Hey, John. How's Thanks? Good, good. Yellow people on the call.
Yeah. So Shawn and I are primarily doing the call Katie and Jack Jack who's new is sitting in. So like, Hey, Curtis friendly, so I don't think Kurt will object if you all sit in and learn a little bit from
it. Yeah, no, no problem how I was gonna ask you How are things in white?
I was there this winter, and we've been back on the East Coast since we're all from Oahu. So you have a White House.
Well, I have some friends there and one of my top partners is actually right there near Colina. They're like our number one largest dealer. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah, lifeline fire and security Todd Bedford
on the west side of the island. Yeah. Yeah. But he
was you know, he had some people in Maui and obviously has lots of friends there and all that good stuff. So it's just devastating. What happened. Yeah,
I mean, it's crazy. It's terrible. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, congratulations on all your success. You guys are really you guys have expanded incredibly that's for sure. Yeah,
I'd say obviously, video monitoring that watch obviously, in the last five years, it's gotten way bigger so well, yeah, we definitely gonna be covering the remote video monitoring market more. So we're gonna do like a series of profiles and major players. Obviously I thought initially going to speak with you. So I was hoping you know, I was looking at a weird line that was like netwatch group, there's networks North America there's different NET watches, right? Yeah. I was hoping maybe you could start just from the beginning understand, cuz I remember there was like the NMC thing was was merged into it. There's lots of different parts. So I was hoping you could just start basically just to give an overview what are the different components of netwatch now in 2023?
Yeah, sure. So they had good play started as Riverside did a process back in late middle late 2019. Where they brought together like five different companies at that point, right. National monitoring center was one of them, you know, Woody in Dallas, is with us here. And then they bought like various other companies and the other big killer company was net watch and Ireland. And I started in January of 2001. And one of the things I needed to do was to just get the businesses organized. And so I separated them into three separate business units. And because they each have their own different strategies, and I'm sure you're all familiar, you may not be but if you're familiar with national monitoring center, which is a traditional contract monitoring company where they provide, you know, traditional intrusion, fire, medical elevator, you know, do some video verification for the independent dealers that don't have their own centers, okay. And you know, in their lane, they're very well regarded, you know, a very strong player in that market with the UL a 27, and a 27, a 27, B, all the you know, three letter acronyms that you've come up with, they all have the certifications with the center in Lake Forest, and another one in Dallas. So that's one of the companies. The other company was netwatch, Ireland and UK, which is a 20 year old business founded by a gentleman by the name of David Walsh. And now Kelly and they're the ones that really started this proactive video monitoring business that we see today here. And David is on our board. David and I are on our board, but they're like the brand in Ireland so Ireland's only about 5 million people and when you go to Ireland and you ask people do you know who net watches a lot of them really no net watch? Well, because it was a small tech company out of Carlow, which is about an hour and a half south of Dublin. You know, they only have like 24,000 people in Carlow. And so this small tech company in Ireland grew and expanded into the US. So, very well regarded Greg reputation really helped kind of define this, this remote video monitoring, live video monitoring, you know, intervention type type service in Ireland, and as they grew into the US obviously, we ended up now forming this company called netwatch, North America that was just solely focused on the North America expansion, which is, you know, as we all know, the remote remote video monitoring sector is pretty broad, and it's been around for a long time. Ever since the invention of video verification, right? So so those are that's why we have separated them because there was kind of it was getting confused. It's like well, NMC, what's NMC within netwatch How's this and you know, so we ended up trying to get it very well organized because they all plan their own separate lanes. And so, you know, we had management teams set up, I created a shared set of services across the organization where all the finance, HR marketing back, you know, all the back office functions are a set of shared services that start in Ireland. And we have some resources here in the US. So our global headquarters, what we say is here in Lake Forest, because that's where I sit. But, but really, each one of those business units operate relatively independently of each other and they they cooperate with each other really well, to help drive this monitoring initiative, whether it's contract monitoring, or its proactive video monitoring. So that's kind of the landscape of it and I sit at the group level. So I look after all three of those businesses. I report to the board that which is made up of the founders, David and I'll Bill Bozeman, I think you know, obviously he's on my board. And our chairman and operating partners are obviously from Riverside group.
Got to Riverside is still is still the owner.
