We continue our Best Advice Q&A series with Fred Voccola, chairman and chief executive officer at Simpro Group. He offers up the best advice he’s ever gotten, how he elevates security industry newcomers and who inspires him most.
Security Sales & Integration: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Fred Voccola: The best advice I ever got wasn’t something someone said to me. It was something I watched—watching the most innovative, intelligent person I’ve ever met: my father.
The lesson I learned from him was simple: always innovate.
Find a real problem that affects a lot of people or businesses and figure out how to make it better. That’s the core definition of innovation: incremental improvement that creates massive impact.
He never used fancy words or frameworks. He just solved big problems and made life easier for millions of people. He did it twice in a major way:
- Electronic toll collection (what became EZ Pass). He saw people wasting hours in toll lines and built the system that made that pain disappear.
- In-vehicle satellite navigation (Navteq / Navigation Technologies). Before smartphones, he helped build the technology that kept drivers from getting lost. Today hundreds of millions rely on it every day.
Watching him, I learned the formula: Identify a painful problem. Fix it. Then make the solution unbelievably easy for people to use. Remove all friction.
But there’s another part, maybe the most important: You have to be willing to outwork everyone. Innovation is messy. You pivot, you screw things up, you learn, you adjust and you keep moving. Relentless grit beats raw talent every time.
That mindset has driven me my entire career. Innovate. Make things better. Stay focused on solving the customer’s problem. Refuse to quit. That’s how you win.
You can build extraordinary businesses by solving ordinary problems better than anyone else.
SSI: What advice would you give to those looking to achieve success in the security industry?
Voccola: Start by truly understanding your customers, not at a surface level but at the level of, “What keeps them up at night?” Your job isn’t to sell tools or buzzwords. Your job is to eliminate problems.
If you can map real threats to real business impact and then build solutions that are simple, automated and measurable, you’re already ahead of 90% of the industry.
And standardize. Everywhere you can. Technology is evolving weekly, but the fundamentals never change:
- Operational discipline
- Customer obsession
- Teamwork and collaboration
Ask for help. Share what works. Build systems, not chaos. And stay laser-focused on outcomes, not activity.
Companies that do that win — in security and everywhere else. Customers don’t care about your tools. They care about whether you make their problems disappear.
SSI: If you could point to one person in the security industry and tell rising leaders, “Listen to them,” who would it be and why?
Voccola: I’ve always believed the smartest voices in any industry are the customers. They’re the ones living the reality, feeling the pain, doing the work.
Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would’ve said a faster horse.” He was right. Customers don’t always know the solution, but they always know the problem. And if you listen carefully, they’ll tell you exactly where the opportunities are.
We exist only because customers choose to pay us. They don’t owe us anything. We have to earn that trust every day.
So if I had to point to one group worth listening to above all others, it’s the operators — the people running security and field service businesses day in and day out. They understand staffing challenges, customer expectations, importance of an extra one to two jobs a day completed, compliance pressure, technology overload and the operational realities that outsiders completely miss.
Listen to the operators and make their lives easy. They know what works, what doesn’t and where the industry is going long before anyone else does.
For commercial contractors and security integrators, the industry is shifting fast. Technology is rewriting the rules. Margins are under pressure. Customers are demanding more transparency, more speed and more reliability than ever before.
In that environment, leaders aren’t looking for theory; they’re looking for someone who’s built real companies, solved real problems and helped real operators grow.
That’s why your voice resonates.
Your message is simple, unpolished in the best way and driven by lived experience: Solve customer problems. Standardize operations. Leverage technology that actually works. Work harder. Never quit.
Click here to check out the entire Best Advice series!
