We are delighted to introduce Blake Galvin as our new Product Manager for alarm monitoring. While Blake may be stepping into a new role, he’s not new to Bold Group or our customers. In his 12-year career at Bold, he’s worked closely with customers as part of our sales, support and implementation teams. His technical expertise and extensive knowledge of our products, industry, and customers’ needs will be invaluable in this key role. Please join us in congratulating Blake, and keep reading to learn a bit more about him.
Give us an overview of your career at Bold Group.
I joined Bold Group in 2013 as an implementation technician. Starting in a role where I installed and configured Manitou on the back-end gave me an opportunity to learn our alarm monitoring software inside out. From there I moved to support, first as a Level 3 technician and then as a support manager. I loved being on the technical side and learned that was my strength, working with the MediaGateway and the more technical pieces of the software. Then I moved to our sales team as a sales representative, where I worked closely with customers on reinstallation projects and cloud migrations. As our sales team expanded, I had the opportunity to move into a sales engineer role, which was more technical and a better fit for me. And my experience problem-solving alongside our customers and finding tailored solutions for them was ultimately what led me to my new role as Product Manager for Alarm Monitoring.
What do you love about being part of the security industry?
I’ve always loved the life-safety aspect of the security industry. Our alarm monitoring software helps save people’s lives and protect their property, and I’m incredibly proud to be part of that. Having worked closely with customers in support and implementation, I’ve seen firsthand how critical our software is to their businesses and how it helps them fulfill their life-safety mission. At the end of that day having that sense of purpose really matters.
What I’ve learned in this industry is that it’s all about solving problems. There are always new products, new technologies being introduced, and whether it’s a video analytics or access control solution, we’re constantly looking at what will help our customers do a certain job better, what should we be integrating with our software. The industry’s push to problem-solve and innovate pushes us to evolve and expand our software, ultimately benefitting our customers.
What are you most proud of from your years at Bold Group?
One of the highlights of my career at Bold Group is working with our team to build up our cloud services. Today it’s a trusted solution, and there are millions of accounts hosted in our cloud, but when we were starting out we had to build it up into a stable solution and earn customers’ trust. I’m really proud of how we accomplished that and seeing what our cloud solution has done for customers and the hosting burden it relieved for them. With Bold Group’s infrastructure taking on that responsibility, those customers could get back to focusing on their business.
Blake with sales rep Marcos Lozano at Bold Group’s GSX customer event in Orlando, Florida.
What are you most excited about as product manager and what unique perspective do you bring?
Coming from a background where I’ve worked directly with users in implementation, support, and sales, I know just how critical an operator’s day-to-day job is and how important our alarm monitoring software is to doing that job. As we design and build out new features, I think it’s important to remain focused on usability. Every product decision should answer key questions: How will this benefit users in real life? How will this make operators’ jobs easier?
I’m also excited about how we can bring innovation to our alarm monitoring products to help customers earn new business and grow. Our software should help central stations compete in the market, and help our proprietary customers do their jobs more efficiently. That means adding usability enhancements that streamline dispatching and simplify data entry.
What’s one fun fact about you that people might not know?
One fun fact is that my wife and I recently spent three years RVing around the country while working remotely. There were too many highlights to name all of them, but some of our favorite places to visit were the DC area, Hilton Head, South Carolina, and Birmingham, Alabama. We also spent a lot of time near Gainesville, Florida to escape the cold. We love the outdoors, hiking and camping, and were lucky to get to spend a lot of time near Los Angeles visiting the beaches and Pacific coast. While we were traveling around the country, we fell in love with the Northeast and ended up settling in Upstate New York last year.