SAFE Security raises another $25m, expands dealer program

SAN RAMON, Calif.—SAFE Security, a 22-year-old, full-service alarm company based here, has moved forward with a new infusion of equity and a flexible dealer program that SAFE president and CEO Paul Sargenti says is multi-featured and may be the best in the business.

One of the new features is what Sargenti says is a one-of-a-kind renewal bonus. “Our program offers a lot of flexibility. There's a two-times RMR bonus multiple available to a dealer if a customer renews their contract. They don't have to do a thing. We think that's pretty unique,” Sargenti said. “There's a number of dealer programs out there, but we offer something that is difficult if not impossible for others to offer. We can combine both bulk and dealer program periodic production. By way of example, if a guy's got a thousand accounts and he wants to do a bulk sale, he can do that and sign up for our dealer program and sell 15 accounts a month. He has the flexibility to make his business more agile with us.”

SAFE raised $25 million last year and has kept the momentum going. “In 2009 we recapitalized the company with new equity partners and a new lender, Bank of America, and the equity partners were Rustic/Canyon Fontis Partners … We were off and running,” Sargenti said. “We had a very nice credit facility of $25 million from B-of-A, and we were more successful than anticipated in deploying that capital and lo-and-behold just around the time of March of this year we were back in the marketplace looking to syndicate the senior debt facility.” Sargenti said a new equity partner, St. Cloud Capital, and additional funding from CapitalSource has brought more equity and senior debt to the tune of an additional $25 million in funding.

“We're very well positioned from a capital standpoint in what is still a very difficult capital market,” Sargenti said. “We were able to raise additional equity and additional senior debt. And that's what's going to continue to fund our bulk acquisition program. And we're ramping up our existing dealer program with a lot of new features that we think will be interesting to the marketplace.”

SAFE Security is part of the SAFE Companies umbrella, which also includes central station Security Monitoring Technologies and California Security Alarms, also a full-service alarm company, purchased in 2009. Security Monitoring Technologies is a UL-listed, CSAA Five Diamond certified facility.

“We've got a number of dealers growing their business in a healthy way with us,” Sargenti said. “We offer dealers funding reliability and program stability in the financing of their RMR production.”