Does the size of your provider help you?
Every proposal you receive will look competent, and most of them will describe the same capabilities in the same order. The differences that decide how the contract actually performs are structural, and they do not appear in the document. This page is about finding them before you sign.
What a larger provider genuinely does better.
It would be easy to open this page by telling you the national firms are impersonal, and you would discount it immediately, because every provider says that about every other provider. So here is the honest version first. There are requirements where scale is the right answer, and if yours is one of them you should buy it.
Surge and depth
A national firm can put several hundred officers somewhere at short notice and absorb the loss of a whole shift without the contract feeling it. If your requirement includes genuine surge capacity, that is worth paying for.
One contract, many states
A single agreement covering sites in twenty jurisdictions, with the licensing handled centrally, is administratively simpler than assembling regional providers. For a national portfolio that convenience is real.
Balance sheet
Larger insurance limits, larger bonding capacity, and the ability to carry a payroll through a slow-paying quarter. If your procurement requires limits above what a mid-size firm carries, that is a legitimate reason to buy scale.
Technology budget
Sustained investment in reporting platforms, analytics and monitoring infrastructure is easier to fund across tens of thousands of officers than across a thousand.
If your requirement is one of those four at national scale, tell us in the first conversation. We will say so, and we would rather lose a bid early than be the wrong provider in month three.
And what scale costs you.
None of this is a criticism of any particular company. It is the arithmetic of running thousands of contracts, and it is the same arithmetic whoever is doing it. Every question in blue is one you should put to us and to everyone else on your list. The answers vary far more than the proposals do.
Distance to a decision
The officer at your post is rarely the difference between providers. What differs is how many steps sit between something happening at your site and somebody with the authority to decide what to do about it. In a large organization that path runs through a branch, a region and a national function. Each step is reasonable on its own, and together they are the reason buyers describe getting a ticket number rather than an answer.
Ask any provider: name the person who can make a decision about my site at 3am, and tell me how many steps away they are.
What else your account manager carries
Every provider assigns a manager. The number that matters is how many other accounts that person is carrying, because attention is finite and yours is competing with everyone else's. This is not a question about competence. It is arithmetic, and a provider who will not give you the number has answered it.
Ask any provider: how many other accounts does the manager on my contract carry, and how long have they been with the company?
Standard programs and specific sites
Standardization is how a large operation holds quality across thousands of contracts, and it works. The cost is that a program built to travel across many sites is not built around the way your building actually operates, and the gap shows up in the post orders. That document is where the difference is visible, and it is the one most buyers never ask to see.
Ask any provider: will you adopt our post orders or rewrite them, and may I read a real set from a comparable site?
Who performs the work
Subcontracting is common and not improper, but it changes what your contract is. You hold an agreement with one company while the people at your gate are employed by another, and the difference is invisible until an incident, when it decides whether the person who answers can decide anything at all.
Ask any provider: which parts of this contract would be performed by your own employees, and will you put that in writing?
Big enough to hold the contract. Small enough that you know who runs it.
More than 1,025 security professionals across nine offices in four countries. Large enough to have held United States embassy guard force contracts continuously since 2009, and to have been named Small Business Prime Contractor of the Year by the U.S. Department of State in 2010. Small enough that the people who win your contract are the people who run it.
- A named manager per office, with a direct local number rather than a national queue. You are told who yours is.
- Overseas operations are our own offices, staffed and supervised by our own management rather than local subcontractors.
- Officer training in house, under a licensed Florida Security Officer School rather than bought in as a vendor line item.
- Licenses and federal identifiers published, so you can verify us without asking us.
- Average executive tenure above eight years, which is why the person you meet is likely to still be there at renewal.
That we are right for every requirement.
We are not the largest security company you will talk to, and on a national multi-state rollout we would not pretend otherwise. We will not quote you a phase-in period before we have seen your site, and we will not promise an officer retention percentage before we have met the team.
What we will do is answer every question on this page in writing, and tell you plainly where another provider is the better fit. A firm that never says that is not being careful with your risk. It is being careful with its pipeline.
What a transition actually involves →Questions buyers ask us.
Is a larger security company a safer choice?
For some requirements, plainly yes. If you need several hundred officers across many states at short notice, or a single contract covering sites in twenty jurisdictions, scale is the requirement and you should buy it. For a single site, a campus, a portfolio in a few regions, or an operation that crosses a border into Latin America, size stops being the deciding factor and structure starts. The useful question is not how many officers a company employs in total. It is how many of them will ever see your site, and who decides what happens there.
Are you big enough for my contract?
Sometimes the honest answer is no, and you will hear it from us early rather than after a mobilization. We run nine offices across four countries with more than 1,025 security professionals, we have held United States embassy guard force contracts continuously since 2009, and we have performed as a prime contractor for a federal client operating outside the United States. If your requirement is larger than that or sits somewhere we have no presence, we will tell you, and we would rather do it in the first conversation than in the third month.
What happens if you have no office in my state?
We say so. Licensing is not a formality in this industry: an officer must hold the credential for the jurisdiction where they stand, and a provider who is vague about that is telling you something. Our Florida and Texas numbers are published in full on the licensing page, and licensing for any other jurisdiction is provided in writing before a bid rather than described in general terms.
Will my program be built for my site, or adapted from a template?
Every provider will say the former. The way to test it is to ask to see a real post-order set from a comparable site, redacted, and to read it. A set built for a specific building reads like it was written by someone who has walked the building, because it was. A template reads like a job description. Ask us, and ask everyone else you are considering.
Who actually employs the officers on my site?
Ask it plainly, and ask for the answer in writing before you sign. There is nothing improper about subcontracting, but you should know before an incident rather than after, because a subcontracted arrangement gives you a contract with one company and officers employed by another. Our overseas operations are our own offices, staffed and supervised by our own management, with the resident manager named publicly on this site. For any contract we bid, we will tell you in writing exactly which parts would be performed by our employees.
Everyone's proposal looks the same. How do I actually compare them?
Ignore the capability sections, which are close to interchangeable across the industry, and compare four things: the named person who will manage the account and how many others they carry, officer turnover on comparable contracts, what you will receive in writing and how often, and what happens at three in the morning. Those four answers vary enormously between providers, and none of them is usually in the proposal document.
What should I be asking you that I have not?
Ask what we would tell you not to buy. A provider who will talk you out of headcount you do not need, or a camera upgrade that will not change your risk, is advising you. One who agrees with every requirement you propose is selling to you. Both are legitimate businesses, and only one of them is on your side of the table.
Comparing providers?
Put the questions on this page to all of us. We will answer them in writing.