, 

at doing that and it's working and um, we're continuing to double down on it. And so, you know, we're practitioners and we can, you know, say, hey, like.

I, if you will kind of follow this approach, like we think it'll work out well for you. So, 

yeah. 

Um, 

yeah, and I just, I, from a humility check moment, like Steven and I are really great at some things, good at marketing, sales modeling, some strategy stuff, modeling fe modeling, Steven in particular. Um, but what we're, what we're, I wouldn't give ourselves, like, I would say we're B players is like operationally like.

Techn technically speaking, like wiring up the dude, I had a, I had a guy call me out up here in the industry and he was like, Hey, uh, can you subcontract this door? It's, he was a friend in another market. He is like, can you do this door for me? And I was like, sure, it's a one door. And I was like, I honestly, you shouldn't be talking to me.

'cause I talked to my ops manager, but Sure. And he was like, yeah, it's an electrified handset. And I was like, what is that? And he was like, okay, I don't think I want to use you. He was like, you don't know what that is. And I was like, that's a, that's a fair yellow flag. So I asked my ops manager, he was like, dude, you need to stop having those conversations.

We do electrified handsets all the time. Like you need to cut it out because you're making people think that we don't know what we're doing. And I'm like, ah, okay, got it. So I'm just saying that to say that like, we're not great at everything and I hope we don't portray that we are really good at.

Building process and strategy. And, and, and I think that like we have done some things in our, our lives that have helped us get to that point. And if you're gonna listen to anything that we talk about, uh, don't listen to what type of camera we use and listen to sales and marketing growth stuff because, uh, we've done it and we've got some reps in there and, um, we've, we've screwed stuff up along the way.

I think 

to add onto that, we've made some really focused bets and. Several of them have panned out, but some haven't. And then, yeah, we've had, 

yeah, 

the humility to be like, okay, we can't keep forcing this. This isn't working. Yeah. We gotta stop it. So, um, I, I agree though, like, we're not perfect. We're not the greatest company of all time.

We've learned some things that are working out pretty well and we're, we're just trying to share 

those. Yep. Yep. I agree. Um, one other thing I want to, I want to kind of talk about, that's sort of a key theme here is. Um, I think that in general, and, and I think a lot of people are kind of, I don't know if this is new.

I think a lot of people have kind of figured this out already. I think that gone are the days where your value is how many different systems you can work on and install. 

Yes. 

And more of the value is can you be the very best at one or two per scope of four. And that was something that we doubled down on early and has paid us paid dividends for us operationally from a sales perspective, from a quoting perspective.

I have friends that'll call me and they'll say, Hey, can you, you know, install Genentech or something? I'm like, no, I can't. Like, I can't. I don't know how to do that. Our team doesn't know how to do that. Um, and so I think that, uh, you know, I think that you've gotta get really tight on being the expert at one or two systems and.

Yeah, yeah. There are some systems that can do some things that other systems can't. If you are trying to be a everything to everybody guy, you're gonna be nothing to a few people. And like, I think we need to figure out how to be, um, everything to a few people. It's like, Hey, I can do these five scopes of work as long as it's fits within these parameters.

And if you want some super sexy something else, I cannot help you with that. And I'm not really gonna spend a bunch of time trying to solution that with you. Like we had a, we had a customer that was like, Hey, I really want y'all to install a gate. There's like a pole arm that in going into our parking lot.

I'm like, no, I can't do that. I can like go find a sub. And they're like, I don't want to deal, like I want to work with y'all. I'm like, okay, well, we'll sub it out, but like, we don't do that and we're not gonna get involved. And they're like, well, we already use this technology at other locations and like, y'all could service it at all those locations.

I was like, no. We don't do it. It's not, not, not part of our core competency. So that's sort of my last, my last key theme. Steve, do you have anything else kind of going into New Year, what other key themes that you see that are on the horizon that folks should be aware of? 

No, I think we, I think we covered a lot of ground.

This is good. Um, 

cool. 

So, um, let's kinda, the last piece, uh, today we're gonna cover is department KPIs and. Some of these, I know that you and I could both go on for a long, long time, so let's stick to like 

Yeah. 

Top two or three 

you in particular. 

Especially me. Yeah. I just, I mumble. It's, it's a whole thing.

Ask my boss. Yeah. Um, top two or three KPIs we're gonna touch on sales, marketing, finance, ops, and a special shout out for m and a. So top two or three? Yeah. And so we'll, we'll go kind of rapid fire a little bit. Uh, you hit sales. 

I have a listener reach out to me literally today and they said, Hey, I'm doing planning.

Can you help me understand like, what are y'all doing? Revenue per rep, what KPIs are you setting? And he started with actually saying, Hey, how many act the, the question was this. It was a two sentence, how many meetings do you do, do you ask your reps to do per week? And I said, well, I'll share with you what that number is.

