Elle Daley: from dispatcher to VP

WILLIAMSTOWN, N.J.—She's now vice president of branch operations, but Elle Daley started out at COPS Monitoring in 1990 as a dispatcher working the midnight shift.

The late hours were actually her preference. The reason? She was a mother.

“I was getting home right as [my youngest daughter] was getting on the bus,” Daley said. “The job was convenient, and about six minutes from home. I had to have something that worked for both my personal life and my professional [life].”

Before her job at COPS, Daley worked in the telecom business in Delaware County in Pennsylvania, about 50 minutes from her home in New Jersey. “I didn't want to be on the other side of the bridge in the event that an emergency at school happened or something in that vein,” she said. “I wanted to be closer.”

The new job at COPS' central station was a good fit. Daley's ability to apply her background in telecom and technical repair to the alarm industry allowed for a clean transition. Since then, she has ascended through the central station ranks, assuming positions of increasing responsibility.

The rise has had its challenges, Daley said, but none related to gender. In her job at COPS, Daley noted, it's sometimes easy to forget that a gender imbalance exists industry-wide at all. “Half my site managers are male and half are female,” she said. “I actually find it to be a little bit more female, believe it or not.”'

Daley believes that the notion of the security industry being male-dominated is gradually diminishing. That's being accelerated with the proliferation of women in leadership roles, which Daley says is a development that's here to stay.

It's also one that enhances the industry as a whole, she said.

“I do think it's better,” she said with respect to greater gender diversity in the industry. “[Women] have a different perspective. It's not always black and white, and we look at problems a little differently. I think that's part of why females are taking some leading roles in the industry.”