ONLINE EXCLUSIVE ROUNDTABLE: Security Managers Discuss Adopting New Technologies

What about in terms of competitors poaching some of your talent and that sort of thing, especially if you get them up to speed in IT or something, and they go off to a competitor, or even maybe someone within your company trying to go off and start their own competitive comp
any? Are you experiencing much of that? Is that a challenge or issue at all?

Simmons: It’s something you’re always concerned about, but the attitude we take is if we lose somebody we haven’t done a good enough job giving them a place to work, where they have fun, and they feel they want career advancement. To the point of maybe being arrogant, our owner doesn’t believe in doing employment contracts. He says if I haven’t done a good enough job to keep employees here, then they deserve to leave. We don’t try to hold them with employment contracts. We have very little turnover within our company. People come in and usually they either stay or wash out in the first three months. You either can live in that culture or you will never make it. You usually find out pretty quickly. They wash out pretty fast. But if they stay they’re usually long-term employees. Our retention rate is very good.

Olivares: The only time we lose employees to the competition is if we push them out. We have a good retaining ratio. We get them trained and educated. The ones that have been with us the longest are the ones that didn’t come in from this industry. We trained them from scratch. Those are the ones that turn out the best, and we do training agreements for the major systems we had to send people out of state for training. They have to pay us back but it’s a five-year plan so that’s five years they don’t owe us anything. If they leave in two years they have to pay a percentage back to us. That makes them think more about jumping to someone else. Not because they’re not happy but because someone got them excited, so it makes them think twice. We have good success on people we trained from scratch, and that’s what we are doing more and more. The ones that have a lot of experience have picked up bad habits and things like that.

Bumgardner: We fortunately have been very good at retaining people. We lose very few folks. But I think it’s a combination of a few things. If you want to hire good people, you have to be able to create opportunity for those good people. If you don’t, they will leave. That includes training programs, certification programs, career paths, things of that nature. The other most important component is the culture in which we operate. We’ve gone as far as discussing relaxing dress codes and putting a game room in the company and allowing flexible hours.  I think those are things we are considering. But the flipside of that I think running a business you have to protect yourself in certain areas. If you have that key IT guy, you better make sure you’re two deep. He may leave and you have to make sure you’re training your people from the top down and not putting all your eggs in one employee. If he’s good, he’s being recruited. You have to make sure you retain him. I think as owners you have to focus a lot on that culture and the environment in which your employees work in order to retain them.

Will: We haven’t had much of an issue with losing technicians. We’ve done a pretty good job of hanging onto techs. Salespeople seem they’ve been pretty heavily recruited and we’ve lost some salespeople but I think at the end of the day it’s all about creating the right environment. Like you, Larry, giving people the opportunity to advance. That’s one of my primary motivators in trying to grow the company is to give people a good reason to stick around, the good ones. I think it’s one of those situations we look inward more than outward if it’s a problem.

Vezina: We don’t have much of a problem with that, losing employees to competition. We try to keep them happy by the fact we’re small enough we’re kind of a family environment. You don’t walk out on your family, it’s your friends. We have a happy type environment. We have parties and things and provide all the benefits and things, and good pay. Why would they leave?

Let’s talk about verticals. Pick one market you’re really keen on and why, and what’s the market that maybe isn’t panning out like you’d like to see, and why you think that is.

Simmons: The market we concentrate on heavily today is health care. It seems to be an area we do very well in. Once you build up a reputation in a market, it becomes easier because you get so many referrals. So we concentrate on the market. We’ve done really well. We’ve recently been able to expand — the info-protection has been a very limited market where you could sell it. It’s been protected territories. That has changed in many ways. We picked up an additional approximately 35 states in addition to what we already had. So big focus for us, tremendous growth in that vertical. It is niche, one of those markets you get in and have to understand how to play in it. It isn’t just security. If you’re going to be successful you need to understand how to work in conjunction with the nursing staff, the clinical side of the hospital, in order to be successful. We’ve got people that are specialists in that who go around and help our teams do it. That’s helped us grow that market.

Compliance is huge?

Simmons: Lots of compliance issues. In any industry you go into, it’s understanding the issues in this ever-changing industry, whether it be HIPPA, JCAHO, a lot of things you need to understand what keeps them awake at night. Basically understanding that and making sure whatever we’re doing is safeguarding that client against what their greatest fear is, what can put them out of business, what can hurt their business or reputation. There are a lot of drivers in the health-care market, as there are with other industries. When you really get down to into the minutiae of it, and understand it inside out, it pays off. It’s a great market for us because of the integration between the info-protection, the video systems and the card access. Integrating all those systems together makes it a well-knit defense to protect the patients, and in many other areas. That’s just one piece and there’s different pieces within each section of the hospital. Great market, a lot of growth, regardless of what happens with the economy we’re going to have hospitals and they need to protect the patients that come in and to say we feel like it’s a safe haven for us. So we’re putting a lot of effort into it.

Vezina: Our biggest vertical has turned out to be retail and the reason for that is with the recession, there’s no construction. A lot of things we were in, like gaming, there was nothing going on. We’re in retail and service wise I felt that was very scalable, even though retail was also having some problems; they weren’t closing buildings so they had to be maintained. I focused on the maintenance side of their business. We got really good at it, we are really good at it. We wanted to parlay that since we are in the industry, into loss prevention and now construction and building. That’s very scalable and it’s everywhere, every chain store is everywhere so it’s a great business.

Will: Our primary focus recently has been on the critical infrastructure. We got involved in the co-op community, the small electrical co-ops and that whole family and the kind of almost pyramid structure among those. So we’ve been able to leverage relationships amongst that family which has been very good for us. There’s plenty of demand there. They have lots of regulations to abide by and so there’s of demand. It’s an area where we’ve been able to negotiate a significant amount of the work and so it’s been a busy we can grow through high-quality service.

Bumgardner: For us we have a tendency to focus on any vertical where there’s a regulatory arm or specific requirement to where that end user has to have some sort of physical security. We do a lot of health care as well. In health care you have to talk their language around the HIPPA and JCAHO, and we deal with airborne pathogens all the time and how do with with that. Fire caulking has become huge in health care so speaking the language is the first part. We do a lot of critical infrastructure around power utilities and NERC and CIP compliance but we’ve had a tremendous amount of luck really understanding their problems and compliance issues and providing the solutions. I think if you can position yourselves in those markets, understand the problems, I think you’re going to see some success.

Olivares: Our main vertical is the federal government. That’s where we’re getting — when the economy was down, that’s where we were getting a lot of work. Even though the government slowed down we still had those accounts like border patrol, they have a big budget and they’re spending a lot of money. They’re trusting us to bring new technology to them and they’re listening to what we want to do with their systems. They’re finding money to spend and their sole sourcing us. They don’t go out to bid. They feel comfortable and they learned their lesson. The first time a government agency comes in they’re always like on the defensive side because whoever they used before didn’t finish the project or didn’t comply with all the specifications. But once they get to learn us, like ICE for example, we do all the work for ICE and they let us design the work. They give us general specs and we bring the product we want to bring in. That’s our vertical market now, the federal government.

Editor-in-Chief Scott Goldfine has spent nearly 15 years with SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION. He can be reached at (704) 663-7125 or scott.goldfine@securitysales.

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