'20 under 40' Class of 2018—Brandon T. Niles

Brandon T. Niles, 34

Director of operations, Acadian Monitoring Services

Lafayette, La.

Brandon Niles, now the director of operations for Acadian Monitoring Services, started at the company as legal counsel, joining the business directly out of law school.

“I was so intrigued by what we were doing on the monitoring side that I spent a lot of time in the central station, and I kept asking a lot of questions. So, over the first one to two years, I got promoted to where I was a manager and doing legal work. Then, I just kept being really interested in everything that was going on with it—especially on the video monitoring side—that I eventually stopped doing most of the legal work and started focusing solely on the operational aspect of the business,” Niles said.

Acadian Monitoring is part of Acadian Total Security, Niles noted. “I work with a number of different teams from our division. I make sure that the goals and the strategies that we create during our strategic planning session the year before … are getting met,” he said. “I mine a lot of different pieces of data, to make sure that our standards for customer service and customer satisfaction are all being met. So, that's on the monitoring and the security side of our business.”

Niles said that he's really intrigued by the quickly evolving nature of security, highlighting the changes of the DIY market in the past two to three years as an example. “I love the fact that it's not a stagnant industry,” Niles said. “It's constantly evolving and constantly improving.”

Niles is also interested in new analytics that utilize artificial intelligence. “The ability to make fast decisions and see what's going on is just improving constantly,” he said.