Question:
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Ken,
The last time I bothered to count, we hold 37 different licenses between three states, many counties and municipalities, including but not limited to business, electrical, home improvement, general contractor, fire and security licenses.
Many if not all of these are required to be displayed on contracts, proposals, business cards, vehicles, yard signs etc. You get the picture – if we fully complied there would be no room left for our logo or your contract language! What is your opinion on having a fine print item stating “license information available at www.alarmengineering.com”?
Many thanks for all of your info and guidance,
Ron Boltz
President/CEO
Alarm Engineering
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Answer:
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That's a lot of licenses. Anybody out there with more?
Whether you are required to display your license on your contract, business cards, stationary, proposals, print ads, truck displays, in your office, is not a matter of opinion or convenience, but a statutory mandate that you have to comply with or face a fine, suspension or revocation of your license. So check the licensing statute for the license display requirement.
But you don't need to display all 37 licenses at once. I certainly hope you don't use the same contract for all of the 37 different licensed services you provide [as well as the services you provide that do not require a license].
If you are selling a fire alarm system then you need to display your fire alarm, or alarm license. If you're doing home improvement then it's your home improvement license. The licenses and the contracts you use for each license are not necessarily compatible or interchangeable.
If I held a law license [which I do] and a medical license [which I don't], I would not be practicing medicine displaying my law license or bar registration on my prescription pad or physician practice paperwork.
With your competing and even overlapping licenses you need to figure out which ones need to be displayed, where and how, and when one license may supersede the others for display purposes.
Small print at the bottom of your contract or paperwork may not suffice either. If there is a statutory requirement to post your license on your paperwork that statute will usually tell you where and how it has to be posted.
Improvise at your own risk.
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license - CCTV in CA
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Hi Ken,
Thanks for your continued discussions on alarm company issues. In your response regarding CCTV on May 12 you mentioned that the "alarm licensing" requirements usually covers CCTV as well. In the state of California that is not correct. The ACO license allows you to install intrusion systems only. a C7 or low voltage license is required to install CCTV. We run into this quite often and unfortunately much of the installation work from these unlicensed installers is very sub standard.
Thanks again for all of your efforts.
All the best,
Paul Udell
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Stats from FBI URC
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Hi Ken,
John from NJ quotes a statistic from the FBI UCR. I have been unable to find the 300% statistic he mentions. Could you put me in touch with him so I can verify what year report and where in the report this information came from?
Thanks,
Tony Barlow, Pres/CEO
North Coast Signal Inc.
*********** John please provide the info requested
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What's wrong with this business model? Free systems
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I see you guys all talk about how you lose a lot to FREE alarms etc etc, but none of you even mentioned any PERMITS.
When I went to check or convert large national companies nobody took a permit, nobody.
I'm sure a lots of companies don't pull permits, it's a fact we all know and many of you don;t pull them either, let's not kid ourselves, but definitely all the dealers for big companies aren't pulling permits either!!!! So if you see a new sign go in and it's one of the bigger companies which massively sell alarms for free, why don;t you call local inspector and tell them they do work without permit??? I think it would stop a lot of those FREE alarm deals in its tracks because there will be extra steps to take and this will take out even more out of the profit of FREE so.... THIS COULD BE A TIPPING POINT and GAME CHANGER
What do you think?
HS
********* I think the large companies probably do get the permits they need. These companies didn't get to the top and successful by shoddy work and disobeying the law.