The 107-Year-Old Startup, Doyle Security: Coffee Break With Jake

Most companies do not make it to 107 years old. The ones that do can easily become museums, carefully protecting the traditions, structures and business lines that once made them successful. Doyle Security Systems is doing something different. The fifth-generation, family-owned company is proud of its history but it is not trapped by it. Over the years, Doyle has exited major business lines, doubled down on recurring revenue, built an acquisition engine, invested in its own monitoring operation and created formal rules for family succession. It has survived because it has been willing to keep changing. That was the theme that kept surfacing during my recent Coffee Break with Jake conversation with Jack Doyle, president and CEO of Doyle Security Systems. Fresh off the acquisition of Sentry Alarms in Binghamton, N.Y., Doyle now serves roughly 60,000 customers across New York and Pennsylvania, generates about $2.3 million in recurring monthly revenue and employs approximately 250 people. Those numbers are impressive. The more important story, however, is how the company got there. Doyle has learned to think like a 107-year-old startup: preserve the values, question the assumptions and never confuse longevity with entitlement. Succession Is a Process, Not an Announcement Family-business transitions often fail long before the new leader gets the title. The problems usually start with assumptions. One generation assumes the next will take over. The next generation assumes there will be a role waiting. Employees assume the change will be seamless. Then, one day, the switch gets flipped and everyone discovers they were working from a different plan. Doyle took the opposite approach. Jack’s transition into the CEO role was built around a deliberate, multi-year process involving financial advisors, a family-business coach and a broader executive succession plan. His father, John Doyle Jr., did not simply step away. He became executive chairman, allowing authority and responsibility to shift over time while the organization adjusted. The family also created a written constitution that governs the relationship between the Doyle family and the business. It includes rules of engagement, expectations for family members who want to join the company and requirements that the next generation first build experience outside the organization. Jack followed that path. He worked as a central station operator while in high school and college, but after graduating he left Rochester and sold copy machines in Syracuse. He later held sales roles in Washington, D.C., and started a corporate housing company that he eventually sold. That outside experience mattered. It forced him to learn how to sell without relying on the Doyle name. It helped him build confidence that his identity and ability were not dependent on the family business. When he returned, he brought new skills in sales, marketing, web development and entrepreneurship, then applied them by running a focused growth initiative in Buffalo. Today, Jack works alongside three siblings, Alexandra, Eric and Chloe. The family holds annual retreats, uses outside advisors and deliberately addresses shareholder agreements, conflict resolution and rules for future generations. That level of structure may sound excessive until you consider the alternative. Doyle’s own history includes a third-generation family disagreement that split the company in two. The current generation is not pretending family conflict cannot happen. It is building systems to keep conflict from controlling the business. Prune the Business to Make Room for Growth One of the hardest things for a long-established company to do is stop doing something it has always done. History creates emotional attachment. Customers may expect the service. Employees may identify with it. Leaders can mistake tradition for strategy. Doyle has repeatedly shown a willingness to prune the business so stronger opportunities can grow. The biggest example was the company’s exit from traditional guarding. At its peak, Doyle’s guard operation employed approximately 3,200 people in Rochester and Buffalo. The business carried thin margins, concentrated customer risk and enormous human resources and compliance demands. Doyle sold it and reinvested in the alarm business, reducing the organization from thousands of employees to roughly 80 at the time. That was not a small adjustment. It was a fundamental redefinition of the company. It also proved to be the right one. Doyle later made a similar decision with locksmithing. The service had historical value and complemented access control, but it consumed a disproportionate amount of management attention relative to its financial contribution. The warning sign was familiar: leaders found themselves defending it with phrases such as, “We have always done it” and “Our customers expect it.” The lesson is not that guarding or locksmithing are bad businesses. The lesson is that every company must decide where it can create differentiated value and where its time, capital and leadership attention are better deployed. Strategy is not only deciding where to play. It is deciding where not to play. Buy Relationships, Then Help Them Grow Acquisitions have become an important part of Doyle’s growth but Jack’s most interesting acquisition insight was not about purchase multiples or deal structure. It was about what happened to an acquired customer base after the transaction. Several years ago, Doyle acquired Commercial Instruments & Alarm Systems, better known as CIA Security, in New York’s Hudson Valley. The acquisition added employees, a central station, engineering capabilities and sophisticated institutional customers, including hospital networks, municipalities and other enterprise accounts. Later, Jack compared the performance of several acquired customer bases. Most behaved as expected: account count declined over time through normal attrition. The CIA customer base was different. Even as the number of customers contracted, the recurring revenue associated with those relationships grew. That is an unusual result, and it reveals what strong integration can accomplish. Doyle retained people who already had deep relationships with the acquired customers. Those employees maintained continuity, earned additional trust and expanded the company’s share of each account. A municipality that initially used Doyle for 30% or 40% of its security needs could gradually move more locations, systems and services to the company. Jack summarized the lesson plainly: you cannot buy your way into valuable organic relationships. You can acquire the opportunity, but people still have to earn the growth. That distinction matters in today’s acquisition-heavy market. Customer accounts are not