AlarmForce goes to Minnesota
By Martha Entwistle
Updated Mon February 1, 2010
TORONTO, Ontario—AlarmForce, a super-regional security company based here, announced Jan. 20 that it will open an office in a fourth U.S. state, Minnesota.
The office will be in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region and will have 12 employees to start, said AlarmForce president Joel Matlin.
“We think there's a great market there for our technology. We're going to do here what we've done in our other U.S. markets: build our brand and build market share,” Matlin said. “We cherry pick our areas and Minneapolis-St. Paul was near the top of the list.”
AlarmForce opened its first U.S. office in North Carolina in 2005. It opened an office in Ohio in January 2006 and an office in Georgia in 2007. The company now services seven major regions within those three states.
AlarmForce manufactures and installs its own two-way voice home alarm systems. Some additional features “are coming down the pike in the next six months” for those systems, Matlin said.
The company, which relies on organic growth, rather than acquisitions, had more than 103,000 accounts in Canada and the U.S. as of Oct. 30. That is up from 56,700 accounts four years ago. The market growth has been strongest in the United States. “Canada is a tough country to do business in. It's got a population the same as the state of the California, but it's spread out over a country that's much larger than the U.S.,” Matlin said. In addition to dense population centers that are easier to penetrate, “the perception of crime is stronger in the U.S. than it is in Canada.”
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