SSN interview with ADT Commercial President Dan Bresingham

DALLAS – Security Systems News (SSN) spoke with ADT Commercial President Dan Bresingham at GSX about its sale to private equity firm GTCR and what comes next for them.

This interview has been edited for length.

SSN: Can you tell us what you have going on for GSX this year, Maybe tell us a little bit about the recent big news you had.

DAN BRESINGHAM: Yeah, we've had a great run. So, we've kind of created ADT Commercial back in 2020. That was our birthday as a separate division within ADT, and that was a lot of fun. The COVID year wasn't easy, but in '21 we had a great year, and in '22 we had a fantastic year. I used the analogy we kind of won the championship. In '22 we grew by 17% organic growth. Profits are up dramatically, and this year we're going to win the championship again.

Because of some of that success, we got some incoming calls from the GTCR saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got this great asset in Commercial.  Great growth, and you’ve got the best employees in the industry’, and that I am positive of. So, we got some incoming solicitations and ADT looked at it and ultimately GTCR put in an offer that ADT said was compelling enough for them to sell ADT Commercial. We'll close hopefully sometime in Q4, probably earlier in Q4 than later. We'll announce a new name as part of that, but it won't be ADT, it won’t be ADT Commercial, it won't be Red Hawk, it won't be P1. I thought it was important that we’re kind of starting the next journey in our life, it’s important for us to tell a story about not only where we are, but more importantly where we're going.

The GTCR has been in this space a couple of times. I was with them at HSM, and Protection Line. This is my third adventure with GTCR, so they're great partners, and they're going to help us kind of continue what we're doing, but can we do it faster and better? Again, we're going to grow this year 17% to 20%. The goal is to keep that growth record. Today it's all organic, and we came here via tons of acquisitions. We’ve got a pretty good playbook of finding great companies but buying them is the easy part. Keeping them together, where 1 + 1 can add up to more than two, that's the hard part.

 Finally, I think we’ve just got a secret sauce to be able to look across the table from the other owners and say ‘Hey, you can take some money off the table. We want you to be happy and want your employees to be happy. More importantly, we want your customers to be happy.’

We're very excited. ADT was a great parent, a fantastic parent, but now we kind of get to, you know, do our own thing, and run at our own speed. So, that has me really excited, and it has the team really excited.

SSN: So, a lot of change, and a lot of growth, do you know what's ahead of you in the future, what's next?

DAN BRESINGHAM: We’ve got some cool stuff coming. We have our own interior robot, and we’ve got an exterior robot. Our DNA is always going to be the best security provider doing, I call it, traditional integration. That's going to be our bread and butter, but we have our own flavor of products and services that's unique to us that is just a value add to our customers. Again, we’ve got pilots going on for the robots with some of our best customers, I think it just differentiates who we are.

We're looking hard at video analytics. Everybody has fancy new cameras with analytics, they wear you out. So, we said can we take all that data and say, OK, can we just summarize that? Here's the five things you really want to look at. So, we're trying to figure out, OK, on this video, what do you do with it and can we spoon feed it to our customers? Fine. We'll look at it for you. But if we could create great video analytics, then we're going to look at this data and we're going to get proactive on, say, before an event happens, can we be proactive? And those are the things that we'll be pushing. But all that, I call it the hard category, because it’s never been done before. We think we're going to be successful because of the robots, we feel pretty good about that. Maybe we’ve got some drones, maybe we got some video analytics. We use video as an intrusion device, right? False alarms are a huge thing in our space, so if the cameras are smart, you should be able to tell if it's a balloon or a rat or a person. Now you’ve got real video verification. So, when it comes into the center now you get the fast track to the PD. Because the PD’s are worn out by the false alarms. Those are some of the things we’re trying to do, but again our core DNA is going to be the best professionals, who’ve been in this space forever, with a mantra for customer service doing traditional work. If we look at 20% of ‘new stuff," that would be video analytics, the robots, and the drones. That would be great.

ADT announced the sale of ADT Commercial in early August, for more information on that transaction you could read our article here on www.securitysystemsnews.com.