On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate — Episode 27 (Watchman Security)
Host: Hello, hello — welcome, listeners, to today’s episode of On Air with Team Jensen. Today we have Lucas Andala with us, owner and founder of Watchman Security, along with a few other ventures he’s got going. Excited to have you on — want to jump right in. Tell us your background, where you’re from, how you got to Kansas City, and how Watchman Security came about.
Lucas: Born and raised here in Kansas City — native blood runs thick. My grandpa, on my Italian side (I’m half German, half Italian), owned a produce company in the River Market back in the ’30s. He came over on a boat from Sicily at 13, by himself, and started wholesale-distributing produce to basically all the retail businesses in town at the time, plus owned some apartments in the North End. He made a name for himself — the kind of guy where if a tomato was missing, nobody went home until it was found. My German side is actually where Renner Road in Johnson County gets its name, since my grandpa on that side owned land out there. So I grew up around business ownership and hardworking, blue-collar people. I was actually a bricklayer, grew up on a farm out in Tonganoxie starting around age nine, so I was used to hard work and grinding it out.
I ended up going to a school of ministry over in Missouri, of all things, even though I’m a Kansas boy at heart. Needed something to make ends meet at night, so I started door-to-door sales — the guy interrupting your dinner. Turned out I was really good at it — I was selling a security product for a franchise that wrote contracts and sold them to a bigger company. They eventually asked me to become a manager, wanted me to co-manage with someone else, but I figured you can’t have two leaders, so I said I’d do it solo. We ended up running the highest-producing sales office for that company in 2008, right during the housing crisis. I did that for a couple years, but every month we were selling our own paper off to the bigger company, and I wanted to build something instead of just handing off deals every month. I offered to work for free just to keep the accounts, but they didn’t see the vision, so in 2011 I started our own business.
That was also the year I got married to my wife, Megan — we’ve got four kids now and one on the way. Our youngest is six months old, so you can do the math on that timing — it was a bit of a surprise for her too.
Lucas: From there, I did what I knew — went out and knocked doors, started serving rural communities and farm towns. A guy approached me with a small camera company he wanted to sell; I only had $1,200, but he sold it to me anyway, along with some decent accounts. That was our first little acquisition, and we slowly grew from there — I met people who introduced me to other people, and we started protecting buildings downtown, one after another. We got in with developers who trusted us with the full suite — cameras, door access, fire alarm, and security — across multifamily and office builds. A lot of that door access was cloud-based rather than on-site servers, which was still fairly novel at the time. We actually put together a comparison across 15 different properties, and the cost of on-site systems versus cloud was about six times higher — that was a real eye-opener, and it convinced us cloud was the right direction from the start.
We did a lot of multifamily work — controlling visitor entry, elevators, unit doors, all through a phone app. Property managers really liked that. At a local Apartment Association event, a VP from Block Real Estate, Melanie Harris, mentioned on a panel how she’d been able to remotely control all her building thermostats during that brutal cold snap a couple winters back — the same week as that frigid Chiefs-Dolphins playoff game — and mitigate a lot of frozen-pipe risk. That was a great real-world testimony for the product.
From there we expanded into bulk-managed Wi-Fi for whole communities, so now we’ve got a Wi-Fi division, a multifamily division, and a commercial division. On top of that, we started an AV company too, doing low-voltage work — conference rooms, digital signage, sound masking — since it’s a natural fit when developers and property managers want one point of contact instead of five different vendors.
Host: Sounds like you offer a real menu of services. On a project like a large manufacturing facility or an industrial site, how would you typically get involved?
Lucas: We do a lot in manufacturing too — we work with Seneca Corporation, for example. When it comes to those decisions, trust matters a lot, since there are so many options out there. What’s worked best for us is getting involved early with the owner, developer, or decision-making team — coming alongside in a design-assist role to help cover any traps or gaps before the project even starts, cost-engineering options, thinking holistically about fire/life safety, sprinklers, access control integration, and card-access points. We’ll sit down with architects and sometimes point out, for example, that you don’t need five doors if you reconfigure the entrance — things they hadn’t considered because they’re juggling so much else. If we can get involved once construction documents are at 50% or so, we can build off that.
Host: Are you more in the building-automation/BMS space, competing with someone like JCI?
Lucas: We do compete with JCI sometimes, though we don’t do HVAC controls specifically — it’s really everything low-voltage: TVs and casting setups in conference rooms, sound masking, structured cabling. Margins on some of that are thin, but it’s better to have it all under one roof for the client — one decision, one point of contact.
