Integrators '20 under 40' 2017—Jay Stone

Jay Stone, 39

VP, Advanced Consumer Electronics

Advance, N.C.

Jay Stone first got started in the industry by luck, he said. “I met Systems Depot owner Wade Moose while I was in college, and he said he liked my work ethic and offered me a role in a manager-in-training program starting out in the warehouse at Systems Depot in Atlanta, right out of college,” he explained. “I got to meet an industry icon, and didn't even know it, and ended up working there for the first 11 years of my career.”

In his current role as VP of a small integration company near Winston-Salem that has been around for 35 years, he helps run the business with owner Jay Faircloth.

“Most of my time is spent in sales and operations, and we have about 4,000 businesses and homes that we monitor in the area,” he said. “We do a lot of new construction on both residential and commercial and we focus primarily on security, fire, video, access control and audio-visual. So we really are a one-stop show for anything security or low voltage in both residential and commercial. We are also a licensed locksmith company.”

One of the biggest trends he is seeing, Stone said, is the Internet of Things. “We are an Alarm.com dealer, and we are installing many more Internet devices and bringing it all together through that platform. So it is very exciting how many different products and devices in a home or business that you can tie together on one platform.”

He continued, “There are tons of benefits that you can now offer. Security itself is extremely important, but now there are all of these bells and whistles you can use to add benefits to an already important system.”