It's between 12 and 15, but that's gonna be highly individualized for you and what your goals are. And so the way that I think about this is what is my revenue? What is my install revenue goal? What is my install revenue goal per rep? What is that rep's close rate? That means they have to generate X amount of pipeline.

What's the average deal size? How many activities does it take to generate that deal that flows down to they need to do X number of meetings? Like, so I, I think that you need to stop thinking about, hey, I think like, yeah, I think if I'm gonna do a million dollars. Then, you know, everyone else is doing 10 meetings a week.

That should be, it's like, well, maybe May, maybe your rep needs to be doing 20, or maybe you need to find another rep that's gonna, because you're never gonna get there. Your numbers have to, they have to go up like they have to match. So you've gotta, you've gotta kind of trickle it down. So for us, we're looking at, um, number of what we call coffee drops, which is just essentially a prospecting appointment for existing customers.

Um, we're looking at, um, the number of deals that have demos on them. And this is a lot has to do with more like sales process adherence. Uh, so we look at close rate and then in order to how do we influence close rate, we're looking at face-to-face meetings per deal cycle. We're looking at average deal size.

We're looking at lead source. We're looking at loss reason. We're looking at, um, I literally 

said two or 

three 

metrics and you have thrown out like 17. 

I know, I know. 

Different. 

I know. I can't help it. I'm so 

sorry, everyone, Colin. It just gets fired. I can't really Good stuff, like the whole process, like really I can't it, and we get, you know what I'm, Hey, I'D video.

That's my 17th video editor. Please go clip out. Like the, the whole thing you just ran through on sales. It's so, so just great. But, uh, you, you totally, you're rude. Totally didn't listen to me, but continue. 

Alright, give us your two to three in marketing. Okay. You gotta stick to two or three. 

Um, cost. Cost to acquire a new customer.

Um, cac, like you have to know, like what you're spending to get a new customer. Um, that's more like new logo. Um, and that's heavily predicated on where you're spending. What channels are you doing like paid ads, are you doing. And, you know, referrals and sponsorships, are you not spending any money at all?

And yeah, you know, like there's, again, it, it depends on what you're doing, how you're functioning, and what you're even able to track. But you should have some sort of idea, especially on the new logo side, what you're spending per new customer. Um, or like creation costs essentially. Uh, people from like an RMR perspective will talk about creation costs.

Um. Two is, uh, I know that in an age of AI people think that like SE o's dead and, or that's not true. Um, I can get on my soapbox, uh, but like organic traffic, I ideally like organic traffic growth month over month on your website. Um, looking at like calls from your website form fills, web, you know, website visitors, things like that.

And then 

those sound like more than one KPI. Dang. I'm just saying listen, I'm just keep it to two or three. I'm walking right into that. Okay. I'm, I told you listener. All right. I told you this guy who's gonna kill, I didnt even, I didn't even realize what I was doing. Alright. I'm editor, editor. I 

didn't even realize what I was doing here.

Um, yeah, 

dogone it. Um, 

welcome. Hey, all the grace. Keep going. 

Well, that's, um, and then if you are especially residentially focused, like more people are focused on social from a residential perspective mm-hmm. Then you're looking at, you know, uh, comments and likes and like daily engagements and follower accounts and things like that.

Views, um, yeah. Across, you know, dms, clickthroughs, um, on, you know, even going back to paid ads, like click through rates and things like that. Obviously. Um, so again, it depends who you are, the strategies you're deploying, kind of what you would want to track, but those are seven or eight, you know, that you might consider.

Yeah. 

Seven or 18. Yeah. Um, that's great. Uh, we're gonna to finance, so we we're gonna stick to two or three, huh? Okay. That's tough. Let's not do the obvious one. Um, alright. What do I think are the most important? Now I've gotta really think about it because I can't just start rattling off my favorite ones.

I think that the one that I am gonna talk the most about is gonna be gross profit margin is one that is, I was like, there's only one. You gonna pick one that's, yeah. Yeah. I'm going Gross profit margin. But this is, this counts. Buy revenue type for me. So I'm gonna go buy, you know, service projects in RR.

So that's gonna be, that's gonna be the one that I'm really focused on. 

Really good if I, 

what's your one for finance? Yeah. So that's what I 

would've said. So, uh, 

number 

one, yes. 

Suck it. That's, I don't care. I keep 

it. Uh, number two, so we obviously are a big advocates, even if you are more kind of construction oriented, more install focused.