Yeah, yeah. And what makes it more even more interesting. Is Provigil is also owned by Riverside. Okay, but netwatch group is owned out of the European fund, and Provigil was owned out of the US funds. So there's like this gigantic Chinese wall between us where the two can't talk. We can't really you know, share information. So it's like, literally were two portfolio companies within the Riverside group, but in completely separate worlds.
Got it. And then so NMC, for example, I think is well known for a long time is the idea that the brand continues and it's going to continue to continue is that is that the right way to think about it?
Absolutely. And and they're doing a really good job. I mean, they're growing. They're growing really well. Since 21, you know, what, he has expanded his sales team, and they're doing a really good job of bringing in some some large dealers and growing their RMR in a space that doesn't grow. That fast, as you know, right. But, but they're doing some really good things. He's just got, you know, he's really proud of himself because he got the front cover of security immigration magazine with the with his new, you know, Nexus, you know, data portal that he just launched, which is actually quite good, but, but yeah, so they're doing a good job. Of we didn't want to change any of that. We wanted to brand it a little bit differently. So like, that's why we kind of have a homogenous branding in terms of logos and things like that, but, but it's really the heart and soul of NMC starts with Woody in the team and a lot of the people there, you know at NMC have been there since the day one, you know, for 20 years.
And so if I want remote video monitoring, can I go to the netwatch North America do I go to NMC like, can I between the two just trying to understand how that how that works from a customer perspective?
Yeah, so we so within the NMC team, you have Mark Matlock, who runs sales and they're primarily out there driving contract monitoring sales however, you know, because we co locate the the netwatch monitoring within the NMC we have a partition right so when you go visit our centers in, in Lake Forest and and Dallas you'll see there's like a partition between the PVM specialists and the NMC and each one of them report to the different businesses, but there's tons of cross selling effort that goes on all the time. Because the investment thesis was, you know, having NMC and netwatch together brings a strong synergy with dealers trying to convince dealers to build a high value long term RMR stream for them in the video space. So what happens is, is when dealers approached the team saying, Hey, we're interested, or the netwatch North America sales team, looking to drive synergies with the NMC partners to adopt them as also selling prep to video monitoring. They all work together, right? So you can think of it as you know that's where we manage we manage all the dealers within this cross selling space.
Got it? Okay. I think can you give us any sense of of reps here like even just number of employees like it says LinkedIn says like 100 employees at NMC, I don't know if that's anywhere near Yeah,
we have about 400 employees across the group. And it's all divided almost equally. Third, a third a third, you know, because of the monitoring operations, obviously, there's a high headcount, high headcount, you know, percentage of that but, but yeah, each one of the businesses roughly, you know, have the same amount of headcount around 120 to 130. But we're right around that 400 mark. And, you know, the, you know, the revenue structure and everything is, is North America, the netwatch North America business is starting to finally get some scale, so they're getting close and MCs, the bigger part of it, but all three of them are almost a third of the revenue share as well.
Got it and then did you have any sense whether if it's revenue or camera count or monitored or whatnot, any any metrics that you could share?
Yeah, so you know, Riverside doesn't like me sharing numbers on revenue, but I can what I can tell you is that you know, when you How do I say this without giving too much away, but now we have on the netwatch side, okay, Ireland and that was North America. We have about over 30,000 monitors cameras today, roughly split around, you know, 1516 1000s a piece kind of gives you some scale of that. I'm trying to remember what an MCs account, last dealer account was, but I think it's over 300,000 accounts or something like that. So they're right in that same ballpark. Of say avant garde, in that in that in that space, you know, they they're kind of the larger of the boutiques, but not the cops are rapid, you know,
right. So and then. So the network just if I just say listen, I just want burglar burglar monitoring. I don't want any video that's on a netwatch customer is that correct? Yes. And
MC and MC. Yeah, yeah. But there is. So we do have synergies there. Right. So for instance, and part of what our strategy was to build a true dealer program is like, I'll give you a couple of good examples. So phrase protection out of Memphis was a long time and MC client, right? They had their own monitoring center on point, they shut it down and transition everything over to NMC when, when introduced to the netwatch practice video monitoring strategy, they got so excited about it, that they ended up opening up a separate company called archive protection. So now they have offices in in Tampa and in Denver, and so they have a whole nother business that's only selling proactive video monitoring. And they're getting this high, high volume high, you know, RMR stream, and they're going all in on that. Not to distract their phrase protection, you know, business in Memphis, but to really get focused on productivity or monitoring, and like lifeline fire and security in Honolulu right out of Hawaii, again, they were an NMC client, and then they had just gone all in on video why they wanted to build a business in there and in video monitoring, and when they met Nicola okie back in I think 2019 or 20. I mean, they were kind of they had a small practice of it. Now it's their main business and there are there are, they are one of our largest dealers along with ESI in Houston as an example.
