How We Grew an Acquired Business 60% in Year One

Most business acquisitions don’t fail because of strategy. They fail because operators underestimate hiring, systems, and execution.

 In this episode of Entry & Exit: Founder’s Story, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the first full year running Alarm Masters after the acquisition — including the wins, the mistakes, and the operational changes that completely transformed the company.

They share how they scaled the business 60% in their first full year, why hiring cheap talent hurt growth, how international hiring became a major advantage, and the lessons they learned rebuilding sales systems, operations, and technology from the ground up.
Inside this episode:
→ Why hiring the cheapest option backfires
→ Building an international team that scaled the business
→ The mistakes they made with their first sales hire
→ Transitioning from legacy software to Salesforce
→ Balancing founder involvement vs delegation
→ Breaking company sales records three times in one year
→ How they grew Alarm Masters 60% in their first full year

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Connect:

Stephen Olmon — http://x.com/stephenolmon

Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy

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Transcript

Year One Reality Check

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I wanna give a warning that not everything we did worked.

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Fall of twenty-three through twenty-four.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

A lot happened in that year. Good greed.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hiring internationally for a long time got a bad rap. There was kind of this funny Western pride of, oh, you know, people that are offshore. And it was kind of this negative thing.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

We were trying to find the cheapest option for whatever we were hiring for. That's right. And it totally changed it, which is talent wins every time. It raises, it's like rising tides raises all ships. Go hire the best person and stretch to pay that person, or don't hire them. And when we did that, it's a critical role. Woo! 25. We looked really good.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Welcome

Taking the Wheel Post Close

SPEAKER_01 0:46

back to the founder story from Colin and I at Alarm Masters, where we're kind of sharing our journey up to this point. Uh, we are about three years in. And so if you haven't listened, go back. We kind of did the initial interest all the way to close, talked about our first 90 days, and today we are talking about the first full year of us at Alarm Masters in seat and really kind of starting to put our own DNA, our own imprint on the business. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

I want to give a warning that not everything we did worked, and not everything uh that we thought was a good idea is something we're doing today. Made a lot of changes, did a lot of things. Um, this is sort of we're calling it the first year. It's really like there was sort of a three to four month period of when the old owners were still involved, and that kind of coincided and ended. So really it's like kind of our first year and a half, really, because we're thinking about it like after we were fully independently running the business, no uh, you know, no help from the old owners, etc.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Fall of 23 through 24.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

A lot happened in that year.

First Key Hires and Role Transition

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Good grief. I mean, one of the things I would say is we transitioned away really in the first six months of the year or of us owning the business, really six to nine months. We started transitioning from Colin kind of doing all of the day-to-day roles, Steven handling the kind of back office and holding that down, us running with basically the original team and transitioning to replacing some of the original team members and um upskilling and hiring new people and hiring. So we hired our first salesperson the summer of our first year. So it was kind of um, you know, six months into the first year. That was a big step up for us. And it was something that I was sort of nervous about because I was running sales and had a very specific way that I wanted that to be run. What was kind of interesting though is I was still doing sales, I was still the enterprise rep running enterprise deals. And then I had the salesperson kind of running mid-market deals and everything that wasn't an enterprise deal. Um, and so so again, that really happened. We hired that salesperson a year after we closed on the business. But that in our kind of storyline, it kind of happened about six months in. And so that was a big hire. That was somebody that was outside the industry, and that was it, that was interesting because I was also running multiple roles still in the business. So I was still project managing, running all of ops, basically running customer success and customer service. Uh, we did end up hiring a customer service director that that year to kind of help run all of the the like billables, all the customer interaction, anything with a customer customer calling in, asking for a service call, any of that really existing customer stuff was being handled by the director of customer service. And that that was starting to peel layers off of getting me enabled to do uh more work. And I think one thing that's really I want to just word of caution. I think we actually balanced it pretty well. But I think too quick people that acquire businesses want to get this is how about this? People that acquire businesses are trying to too quickly get out of doing tactical, not highest and best use activities. And people that found a company and are building it from the ground up take too long to get out of those roles. And I think there's a I think there's a balance there. You have got to do the thing to know how to improve it. And you need to save money and you need to to stay in it longer. If you're acquiring a business, you're gonna want to take off ops and customer service and collections calls and fail to communicate calls. You're gonna want to scoop that off your plate because it doesn't feel highest and best used. And there is some of that. You can't do it all, but you really need to sit in it a little longer than you really think. Um, because I think that it's incredibly valuable for you to get perspective on your business. And and I would say this to somebody that's running a business today and they were really trying to find that general manager to kind of replace them. I would highly advise that you take that general manager and their first six to nine months, you hire them to kind of come alongside of you, you continue to do the role, and you let them go do every single role in your business for some period of time and be a gap filler. Because if they if they can't see 360, yeah, they're gonna be coming back to you and they're not gonna be as effective. So I would say that was one thing we did really well was balancing me staying in the grind of doing a lot of these tasks and then slowly peeling away and hiring people to replace those. And I was still kind of involved, but just not to the same degree. Um so yeah,

