Five Questions: Gary Franklyn

Gary Franklyn was recently promoted to the newly created position of senior vice president of dealer sales at SAFE Security, a national security company headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. Franklyn is responsible for all facets of dealer management including dealer sales and marketing and dealer recruitment and retention. He is based out of Scottsdale, Ariz., working in SAFE's branch Safeguard Security.

Are you married? Kids?

I am married and our 14^th anniversary is coming up. I have a daughter and a son from a previous marriage, and my wife has a son who is now my stepson. My daughter recently graduated from Vanderbilt and is heading to medical school, and my son just recently graduated law school at the University of Tennessee.

Where are you from originally and what brought you to Scottsdale, Ariz.?

I am originally from Florida, but my security industry career has taken me to Nashville and Dallas, back to Florida and then to Scottsdale, where I have been for two years. My wife's family is from Scottsdale, so I told her that if I were ever fortunate enough to be in a position to sell the company (I was part of the executive ownership team at Security Networks), I would move here to be closer to her family. So things worked out, and here we are.

What do like to do in your spare time? Hobbies?

What I have been doing is helping to manage a thoroughbred horse racing partnership called Top Hat Thoroughbreds. We've got about 24 horses currently in training and a lot of security industry folks are invested in the horses. It is a fractional ownership model, and every single one of our horses has had a positive return on investment for the partners.

Read any good books recently?

Right now I am reading Goldeneye: Where Bond was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica, which looks at Fleming's time in Jamaica when he first started to put together the James Bond stories, which is very interesting.

Any pets?

I have a Dachshund and Labrador-German Sheppard mix—both lovely and smart female dogs. We do a posting on Wednesday on the Top Hat Thoroughbreds page—we call it wiener-dog Wednesday—of cute videos of wiener dogs racing.