And could you find that do you one thing I'm sure it's like the system integrator side versus the alarm dealer side know you've worked across the business. My perception and maybe I'm wrong as I'm asking you this is that it seems it seems that the alarm dealers have adopted remote video monitoring quicker than the like commercial systems integrators are you seeing differently or what do you see in terms of?
Yeah, I see. I see both. That are struggling to adopt it. Okay, so when I think of remote video monitoring, I think of a very broad like remote video monitoring is a very broad lane. So that goes from the days of video five, to video verification. And when you look at that lane, it gets very confusing because you see like live video monitoring and you see virtual guardi and you see, like all these different ways that everybody tries to market it differently. Right. And so, we specifically are trying to carve out a lane within that broader RVM space, which is the proactive side. Because if you compare us to say a Provigil or a stealth as an example, what you're gonna find is, everybody will say, Oh, well, you guys are all the same. Okay? But what you're going to really end up finding is that it's really some of them will have a pre recorded message with video verification and dispatch. Right? And the best way to look at as you just look at their YouTube videos, right, and, and, and stealth is videos, and there's nothing wrong with it. It's just the space is different. Whereas they have people alerts come in, they verify it and they dispatch okay, and you can see that just in their incident videos because they're not highlighting the the takedown portion of it. And in other cases, you'll see the pre recorded message that just goes down and you can hear that it's pre recorded, and then they've got a bank of people that are verifying it and dispatching we're we're trying to fit into a specific niche of personalized talk down where we're like, like that you Shawn, we're like, Hey, you in the blue shirt, you know, we see you leave now or else we're gonna dispatch today and we will continue to go down and and you see there's a difference response in that regard because the person really then understands there's a live person yell yell yelling at you on the other end. And we believe that that fits our lane versus just video verification. And we want to leave video verification to the contract monitoring side of the business right because they have they have MHS and they have sure view and they have these, you know, other other mechanisms to do it. And to do the live personalized intervention takedown. It's it's not as easy to do in a MHS sure view environment. And so that's where we really fit because on the netwatch side, David Walsh and them 20 years ago, they built a software platform that just helps their operators do PVM not video verification at all. That's not what they do. And so it's it's this really broad range because all the private equity and all the investors are all wanting to talk when we talk about it. They're like, Oh, yeah, you know, you're just like this and you're just like that. I'm like, what not really we're kind of trying to just fit into this lane. Because our dealers like lifeline, for instance, are selling this premium service of intervention personalized intervention. So they're able to get longer contracts. They're able to get higher RMR rates, they're able to have a much more profitable business, but it's not for everyone. And so to your point, John, I find the the intrusion alarm dealers and the integrators still struggling with the idea that they want to build a RMR structure.
Why do you why do you feel that they're struggling to build an armor structure?
So the traditional integrator you know and I talked to like my friends at JC JC is one of our one of our dealers as an example. Right? But the traditional integrator, the salesperson wants to go hunt for that next million dollar $5 million project, right? They want to go do the big, you know, Google data center or they want to go work with Amazon or they want to go do the national grid on grid utility and and put five people on site and do programs. Right. But the the leaders of those groups want those businesses to sell RMR. Right? You see it every day. There's big initiatives. RMR, RMR, but the salespeople are still they'd rather grafted that big that big, that big project that doesn't have any armor to it, but it's million dollars. So they think it's really it's it's it's good, it is good business. It's not bad business.
