At the age of 10, Peter Rogers chose to leave his childhood home in Connecticut to attend a boarding school in New York. Although both parents encouraged him to go, the decision was left to Peter, and at first he declined the offer and remained home as his 5th grade year commenced. But during the Thanksgiving holiday, his two older brothers, both already students at the school, urged him to reconsider. Ultimately, Peter put aside his concerns and resolved to take advantage of the opportunity, enrolling in his class late and setting to work catching up on everything he’d missed. That decision was his first major defining moment—one that set the stage for a life of self-reliance, independence, and many adventures to come.
Today, Peter is the Senior Advisor to FrontPoint Security Solutions (FrontPoint), a business he co-founded with two partners. FrontPoint sells home security and home automation services utilizing top-of-the-line technology, with systems that are both modern and affordable. Customers can control their system remotely, and those with a credit score of 600 or better receive significantly discounted equipment. But it’s their business model that truly differentiates FrontPoint from their many competitors in the alarm industry. While fewer than 5 percent of alarm systems on the market today are Do-It-Yourself, FrontPoint systems can easily be installed by the end user in less than an hour.
According to major industry metrics, the company’s success is evidenced by its low cancellation rate and low costs per customer added, and by the fact that all of their customers have been added organically. “Everyone that we talk to is someone who was searching online for an alarm system,” Peter affirms. “We’re not direct mailing or cold calling. It’s not push marketing, but pull marketing, lessening our acquisition costs and attracting better customers.” Thanks to this approach, business has taken off since FrontPoint’s founding in 2007. Once comprised of Peter and his two partners, the company now employs over 400 people. The entire operation has been self-funded, with almost all of the equity remaining in the hands of the three founders. Success on such a large scale, without limited outside investment, is practically unheard of in the alarm industry.
Peter has long been clearing his own path, professionally and personally—a character trait he’s been known for since childhood. His father died ten days after his birth, but his mother remarried three years later, and she and Peter’s stepfather always encouraged their children’s independent spirits. In fact, after their children had finished with school, Peter’s parents had to track their various whereabouts on a world map full of pushpins, with one brother sailing the Pacific, another motorcycling through South America, and Peter working his way across Asia and the Middle East. Along with Peter’s two brothers, his mother and stepfather had two daughters, and all five children were exposed to travel, music, the outdoors, and reading of all sorts. Peter developed a lifelong love of nature that paralleled his stepfather’s love of hiking, and between junior and senior year of high school, he spent time at Outward Bound cultivating a passion for climbing and exploring. His interest in music also played a major role in his formative years, compelling him to sing with boys’ choirs through his grade school years and to later consider majoring in Music when he enrolled at Harvard University.
After his sophomore year at Harvard, Peter travelled with the men’s glee club to Europe for a summer trip, but unlike his classmates, he didn’t return home when the summer ended. Instead, he chose to remain in Europe, determined to explore his passion for singing and then decide if his career lay in music before returning to Harvard the following year. It was another foray into the unknown, and well worthwhile, but he ultimately decided a music career was not in his future. “I didn’t feel I was on par with the professionals, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to support a family, even with some mild success in the field,” he recalls. “And above all, the future vocal stars I did meet possessed a certain single-mindedness that I did not. The unwavering focus and commitment to doing only singing in my life—I simply didn’t have that. I wasn’t ready to close all the other doors that were open before me.”
Peter’s adventure had taught him much, and he returned to his junior year at Harvard with his options open. His major had changed from Music, to Classics, to English. And now, with a year in Europe and German fluency under his belt, he finally settled on Comparative Literature. He didn’t have any idea how he might apply his degree professionally, but through his time at Harvard, his passion for climbing had grown. The Harvard Mountaineering Club became his primary interest, and with them he learned to ice climb on Mt. Washington, then travelled out west for more climbing adventures. “When everybody else was graduating and applying to grad school or attending their on-campus recruiting sessions, I was dreaming of Patagonia and the Himalayas,” he recalls. “I ended up going to the Himalayas by way of the Arctic and the Alps. I just wanted to travel and climb.” Sure enough, when graduation rolled around, Peter took off for Nepal. It was 1976, and these adventure trips were far from common. He considered trying to turn his passion into his occupation, but the odds of making a living through adventuring were even worse than those he faced in pursuing a singing career. Being a guide was a possibility, but it had some of the same attributes as being a full-time opera singer: constant travel and potentially challenging economics.
With these concerns in mind, Peter returned home without any clear direction, but as free-spirited and willing as ever. His brother was running a bee operation in North Carolina and invited him to explore the bee industry, so Peter joined the business as an apprentice beekeeper, learning the trade and spending a summer working with the local Conservation Foundation in Nantucket. “They gave me the rights to a lot of their honey, which I harvested and then sold to natural food stores to fund more expeditions,” he explains.
Finally, his then-girlfriend proposed a move to San Francisco. Neither of them had ever been there, and that was reason enough for them to pack the car and make the trip across the country. They fell in love with the city immediately and decided to buy a house there, and Peter found a job with Eddie Bauer. “It seemed like a good place for me to earn a living and utilize my knowledge and passion for the outdoors,” he remembers. After a circuitous but rewarding route, Peter had finally joined the business world, and his star quickly began to rise.
