N.C. provider ready to get growing

GREENSBORO, N.C.—Superior Quality Security, a provider of residential and small business systems, is looking to grow through home automation offerings, acquisitions and new partnerships with homebuilders.

“It's a slow process,” president and co-owner Mark Reid said of his company's entry into the world of smart homes. “You start [resi customers] slowly with just a burglar system, and they see the value of remote arming and disarming. Then it's on to home automation.”

Reid says he has seen that once customers get comfortable with the remote app “they embrace it—'Let me add lights or a thermostat.' They want to build on it.”

“We're really looking at that for down the road,” he told Security Systems News.

Superior Quality Security does business within a 60- to 70-mile radius of its base here, said Reid, whose wife, Monica Reid, is a company co-owner and its vice president. “There's plenty of work within that territory,” Reid said.

The family-owned firm, recently named an authorized Honeywell dealer, has two full-time employees and additional part-time workers. For its first nine years it only “dabbled” in the residential side, putting its focus instead on small business accounts, access control and surveillance, Reid said. Over the past year and a half, though, it has made a push to gain residential accounts and those now number in the 250 to 350 range, he said. At $25 per account, its resi RMR is between $6,250 and $8,750.

Superior Quality also is in the market to acquire. “We truly want to grow through acquisitions, too, but it's hard to find anybody right now,” Reid said. The smaller companies that survived the recession most likely want to “stick around,” he said.

He's looking for companies about the size of his.

“We did find one [in North Carolina] last year that had a little over 500 accounts, but I don't think they took us seriously enough. It was a little out of our range, but it wasn't out of the question, and we did make a bid,” he said.

The housing market is picking up in his area, and Reid said he sees that as another growth opportunity. He has relationships with a couple of custom builders for two to three homes a year, but the next step is to find builders on a larger scale to partner with, he said.