So Kurt, if you were if you were running if you were running those organizations, would you change the comp structure or what would you do? Basically
I realized that you can't commingle those salespeople you have some type of salesperson that is really good and understands RMR. I would build a separate division just like the companies that we've worked with have done and I would bring in salespeople who know how to sell RMR and our compensate them totally different, completely different. Because the dealers that we have that have been uber successful at it, that's exactly what they did. You have to have a dedicated practice to it. And the results are, you know, John, we have some dealers that are making 40% EBIT. done now, because of it, a traditional Integrator as you know is gonna make, you know,
eight 6% something
right. But But these these are these dealers are they're seeing the light at the end of the road and they're having like 2030 40% Even though you know, and so, now I'm getting loads of conversations with people and they're like, Well, how do I get that replicated in my business? And they end up realizing that it's really difficult to take a interoute an intrusion dealer who's selling residential or small business and use the sign, you know, camera systems and burglar alarm systems. They do that to get into this space because it's a different value proposition. It's a different sale process, because the value proposition is really trying to augment physical guards, right, because what you would normally do to secure your building on the outside is you would go hire ally Barton or Securitas whatever, put a mobile guard outside and they would go do their patrols. Well now what you're saying is no use your own technology and have somebody else do that for you at a much more effective rate. And you know, if you're gonna the average guard now costs what 40 to $50 an hour versus doing a practice video monitoring solution that's going to cost you you know, 1/10 of that, you know, and but that sales that's that sales process is very difficult to achieve because the garden guys don't really want to do it. The big integrators can't get salespeople to really do it. And, you know, the, the traditional intrusion alarm dealer, it's, it's hard for them to grasp it. And so, you know, but as the market is growing, which I think you're seeing now, it will eventually get there, it will write
about the intervention side. So, it was your core differentiator This is proactive intervention is when I ask the question where directly so we have the one place when you give the pitch, basically, you dealer comes to network, say hey, why netwatch Can you give me that sort of 32nd One minute pitch? So we have an in one sort of bite?
Yeah, you know, it's very simply this right. Our intervention method is to be instantly intervening with a live agent, but with a personalized talk down with a live person you know, versus a pre recorded message. Okay? And that's really it. Because when you have, you know, whether you put in new cameras or existing cameras, which we can work with both at the end of the day, it's that live person intervening and really calling out the scene so that person knows that there's actually a live person on the other end that's doing something. You know, we've we've seen this a lot, and that doesn't mean that this is a bad thing. But you see all of the LVT towers or the towers that you see in the parking lots at Walmart, and, and initially, those are really good, right? Because if they're not there before, and now all of a sudden, there's a presence of it. But as you walk by those all you see is the blue light flashing in a pre recorded message that's computerized, right? Eventually people just ignore it. But when there's a live person on there talking down to you identifying you you in the orange car you in the Chevy pickup truck, you in the blue shirt, a tank top that, you know, all of a sudden, it becomes real to them. And our experience is is that when they look up, they're waiting to see if that's a live person and when they realize it's a live person, then they just leave you know and then if they don't leave, then we're calling the police department and we're saying, Hey, we got this situation. We tried to get them to leave. They're not there. It's it's a real it's a real thing. We just did a pilot for a city municipality here. Unfortunately, I can't use their name, but in that pilot, and now they're going live with us. We had like 147 voice downs, and we only had to dispatch the PD seven times. So we're reduced and basically before that, those were all PD call outs. So the Chief of Police is like, at first he was like, oh, wait a minute, you're kind of trying to do my job for me. And then afterwards, he's like, Wait a minute. I only had a role seven times. Now I'm able to go do the things that I really need to do. And you're moving all the vagrants and all the drug dealers and you're moving all these people out of this public area night where I would normally have to send officers. So those are kind of the anecdotal things that that the live intervention does. Still to Provigil and IQ monitor and they're all very successful and they're great companies. But we are trying to just really fill that lane have that live personalized intervention.
