The Year I Stopped Guessing and Started Mathing

I remember the call like it was yesterday. A dealer principal I'd known for years—let's call him Dave—was sitting on $2.4M in annual recurring revenue from his home security and alarm company, roughly $200K in RMR. He wanted to hit $3.6M ARR. His question to me, dripping with frustration: "Kory, how many reps do I need to hire?"

He'd been guessing. Hiring a few warm bodies here, a couple there. Watching some flame out. Wondering why his revenue wasn't moving the needle. I told him what I'm about to tell you: you don't guess at headcount—you back into it from the gap between where your revenue is and where you want it.

The Setup: Every Alarm Company Owner's Blind Spot

Here's the math that changed Dave's business. His monitoring contracts held at 88% retention. That meant his existing base carried itself to about $2.1M before a single new install. So his net-new revenue gap? Roughly $1.5M of RMR-driven revenue he needed to close.

A fully ramped in-home rep sells about $300K of annualized new contract value a year at realistic attainment. That's not the quota on paper—that's what they actually close after learning the in-home pitch, the equipment lineup, the financing options, and how to close at the kitchen table.

Do the division: $1.5M ÷ $300K = 5 rep-years of capacity.

But here's where most owners screw up. They stop there. "I need five reps." Wrong. Dead wrong.

The Turn: Ramp, Attrition, and the Hidden Math

A new rep is not productive while they learn. Ramp-up time eats into their first year. And in-home and door-to-door alarm sales carry some of the highest turnover in any industry. Lose 20% of a 10-rep team and you backfill 2 just to stand still.

So Dave's five rep-years became 8 to 10 reps—started early enough to ramp before peak install season. That's the difference between a plan that works and a plan that leaves you short.

The formula that saved him: reps to hire = (net-new revenue you need / productive capacity per ramped rep) + backfills for attrition, adjusted for ramp time. Work it in order: start with current recurring monthly revenue and goal, subtract the growth your existing base produces on its own through monitoring contracts that renew, and what is left is the net-new number your in-home sales reps must sell.

The Payoff: From Guesswork to Defensible Plan

Dave hired 9 reps. Started them staggered so they'd hit peak productivity by spring. His revenue crossed $3.6M ARR in 14 months—not because he hired more bodies, but because he hired the right number at the right time.

Sidebar: The Ten Tools That Solve This

Sales-capacity planning for a home security and alarm company is a math problem dressed up as a hiring problem. Your reps sell in the home—they walk the property, design the system, present financing, and close a multi-year monitoring agreement that becomes recurring monthly revenue.

Here are the tools that turn your revenue gap, ramp, and attrition into a headcount number:

1. PULSE Recruiting Calculator 🏆 *Best Overall* — Free, browser-only, built for this exact math. You type in current revenue and goal revenue, current retention and goal retention, productive capacity per rep, ramp-up time and training length, current headcount and attrition. It outputs reps-to-hire with start dates. No login, no spreadsheet, headcount plan in seconds. Use it free now →

1. Salesforce — From about $25 per user per month (Starter) to $165-plus (Enterprise). Holds the actuals (attainment, ramp, attrition, RMR sold) the calculation needs. Best for dealers that want the plan living next to the pipeline.

1. QuotaPath — Free tier, paid from around $15 per user per month. Tracks what reps actually produce against quota, grounding your per-rep capacity figure in reality.

1. ServiceTitan — Premium, sold by quote. Models sales performance, membership and recurring revenue at a scale spreadsheets cannot hold. Best for multi-branch dealers.

1. HubSpot — From about $20 per seat per month. Supplies the actuals the capacity model needs for mid-market security companies.

The model is the same whether you sell DIY-plus-monitoring or fully installed systems: revenue gap divided by productive capacity, plus backfills, adjusted for ramp.

One more thing that Dave learned the hard way: Protecting RMR is the single biggest lever an alarm company has. Raising goal retention shrinks the net-new your reps must carry. Retention and hiring are the same equation.

So next time someone asks me "How many reps do I need?", I don't give them a number. I hand them the calculator and say, "Show me your gap, your ramp, and your attrition. Then we'll talk."

*The PULSE Recruiting Calculator runs this whole model—current and goal revenue, current and goal retention, ramp time, training length, attrition, and current headcount in; reps-to-hire and start dates out. Built by a 25-year revenue operator for exactly this question. Because you shouldn't guess at the number that determines your entire year.*

*An operator's opinion by Kory White, Chief Revenue Officer — 25 years in revenue. More at PULSE · CRO Syndicate*