Freeus more than doubles customers in post-acquisition year

OGDEN, Utah—Since Freeus' acquisition of Securus' PERS assets in early March 2015, the company has doubled its customer base and now has more than 100 dealers.

“In the last year, Freeus has grown from a subscriber base of 30,000 active users to over 75,000 active users,” Brock Winzeler, GM at Freeus, told Security Systems News.

Winzeler said that the company's unique Orion platform and competitive pricing led to this growth. “Some partners that are activating large quantities of [PERS] units on a daily or weekly basis have chosen to integrate with our API to achieve improved efficiency so that they can focus on growing their business,” he said.

Freeus in March announced its first new product, which the company calls “Belle.” What sets Belle apart from other mPERS offerings? “It is a 3G AT&T device, it's waterproof, it has a battery life that lasts over 30 days,” Winzeler said.

Winzeler said the company's been busy preparing for ISC West, setting up a lot of demos and hoping to meet dealers. “We don't compete with our dealers by selling to end users, so we rely solely on our dealer network to place Freeus products in the hands of users.”

Nicole Swartwout, an SSN “20 under 40” Class of 2015 award winner, recently announced the launch of a new mPERS company, CallSafe, dealing Freeus products. “She's one of our up-and-coming dealers that we're excited about,” Winzeler said.

It has been a busy year for Freeus. Following the acquisition, Freeus moved the operations from North Carolina to Utah. “We built a brand new facility in Ogden that houses both our engineering and sales and operations teams. Our new facility is ideal for testing and bringing new products to market and it is built to accommodate our growth going forward,” he said.

“We learned the processes that Securus had in place, some of them that we brought with us to Freeus, others that we've changed completely to better meet our model,” Winzeler said. Securus sold through dealers as well as direct-to-consumer, whereas Freeus only sells through its dealers.

Freeus brought on some of Securus' employees, including Mark McGrann who became the company's national sales manager. Since the acquisition, Freeus has added about a half-dozen employees, according to Winzeler.

Is the company looking into other acquisitions? “Not at this time. We are very focused on the release of some products within the next quarter or two,” said Winzeler.