International Talent and Hiring Lessons

SPEAKER_00 5:38

I think we did that. Steven, you can kind of touch on one big thing we did in our first year, start to hire international talent, which really helped us dramatically.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Yeah, I had used international talent. Uh well, I guess we both had in a couple other businesses, business ventures in the past. And um, I think hiring internationally uh for a long time got a bad rap. Um, and there was kind of this funny Western pride of oh, you know, people that are offshore, and it was kind of this negative thing. And um, there are just so many bright, talented people all over this planet, and we found some, and we started to do that probably in the first six to nine months um is when we introduced that. And that's shifted some over the course of time, and today we have about uh ten people uh internationally, but um it was a huge leverage point, and it enabled us to have more dedicated, focused team members, but where it helped us from a payroll perspective, to be honest. Like it it helped us be um just careful with uh not getting into a bad cash position and um while while still kind of fueling some growth and and helping us kind of grow up a bit and mature some of our processes and teams. So that was a big deal. Um one thing I want to call out is we did a great job and maybe not a great job when it came to hiring people that we knew for friends.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

I yeah, I thought you were gonna say something else, but yeah, I agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

We had we had a couple missus, and it doesn't matter who knew them.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

It doesn't matter where they was always me that knew them, it's always me. It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

Look, I wasn't gonna say it. Um I think any of everybody knew um so uh but but then also some of our very best people came from very personal relationships that either you you knew or both of us knew. Um and that's just a dangerous game to play. And you have to have really frank conversations on the front end with those people if you have relationships outside of the business prior. Um, and so man, I mean, I I would say, you know, a handful of the most important people at Alarm Masters are people that we had some sort of relationship with prior, um, but lots of expectation setting, and um it's overall that's been a strong suit like internally, but we had a couple missing.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

No, you're you're totally right. I thought you were gonna take a different approach because this is one thing that we did not do well either, is uh when we hired local like local employees um to our office, full-time local employees, we were trying to find the cheapest option for whatever we were hiring for.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

And um we have since learned, and going into 25, we totally changed this, which is talent wins every time it raises, it's like rising tides raises all ships. And uh we learned that very acutely in 24. So I just want to call that out. That like, hey, I would even wait. It's just destructive, it's not helpful, it's it's a waste of everybody's time, a lot of hurt feelings, like go hire the best person and stretch to pay that person, or don't hire them. Like, if you truly don't believe you can hire the stretch, then don't hire them. You gotta find somebody that's outsized. And when we did that in some critical roles, whoo, 25, we looked really good. But in 24, uh, we didn't do that, and we made a lot of mistakes

Sales Process Mistakes and Fixes

SPEAKER_00 9:27

around that. Another thing that I think that we didn't that really I didn't do well was um I sort of like with sales a little bit, I sort of like kind of let that salesperson run independently. I didn't give them the sales playbook. All the sales playbook stuff we talked about really materialized at the end of 24. And in the first part of 24, when we had that salesperson, I was kind of just letting them run wild and kind of go do their own thing. And I didn't have give them a tremendous amount of oversight and training and structure. And that was a mistake. And I don't know if you can learn that any other way than doing it, but I would say that one thing I look back at is like, I wish before we made that first hire, we would have had it all the structure in place. I would have followed it, had it documented, had it dialed. And really, the reason we hired them was we were so overwhelmed with sales leads that I was had to hit the easy button because I needed somebody to help me go on these job walks and do these quotes because I just couldn't

Tech Overhaul and Big Growth Wins

SPEAKER_00 10:21

keep up.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Another major thing in year one was technology. So the business that we acquired was using an on-prem, unbelievably painful legacy piece of software that looked like it had not been touched since 1999. Um it was, I think, the single worst piece of software I've ever logged into in my entire lifetime. Um and so we tried, we had a false start. We started to try to implement Service Titan, actually, which, you know, for our residential friends, that could be great. Obviously, a lot of our like kind of plumbing, HVAC um types of friends use Service Titan really effectively. And that's who it was built for. It wasn't built for even an alarm company, but it definitely wasn't built for a secure commercial security company at all. And you know, they they overpromised a little bit, and so we tried for a couple months and it ended up backing out of that.