Got it. And then you talk a little bit I mean, especially this live intervention is that you know, you're immediately there. I think you were mentioning, how much of that driven by video analytics, like what how do you how do you get to sort of immediately be
there? Exactly. It's all through that right. So we've been when I got here, we only had one tech stack, we could only we were only able to work with the old Honeywell Excel sheets, okay, which we all know that they're not they're not invested in anymore. So since then, we've created a hardware API and a cloud API and we are integrated into Harnois Avigilon, Eagle Eye, I met us which is a historical one and out and now that and then we just brought on Kammok, which you're seeing Kammok starting to rise to the surface for monitoring companies, and they're, they're a great partner. And then we also then created a cloud and a cloud integration with the different AI technology. So we built our own algorithm for filtering. But then we also just signed a contract yesterday with actuate. And we're going to start using actuate as well. And we and we're constantly addressing those with others. So it's a multi layer approach. If we could use the camera analytics we do then if we use the NVR or the AI box analytics we do. And then if and then we have our own filtering. And then we also have the option for the cloud filtering. So depending upon what's already there, we have to have sometimes just use what's there and then we apply the other mechanisms on the back. But all of it is is to reduce the amount of noise so we're not getting alarms for trees, and trash and wind and rain, because we're just looking for two things. People intruding or loitering. It's pretty simple, right? So you know we're doing we're doing some work for some big box retailers. And all we want to do is clean up the vagrancy issue that sits in the front of the store. So we just look for loitering. Okay, we don't care if people are walking around and coming in and coming out. We just want to see if people are bedding down and then we shoo them away. We're also looking like in the back of the house for dumpsters and behind the store. And we're there we're looking for intrusion. Right so anybody that enters into the dumpster area that's not supposed to be there, then we're yelling at them and and notifying then you know, anybody that's camping out behind the dumpster, we're shooing them out to clean up the back of the house and reducing all the dumpster fines, the drug deals the homeless people and stuff like that for staff safety. So we are using every analytic that's available to us all the way from the edge of the camera to the NVR. You know, if it's a if it's a technology that doesn't have good analytics, then we'll take like an AI box like a Kammok and we'll apply that on it and Bridget because all we need to do then is take either the RTSP stream or the second stream of that system. Let's say it's a genatech system or milestone. I don't need to integrate all of that. I could just use a bridge device that allows me to then ingest the video, pass it through, you know the AI models that we want and then deliver it to our our platform, if that makes sense.
And then so a couple questions here. You mentioned having your own algorithms. So is it still you have some own algorithm to actuate so there's different things like router for different scenarios or do you basically exact class?
Yeah, no, exactly. You know, we so we have our own that allows us to do some filtering at some level, but we're not AI experts. Okay, we built it over the last few years. It's pretty good. It's not great. You know, it's pretty good. And, and we've been and we've been exploring all the different companies from mag to actuate to Calypso to remark, I mean, everybody, we're, we're constantly exploring all of it. Because, as you know, no two AIs are the same. Right? And so, we we've tested with actuate and that has given us the results that we want. But again, it's it's a little scary because it's not perfect, right. And so, you want to be accurate 99% of the time, but, you know, sometimes it's just not and so, I think it's takes for us to reduce the amount of alarm activity in our center to have our specialists have an opportunity to succeed and keep our response times down, you know, under that, you know, 62nd 32nd timeframe. We have to always be trying something new and in different given the type of environment we're in because car dealerships are much more difficult, then a storage facility.
Right. And then can you talk a little bit about analytics over the last couple years Has that improved the economics of remote video monitoring, in terms of like reducing the amount of false alerts that your operators you know, manually look at?
Totally, totally and it's going to continue to get better, right, and it's something that you have to rely on. Because, you know, monitoring in general is a very labor intensive sport, right. And you have to use the different layers of technology to reduce the falses and increase the accuracy of what you need to be looking at. And, you know, because in the old days, you would just hire a bunch of people. Right and and luckily for us, we have a good we have really good teams in both Lake Forest, Dallas, Carlo and Newari. But you know, at the end of the day, you still need to rule out the noise because if you just have a bunch of false alarms coming in, it doesn't it doesn't work but you know, we built a platform that our operators work in, that does a really good job of of organizing and work flowing and presenting the alerts and everything so that they can manage it in a single environment. So that's why we don't use MHS or share view or any of those other platforms.
Got it? And is that do you view that as a competitive advantage that you do? Absolutely. Absolutely. Just a few sentences on that so we can just sort of
Yeah, so it's it's called Kratos. It was built over the years, you know, in Ireland, but I believe it gives us a differentiating advantage because the efficiencies of how many cameras and how many for the number of cameras we have for the number of full time employees we have that are monitoring I believe that it's it's much better than and I don't have this as fact because I don't know what the other company's head counts are. But from what I've heard, anecdotally, we're able to scale much better than any other companies that aside from those companies that are sending their signals to say the Philippines or to Bulgaria or to India, because we don't do that. You know, I think it gives us a competitive advantage and, and just based on some of the customers that we're now bringing over, you know, our response times and our quality of service seem to be the thing that makes makes the difference.
