Coffee Break with Jake

This week Jake Voll brings three lenders and one operating dealer together on the money side of mobile surveillance trailers. Marvin Fuller of M&S Security Services Inc has gone from two rusty prototypes to seven trailers in about a year. Jim Wooster of Alarm Financial Services lends against RMR, Jennifer Holloway of CIBC Bank leads the specialty security group there, and Peter McCoy of NewLan...

This week Jake Voll talks with Jack Doyle, President and CEO of Doyle Security Systems, a company founded on St. Patrick's Day in 1919 and now in its fifth generation of family ownership. Doyle runs roughly 60,000 customers and $2.3 million in recurring monthly revenue across upstate New York and Erie, Pennsylvania, which puts it 19th largest in the country by RMR, and Jack stepped into the CEO se...

This week Jake Voll brings the topic of wireless jammers to the room, and the room has stories to tell. A few years ago this sounded like a movie plot or a theoretical problem. Now police and federal prosecutors are describing it in burglary investigations, and the dealers on this call have lived it. The uncomfortable part is that nothing on the shelf today would have stopped either one. Encryptio...

This week, Jake Voll sits down with Robert Few of The Connection Xchange and Greg Sariti of In Charge Electric to talk about company vehicles, the part of your business that is the most visible, the most expensive, and the easiest to ignore until it bites you. Robert runs TCX, a consulting and coaching company that works with integrators, electrical contractors, and distributors on building a foun...

This week, Jake Voll pulls together a three-person panel to walk through what an acquisition in the security industry actually looks like from the broker's chair, the banker's chair, and the operator's chair. Colby Monachino of Monachino Partners handles the brokerage side, Jennifer Holloway of CIBC US handles the debt side, and Sean Forrest of Alarm Detection Systems, Inc. handles the buyer side....

This week, Jake Voll sits down with Jon Perry, president and owner of Sting Alarm in Las Vegas, for a 24-year look at what it takes to build a security company in a no-response city, roll out remote guarding before anyone was calling it remote guarding, and stay disciplined about which shiny objects to chase. Jon's background is IT, not alarms. He graduated UNLV in 1998, and in 2003 his longtime f...

This week, Jake Voll sits down with Randi Elrad of Crime Prevention Security Systems for a 51-year lesson on what it actually takes to build a workplace people don't want to leave, and why the trophies on the wall are the byproduct, not the point. Randi's origin story is one of the best in the industry. In 1975, she was a special education teacher and her husband Johnny was a microbiologist studyi...

In this special edition of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake Voll sits down with David Erickson, co-founder and COO of CHeKT, to unpack what it actually takes to turn a book of camera system customers into scalable, defensible recurring monthly revenue.  David walks Jake through the founding vision he helped build about 10 years ago: there is no reason a camera can't replace every motion detector in th...

In this episode of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake Voll sits down with John Loud, founder and owner of LOUD Security Systems out of Atlanta, for a 30-year look at what it takes to build an alarm company from scratch, survive a housing crash, and stay founder-led at 70 employees and 14,000+ customers. John came into the industry from all the way outside it. He was a Delta flight attendant with a polit...

This week, Jake Voll sits down with Derek Carder, COO of FrontPoint Security, to talk about what happened when a DIY home security company decided their 60-to-90 minute hold time was the number one problem to solve, and how the fix turned into one of the more grounded AI rollouts in the industry. In this episode, we talk about... ✅ Why Derek starts every role by taking live customer calls, and wh...

This week, Jake Voll sits down with Ainsley Close, president of Guardian Security Systems out of Seattle. Guardian is a third-generation family alarm company. Ainsley's grandfather Donald founded the parent business, her dad Frank bought Guardian off him 50 years ago, and Ainsley took the chair as president in the middle of the pandemic, after Frank sent an all-company email naming her successor a...

So what are dealers actually wrestling with right now, and what's working? In this episode of Coffee Break With Jake, we take a look at your biggest challenges. In this episode, we talk about... ✅ The lead-gen reality check: what is a quality lead actually worth to you, and can you afford to outbid the largest competitor in your market? ✅ Why fire alarm and access control leads beat residential...

