When Milton Pierce first founded his own security company in 1930 — at the age of 15 after recognizing the need of his parents’ friends to protect their small family-owned business in Detroit — it’s unlikely he had any idea of what the world would look like more than 90 years later. AI, video cameras, computers and the data-driven world we live in today was not even a concept back then. As is often the case these days, when Milton’s descendent Douglas Pierce passed away in 2016, the family made the difficult decision to get out of the fast-changing security industry and sell to a private equity firm.

This began a four-year transition period for Guardian Alarm that saw an interim management team start to move the company in a new direction, and culminated in the PE firm ultimately transitioning to a completely different management team that has taken the company miles away from where it started — yet managed to retain the brand reputation, loyalty and the majority of its employees in the process.

The new team is headed by Brent Uhl, president and CEO, who was hired in 2020.

At a Glance

Guardian Alarm, Southfield, Mich.

Ownership: Private Equity
Websites: guardianalarm.com
Employees: 404
2024 Revenue: $85 million (estimated)
2024 RMR: $5.5 (estimated)
Customers: 73,000 (estimated)
2024 SDM 100 Rank: 14

“They recruited me,” Uhl recalls. Coming from CPI Security (SDM’s 2019 Dealer of the Year), Uhl was excited to bring his industry knowledge and lessons learned from there and his previous experience at Brinks Security to a brand new opportunity.

“Frankly, I had always wanted to be in a position where I could lead a company and a team and fortunately got the opportunity here at Guardian Alarm,” he says. Within a year, Uhl had put together a leadership team comprised of a combination of existing managers and a few others he had known in his previous roles.

One of those is Keith Patterson, chief operating officer, who had previously worked with Uhl at Brinks and had kept in touch through their various roles after that.

“Brent called me and said, ‘I accepted the CEO position at Guardian Alarm in Michigan, do you want to come work with me?’” Patterson recalls, although he initially hesitated, unsure about starting someplace new and moving from Texas to Michigan near the end of his career. “He said, ‘Come on, we’ll have fun,’ and I haven’t regretted it for a minute. I’m happy to go to work every day. These are great people. The company is almost 100 years old and we have employees that have retired after 40 or 50 years.”

Another Brinks alumnus, Jay Autrey, chief customer officer, joined next, after a period of initially working for the company as a consultant. “I have been with other companies that put an emphasis on the employee experience and I have seen how it is successful over the ones who don’t. What stuck out with Guardian is they practiced what they preached. A great customer experience begins with a great employee experience and I joined after seeing that first-hand.”

That approach, which the company calls “One Team” culture, was a deliberate choice made by Uhl and his team, including the only member of the leadership team who had been there when the family still ran it, Jennifer James, vice president of people and culture.

“James joined Guardian in 2009 after the recession eliminated her country club membership director position, and she found her calling in human resources. She has seen the company through the sale, the interim transition period and the past four years of the new leadership.

“My favorite time at Guardian has been these last four years,” she says. “We brought in Brent in late 2020 during the height of the pandemic. He came with a wealth of industry experience that the prior (interim) team didn’t have. It allowed us to get back to our roots.”

One of the things James most appreciates about the new leadership is their strong focus on workplace culture. The other is the implementation of an amazing array of different metric programs to measure the success of anything and everything they are doing. The combination of these two things, she says, “has led to year-over-year growth, high engagement and historically low attrition.”

John Penders, vice president, IT and security, is another leader who was there when Uhl’s team arrived. “I came in almost a year after the Pierce’s sold to private equity,” he says. “I realized from the first day that this new leadership would be data-focused going forward and there was tremendous work on the IT side to provide that data with new platforms and data gathering mechanisms.”

The results are worth the effort, with organic revenue growth of 7 percent and EBITDA growth in 2024; a 13 percent reduction in service costs due to a remote virtual tech offering; a low employee vacancy rate of 5 percent, along with a retention rate 10 percent higher than last year; and an attrition rate that is 36 percent lower than the industry average. But these are just the tip of the iceberg of the metrics Guardian Alarm relies on daily to inform everything from employee satisfaction, to customer engagement, to marketing and more.