And so there was actually mentioned in terms of other countries, so all of its US base for netwatch
are US based in Ireland. And so you know, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, in to be transparent to us like we had when we first came into the business a lot of our accounts in the US were monitored in Ireland. Okay, and then we moved some over and we still have some of there. So really, it's kind of between us and Ireland. We have four centers, and that just gives us you know, better scale, better redundancy, you know, you know, in my opinion and and I think that, you know, I think there's people view Ireland is a very friendly country for doing stuff like that. But Ireland is, is really my base of operation for my international growth. So we do work in the UK, we do work in Europe. We just launched a dealer program so we just opened up you know, dealers in Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and so we're going to try to replicate what we did here in the US, internationally from Ireland.
Got it met. I know there's been some debate recently about sort of alarm monitoring at home just like netwatch have any sort of position about sort of having operators at home versus sort of their centers.
Now we don't do that.
You don't you don't monitor at home? No. Oh, at all. Elaborate, I'm just plowing or operational or
Yeah, I mean, you can because there's no UL requirements for video monitoring in that sense. Like we could have people sitting at home and doing it. I will tell you during COVID We did augment and we had we had people working from home, but now that COVID is over. We're we're only having people monitor in our centers. Just we feel like we have I mean part of the reason why people do business with us as we have this ul infrastructure we have all of this you know, redundancy, we have all the protections of a fully UL certified organization and you know, we need to use it. We just feel it works better for us, you know, others others may do it differently. And that works for them. But for us, it just works.
And you also I know you've already alluded to that you do work with various third party video surveillance systems, I think you mentioned genatech and Avigilon, hahnville and others so
certified with Harnois Avigilon Kammok EagleEye, where we have full integrations with EagleEye. I met us and Honeywell. We don't we don't do anybody else. We may develop some in the future. But we use the Kammok box as a bridge device now, for any other third party BMS that we don't currently integrate to
God so if I if I had like an exact system at my office, you would send me a cam X Box. Got it? Yeah. And that's directly with with Cam because I know DMP as a partnership with Cam as well. But that's that's separate from what you would do all directly. Yeah, we
have a direct we have a direct relationship with Kamnik and they're popping up everywhere. Like they're doing a really good job you know, getting a good technology
team I think they were trying to figure it out their their business model for a few years.
Yeah, they're still trying to figure out the international piece for distribution and all that stuff. But but if you if you guys have tested I'd love to see you guys do an analytic two
years ago. It was really good a couple years. ago, the big issue they had initially they were going after SMB, like we're trying to sell like an add on type thing, right? Yeah. Basically like so. But I think what they're doing with TMP and yourself makes a lot more sense. Because the b2b to see type thing right and they can sort of rely on you for distribution.
Yeah. But their person detection and vehicle detection and everything is really good. They, they were a little weak on loitering, but now they've made some improvements on that. But, but we've found that their analytics are really good and I'm excited to see how we how things go with actuator testing has been really good. We have a subset of accounts that we have with I met us and their analytics were not very good. So we're going to run those through actually and
this is all the records I don't I don't want you to comment on others but on the record, but we're finishing up testing Calypso so just curious if you lips up and what was your sense on that? It's just
the how I say this correctly. Okay. So it just didn't work for us. Right. And, and it was, and it's interesting, because, you know, they were bought by Motorola. Sure. And so the people running that division were all the people who used to work for me at Pelco
go and Calypso is combined with Pelco Yeah,
yeah. See, I was getting a lot of heat for that. From from there guys. And and but it just didn't. Probably the the way to off the record. I can tell you, but I think on the record, it was just it just didn't work for us, John, okay. Yeah, we looked at mag as well. Good mag, M E, G, H, they're, they're they're they're actually pretty good too. They're like actuate they were a close second for for us, and we continue to talk to them because I think they've got it. Yeah, yeah, PK is their CEO. If you haven't looked at their tech, their tech is good too. And they're looking at doing some interesting things. actuate is who we chose. Sonny Ty is their CEO. Been talking to remark as well which is a kind of a new up and comer. Oh, that
that was the guy they were the one like they were the half I remember then they do the fever camera stuff a few years ago. They're like publicly traded to I think Oh, really? Oh,
yeah. Okay. And we looked at Iron noon, we looked at Iron noon. And we looked at we looked at we looked at everybody that I could think of that made sense for what we what we were doing. Because a lot of the AI companies that were approaching us they're not really built for monitoring centers. They're built for enterprise. Sure. Good, it's been good. It's been good. And I just I'm, I'm optimistic, optimistic about the future that it'll continue the algorithms and everything will get better and better. Because the better it gets, the less alarms I get, which means the more efficient I can be, which means the more the more we can do faster.
