President post provides prime positioning plan

LACEY, Wash. - A new president at the helm of the Alarm Center Inc. is expected to give this full-service security company with a central station additional fuel to drive future growth. Doug Beaulieu was recently named president of the company, which does business under the names of Custom Security Systems, Ace Fire & Security Systems and The Call Center. The company monitors 30,000 alarms, with about 20,000 coming from its third party monitoring business. Beaulieu has been with the company for more than 20 years and most recently served as vice president of the central station. He replaces Bob Helstrom, the company’s founder. Helstrom remains chief executive officer, but is focusing his attention on ReachOne Internet, an Internet Service Provider sister company. “He’s focusing more on that business,” said Beaulieu of Helstrom stepping down as president of the Alarm Center. Beaulieu described the Alarm Center as an already well-run company, with little changes that needed to be made. Founded in 1972, the company employs 30 people in the central station and another 55 people between Ace Fire & Security and Custom Security. Another 20 employees work for the answering service company, The Call Center. While Beaulieu downplayed his new role at the company, he has made a number of major improvements. Within the past six months, the central station has added an AES radio network, a backup option to phone lines, plus implemented internet monitoring and video verification. Within the next three months, the Alarm Center plans to roll out GPS tracking as another suite of services to its customers. “We’re just exploring a lot of new technology that’s out there,” said Beaulieu. “We’re making sure it’s being implemented in our infrastructure so we can offer these to our customers.” Beaulieu credits technological advances and offering dealers programs such as group insurance rates, answering services and updates on regional false alarm ordinances for the company’s double digit growth rate each year. “There’s a lot of stuff to do,” Beaulieu said. “Our alarm dealers are very important to us.”