My story

One truck, 23 years, and what it actually cost

The short version is on the home page. This is the whole thing, the good and the bad, in my own words.

Written by Thad Paschall.

Before the truck

I came up in door-to-door sales. That’s not a line on a résumé. That’s knocking on a stranger’s door at six in the evening and asking for their business. You learn fast whether you can take being told no. I could, so I kept going, and eventually I was a regional manager at an alarm company.

Then that company went under. Everybody scattered. And I had a decision to make: go find another job, or go do it myself.

1992: one truck

I started Protect America in 1992 with one truck and money that came out of my own pocket and my family’s savings. No outside investors for years. Just installs, one at a time, and a phone I answered myself.

For more than ten years we ran it the traditional way: technicians, trucks, hard-wired systems, customers signed one at a time. That decade is where I learned the business. Everything that came later stood on it.

What it grew into

Over 23 years, Protect America created more than 800,000 customer accounts and over $600 million in revenue. We sold accounts in bulk along the way, sometimes tens of thousands at a time, because that was the business, and at our peak we had about 150,000 active customers. We were in the top 15 of the SDM 100, the industry’s ranking of the largest security companies, for more than a decade, and one of the ten largest residential subscriber bases in the country.

We were nationwide, not one state. At our biggest we had close to a thousand employees. And at one point we were spending a million dollars a month on Google ads to find customers, so I’ve been buying attention for a long time, and I’ve watched what it costs when the rules change underneath you.

The part nobody puts on a website

I financed that company every way there is. Banks, mezzanine funds, private equity, and a $150 million facility from a hedge fund that was, honest to God, the best money I ever got, because it came with control the banks would never allow. That facility is what let us build the self-install model the rest of the industry followed. For the record: I helped create do-it-yourself home security, and I’ll tell you today it’s not the way to go. A real company installing a real system beats a box in the mail.

Our credit lines came up for renewal around Christmas every year, so I never had a good Christmas. One year the senior lender who’d promised to be there wouldn’t extend the line, and we were out of cash. I went to our monitoring partner and asked for ten million dollars on top of the fifty million we already had. They came back and did the whole thing, a hundred-million-dollar facility. That’s the difference between a partner and a vendor, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Then 2008 happened. The housing market went down, our lender’s own investors pulled their money out, and the loan got called. I had to replace $150 million in a market where nobody was lending, and the money I found came from the kind of people who smile at you on the way in and stab you in the back on the way out. I kept the company alive. I lost most of my equity in the thing I built. So I know exactly what it feels like to be the small guy across the table from people with more lawyers than you, and that’s why I’ll never touch anybody’s customer list.

2015: out

My last day was January 2015. Twenty-three years, and then I sold it and I was done. I’m not an operator anymore, and I’m not going to be. I say that plainly because owners in my old industry have every right to wonder whether the guy calling them is really after their accounts. I’m not. I don’t compete with anyone I talk to.

Why I came back to work

I was retired for a few years. Then AI got good. Not the hype version, the version that actually answers a phone at nine at night and books the job. The first time I used it seriously, my honest reaction was: this would have made my life so much easier when I was running trucks. I’d have paid real money for it.

And here’s what’s actually changed for a small business. When I was buying customers, it was Google. Everybody typed a search and picked off a list. Now a whole lot of people just ask ChatGPT who the best one near them is, and take the answer. If your business isn’t in that answer, you’re invisible, and the worst part is nothing tells you. No report shows up in your mailbox. You just get fewer calls and never find out why.

So that’s what I build now. Websites Google and ChatGPT can actually read and recommend. Something that answers the phone when you’re up on a ladder. Booking, and reviews starting with customer number one. The stuff I wish somebody had handed me on day one, mostly for the people who are where I was in 1992, with one truck and a lot of nerve.

Because here’s the thing I didn’t understand in 1992, and it took me years to learn: the work was never the hard part. Getting found was. Your first customers can’t hire you if they don’t know you exist.

What I will and will not promise you

I’ve been sold to by every kind of agency there is, and I never once believed the guarantee. What I will do is answer you as somebody who has done every part of running a company, startup to exit, and learned all the hard lessons along the way. I’ll tell you what’s working, what’s hype, and what I’d do if it were my money, because for 23 years it was my money.