SIA Member Profile: Bold Group

ISC West booth

Security Industry Association (SIA) member Bold Group is a leader in alarm industry solutions, providing a comprehensive array of alarm monitoring and integrated financial management solutions tailored to achieve optimal business performance. The company is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with offices in Chagrin Falls, Ohio; Canton, Michigan; Plano, Texas; Irvine, California; and Mequon, Wisconsin, and serves customers on every continent.

SIA spoke with Alison Forsythe, president of Bold Group, about the company, the security industry and working with SIA.

Tell us the story of your company.

Alison Forsythe
Alison Forsythe

AF: Bold Group has been serving the security and alarm industry for more than 40 years. The company as it is today was established in March 2019 with the operational merger of Perennial Software, Bold Technologies, SIMS and Secure Global Solutions. These four companies came together under Bold Group, which is part of the EverCommerce suite of software companies.

Each of these businesses had built significant expertise in serving distinct segments of the security and alarm monitoring market. EverCommerce saw the opportunity to bring these companies together that were complementary in their customer focus and enabled a portfolio of offerings for everyone in the market from small to large.

What solutions/services does your business offer in the security industry? And what makes your offerings/company unique?

AF: The Bold Group product portfolio includes alarm monitoring systems Manitou, stages and SIMS. These leading alarm monitoring systems are complemented by our accounting and business management systems, including SedonaOffice and AlarmBiller.

What makes Bold Group and our offerings unique is our extensive experience and knowledge. There’s not much we haven’t seen when it comes to both legacy and new technologies – our experience allows us to work with both. Central stations are often working with older technology, and our team is able to address the problems that can occur between older technology and newer systems. Because of our team’s long and extensive experience, we can implement solutions that meet a wide range of needs.

What is something we might not know about your company – or something new you are doing in security?

Bold building

AF: 2020 was was a year of change for Bold Group. In addition to having to quickly address our own internal impacts due to COVID-19 and work to meet the changing needs of our customers, we also refined our vision and philosophy to create a culture that is laser-focused on customer needs.

One example is that we are in the process of consolidating all of our divisions onto a single customer management platform, which will give us more insight into how our customers are using our software, as well as provide an effective method to manage all divisions.

What is your company’s vision, and what are your goals for the security industry?

AF: Bold Group is continuously pursuing our vision to be the most trusted provider of mission- critical security industry software that gives our customers the ability to deliver superior experiences for their customers across the board – ranging from precise alarm response to friendly and easy billing interactions.

The combination of the four companies that created Bold Group – backed by EverCommerce – has strengthened everything we’ve done in the past. We are security market experts who are driven to innovate solutions needed by the industry. Bold Group now has the ability to scale by building stronger teams, developing existing team members and continuing to attract premium talent.

What do you think are the biggest opportunities in the security industry right now?

AF: The proliferation of smartphones and Internet of Things devices means we are creating enormous amounts of data. With the technology available today, we are able to monitor almost anything. Any action that creates an event can be monitored, and from that we can collect data, create alerts and track responses; this will be important as we continue to navigate COVID-19.

There are also significant opportunities in remote video and surveillance, especially in health care, education and the consumer markets. For the consumer market, combining artificial intelligence with video monitoring to analyze motion and determine threats can help deter crime by creating alerts at the scene to warn intruders to stop the event. In education, with additional needs to monitor for COVID-19 and contract tracing, there may be significant growth.

Finally, the shift to remote working is likely to continue, even when the dangers of the pandemic have ended. There are opportunities for security companies to help identify ways to keep organizations secure with a hybrid mix of remote and on-site workers.

What are your predictions for the security industry in the short and long term?

AF: We anticipate that 2021 will look a lot like 2020. There are significant economic issues that we will continue to need to manage – growth may be slow, revenues may be lower and we may see a lot of attrition among the dealer market. It’s likely we’ll see company closures, as well as partnerships and mergers. We may see some monitoring companies expand by partnering to monitor for larger companies, and others will decide to stop monitoring altogether.

In the long term, scalability is going to be key in keeping things secure in an ever-expanding world of surface attacks. There will be new ways of doing security and new ways to use technology to scale up and scale down depending on the needs at any one point in time, and this will drive new products.

NYSESA Booth

What are the biggest challenges facing your company and/or others in the security industry?

AF: There are several challenges facing our industry. First, with the entrance of large companies like Amazon and Google into our market, we will have to figure out how to work with them in order to stay relevant. Our industry has not always been fast to adopt new ways of doing things, and we need to learn to adapt and innovate more quickly.

New standards and regulations will need to be developed to address remote workforces, and these have been historically slow to change. There is a need to evaluate, advise and regulate this landscape faster than it currently is. Finally, with regard to dispatch, law enforcement has changed the way they respond to calls from our industry. Because of the high rate of false alarms, law enforcement has put response as a low priority, which creates opportunity for security response companies to expand their services, and we are already starting to see this shift.

What do you enjoy most about being at your company – and in the security industry?

AF: Being involved in pushing the boundaries of technology to maximize safety in a respected industry is motivating. The people in our company are also truly amazing – we’ve created a family. So many employees have worked in this industry for a long period of time and bring to our organization a great deal of knowledge, insight and experience.

What does SIA offer that is most important to you/your company? And what do you most hope to get out of your membership with SIA?

AF: We value SIA as a partner in the industry for knowledge and research as well as a way to connect with leaders and customers. We hope that through a variety of opportunities that SIA provides that we are able learn valuable insights and connect with new customers and grow Bold Group.

How does your organization engage with SIA? what are your plans for involvement in the next year?

AF: We are currently exploring all of SIA’s sponsored opportunities and events for 2021 and plan to incorporate several options into our employee education and marketing plans.

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association.