Seeing Around Corners
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 family friend Jonathan Fine pitched him on starting Sting Alarm with the line "we'll be on every casino on the strip." That was the hook. Twenty-four years later they're headquartered in Vegas, deep in gaming and a handful of other verticals, and recently opened a second market in Phoenix. What they built in the middle is the interesting part: an alarm company that treated the IT side and the physical security side as one thing back when nobody else was, and used that convergence as its first real competitive edge.
The through-line of the conversation is discipline. Discipline about who you buy, discipline about which technologies you roll out, discipline about what you say no to, discipline about setting the expectation on every remote guard account before the cameras go live. Jon is candid about the misses too. Around the time they moved their monitoring from in-house to a third-party partner, they lost roughly 90% of their video analytic customers because the service couldn't deliver what had been sold. Some of those accounts were four figures a month. He calls it terrible, learns out loud from it, and now Sting brings every new video account on with a much tighter filter and a much clearer promise.
In this episode, we talk about...
✅ Why Jonathan Fine's "every casino on the strip" pitch got Jon out of IT and into the alarm business in 2003, and what the analog-to-IP shift looked like from an IT guy's seat
✅ Las Vegas is a no-response city: the police don't come unless the alarm is verified by a guard, audio, or video, and how that one municipal rule shaped Sting's entire product roadmap
✅ Video verification in 2004: tying the customer's camera to the alarm panel, popping the DVR feed to the operator, and using that as the wedge to compete against the incumbents
✅ Rolling out video analytic monitoring around 2012 on the Video IQ platform (later gobbled by Avigilon, now Motorola) and running it out of their own central station
✅ The brutal transition when they moved monitoring to a third party the first time and lost ~90% of their video analytic customers because the service couldn't be delivered, and what that taught them about setting expectations before the cameras turn on
✅ Two businesses under one roof: separate teams for residential/small business and commercial enterprise, because they show up different, talk different, and need different training
✅ Adding fire construction and fire monitoring through a local acquisition, and why fire is a different kind of platform play than bolting on more RMR
✅ Over 1,000 five-star Google reviews and the platform, leaderboard, and gamification behind them, and why "just ask" is the whole trick if you actually earned it
✅ Jake's own $20 spiff experiment that landed a hundred five-star reviews in two weeks and cost him $2,000 he'd happily spend again, and Jon's read on what those reviews do to the team internally
✅ Eight-plus acquisitions since 2010 and what Sting looks for now: cultural fit and how the accounts were originated (not just the RMR), no door-to-door dumps, no square peg / round hole deals, no lawsuits ever
✅ Halo sensors as camera-less cameras: the technology Jon says he missed the boat on and is bullish on now, especially for hotel and casino applications where privacy and awareness both matter
✅ Why remote guarding is at the "toddler stage" of its growth curve, and how that shapes Sting's next ten years of camera and RMR sales
✅ Rapid fire: the industry needs to get better at communication and transparency about what products actually do (and don't), and customers still underestimate how long real response takes
Coffee Break With Jake is recorded live every Friday at 11am ET. Join us live or register to attend at https://go.ssandsi.com/coffeebreak
Jon's background is IT, not alarms. He graduated UNLV in 1998, and in 2003 his longtime family friend Jonathan Fine pitched him on starting Sting Alarm with the line "we'll be on every casino on the strip." That was the hook. Twenty-four years later they're headquartered in Vegas, deep in gaming and a handful of other verticals, and recently opened a second market in Phoenix. What they built in the middle is the interesting part: an alarm company that treated the IT side and the physical security side as one thing back when nobody else was, and used that convergence as its first real competitive edge.
The through-line of the conversation is discipline. Discipline about who you buy, discipline about which technologies you roll out, discipline about what you say no to, discipline about setting the expectation on every remote guard account before the cameras go live. Jon is candid about the misses too. Around the time they moved their monitoring from in-house to a third-party partner, they lost roughly 90% of their video analytic customers because the service couldn't deliver what had been sold. Some of those accounts were four figures a month. He calls it terrible, learns out loud from it, and now Sting brings every new video account on with a much tighter filter and a much clearer promise.
In this episode, we talk about...
✅ Why Jonathan Fine's "every casino on the strip" pitch got Jon out of IT and into the alarm business in 2003, and what the analog-to-IP shift looked like from an IT guy's seat
✅ Las Vegas is a no-response city: the police don't come unless the alarm is verified by a guard, audio, or video, and how that one municipal rule shaped Sting's entire product roadmap
✅ Video verification in 2004: tying the customer's camera to the alarm panel, popping the DVR feed to the operator, and using that as the wedge to compete against the incumbents
✅ Rolling out video analytic monitoring around 2012 on the Video IQ platform (later gobbled by Avigilon, now Motorola) and running it out of their own central station
✅ The brutal transition when they moved monitoring to a third party the first time and lost ~90% of their video analytic customers because the service couldn't be delivered, and what that taught them about setting expectations before the cameras turn on
✅ Two businesses under one roof: separate teams for residential/small business and commercial enterprise, because they show up different, talk different, and need different training
✅ Adding fire construction and fire monitoring through a local acquisition, and why fire is a different kind of platform play than bolting on more RMR
✅ Over 1,000 five-star Google reviews and the platform, leaderboard, and gamification behind them, and why "just ask" is the whole trick if you actually earned it
✅ Jake's own $20 spiff experiment that landed a hundred five-star reviews in two weeks and cost him $2,000 he'd happily spend again, and Jon's read on what those reviews do to the team internally
✅ Eight-plus acquisitions since 2010 and what Sting looks for now: cultural fit and how the accounts were originated (not just the RMR), no door-to-door dumps, no square peg / round hole deals, no lawsuits ever
✅ Halo sensors as camera-less cameras: the technology Jon says he missed the boat on and is bullish on now, especially for hotel and casino applications where privacy and awareness both matter
✅ Why remote guarding is at the "toddler stage" of its growth curve, and how that shapes Sting's next ten years of camera and RMR sales
✅ Rapid fire: the industry needs to get better at communication and transparency about what products actually do (and don't), and customers still underestimate how long real response takes
Coffee Break With Jake is recorded live every Friday at 11am ET. Join us live or register to attend at https://go.ssandsi.com/coffeebreak
