He Built It. He Sold It. And He’d Tell You the Hardest Part Had Nothing to Do with Money.

A conver­sation with Jeremy Bates, former President of Bates Security and current SVP of Business Devel­opment at Pye-Barker Fire & Safety.

There’s a question that lives in the back of every security company owner’s mind. You don’t say it out loud at confer­ences. You don’t put it on the agenda. But it’s there, especially on the hard days and, maybe more danger­ously, on the good ones too.

What happens when it’s time to let go?

Jeremy Bates knows the answer. He spent 30 years building Bates Security into one of the most recog­nized brands in the industry: ranked #32 on the SDM 100, a Dealer of the Year winner, five branches, 115 employees, and a reputation that traveled well beyond Lexington, Kentucky. His parents, Sonny and Pat, founded it. He and his brother Brian grew it into something they never could have predicted.

And then, in 2023, they sold it.

Selling your business is 50% emotional and 50% financial,” Jeremy told me over lunch recently, repeating something his broker had said years before the deal closed. ​“But in my case? I was heavy on the emotional side.

That’s the part of this story worth paying attention to. Not the multiples. Not the due diligence. Not the LOI. The part where you have to figure out who you are when the thing you built isn’t yours anymore. I’ve known Jeremy for years, worked alongside Bates Security as their digital partner, and watched this chapter unfold from close range. What he shared is the kind of hard-won perspective that doesn’t make it into the press releases.

This is that story.

It Was Never Supposed to Happen

Jeremy didn’t grow up thinking about exits. He grew up thinking about growth. His parents handed the company to him and Brian with a simple expec­tation: keep building, take care of the team, and eventually pass it on the same way it was passed to you.

I always figured I would just retire in that business,” he said. ​“I never thought I could sell it.

The first real conver­sation about a sale happened two years before the deal actually closed. The money was there. A credible buyer was at the table. Jeremy walked away anyway.

I could not get my mind wrapped around it. What would be my identity?

That question stops most owners cold, and not because it’s melodra­matic. It’s real. For someone who’d spent three decades building a brand that people in the industry knew and respected, the idea of selling wasn’t just a financial trans­action. It was an identity question. Bates Security was how people knew him at confer­ences, how he was intro­duced at industry events, what his parents had built their lives around.

So he didn’t force it. Instead, he paid attention. He watched other owners who had sold and kept going, people who, as he described it, had managed to have their cake and eat it too. He quietly studied what life looked like on the other side.

The real turning point came through a single conver­sation with a former competitor who had sold his own family business and emerged on the other side, not dimin­ished but expanded. That person walked Jeremy through his thinking, not the finan­cials, but the mindset. How he got there. How he sold it to himself and to his family.

He walked me through his journey. His mindset. How he ratio­nalized why it was a good thing.

It took two years, but that conver­sation planted the seed. And once it took root, things moved fast.

The Morning He Called His Brother

When Jeremy was finally ready, he didn’t call a lawyer first. He slept on it one night, knowing exactly what would happen the moment he picked up the phone.

I said to myself, as soon as I tell my brother about this conver­sation, he’s going to go off to the races.

He was right. Brian had always been more ready for this than Jeremy. The next morning, Jeremy called him, and by the end of the day, they were in conver­sa­tions with the company that would eventually become their buyer, facil­i­tated by Mark Sandler at SVB Advisors, a trusted industry advisor they’d known for years.

That’s when I knew this was real and likely to happen. As long as we could get a good valuation, we were in.

They talked to four companies. Pye-Barker Fire & Safety wasn’t just the best offer. It was the best fit. Their growth trajectory was compelling, their culture matched what Bates had built, and they offered something Jeremy didn’t fully antic­ipate: a genuine path forward for him personally.

Early in my career, I always thought it would be fun to work for a big company and climb the corporate ladder. I went the other direction: small family business in a secondary market. But here I was, at the end of my small business career, actually getting that big-company role.

He paused and smiled. ​“Just in reverse order.”

The Hardest Day

A sale like this lives in a small circle for months. Jeremy, Brian, their CFO, Kira Mingi, their attorneys, and their accountant. Everyone else came to work every day, not knowing their world was about to change.

The announcement came the day before the Pye-Barker team arrived. Jeremy and Brian pulled all five offices together virtually and simul­ta­ne­ously, then laid out what was happening. Then they walked the floor.

I went to talk to one young lady, and she was crying. She said, ​‘Jeremy, I just can’t talk today. Let’s talk tomorrow.’ And so we did.

The tears weren’t about the deal. They were about what that company had meant. People had built their careers there, trusted the Bates family, and shaped their profes­sional lives around a culture that Jeremy and Brian had spent decades creating. The reaction wasn’t resis­tance. It was grief, the kind you feel when something you love is changing.

“It kind of hurt,” Jeremy said. ​“I thought, what have I done?”

He let it sit. He didn’t over-explain or over-reassure. He knew what he’d built, and he knew what he was walking his team into. The next day, he had the conver­sation he’d promised.

That woman? She eventually relocated to a new branch and moved into an outside sales role.

“She’s prospering,” Jeremy said. ​“She would probably say it was a good thing after all.”

Two Years Later: What Actually Happened

The promises Pye-Barker made weren’t just promises. They were, as Jeremy put it, predictors.

More than ten Bates team members have been promoted into broader Pye-Barker roles outside the original Bates structure. Kira Mingi, their CFO, has been promoted three or four times. Their marketing coordi­nator joined the corporate marketing team of a company, Jeremy says is on track to go public in three to five years, at a stage in her career where that kind of platform is genuinely life-changing. Brian Bates is now leading a national sales initiative across the entire Pye-Barker organization.