These metrics — and more importantly what the company does with them — are a large part of why Guardian Alarm was named SDM’s 2024 Dealer of the Year. Read on to learn more about what makes this company deserving of this award.

‘One Team’ Culture

Of all the places he has worked, Uhl says Guardian feels the most like a “family business” to him. “There are just over 400 employees and many with a lot of tenure. It is just a great environment. Being around since 1930 you develop a lot of deep roots in the community.”

But that didn’t mean there was little work to be done once the new team was in place. In fact, it was the opposite. While the family-run business had done a lot of things right to get to the level of success and customer loyalty they had, internally, the company was more siloed than Uhl and the team wanted to see going forward.

“I felt when I got here that, culturally, we had a big opportunity,” Uhl says. “We had the foundation and we could do a lot with culture.”

So Uhl and the leadership team set out to list, and ultimately quantify, that culture, so that everyone would be on the same page.

Step one was developing a set of core operating principles the team calls the “Core 8.” As James explains, these are: Hire to Aspire; Connect; Evolve and Adapt; Customer Experience; Integrity; One Team; Own it; and Have Fun.

“We wanted to create some unifying operating principles,” she recalls. “I had put together a draft of all of them and some research on what I thought Guardian could be and we refined them from there.”

These core principles are not just lip service. They are incorporated into meetings, performance reviews, and even printed on the walls in the hallways of the company headquarters.

“I give Jennifer a lot of credit,” Uhl says. “She has done a great job weaving our core values into almost everything we do as a company and promoting that. The executive team put that together and really acted on it.”

Now, from hiring to training to ongoing employee satisfaction, the company uses these core values to strengthen and build on that culture. But beyond that, they measure it, in several key ways.

Before hiring, Guardian uses a predictive tool to help guide managers on the best questions to ask candidates and to make sure they are put in the best role for both them and the company.

“Predictive Index is a behavior assessment tool,” James explains. “What it helps us do with candidates or internal transfers and promotions is to put them in the right role here at Guardian.”

When Guardian first rolled out the Predictive Index, every person in the company took it in order to create “personality buckets,” she says. “Mine is collaborator, which is good when you are in HR. It gives you a score of how easy it is to fit into the role you are in.” This is what the company means by “hire to aspire” in the Core 8 principles, she adds. “We are hiring them for their unique abilities and sense of self. Predictive Index helps us ensure they won’t have to work counter-productively to who they are as a person.”

This was one of the tools Autrey appreciated when he joined in 2022, particularly in his role at the call center. “I was fortunate that Guardian had good programs in place like Predictive Index to find the right candidates for our organization,” he says. “It speaks to Guardian making meaningful investments in their employees.”

The One Team approach carries over into onboarding as well. “We transitioned to an electronic hiring process to make the paperwork experience better for new hires, and built out a whole day to meet with the HR team and walk them through what it means to be a Guardian employee. It is a really collaborative day.”

James says it is a far cry from her own onboarding experience. “I sat in a room and watched videos by myself. Now we have ice breakers, and we made it a class instead of just one individual so they have a group of peers they are coming in with.”

Training, particularly for technicians, is largely accomplished through apprentice-type programs. “We realized that in order to get skilled technicians we had to build a program from within,” James says. “So we built an apprentice program. We are going to bring them in at the start of their career, or from a different industry, and teach them by shadowing other technicians and learning our industry. Within that first year that is their apprenticeship year and we have made sure they know they have a career pathway. They know they will start as an apprentice and either go into residential or commercial installation after that year.” Beyond that, they understand the growth path and eventual salary that is possible for them to achieve.

This approach helped stop the loss of skilled labor Guardian — like many other companies — was experiencing. “That has helped us recruit others because they tell their friends and family,” James explains.

Guardian also partnered with PayScale to more accurately measure compensation, James says. “In 2017 there were a lot of ‘gut’ feelings, but that is not valid data. The PayScale partnership pulls in 500,000 datapoints to help us understand where our compensation needs to be to make sure we are at or above the market. It was a quick win for us that I am now confident everyone at Guardian is paid exactly where they are supposed to be and they have room to grow.”

This also helped with attracting technical talent, she adds.