We still are really big advocates for trying to drive RMR. So I will say my number two would be net RMR change month over month. So we want to be obviously going up into the right and we wanna look at like net, RMR contracted, RMR, monthly, quarterly, annually would be kind of a non-obvious, you know, not like gross revenue would be like a top one.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I'm gonna add one more since we did two, we get three. And, and this, 'cause this is a big one for us, which is just, uh, receivables and all of the metrics that go along with receivables. Like total account balance I think is fine. But I, I would look at your over 60 days. You can impact what's at 90 days.

At 60 days, it's really hard to impact what's going on in 90 days. So we have not mastered this. So just full disclosure, like we are constantly figuring out better strategies around. How to collect, how to do it, how to set us up for success on the front end. You could say we're Masters of Alarms, but maybe we're not Masters of collections.

Yeah, I think that's great. Collections Masters is not our name for a reason. Maybe we're alarm. Maybe that's the future business. I agreed. We'll see. Yeah, you heard it here first. Here's our affiliate link Collections masters. See? Yeah. Right. Perfect. 

Okay. 

Uh, okay. Op operations, I'm gonna just, I'm just gonna do two, three, uh, two here.

Uh, one would be technician, um, they're both, they're two actually related technician. One is technician utilization rate. Um, that has to do with, that has to do effectively with how much billable time are they basically taking. Right. So they got an eight hour day, you're paying 'em eight hours. Generally how many hours are billable?

That's a complex thing to track if you don't have a really tight system. So, and it's also really hard to, uh, improve a technician utilization rate. If you have a process in place and your technician is not hitting high utilization, it's usually a technician's fault. If you don't have a process in place, you don't have expectation, it's your fault.

Uh, and then the second one is just revenue by technician. Um. Total number of techs. You know, how much revenue do you have, how much revenue you make to protect. It's just a good way to kind of benchmark yourself in the industry to figure out how are you performing. That's just like our, that's an easy way to kind of look at utilization.

So those are my two for operations. You have any for operations or, 

I was just gonna 

say, if you 

have dedicated service and install teams on the tech side, you could split it out, you know, those revenues within those teams. If it's a little more blended, you could blend it. Um. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. Last one is m and a, especially if you are really focused on inorganic, um, being a larger driver of your growth.

Like, so if acquisitions is a big part of your, you know, revenue story and where you're headed and mm-hmm. Then you've gotta have shots on goal. So that just goes almost like in sales, right? So how many people are you reaching out to? Um, how many meetings were set based on that, out of all the meetings that you established, how many actually happened, you know, and after that, like, did you get to an LOI and you know, just kind of tracking those.

But ultimately if you're reaching out to like one or two random people every three months, if it's kind of half-hearted, then you're gonna have kind of half halfway results that, you know, probably don't meet. Your goals. So I would say align your m and a KPIs to your m and a expectations, you know, similar to what we've been talking about in other departments.

And so if you're thinking, Hey, I'm trying to close three deals this year with a total purchase price of X, well, you're probably gonna have to do a significant, I would say, for every deal that you hope to close in a given year, you probably. Are needing to actively meet with 10 to 15 owners that's that Right.

Who are interested in selling. You verified they have interest in selling. That's right. Probably one out of 10 to 15 may convert to a closed deal for you. Yeah. Again, who are in market, they're interested. It's not like three years from now we're thinking about it. 

Mm-hmm. 

Um, so yeah, those are, those are some KPIs for.

My last one for m and a actually is on the other side, which is after you close. Um, we are always looking at revenue by type, by legacy company. So, uh, we closed on a business last year. We closed on a bunch of business last year. And then I'm looking at is how much revenue did each of those, the customers that came from those acquisitions, how much revenue did they generate and, and buy type.

Um, and the closest that you can get to. Their previous year sales number the better. And you would think that that would be insanely easy. It is not. Okay. Let me just tell you. If you bought a company and they're doing 2 million last year and you acquire them and your expectation is you're gonna do an incremental 2 million, good luck because it's not easy.

Yeah, 

it is hard. A lot of that comes down to attrition, but that's a big metric for us to, to evaluate a lot of different things. Uh, but that's one thing that we're, that we're looking at. So real quick before we close, let's talk about homework. We'll each give one, um, my homework is sales related, and that is, uh, go figure out these numbers, average deal size, and your close rate, and then build out the KPIs as a result of that.

Okay. Email me. At info@intraexit.co and I can help you with that. Hit me up on LinkedIn. That's my homework, Steven. 

My homework is if you don't have a lot of this data readily available to help inform your decision making, it's time to bite the bullet as a part of your 2026 budget to invest in technology.

Yeah, so that you can know your numbers. 

Agreed. That's great. Couldn't agree more. Um, hey listen, listener, would you please go like and subscribe our videos and subscribe. That helps us a lot and especially when you engage in our videos. Uh, we do this 'cause we enjoy it and we like to help people and I like to engage with people and I geek out when people reach out to me and I spend.

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I.