SPEAKER_00 11:24

And it wasn't their fault, truly. It just it wasn't the right technology. Like I we just didn't know. There probably could have been some better scoping on the front end. Um and they and they they were super fair because we were like, this isn't working for anybody.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Yeah, um and they agreed. I think I think it was slightly misrepresented of what it might be able to do, especially when it came out of subscriptions, like all of our recurring stuff. It was kind of messy, but um anyway, so moved on, hit pause, and then ended up implementing Salesforce in 2024, and went live in September of 2024. Yeah, and you know, none of those things are ever perfect, but ultimately that has proved to be transformative for our business, and so that was another element of us really kind of uh installing our own processes and DNA and kind of the the the blueprint that we've been wanting to kind of have in our business and true customer 360 and um cloud-based. Welcome to the 2000s.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

So uh that was a huge well, and it gave us what it really gave us is visibility into our data, it gave us visibility and to our customer interactions so that we could take actionable insights to like actually do something with that. And um it the other thing is it wasn't just Salesforce, like we moved our full phone system over, we moved all of our email uh to cloud-based. I mean, everything was local, yeah, and that's just how it had always been done. We we had all of our files were local, so we had to do a massive scanning project. So like everything was local, everything was paper, and converting that in 2024. And what's interesting is like you're just starting. Once you get it digital, then it's cleanup time. So we spent all 2025, and truthfully, we're still cleaning stuff up today, and that's really a factor of acquisitions because it won't every time you add an acquisition like that as messy data, you're just added to the problem. So that you gotta have to get used to that when you're doing MA work is like your data is never gonna be perfectly clean. Um, but anyway, yeah, so the Salesforce thing and and and then moving to a VoIP system, all that was like a huge game changer for us and really and really moved the needle. Uh, and then you know, the last thing I want to highlight, and then and then we can wrap it up here, is like this is just really exciting. Like, I just we'll let's brag on ourselves for a second. That previously when we bought the business, you know, it's really a small team, and like they were doing, they were really an alarm company, they weren't truly a security integrator business. And the largest project I think to date they had ever done was like 100k, 110k, something like that. It was just a great size project, but that's the biggest in all of the lifetime of the business. And in that first real full year, and these were when I was like really driving all these projects, we sold our we hit we broke the record three times in the first year. So we hit 160k for the first project, then we went to 385 K, then we went to 625 K all in the first year. It was just like next project after project. And and that was a function of me really figuring out the sales playbook and understanding how to go to market and how to run enterprise deals and like how to apply everything I knew from Salesforce and selling and helping consult with businesses in this space and trying to like apply that playbook. And we just we saw it working time after time. And so I would just encourage you, like, man, do those things because me running those deals and getting those deals, A, were fundamental to the growth of the business, but also it helped inform how we think about sales today and has really helped us get kind of on this rocket ship that we have as our sales team now.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Yeah, and you know, to kind of wrap that up, you know, our we bought the business in the middle of a year, calendar year, but then that first full calendar year that we ran the business, we were up 60%. Yeah, and so that started working, baby.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Yeah, yeah, it sure did. Um, anyway, it was a wild ride. We learned a ton of stuff, we screwed a ton of stuff up. Um, and like we're still trying to figure out how to how to run business. We've been doing this for three years and um been in the industry for a long time, but like running this type of business for the last three years has been a wild ride, super fun. Excited to kind of talk about the next kind of the next the next episode will really be focused on kind of from that first year to current, and then and then we'll really start to talk through where we are. Like we want to just start giving you all business updates of like, hey, this is what's happened recently, like this is what's been going on in our business, and and we hope that's useful. And like we like to build in public, like we're excited, no secrets among friends here. So, anyway, if you like this content, like, subscribe, uh, leave us a comment, just like engage with it in any way. It's a huge help to us. And we hope you guys have a great week. Thanks.