PROVO, Utah--Platinum Protection, one of the summer sales model companies based here, reported selling 55,000 accounts in its second summer, 25,000 more accounts than last summer. The company plans to get bigger and sell more accounts each year, but this year it's "dialing in on quality," said Jake Nielson, head of corporate communications for Platinum.

In addition to its charitable efforts (see accompanying story this page), "our goal is to continue to improve the customer experience and we start with the sales rep; we spend a lot of time with the guys teaching them how to sell ethically," said Jared Hallows, CEO of Platinum.

Platinum became a GE dealer this year and is also partnered with alarm.com and Monitronics. Those partnerships "added new features and flexibility to our offerings." One of GE's largest dealers, Platinum in October received a "Homeland Security Award" from GE Security.

The company is developing new internal programs including a new service scheduling system "that allows us to get technicians out to a customer's house quickly using GPS coordinates," Hallows said. "We're also developing a license and permitting database to help customers get permits in a timely manner." This program, which will include data from all the cities, counties and municipalities in which Platinum does business, is expected to be in place by the summer of 2009.

"We're looking at our back-end support-breaking down the processes and figuring out what worked and what didn't and we work on improving the process," Hallows said.

Hallows said he didn't have an account volume sales goal for 2009. "What we're going to do is improve quality, have qualified sales reps who make money [and] make sure our customers are taken care of, and we have every thing in place to support them."