inventory. They are relationships held together by technicians, salespeople, operators and managers who understand the customer’s history. Buyers that focus only on the revenue stream risk destroying the very asset they paid to acquire. The Trusted Advisor Advantage Doyle’s growth philosophy is closely tied to its position as a trusted security advisor, not simply an installer that wins projects. A trusted advisor does not begin with the product that is easiest to sell or the manufacturer that offers the best incentive. The advisor begins with the customer’s problem. That requires knowledgeable employees, enough flexibility to recommend the right solution and a willingness to avoid overselling today at the expense of credibility tomorrow. Jack believes the most profitable customer relationships are the ones that stand the test of time. Those relationships cannot be produced instantly by hiring a talented salesperson and handing over a territory. They develop through continuity. Employees learn the customer’s environment, earn confidence through repeated decisions and become increasingly valuable as the systems and risks become more complex. Doyle supports that model by allowing experienced employees to develop their own styles and informed opinions. The company has preferred manufacturers and guidelines, but it does not force every customer into the same narrow solution. When an unfamiliar product is clearly the best fit, the team has room to pursue it. That approach may be harder to standardize, but it reinforces the idea that professional judgment is part of the product. In a market where hardware can become commoditized, expertise and trust are much more difficult to copy. Why the Central Station Matters Again For years, many integrators made a rational decision to outsource monitoring. Wholesale monitoring offered scale and efficiency, while traditional alarm dispatch increasingly felt commoditized. Doyle kept its own UL-listed monitoring center. Jack readily acknowledges that an in-house central station can be financially demanding, but he also believes the technology cycle may be making it strategically valuable again. Video monitoring and remote guarding require tighter coordination between system design, installation, analytics, operator procedures and customer expectations. When the integrator and monitoring center are part of the same organization, each side can communicate directly and continuously. The monitoring team can help shape how systems are deployed. The field team can understand how operators actually handle events. Both sides share responsibility for reducing nuisance activity and improving the response. The people inside the monitoring center remain essential. Jack spent four years as an operator himself, and that experience shapes his view of artificial intelligence. Automation can improve triage, analytics and workflow, but it cannot remove all ambiguity from an emergency response environment. Operators still confront imperfect signals, complex instructions and situations that do not fit neatly into a decision tree. Technology can identify a person loitering, detect missing personal protective equipment or help count inventory. Human judgment is still required to understand context, follow a customer’s unique procedures and make the right decision when the event is unclear. The quality of the operators and their training ultimately influences the value the customer receives. Culture Has to Show Up in the Budget As Doyle has expanded organically and through acquisition, the company has promoted the idea of one Doyle team. Jack is quick to point out that culture cannot survive as a slogan. It needs specific actions, assigned responsibility and a budget. Doyle has two employees with employee engagement in their titles. Their job is to foster belonging and help a geographically distributed company feel smaller. The company also measures engagement through annual surveys and Great Place to Work feedback, then communicates the results and the actions leadership plans to take. One of Doyle’s most distinctive initiatives is a nonprofit employee hardship fund. The company originally funded an internal program that offered grants to employees facing financial hardship. It later established a formal 501(c)(3) governed by a board of non-leadership Doyle employees. Those employees oversee the funds and make decisions about how to help colleagues in need. The program is a powerful example of both empathy and trust. Leadership supplied the resources, but employees were empowered to steward them. That makes culture tangible. It also shows that a company can become larger without becoming impersonal, but only when leaders are intentional about the systems that keep people connected. Protect the Relationship Near the end of our conversation, I asked Jack what advice he would offer independent alarm companies trying to build for the next generation rather than a short-term exit. His first answer was practical: protect the business with strong, current customer contracts. Weak or outdated agreements reduce value, create liability and can limit a company’s ability to borrow against its recurring revenue. Owners who postpone the uncomfortable work of updating contracts may sacrifice a meaningful portion of the value they spent decades building. His second answer was even more important: protect the customer relationship. Independent integrators should think carefully about partnering with companies that want to control the end customer, reduce the dealer to a source of labor or weaken the dealer’s long-term position. Short-term incentives can be attractive, but the relationship with the customer is what makes an alarm company valuable. Once that relationship is surrendered, it can be difficult to recover. That idea connects nearly every part of the Doyle story. The family constitution protects the relationship between the family and the business. Deliberate succession protects the relationship between leadership and employees. Disciplined acquisitions protect the relationship between acquired customers and the people who serve them. The monitoring center protects the connection between installation and response. Investments in culture protect the relationship between the company and its team. A business that lasts 107 years is not built by resisting change. It is built by knowing what must never be surrendered while remaining willing to change almost everything else. Doyle Security’s story is remarkable because of its age but its longevity is not the real lesson. The real lesson is the discipline required to keep earning the future. Jake Voll is president of the SS&Si Dealer Network and host of Coffee Break with Jake. The post The 107-Year-Old Startup, Doyle Security: Coffee Break With Jake appeared first on Security Sales & Integration.