NCA expands

NASHVILLE, Tenn.--Jimmy Stein is taking his low-cost monitoring and alarm business to other parts of the Southeast with a new corporation called NCA USA. Stein, chief executive officer of National Certified Alarms, has been in the alarm business since 1974, and founded NCA in 1997. In June 2005, he started NCA USA with investment banker Drew Trapnell of Market Street Advisors. The new corporation is designed to "take the NCA concept to the rest of the U.S.," Stein said. NCA USA is headquartered in Nashville, in the same building as NCA. They opened a three-person office in Memphis in June. Trapnell plans to have a fully operational three-person office in Jackson, Miss., this month and a three-person office in Birmingham, Ala., next month. "Those are the only three we have on the drawing board now, but at some point, we've got to look at Atlanta, the Florida market and Charlotte, North Carolina," Stein said. Trapnell is currently serving as president of NCA USA, and is spending about half of his time working at the company, getting new offices set up and hiring managers and installers for the office. Market Street Advisors "raises capital and advises on mergers and acquisitions and then comes along and does hands-on management." This is his first venture into the security industry. "Jimmy's model makes sense to us," he said. "We do our marketing on the radio and our value proposition is simple," he said, affordable monitoring rates ($9.95 per month), with a full-service alarm company behind it. NCA USA currently has seven employees, three in Memphis and three, besides Trapnell, in Nashville. Trapnell's goal for account acquisition in the Memphis office is "ideally 30-50 per month." He reports that they're "somewhere south of that goal" right now, but "we're keeping three guys running really hard in Memphis every day."