SAFE Security buys more Pinnacle accounts, doubles in size

SAN RAMON, Calif.—SAFE president and CEO Paul Sargenti reports that the company has more than doubled in size within the last year and recently acquired 6,000 additional accounts from Pinnacle Security.

This year, which marks SAFE's silver anniversary, Sargenti told Security Systems News, “We have exceeded all the goals that we established in our budget and model. We're about 180 percent of our goal right now, so the forecast we put together in December of last year for 2013 has become completely irrelevant, on a good note. We were anticipating someplace around a 30 percent growth rate, which was very ambitious, but we went ahead and more than doubled the size of the company.”

SAFE, based here, recently purchased 6,000 more accounts from Utah-based summer-model company Pinnacle Security. The buy marks SAFE's third recent purchase of accounts from that Utah-based company, and brings the total purchased to more than 40,000 accounts. 

SAFE announced in February that it had bought 24,000 Pinnacle accounts and also said it had purchased another 11,000 in March. Protection 1 earlier this year announced it had purchased select assets of Pinnacle and its headquarters in Orem, Utah.

“Our business has really grown as a consequence [of the Pinnacle purchases],” Sargenti told SSN.

The purchases have helped expand the SAFE Dealer Network, he said, from about 270 dealers earlier this year to just over 300 now. “We've acquired a lot of the servicing infrastructure that Pinnacle had, so I would say we're in the low 300s … servicing dealers that are in our network,” Sargenti said.

When it comes to RMR, in February of this year it was about $2.7 million. Now, Sargenti told SSN, “we're right around $3.3 [million] or $3.4 million [in RMR], so we're doing OK.”

The company plans to add another $3 million to its RMR over the next three to five years, Sargenti has said.

He founded the company 25 years ago. Sargenti said that at that time, in 1988, SAFE “was really just a specialty finance company, … even though we didn't make loans. We bought accounts.”

SAFE acquired California Security Alarms in 2009, adding a central monitoring station known as SAFE Monitoring Technologies (SMT), which has a Five Diamond rating. SAFE also launched a dealer network in 2010.

Today, SAFE is a full-service security company and has more than 70,000 customers in the United States and Canada.

Sargenti praised “ICV Partners, my equity partner” and also said, “I have a very good banking relationship with five banks led by the Bank of America.” ICV, a New York-based investment firm, acquired SAFE last year.