Taylor Sears is back. A few months after his Dealer Spotlight, the COO of Silent Guard and Davis Heat and Air joins Jake Voll for a working session on the four levers any dealer can pull to grow recurring revenue and the profit underneath it. In this conversation, Taylor and Jake walk through those levers, talk through where most dealers are leaving money on the table on each one, and what to actu...

In this Dealer Spotlight edition of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake Voll sits down with Taylor Sears, COO of Silent Guard in Kentucky and Davis HVAC, to talk about how a 17-person family alarm shop turned itself into a 42-person operation doing three and a half times the revenue in five years, without ever buying out a competitor or chasing a fad. Taylor's path into the family business is not the usu...

In this special edition of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake Voll sits down with Rebekah Johnson, co-founder and executive director of Embers of Hope. Rebekah's story starts in May 2002, when an electrical spark from the outlet behind her headboard set her mattress, and her, on fire. She woke up engulfed, ran out the front door, dropped, and rolled in the grass. Then she ran back inside for her roommat...

In this special edition of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake Voll sits down with Manish Dalal, Founder and President of ZKTeco USA, to dig into where biometrics fits in the modern access control stack and why the physical credential is quietly becoming the weakest link on your customer's door. Manish has been working in biometrics since 1998, starting with the first biometric time and attendance system...

Join Jake Voll as he sits down with Lee Odess, globally recognized access control industry analyst, author of The Six Phase Changes Shaping Access Control , and founder of PhySec Collective, to talk about where access control is really headed and what that means for every dealer and integrator selling into this market today. In this episode, Jake and Lee break down the thesis that has defined Lee'...

Join Jake Voll as he sits down with Josh Trim of Pennington & Trim to talk about what it takes to grow a security company across generations — and why “sales” isn’t about pressure or commissions, it’s about trust, character, and delivering the right solution for the customer. In this episode, Jake and Josh unpack the early grind of building a company, the advantage technical people often have...

Join Jake Voll as he sits with industry consultant Robert Few, managing partner of The Connection Exchange (TCX), to unpack one of the biggest growth bottlenecks in the security industry: hiring and keeping the right salespeople. For many dealers, growth stalls not because of a lack of opportunity, but because they are afraid to invest in sales talent without the systems, pricing structure, and ac...

Professionalism isn’t branding; it’s operations. In this episode, Jake is joined by several seasoned pros across the industry to break down what “high standards” actually look like in the alarm and security integration world. From hiring sales reps for character and integrity, to building packages, pricing guardrails, and quote approvals, to tech behaviors as simple as booties + moving blankets, t...

Most alarm systems still deliver the same thing they did decades ago: a binary signal from a door or motion sensor. But customers don’t buy “a signal”; they buy the belief that you’ll stop crime. In this episode, Jake sits down with Wes Usie (Founder/CEO, Guardian Alarm Systems and CHeKT) to unpack why traditional intrusion is hitting a ceiling and why proactive video monitoring is becoming the ne...

What does it really mean to be unapologetically client-focused in the security industry? In this episode of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake sits down with Marvin Smith, owner of Orlando Emergency Signal, to unpack nearly two decades of lessons on service, culture, and building a brand people trust. From growing up on a farm with a love for electronics to walking away from Disney to build a security c...

The tables have turned. Jake Voll (the host of Coffee Break With Jake and CEO of SS&Si Dealer Network) is in the hot seat this time! Tyler Martin takes over the mic to uncover the story behind one of the alarm industry's most distinctive distributors: how a family business and an eBay side hustle evolved into a national competitor that punches well above its weight class against billion-dollar...

Selling a family business isn't just a financial transaction. It's an emotional journey that tests your identity, relationships, and vision for the future. Jeremy Bates, VP of Business Development at Pye Barker, joins Jake to share the raw, unfiltered story of selling Bates Security, the second-generation company he helped build from cleaning bathrooms to the SDM Top 32. This conversation goes bey...

Most security integrators treat large commercial projects like one-time windfalls. Install the system, collect the check, and move on. But what if that $50,000 access control system could generate $200,000 over its lifetime?  In this episode of Coffee Break With Jake, Jake Voll welcomes Peter McCoy from New Lane Finance to discuss strategies for security dealers to transform project revenue into p...