AvantGuard Monitoring to open third central station

OGDEN, Utah—AvantGuard, a wholesale alarm monitoring provider based here, has started the process of opening a third central station location in Cedar City, Utah. Within the next two years, it will become a complete part of AvantGuard's redundancy infrastructure, further cementing the company's level of reliability while allowing it to scale with the rapid growth of its subscriber base.

AvantGuard will follow the same plan of attack it used when opening its Rexburg, Idaho location. Using a temporary office space, the management team will evaluate the workforce pool and slowly build a team, simultaneously establishing a permanent office location and implementing new system redundancies.

"We are going to test the waters before jumping in with both feet," AvantGuard President, Justin Bailey said in the announcement. "Working in small college towns provides its own challenges, but we love working with the local universities and the students who are looking for part-time work."

In addition to primarily hiring college students to fill operator positions, the Utah workforce has a high portion of bilingual people. In fact, about 30 percent of AvantGuard operators speak at least two languages, helping serve a diverse customer base.

"We love operating in small college towns and that had a big influence on why we chose Cedar City to be the new home of an AvantGuard central station," said Bailey. "Our operator positions are primarily held by college students working through their degrees, and this new location positions us to enforce the hiring model that has proven to be very effective thus far."

Currently, AvantGuard's two locations are each capable of handling the entire signal load, if one loses functionality. The addition of a third location positions AvantGuard to continue offering that ability.

During a video interview with Security Systems News at ISC West, Bailey said, “We continue to experience phenomenal growth and we are excited to be able to provide another layer of redundancy for our customers and give us another location to continue to grow our business. This will give us the capacity to handle the growth that we are see in the industry, and that is why we are growing because the industry continues to grow and need professional monitoring services.”

He continued, “And we continue to look for the latest and greatest technologies as well, the things we can bring that will provide the experience that all of our dealers and customers expect, that we are always there and interacting with them in new ways.”

Another reason the AvantGuard management team selected the location is its relative immunity to natural disasters. Coastal cities, especially in the Southeast United States, have a high chance of being hit by hurricanes, flooding and other disasters. Utah, however, has never encountered any of these issues.

The AvantGuard team has begun preparations for the new central station and expect to have filled new positions before the end of Q3, 2019.