Alarm monitoring: the recurring half of the business

A security installer can run two businesses from the same van. One sells equipment and installs it; the other sells monitoring and bills monthly.

The first has a good day when the phone rings. The second pays whether it rings or not, which is what makes it worth building deliberately.

Sell monitoring at the install, not afterwards

A customer buying an alarm is already thinking about the moment the siren sounds. That is the only easy moment to sell the answer.

The same conversation six months later competes against a habit of ignoring the siren, which is a much harder sale.

False alarms are the whole retention problem

A customer whose alarm cries wolf three times stops arming it, and an unarmed system cancels its monitoring within a year.

Most false alarms come from pets, poor detector placement, or a user who never understood the keypad. All three are installer decisions rather than customer faults.

Train the user, properly, at handover

A handover that hands over a manual teaches nothing. Walking the customer through arming, disarming and a deliberate false alarm teaches everything.

Our guide to solar handover makes the same argument: the calls that follow an install are usually questions, not faults.

Keep the contact list current, because it decays

A monitoring contract is only as good as the phone numbers on it, and those change constantly through moves, separations and staff turnover.

An annual confirmation of the contact list is a short call that prevents the worst possible outcome, an alarm nobody answers.

Say plainly what monitoring does and does not do

A customer who expects somebody to attend within minutes, when the service actually calls a contact list, learns the difference at the worst moment.

Setting that expectation at sign up costs a small amount of enthusiasm and prevents a complaint that ends the relationship entirely.

Service visits protect the recurring revenue

Batteries fail, detectors drift and communication paths change when a customer switches internet provider.

A yearly service visit catches those, and it is the visit where upgrades get sold. Monitoring without service becomes monitoring of a system that stopped reporting.

Communication paths change underneath you

Systems that reported over a phone line, then a mobile network, now increasingly report over the internet. Each change strands older equipment.

Knowing which customers sit on an ageing path is a list worth holding, because it becomes an upgrade campaign rather than a series of failures.

Keys, codes and access lists need an owner

A commercial customer with staff turnover accumulates codes nobody can account for, and every one of them still opens the building.

An annual review of the user list, done with the customer, finds those and usually sells a change of system to something easier to manage.

Cameras and alarms sell each other

A customer buying cameras usually wants to know when somebody is on the property, which is an alarm question wearing a different hat.

Quoting the two together, with one app and one monitoring arrangement, sells more than either alone. It also leaves the customer with fewer things to learn.

Measure the recurring line separately

Revenue from installs and revenue from monitoring behave completely differently. One combined total hides whether the valuable half is growing.

Monthly recurring revenue, with the customers added and lost each month beside it, is the number that describes this business.

What to change first

• Monitoring gets offered during the install conversation
• Detector placement accounts for pets before the first false alarm
• The handover includes a deliberate test, not a manual
• The contact list gets confirmed annually
• The sale states plainly what the response actually is
• A yearly service visit protects the recurring revenue
• Recurring revenue gets measured apart from installs