Ken Gross had already sold an alarm company when he acquired a rather different kind of recurring expense: a basketball team. The Atlantic City Seagulls won three straight league titles during his ownership. He called the venture “an expensive hobby.” It is a pleasingly candid description from someone whose working life has included rather more ventures than most retirement plans accommodate.
The trophies belong in his story. So does the return to the alarm business, and the degree he went back to finish. Gross, the founder of Connect America, has a career full of departures that turned out to be temporary. Follow those returns and a more interesting portrait emerges than the usual sequence of company names and executive titles.
There are several ways to measure his progress: customers, properties, a diploma, championship seasons. They produce different answers. Keeping them together helps explain the range of work he has chosen to do, and why the sale of one business occupies a relatively early position in a much longer working life.
A business worth coming back to
Gross and his brother started Tri-State in 1977. An alarm company makes a particular promise: install something that people can rely on, then remain available after the installation. The equipment begins the relationship. The continuing service gives the relationship its value. It is a business with a long memory, measured through customers who keep paying for something they expect to work.
By the time Gross sold the original business to Security Link in 1989, Tri-State had expanded well beyond its Philadelphia beginnings. Its operations reached several states and metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Memphis and Washington. A regional start had become a geographically dispersed operation. Gross continued as a consultant after the sale, retaining a connection to the business he had built.
The years afterward brought real estate investments and a bagel franchise. Eventually, he returned to alarms and revived the Tri-State name. For an entrepreneur with money available for other ventures, familiarity had its attractions. Starting again in an industry he understood gave him a body of experience to put back to work.
A sale. A departure. A return.
Gross’s career keeps reopening apparently finished chapters.
The degree he went back for
There was another unfinished chapter at Bloomsburg. Gross had attended in the 1970s and left before earning his degree. In 1990, he completed his bachelor’s degree. His return made the university a place where he had both studied and come back to finish something, years after his original classmates had moved on.
That same year, he established the Kenneth S. Gross Scholarship Fund for returning adult students who were single parents. The choice of beneficiaries gives the gift its character. An adult returning to college can have obligations that never appear on an admissions transcript. A scholarship aimed at that group acknowledges the life outside the classroom as part of the challenge of getting into it.
His support also went into a shared university space. In 1991, a second $100,000 gift helped renovate the Carver Hall auditorium, which was renamed for him. A scholarship and an auditorium serve different purposes: one helps a student continue; the other gives a campus somewhere to assemble, perform and listen. Both outlast the moment a donation is announced.
Gross’s connection to Bloomsburg therefore has more than the familiar donor-and-building outline. He had been a student who left, an adult who finished and a benefactor who supported other returning students. Those roles sit alongside one another. His own completed degree and the opportunity offered to someone else belong to the same year.
Three trophies, separate accounts
From 1997 through 1999, Gross owned the Atlantic City Seagulls. They won the United States Basketball League championship in all three seasons. For a business biography, the team is an enjoyable complication. Its results can be excellent on a court while its ownership remains costly. The word “won” needs an object.
A trophy settles the sporting question. The cost of obtaining it lives elsewhere. Gross’s description of his expensive hobby leaves room for both accounts without pretending they reconcile themselves. It is also a welcome piece of plain speech in a world where almost any costly enthusiasm can acquire a suitably grand investment thesis.
Three seasons. Three titles. Ownership had its own arithmetic.
The customer list gets longer
In 2004, Gross founded Connect America. The venture carried his experience in service businesses into another company built around a continuing customer relationship. The business would grow through direct marketing, distribution partnerships and the operational work required to keep serving a growing account base.
By the 2011 transaction led by Rockbridge Growth Equity, Connect America had more than 75,000 customers. Gross remained chief executive and a substantial owner. That arrangement matters to the sequence of his career: selling an interest did not mean disappearing from the work. The founder and the new investment partner would continue together.
Falcon Investment Advisors participated in the financing. Rockbridge brought experience and resources in marketing, technology and operations. Those are unglamorous words beside a deal announcement, but they describe much of what a growing service company needs. Winning a customer is a beginning. Handling the next customer, and the next, requires the business behind the advertisement to keep up.
“The biggest thing this gives us is a strong partner and the money to grow.”
Ken Gross, on the Rockbridge transaction, 2011
The partnership also brought distribution possibilities. Connect America and One Reverse Mortgage were already including each other’s material in customer packages. It was a practical way to introduce an offer to people already dealing with a related business. A box or mailing could perform a second job without requiring a separate storefront.
Such details make the expansion easier to understand. Business growth is often presented as a line rising across a chart, with the difficult middle removed. Here, the middle includes financing, marketing materials, relationships and the mechanics of delivering a service. Gross spoke about the transaction in terms of the resources it would provide for that work.
Connect America also became known for selling online and shipping equipment directly for customers to set up themselves. Month-to-month service, without upfront equipment costs or long contracts, changed the terms on which customers could begin. These choices concern the entire buying process: how somebody hears about the company, receives its product and decides to stay.
- FindDirect marketing and distribution partners
- DeliverEquipment shipped for self-setup
- ContinueMonth-to-month service
Experience becomes something to share
Gross also helped organize a place for operators to compare ideas. In 2007, he was president of the newly created industry association known as MAMA. Its founding board brought together people from several companies. His stated reason for starting it was simple: sharing ideas. Even a competitive industry has problems its members can usefully discuss together.
A decade later, that exchange had a different setting. Affiliated Monitoring invited Gross to speak at its 2017 Catalyst conference in Florida. The event concentrated on the practical work of growing a business. Organizers pointed to the different company sizes he had experienced as the reason his story would be useful to other operators.
The distinction is worth preserving. Someone who has built a company through successive stages can discuss how the work changes along the way. An owner with a handful of customers faces different decisions from an organization serving thousands. Gross had spent years inside that progression, rather than encountering it only at the moment of a sale.
A different chair at the table
In November 2020, Connect America appointed Janet Dillione chief executive. Gross was identified as founder and chairman. He welcomed her experience and her ability to build a customer-focused organization. His relationship to the company had changed again, with another executive taking responsibility for leading it.
His other business interests have their own geography. The property portfolio documented on his personal website runs through Philadelphia and its surrounding communities, including Ardmore, Bryn Mawr, Wayne and Broomall. Retail space, offices and apartments appear on the list. These are businesses with physical addresses, tenants and continuing responsibilities, scattered across a region he knows.
One useful way to read that property list is as a counterweight to the company announcements. An acquisition has a date. A building remains to be managed afterward. The listed uses range from shops to apartments, placing several kinds of everyday activity inside the same investment career. Gross’s business interests have continued to include places as well as customer accounts.
His personal website makes an equally revealing choice of title: Kenspiracy. Beneath the joke sits a collection of business history, photographs and older accounts of his work. It allows the basketball seasons and the university years to share space with the companies. The resulting picture has room for detours, unfinished business and an occasional expensive pleasure.
Connect America’s founder, a returning graduate, a property investor, a basketball owner: each title captures a portion of Gross’s life. Together they suggest a working rhythm that a conventional retirement timetable would struggle to contain. He has sold, invested, returned and taken on different responsibilities. The three championship seasons add a useful reminder that even an experienced businessman can enjoy an undertaking whose rewards arrive in a form an accountant cannot deposit.