The 107-Year Startup
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 seat in 2023 after a deliberate three year succession plan. What makes the story worth an hour is not the longevity itself but what the company was willing to give up to get here, starting with a guard division that once employed 3,200 people.
In this episode, we talk about...
✅ The family business constitution, including the rule that you work somewhere else before you work at Doyle
✅ Why the family holds annual retreats and conflict resolution sessions, after an earlier generation's split broke the company in two
✅ Selling a 3,200 employee guard division to reinvest in the alarm business, and dropping to 80 employees
✅ Exiting locksmithing, and the phrases that tell you a division has outlived its usefulness
✅ Deciding where to play and, just as deliberately, where not to
✅ Keeping a UL listed central station when almost everyone offloaded theirs, and how video monitoring made it a differentiator again
✅ An acquired customer base whose RMR grew 10% over four years while the unit count shrank
✅ What a trusted security advisor does differently from an integrator chasing projects
✅ Why you cannot automate the ambiguity out of a central station seat
✅ Jack's closing advice on contracts, and why you cannot cede ground on the customer relationship
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
In this episode, we talk about...
✅ The family business constitution, including the rule that you work somewhere else before you work at Doyle
✅ Why the family holds annual retreats and conflict resolution sessions, after an earlier generation's split broke the company in two
✅ Selling a 3,200 employee guard division to reinvest in the alarm business, and dropping to 80 employees
✅ Exiting locksmithing, and the phrases that tell you a division has outlived its usefulness
✅ Deciding where to play and, just as deliberately, where not to
✅ Keeping a UL listed central station when almost everyone offloaded theirs, and how video monitoring made it a differentiator again
✅ An acquired customer base whose RMR grew 10% over four years while the unit count shrank
✅ What a trusted security advisor does differently from an integrator chasing projects
✅ Why you cannot automate the ambiguity out of a central station seat
✅ Jack's closing advice on contracts, and why you cannot cede ground on the customer relationship
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
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