Host: What’s the size of your team locally?
Lucas: 34 people here locally. If we’re working out of town, we typically use vetted subcontractors under service-level agreements — they have to submit as-built documentation, follow our install standards, and we don’t pay until we get the as-built photos and checks completed. Integrity in the work is one of our core values — cabling dressed properly, panels labeled clearly, so if someone services it later, it’s straightforward. We just got back from a trip to Italy, and it really struck me how much pride people there take in their work and service, even without tipping culture — quality isn’t necessarily more expensive, and in the long run it pays off in customer retention.
Host: How does your technology tie into public safety response — like police or fire dispatch?
Lucas: It depends a lot on the jurisdiction. On life-safety code compliance — fire alarms, sprinkler tampers, elevator recalls — the fire department is pretty rigorous about annual inspections. On burglar alarms, cities don’t want a lot of nuisance false-alarm calls, so permits matter. We’ve leaned into video verification, and we also offer an E911 feature through some of our software — if someone calls 911 from inside a building with our technology installed, KC dispatch can pull up a live camera feed and route that to responding officers before they arrive, giving them much more situational awareness. We’re working on a bigger rollout with the mayor’s office and the police chief up in North Kansas City this spring, hoping to get more counties on board with E911 integration, since it genuinely helps first responders know what they’re walking into.
Host: Who typically covers the capital cost for something like that?
Lucas: It requires hardware on the building — a gateway device that splits the video stream — so building owners generally cover that upfront cost. The more building owners who participate, the more real-time information the police have, which can meaningfully speed up response, especially in something like an active-shooter scenario, where officers could get live footage before ever setting foot inside.
Host: How do you address privacy concerns — the “Big Brother” pushback some people have around all this camera coverage?
Lucas: It’s definitely a sensitive topic for some people. My personal view is that data’s being collected in a hundred other ways already, but I understand the concern. All our systems are SOC 2 compliant and cloud-secure, with regular penetration testing — the company behind a lot of our security backend was founded by the same person who started Barracuda Networks, the spam-filtering company, so cybersecurity is taken seriously. Most people don’t think enough about the IT risk of tying security systems into a building’s network — if it’s not properly secured, someone could potentially hold a facility’s operations hostage, similar to ransomware attacks we’ve seen hit other industries, like the software outage that forced auto dealers back to writing orders on paper for months.
Host: Can existing hardware and older systems be integrated with newer tech, or does it all need replacing at once?
Lucas: It can play well with other systems. If it’s a budget-constrained project, we can often swap out just the “brain” of an old system and keep using existing peripherals — like an older analog camera run over coax — while gaining better cybersecurity, searchability, and AI features at the head-end. Then as individual components fail, we replace them incrementally rather than requiring the client to bite off the whole project at once.
Host: How do you navigate insurance and liability, given you can’t necessarily promise a system will prevent crime?
Lucas: Security is more of a deterrent than a guarantee — cameras help determine what happened, but they can’t necessarily stop something from happening. We work closely with our insurance folks on E&O coverage and additional-insured arrangements with partners, and we try to make sure lease agreements and contracts are clear about what the systems are and aren’t meant to do, so the liability is understood upfront on all sides.
Host: I’d imagine there’s also a deterrence factor just from cameras being visible.
Lucas: Definitely — same idea as a yard sign for an alarm system, even if there’s no alarm behind it. I saw that a lot when I was still knocking doors.
Host: What’s the process if someone wants to bring you into a project?
Lucas: Our model is design, discover, deploy, then service and support. Reach out to me directly, and I’ll bring in the right people from our team — engineers who go out on site walks, sales staff, security consultants — to get things moving. We’ve actually got a project starting soon in the Crown Center area, on the seventh floor at 2600 Grand, where we’ll be integrating our system with the building’s existing common-area credentials so tenants aren’t carrying multiple badges — we support mobile credentials now too, which helps a lot with older buildings that already have a legacy security setup in place.
Host: What’s the best way for listeners to get in touch with you or Watchman Security?
Lucas: You can call our office at 816-744-8900, or reach us at WatchmanKC.com — we’re also on LinkedIn. The website has a good portfolio of past projects if people want to see examples of our work.
Host: Awesome — thank you, Lucas, for coming on. That’s a wrap on this episode — give us a follow.