“We wanted to know what people really thought about working at Guardian. We look at their feedback as a gift. It helps us understand very quickly where we can make changes and make the environment and culture even better.”

“Most of our techs come through word of mouth. We have a strong culture and have the compensation right so they don’t want to leave you once they are skilled up. We can show them from day one that we will invest all if this in them to get them trained.”

Another key metric Guardian implemented was Culture Amp, an employee engagement and satisfaction survey platform.

“We wanted to know what people really thought about working at Guardian,” James says. “We look at their feedback as a gift. It helps us understand very quickly where we can make changes and make the environment and culture even better.”

James recalls that in the past the company would sometimes use surveys but didn’t do much with the data, leading employees to feel their concerns were unheard. She and the new management team wanted to change that dynamic.

Guardian is now in its third year doing the survey each May, and has gone from 80 percent to an impressive 93 percent participation rate, with no financial or other incentives.

“The best slide in every quarterly board meeting deck is our team engagement scores,” Uhl says. “The thing I am proudest of is we are in the top 2 percent nationally for having engaged employees using Culture Amp. Normally you hear about employee surveys getting about a 50 percent participation rate. Ours is over 90 percent. That was a big part of helping us to get the culture right and making sure they knew their voices would be heard. We want to be the best version of ourselves.”

From the first year, Guardian took the results very seriously, Uhl explains. “The overwhelming opportunity for us at that time was the employees wanted to see us take action based on their feedback.” Using the scores for each manager and department the company came up with specifically tailored action plans and goals.

“That first year managers and department leaders were nervous about what they would hear, but now they look forward to the feedback,” Uhl describes. “Everyone wants to know how they are doing.”

What’s more, the increased engagement, in conjunction with the PayScale and careful placement and onboarding, has really helped with employee retention.

“We are going to be less than 30 percent turnover this year, which is fantastic in a call center,” Autrey says. “When I started we were in the 60 percent range. We have made meaningful improvements in the last two years and that is the thing that is really important. If you are constantly churning through people, you are never going to build the foundation to do what you want to do.”

James agrees. “The fact that we will end this year under 30 percent is phenomenal. We have teams that haven’t changed in two years. It really shows all these cultural practices we have put in place and the environment we have created are really working.”

Matthew Mowat, vice president of marketing, is the newest member of the leadership team, joining about a year ago. He credits the One Team approach with the positive atmosphere at Guardian.

“It really is that One Team aspect that stands out for me compared to other experiences in the past,” he says. “We do operate as one team. When we see a challenge or opportunity, we bind together to go solve that challenge or capitalize on that opportunity.”

Darren Brown, chief financial officer, adds, “I wish I would have found this many years before I did, but at least I found it now. Our values are reality here. I can’t believe the contrast in culture from where I spent much of my working life to coming to a place where we are all on the same page.”

Customer Attraction & Retention

The same measured approach Guardian applied to its own employees and culture is also present in the company’s philosophy on customer engagement and retention.

“Any organization I have been a part of, when we measure something, we have been able to improve it,” Uhl says. “We have a Net Promoter Score for every single employee. Our customers rate them. That really drives both caring and accountability.”

Guardian also uses a predictive software for customers to help with retention efforts and drive attrition down, starting with residential customers.

“Over the past five years we have driven attrition down 300 basis points,” Uhl says. Currently averaging 7.2 combined residential and commercial, Guardian’s attrition rate has dramatically improved, he adds.

Guardian Alarm Management Team:

Brent Uhl, President, CEO

Keith Patterson, Chief Operating Officer

Jay Autrey, Chief Customer Officer

Darren Brown, Chief Financial Officer

John Penders, Vice President of IT & Security

Jennifer James, Vice President of People & Culture

Matthew Mowat, Vice President of Marketing

“It’s really about defining the customer journey, understanding the key touchpoints in the lifecycle of a customer, whether that is residential or commercial,” Autrey says.

Launched less than two years ago, this AI-based software helps identify at-risk customers and routes them to the best-qualified agent. The AI model scores customers, ensuring that when they call in, they are matched with a highly skilled agent equipped to address their needs.