During his seven years working at Eddie Bauer, Peter ascended from part-time Christmas help in the San Francisco store to Regional Manager running all the stores east of the Mississippi, managing to find the time to marry and have his first child in the midst of his professional success. In the business environment, his competitive spirit and desire to be productive made him a true force to be reckoned with. “That’s where I got the beginnings of my business education,” he recalls. “I came in the back door as a mountain climber and left as a retail industry professional.”
In 1984, the family decided to move back to Connecticut, where Peter found work with a small manufacturing firm for the next four years. In that capacity, he got an education in operations management and learned about computers, networking, and the efficiencies each could engender. In the process, he automated so much that he worked himself out of a job. Once again, he was eager to start down a new path, now with a whole tool belt of business expertise.
Peter’s move into the alarm industry was nothing less than serendipitous. He was looking for work, networking with friends and professional acquaintances, when an HR consultant he knew found him an opportunity at a growing company. In 1989, he joined his first alarm company as a senior manager. The second alarm business he worked for was acquired by a larger one, and he stayed on to work for the acquiring company for a time. In the process, he gained a wealth of information about the alarm industry. “We were a little different from other alarm companies because much of our growth was organic, but we also grew significantly through acquisition,” he says. “So we had to understand not only what it took to run a successful company, but also the deal-making and transaction side of the business. Most folks in the industry understand one or the other of those reasonably well, but you won’t find a lot of people who understand both.”
The thorough business education he received at the alarm companies, combined with the expertise he already had, left Peter confident he could run his own operation business—an idea that had been germinating in his mind for the past 15 years. “I always liked the idea of having my own company, of being my own boss, but the opportunity hadn’t arisen,” he reflects. Now, armed with experience and knowledge, he decided to create that opportunity himself and set up a consultancy specializing in the alarm industry. His efforts were met with almost immediate success.
Though his first marriage hadn’t worked out, Peter remarried in 1997 to the love of his life, Bonny, who from Day One has been nothing but supportive of his goals and work ethic. “I was working with the lenders and investors and the operating companies themselves, mostly on mergers and acquisition activities,” he recounts. “Then Goldman Sachs entered the industry as a lender and investor, and I began working with them.” Peter and his point person at Goldman, Chris Villar, enjoyed working together and began to explore their shared interest in the alarm industry. “We had met a lot of smart people and seen a lot of good business models, but there was a gap in the market” he says. “It was clear that we had an opportunity to do things other people weren’t doing, so we decided to start our own company.” With that, Chris enlisted another Goldman employee and a friend from Georgetown, Aaron Shumaker, to join them, and in 2007, FrontPoint was born.
Before FrontPoint, Peter and Bonny had dreamed up a meticulously planned future in which he retired with his consultancy money at age 62. But with the heart of an adventurer that was first kindled when he decided to leave home for boarding school at age ten, the twist in the story has brought the thrill and excitement he’s always loved, and Bonny has supported him every step of the way. “She’s the angel on my shoulder,” he avows. “She’s always reminding me to look for the best in people or in a situation, and to have high expectations without necessarily applying the expectations I have for myself to everyone else. She’s a great coach.” With such a strong supporter, it’s perhaps poetic that, when asked what one object he most treasures, Peter references a black, heart-shaped rock given to him by Bonny before they were married. While they were dating, she told him she planned to give the rock to the man she would marry, and he proposed soon after she gave it to him.
“Making the bold decision to start FrontPoint with Chris and Aaron was the smartest thing I ever did for my family,” Peter says today. It’s only the latest in the series of bold steps that have propelled Peter through life, and the leadership style with which he operates is as honed as the journey that has warranted it. “Whether you’re an expedition leader on a wild and wooly trip to the mountains, where people may face serious injury or even death, or the CEO of a company, leadership is leadership,” he says. “To me it’s a combination of competence and conscientiousness—the ability to lead by example and the willingness to roll up one’s sleeves and do whatever needs to be done, which garners the essential element of respect.” Peter emphasizes the importance of modeling the behaviors expected of employees, and warns that the best leaders are neither mired in detail, nor singularly focused on the big picture. “It takes a combination of tactical and strategic thinking,” he explains. “Good leaders can think on both levels, and the best leaders can move with fluency and speed between them.”
To young people entering the business world today, Peter is encouraging and optimistic. “I would say there is more opportunity today than there has ever been, which is the exact opposite of what a lot of people think,” he says. “The rate of technological change and advancement is opening a lot of doors. You can either be part of that and engage, or sit on the sidelines and lament the fact that you think all the good ideas have been taken, which couldn’t be further from the truth. You’ve got to get out there, try stuff, and climb every mountain—otherwise you’ll never know what’s there and what you’re truly capable of.” From the man who left home at age 10, who left Harvard to travel Europe, who left a comfortable life to climb the Himalayas, and who left a successful consultancy to launch an even more successful business, it’s clear that making the effort to explore the unknown isn’t necessarily about finding opportunities and success, but about making them
yourself.
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