Wayne Alarm builds out headquarters

LYNN, Mass.—Wayne Alarm Systems, a full-service company based here, is building out its headquarters, expanding its monitoring space, and growing its account base, partly through acquisition.

In the first phase of renovations, the company added on 1,200 square feet for training and conferences, having moved the conference room, which had been adjacent to the monitoring center. “Now we're able to build out the whole monitoring center without interrupting the current day-to-day activities,” Jeff Kahn, Wayne Alarm GM, told Security Systems News. The monitoring center will be completed by the end of the year, he said.

This expansion allows the company to offer new services and capabilities. “We'll be doing a lot more video monitoring and our training will be better because the way we have it set up will allow the shift supervisor to have someone sitting right next to [an operator],” Kahn said. “We're bringing hosted and managed access into our building.”

Ralph Sevinor, president and CEO of Wayne Alarm, said updating the monitoring center is “making it more comfortable and better for the operators so they can empathize, and be, better with the customer.”

Brandon Freedman, company director of marketing, said 2015 was a record year for the company, but declined to release exact figures on growth. “While we're growing organically as well, we've also made a couple acquisitions over the past year,” he said.

Three weeks ago Wayne Alarm acquired about 400 monitored accounts from Minute Man Alarm, based in Wayland, Mass. Sevinor said the acquisition also included “a significant number of non-monitored accounts.” Prior to this deal, the company acquired a few hundred accounts in Nantucket last summer, where the company has a sizable presence, according to Kahn.

The conference and training space, opened in December, has also been used by other local entities. Freedman said, “The day that we opened up the new conference room, there was a fire in Lynn. The Red Cross needed a place to operate out of, [and] we were pretty much the only company in the area that was open 24/7 so they were able to utilize Wayne Alarm System's new conference [space].”

The room is also used for Chamber of Commerce and firefighters' meetings. “It's really open to a lot of different organizations, as well, that want to utilize it,” Freedman said. Kahn said, “It fits into our every day charge and mission of ingratiating ourselves into the community, as we have been for 42 years.”

Kahn said that moving the monitoring center also gives Wayne Alarm more space for the sales and IT departments.