“It is looking at the customer’s profile; what they are paying per month, their equipment, and where they are in their contract life cycle,” Autrey says. “It looks at their behavior. Have they called customer care multiple times? It looks at sentiment. If they did interact, were they upset and talking about problems? It takes these listening points and puts them through a model to predict.”

Each customer is assigned a risk score, with the top 25 percent automatically flagged. When these customers call, they are routed to a specialized team, and the agent is notified of which offers align with that customer’s risk profile.

Autrey notes it has been very successful so far. “Once you make that intervention those customers perform like a new customer, with a super low attrition rate.”

Thus far the predictive analysis has primarily been used for residential and small commercial customers, but the team has plans to expand it to enterprise level customers in the coming year.

“This is a platform I had used at a previous company,” Autrey explains. “It has only historically been done with residential and single-site customers, but we have developed a model for large enterprise customers that I am fairly confident is the first of its kind in the large commercial space.”

Any organization I have been a part of, when we measure something, we have been able to improve it.

Keeping existing customers is one part of the equation, but adding new customers or reaching those that may not call in is another key part of the effort. That is where the marketing team comes in, Mowat says. And as with everything, there is a metric for that, too.

“We have visibility across every market and campaign from click to close,” Mowat says. “Metrics are the pulse of the program. That was my first focus when I came in. Now we can see across all five of our markets, which campaigns and channels are driving opportunities and react in near real time to the metrics coming in.”

It also allows them to be more nimble. “For us, where we are as a company, to be able to grow and scale and compete we have to do it a bit smarter,” he adds. “Those metrics give us the opportunity to react and adapt.”

To date, after launching the platform and rolling out some new campaigns (see sidebar, “Safety, It’s Personal”), the company has seen traffic increase four or five times over 2023, Mowat says.

The upshot of both retention and customer acquisition efforts has been a 6 percent growth in the company’s residential segment and 7 percent in commercial. Upfront installation revenue has also increased by 16 percent.

The company also recently launched a Virtual Tech program that has allowed staff the ability to Facetime with customers, which has helped with both engagement and service issues, with 78 percent of calls able to be handled over the phone without rolling a truck, Uhl says.

And finally, Guardian completes the customer process with what they call a closed loop feedback, which is something Autrey is particularly proud of.

At the end of an installation or service call there is an expectation that the system will work as expected and that the customer has been educated and helped. The customer is then sent a survey. “When a customer does click that survey and give you a less than positive feedback we have it automatically route to the correct manager and they have an expected time frame to reach out to the customer and close that out,” Autrey says.

Just as with their employees, the goal is to make sure the customer understands they are listening to their concerns and attempting to make it right.

Moving Forward

With the right management team now in place — and employee and customer retention, engagement and metrics working as they wanted — the next change Guardian leadership decided to make was to look for a new headquarters location that would better reflect who they are today.

“We were in an older facility that the family had owned since the 1960s and it was not well laid out for an open environment feel,” Uhl says. “It had become run down over the years and really wasn’t the environment we wanted to create as part of the culture here.”

Guardian leadership sought out a new location that was not too far from the old so no employees would need to move. They also looked for one they could customize to exactly what they wanted, from the open and airy common workspaces with live plants, to the lunch room to the call center.

“We designed this thing,” Uhl says. “It was an empty shell so we got to build it out the way we wanted. It is open and bright with areas for team members to collaborate. There is a nice café for the employees including overnight teams to get food any time they want.”

‘Safety. It’s Personal’: Strengthening Customer Connections

Marketing is a critical piece of customer acquisition and retention, and something that Guardian has put a big focus on in the past year, building out a marketing intelligence platform to track campaigns across all digital channels.

This platform was launched in unison with a new multi-channel marketing campaign called, “Safety. It’s Personal.”

Matthew Mowat says, “We had the opportunity to go out and test and learn across all our audiences. At the beginning of the program we started with a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Since then, the marketing team has fine-tuned different marketing programs for different audiences, he says. The other piece of the program involves branding.

“A lot of companies in our space and even outside of our industry tend to focus on products and devices,” Mowat says. “Our brand is much, much more than that. When you think about our brand there are the intangibles of our people and the services we deliver. So in this marketing campaign we are much more about playing to that emotional aspect in terms of the relationship we have with our customers.”