“The amount of promo­tions exceeded what I was expecting,” Jeremy said.

Not every­thing was seamless. Integration never is, and Jeremy knew that better than most, having been on the acqui­sition side himself with Bates. Budget processes were different. He’s traveling more than he ever has in his life, which took some adjustment. Moving from running a 115-person company to contributing within a 9,000-person organi­zation required a recal­i­bration of how he thought about his own role.

“Every single company that gets acquired thinks they do something better,” he said with a laugh. ​“At the end of the day, you’ve got to suit up and join the company’s way of doing things and make it work.”

That realistic expec­tation, built from years of being a buyer himself, is one of the things that made the transition smoother than it might have been. He knew what integration pain looked like. He didn’t mistake it for a broken promise.

What Your Digital Presence Has to Do With All of This

Here’s the part most owners don’t connect until it’s too late.

Bates Security’s growth strategy was heavily based on acqui­si­tions. Multiple markets, multiple brands, multiple digital identities running in parallel. As their agency partner for years, Rocket Media worked alongside Jeremy and his team to do something most companies put off: consol­idate all of that into a single, scalable digital platform before they needed to. One brand. One website archi­tecture. One content system designed to grow as the company grows.

At the time, the driving reason was opera­tional efficiency, not exit planning. But when the acqui­sition conver­sa­tions started, it mattered more than Jeremy had expected.

“What we did digitally played a key role in building the culture of Bates, building the identity of Bates in our commu­nities and in the industry,” he said. ​“I think that made us a more attractive acqui­sition target. We were a known entity. People knew us.”

His advice now, as someone who evaluates acqui­sition targets for a living:

Your website is your online commercial. It’s probably your best sales­person. The companies that are most attractive to acquirers are the ones staying up to date: on their website, on their technology, on their growth. A stagnant website is a signal. A growing one is an asset.

He’s seen both sides of that from the buyer’s seat. A well-maintained, growing digital presence signals the same thing in a company that clean books do: someone is paying attention.

That’s something Jeremy spoke about directly when reflecting on the Rocket Media partnership. Unprompted, at the end of our conver­sation, he said this:

There’s our team that we work with, and then there’s our vendor partners that are an extended part of our team. You and Rocket Media have certainly been one of those. You’re a trusted part of our team. We certainly could not have done what we did without partners such as yourself.

He also admitted, with a laugh, that it almost didn’t happen:

“It took a minute for us to get there with you because, well, we can’t pay that, you’re too expensive. But you get what you pay for. We finally realized that, and there’s a lot of value in your services and your work every time.”

That’s the thing about investing in the right partners before you need to. Whether it’s your agency, your broker, or your legal team, the relation­ships you build years before a trans­action are the ones that show up when it counts.

What He’s Most Proud Of

Ask Jeremy Bates what he’s most proud of from 30 years of building Bates Security, and he doesn’t mention the SDM 100 ranking. He doesn’t mention the sale price. He doesn’t mention the acqui­si­tions or the branch count.

The team we built.

Bates Security ran on EOS. Their guiding principle wasn’t a mission statement; Jeremy called it a passion statement: Building a great company while enabling personal success.

I always loved seeing the company succeed, and I loved seeing the people succeed. You need both to make the other work.

He talked about frontline employees who grew into managers and leaders. Careers that changed. Families that were shaped by the culture that the Bates family and their team built together on Custer Drive in Lexington, Kentucky.

I get more pride about that. About what my family was able to play a part in, alongside the team that surrounded it.

His father, Sonny, who founded the company with Jeremy’s mother Pat, has more seller’s remorse than anyone in the family, Jeremy said with a laugh. It’s easy to roman­ticize what was. But Sonny also knows what his sons built on the foundation he gave them, and where their people landed because of it. That’s the legacy.

They’re super proud of their sons. And proud of the roles they’re playing as they grow within their second careers.

For the Owner Reading This Right Now

If you’re a security company owner with $5M to $20M in revenue, thinking about this but not quite ready to call anyone, Jeremy has one piece of advice that applies whether you ever sell or not.

Build your company as if you’re going to sell it one day, even if you have no intention of selling it.

Profitable. Sustainable. Systemized. A business that doesn’t need you in it every single day to keep running. Not because you’re planning an exit, but because that’s what a great company looks like from the inside. And when the time comes, whether by choice, circum­stance, or oppor­tunity, you’ll be ready and you’ll have something worth selling.

If you do those things, you’ll have a more enjoyable experience as an owner. And if you do eventually sell, you’ll be ready, and you’ll command the best price.

Jeremy is genuinely happy to talk to anyone working through this. That’s his role at Pye-Barker now, and he brings the perspective of someone who has sat in exactly the chair you’re sitting in.

And if your digital presence isn’t reflecting the company you’ve built, that’s where Rocket Media comes in. We’ve been doing this work with security and home services companies for over 22 years. We were part of Bates Security’s story. Jeremy said it better than we ever could about what the Rocket Media partnership meant:

There’s a lot of value in your services and your work. We’d like to be part of your story too.

— — — — — — — —

Editor’s note (June 2026): Since this conver­sation, Jeremy was sworn in as Chairman of the ESA — Electronic Security Associ­ation Board of Directors at the ESX — Electronic Security Expo 2026. It’s a role that puts him in an even better position to advocate for the owners and operators shaping the future of this industry, and a fitting next chapter for someone who has spent his career building, growing, and now leading at the highest level. Congrat­u­la­tions, Jeremy!

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