Eagle adds dealers for growth

SAN ANTONIO - Flush with a new corporate backing of its home security operations, Eagle Broadband Security’s Home Division has rolled out a new dealer program that company officials expect will rapidly ramp up the new division’s growth. Part of Eagle Broadband, a bundled digital services provider, Eagle Broadband Security is the company’s newly minted division that bundles all security operations, including sales, installation and monitoring into a single operation. Through this new entity, President Ronnie Evans said, the company will work toward bringing on quality dealers with quality accounts. At press time, the company had seven dealers signed onto the program, located in Houston, where Eagle’s central station is located and San Antonio, where the security subsidiary is based. And with a recently announced $10 million funding agreement between Eagle Broadband and Aggregate Networks, a provider of broadband infrastructure financing, the dealer program has got the legs its needs to stand on to reach its goals of having 15 to 20 dealers on board by the end of 2003. “There has been so much consolidation, multiples are coming down,” Evans said. “The time was right for us to make our move.” That move toward increasing the company’s account base through the rollout of the dealer program falls squarely in line with Eagle’s corporate emphasis on growing the company’s recurring revenue base, said Chief Technology Officer Dean Cubley. The company plans to attract new dealers with a combination  of different flexible  options and credit requirements that are “not that high,” Evans said, although the company does require accounts to be set up with automation check handling. “We don’t want a company with a history of bringing on bad accounts, we want good, clean operations,” Evans said. “We’ll grow with the quality of accounts that we are bringing on - small dealers who will bring us 50 to 75 accounts per month, but if we can manage to bring on 1,000 accounts a month, then we will bring on 1,000 accounts per month.” While the company is currently monitoring about 6,100 accounts in its Houston facility, capacity in that location is about 20,000 accounts. Evans said the company has the option of expanding at its current location or investigating a new central station. The company also announced in July that it had appointed Dave Weisman as Eagle’s new chief executive officer and member of the company’s board of directors.