And when we talked I think when the deal happened five or six years ago, the price they gave for dealer pricing was roughly $70. Is that the same ballpark today is that
yeah, we range we so we've we've kind of formalized our dealer program now where we have different levels, but I think it starts around 100 And you could you can work your way down to as low as 75 per camera per camera. Yeah. And the dealers, some of our some of our dealers sell it for, you know, 100 and others sell it for 300. So it's like all over the board.
Right and you but you do a bad thing because presumably certain location have 1000 events per month. Other locations have 20 events. How do you handle basically the level of sort of events that you're you're responding to but
we haven't really gotten into the event because it's just like all in price for if you wanted to, if you wanted your camera monitor 24 hours a day we would do it for that same price. You're like some so what I've seen some pricing and and I'm not the dough fact don't check the factual you probably check this yourself but some of them say okay, it's this price between these hours, you know, and then it's like you get this many alarms and then after you get this many, we're going to charge you for X dollars for it. It was it was way too complicated for us. So we're just like here, here's just one price. Whatever you need. We'll do everything at this one price and try to make it simple,
interesting, but then there's I again, this part is off the record up I'll give you some feedback. So you know ricotta they're only charging and I talked to one of the lot one of the guys you know well and he was just sort of flipping out about this because only charging $1,000 A month up to 50 cameras. But it's limit up to 1000 verifications per location per month. It's crazy. So that was an interesting mod but he was like hey, the pricing is way too low. I guess it's in line with you. You also think that pricing is way too
they don't know what they don't know yet. Right. And it was funny because I was talking to again off the record. I was talking to your About two years ago. One of my buddies Chris Carney that I worked with at ADT started about right and they were trying to get into the video monitoring space. And they were talking to new light at the time and new light was just sold to alarm.com and I remember talking to them and he was saying oh yeah, he was this week. We use a Katie and Katie and charges us 85 cents and account for video monitors. I'm like yeah, it's a Katie and
Katie is with recorded using Yeah,
I know. I'm like, what I got how do they even make How could they even make money? Like when you talk about like how many alerts come in and the amount that you have to pay a person to sit there and do something, just do anything? Right? So I don't know how that's gonna sustain itself, quite frankly and Akkadian is seems to be that that one provider that's given it away that really low price, but when you look under the hood of what it costs for the infrastructure, the manpower, the licensing, like all of it, I don't, I don't see how you make money at that. I think that's a lose that's a losing proposition, unless it's just a video verification. If it's just video verification, then you could do that in a contract monitoring environment for contract monitoring rates. At that point.
Yeah, so it'd be clear that they are claiming that video verification is not meant to monitor continuous human activity meant for off peak hours, etc. So that seems to be the the limitation that they have.
And how do you voice down with a ricotta camera by the way? Like it's
like they have audio belt that right?
Yeah, but you know, those those speakers in your outside in a parking lot? You're not going to hear that, you know, so.
Johnny, John, I
didn't hear you. Yes, you couldn't like you couldn't yell or alert or even acknowledge.
Right? It looks good on on the website and rhombus is trying to do the same thing and like they're all trying to do the same thing. But like my ring at my house, it's not very loud. It's good if you're standing in front of the door, but it's not going to I couldn't do anything beyond that. Right. So that well, I shouldn't say that. It could but our niche is going to be in that we want to be super loud, scare the crap out of everybody and scare him away so they go away. That's that's
normally tell your customers then to add in specialized speakers or loudspeaker horns or what
Yeah, so when we use IP speakers, right like access IP, we do some some just use simple some of our dealers like to use simple barracks systems, but speakers are loud right and and like you could hear it blocks away. And that's the intent is it needs to be loud and obnoxious and scare people.
Got it? And then for the future going forward is the hundreds of 1000s of cameras like what's the what's the ambitions basically, you know, going three, five years at the end of the decade, etc.
Yeah, well, you know, the way I look at it is you got stealth, who's probably the big dog right now with the most cameras and I forget how many what their camera count is, but maybe I think it's over 50,000 or something like that. Then you got I'd say Provigil in North America as the second biggest and then I'd say behind them would be us and maybe netwatch North
