Not Home Alone
May 25, 2010
Michael Hagan pumped up the ad budget to boost sales when he ran Horsham-based diet-food distributor NutriSystem Inc. He’s trying a similar push in the wireless home-alarm business.
Hagan says he’s raised $10 million with investor Mike Bolton‘s Novitas fund and David Berkman‘s Associated Group since taking over in December as chief executive at LifeShield Security, which he’s moved to Yardley from Berwyn.
He plans a NutriSystem-style multimedia ad campaign, using spokesmen like ex-NFL quarterback Dan Marino, who signed up to pitch Hagan’s diet food after they met golfing near their South Carolina vacation homes.
Hagan’s predecessor, engineer Lou Stilp, founded LifeShield in 2004 as InGrid Home Security. Stilp hoped to sell alarms through Verizon or Comcast. “Didn’t work,” he told me. He runs LifeShield’s Wayne operations center.
LifeShield claims wireless is cheaper and more effective than wire-based alarm systems like those installed by industry leader ADT, an arm of Tyco International, the conglomerate run by Hagan’s Yardley neighbor, Ed Breen.
“You don’t need to pay $1,000 so a crew can drill holes in your walls to run wires around your house,” Hagan says. “You need systems you can read from your iPhone or your laptop computer,” to warn of fires or intruders, and “cameras to check on your daughter when she comes home from school, or make sure your son isn’t opening the liquor cabinet.”
LifeShield calls itself the all-wireless pioneer. But Tyco spokeswoman Ann Lindstrom says her company has marketed its “ADT Safewatch QuickConnect digital system” since 2007 at competitive prices. ADT does its own alarm monitoring; LifeShield contracts with Guardian Protection Services, Pittsburgh.
Hagan claims 5,000 U.S. customers; “we’re planning for 10,000″ by year’s end as the ads start running.