This idea came out of internal research. Mowat explains:

“It happened organically. Last year we were bouncing around different ideas for different campaign concepts. We knew our team here had potentially a lot of great stories to tell so we had some of our employees come in and have an open conversation about what makes Guardian Alarm special. And what came out of their mouths was incredible. They told stories about their relationship with customers, about customers inviting them to holiday dinners, some of the successes they had in terms of protecting our customers. It was amazing. That is where we came up with the idea that security is very personal. If you are going to trust a company, then trust us, because we have those types of relationships. That is where it came from.”

The results have been a three-fold increase in volume of first-time visitors to Guardian’s website as well as a 35 percent increase in inbound call volume since the beginning of 2024. Mowat is thrilled with the response.

“I love this company. This is my home. It really helps from a marketing perspective when you have a great foundation to build from. It makes it easier to do what I do. I love where the brand is at from a marketing standpoint,” he says. “It is a treasure chest in terms of being able to unlock it further, position in the marketplace, grow and scale not only what we have today but also any future potential acquisitions. I can foresee a very long career here.”

In the previous facility, James says she would often apologize to employees and visitors and promise to move some day. “The walls were painted a dark gray and it was dungeon-like.”

The new facility is a physical representation of moving from a siloed culture to the One Team, she adds. While Guardian did and still does allow some employees to work in a hybrid environment, “Employees started to want to come back into the office more because it is such a nice place,” she says. “We began doing tours and showing customers what we do. We said, ‘Come see our monitoring center.’ We are very proud of it.”

They also used Culture Amp results in the design phase, James adds. “One of the things we heard was employees wanted more hands-on training with our product suite and to understand what the products are in the field because it helps them service the customers better,” she says.

A product wall and training room was part of the design in the new facility. “It shows every single product we sell the most,” she explains. “Everyone uses that room. Behind the wall are the panels that technicians or support people can go to and hands-on play around with the equipment and get the look, feel or troubleshoot about what customers are talking about.”

It’s also used in training and onboarding classes.

The move has also been a “home run” from a recruiting and retention standpoint, Uhl reports. Since the move in 2023, “Our employee attrition is at the lowest level Jennifer can find on record. And we are 95 percent staffed to our plan,” he says.

Guardian also expanded geographically, acquiring companies both in their core Detroit-area and, since 2021, in Columbus, Ohio, with the most recent acquisition this past September.

Uhl doesn’t rule out more acquisitions in the future, as long as they are the right fit. “We are looking at another one outside of our current footprint,” he says. The ideal acquisitions, he adds, have been in business over 20 years and are greater than 50 percent commercial. It also helps if they are well established in their markets with a good brand reputation. “We want to find those organizations where the combination of their branches plus ours makes a better than ‘A+B = C’ equation.”

Brown says new acquisitions may not be in their existing markets, or even the Midwest. “We are starting to look at companies outside of our regional footprint. If we do that it would definitely be a well-run, reasonably sized company with the ability to sustain itself because it would be somewhat remote. … I think it will be opportunity-based, but looking at the whole set of criteria we might be more likely to do something closer than farther. But that isn’t the overriding factor. Whether it is 1,000 or 3,000 miles away it is going to be self-sustaining where it is.”

One thing Uhl and his team aren’t concerned about in acquisitions is attrition. “Most of the companies will have higher attrition than ours, but we feel like we have the model of how to really drive lower attrition metrics and will be able to improve that,” he says.

In the end, everything Guardian has achieved in recent years comes back to those metrics, Uhl says. “A lot of companies measure customer satisfaction, and we do that too; but I think in general we are a very data-driven environment that helps us make good decisions.”

What’s more, those decisions can be changed, based on other metrics.

“When we make decisions based on these metrics we are not always going to be right,” says James. “We are not perfect. We will also use metrics to track whatever change we are making and if we find out it isn’t working, we are good at pivoting and evolving.”

James notes it is unlikely the company’s founder would recognize the company today, but she is confident Milton would be proud of what it has become. “That is a positive thing, because we are willing to adapt and grow,” she says. “We are happy. We have fun. And this is what I always hoped and knew Guardian could be.”