 of security matters hosted by C.R.R.A.D. We'd like to start off by thanking Andrew Lannings for loaning up the microphone today. I'm Tommy Zarna and I'll be your host. Today we're joined by industry experts to discuss security on the front lines, discussing how security officers and solutions are mitigating risk and keeping our world safer. With me today, we have Lee Otis from Group 337, Robert Russell from Securitas, Paul Crusoe from Allied Universal and Tammy Moore Reed from G4S. Thank you all for being on the show today. To kick things off, tell our viewers who you are and a little about yourself and let's talk about how our officers on the front line have stepped up and adapted to the growing demand we've seen over the last 12 months. Lee, let's start things off with you. Wonderful, appreciate the opportunity to be here. I just said my name is Leo Das, CEO Group 337. We're a consulting and strategy firm that focuses on the security industry, primarily in access control, but then we shift across. So we've been sort of on the front end of the trends analysis of what's happening and it's been somewhat of a, especially during a terrible time, it's been quite interesting to see the response by our market and the industry. So it's, I think it's a great time to be in the industry and excited to see what happens coming out of it. All right, Rob, we'll start with you now. Yeah, good afternoon everyone. Rob Russell with Securitas spent the last 20 plus years in the protective services industry and certainly watched the industry change and evolve over time, but at no point has it evolved faster or in a more profound way than we experienced the last 12 months. So sort of looking forward to sharing some insight and perspective with our group here today. All right, Paul, we'll kick it over to you. Thanks, Tommy. I'm Paul Caruso with Allied Universal, Vice President here in Boston, Massachusetts. The last 12 months has been interesting to say the least and what strikes me most strongly is the good stories that have come out of the last 12 months. You know, we're focused on the difficulty in a lot of the news feeds, but it's been a time of wonderful service and great dedication and it's been really good to be part of organizations and serve the public every day. Yeah, I know it's certainly been amazing to watch and hear the stories of officers around the world coming together to keep us safe, but Tammy will close off this first introduction with yourself. Great, good afternoon. My name is Tammy Moreed. I'm the Manager of Business Development for G4S Secure Solutions. We're a risk-based security company. Very excited to be here today to talk about how we've overcome the pandemic and our officers who are on the front line. Oftentimes you don't hear much about them and they've been extraordinary during this time period. So really looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, thank you for that. All right, Rob, now things get exciting. So once you talk to us for a few minutes here about how the industry is pivoted to provide coverage to both our existing clients and then our new clients, that the clients that we're going after in the industry. Yeah, certainly, Tommy. There's a lot of the various words used to describe the past 12 months in terms of our industry and resiliency certainly is one that comes into play, but another one is adaptability. And Tommy, when I think of our industry and our frontline officers out there, it's really about adaptability. Many of the men and women that make up the ranks of the protective services space regardless of the company you work with, they've had to take on roles and challenges that they previously had never even considered nor were necessarily equipped for. So as an industry, we've certainly had to evolve and provide some very unique training, unique resources, certainly on a technology front, even from a procedural standpoint, ensuring that our officers were prepared to begin providing duties or tasks that they simply had really no prior exposure to. So there wasn't a training manual out there that I'm aware of on temperature screening or access control questionaries as it relates to a pandemic. So there was certainly a lot of scalability involved, but I'm certainly very proud to watch how security professionals across the world have adapted over the past. We'll call it 14 months, give or take now. It goes beyond just looking at the task of screening a visitor onto a facility. It's also power officers learn to engage people that maybe we're feeling some anguish, some sense of nervousness, some concern about what they might be encountering as they're walking into an office building or to a manufacturing facility. So when I think of this, and I think of it the last 12 months, adaptability is something that really resonates with me, resonates within our organization and sort of the organizations that my peers represented for today. What, as I visited with our officers across the Southern United States and have had conversations about what the last year has meant to them, many of them have talked about really a sense of purpose and understanding that what they were doing had such a profound impact, not just on their posts, their position, the ability of protecting, but in many cases on the community in general, on the ability of a manufacturing facility to ensure that maybe packaging material was able to make it out to a facility where research and development was going on or what ultimately became the COVID vaccines. So these officers really began to look at their roles in a much larger scope and understanding that what they do was there was certainly nothing routine about it, that what they were doing out there was going to make a long-term difference in our economy and in the sense of safety and well-being of the people around them, the people in their neighborhoods, the people they interact with on a daily basis. So they're quite proud of what our industry has done in such a short amount of time. None of us could have anticipated the challenges we would have faced when we entered into 2020. Tommy, certainly you and I were looking at a lot of traditional responses and solutions to risk and threats we were facing and then we all had to quickly scale up and adapt and look at new ways of approaching emerging threats. And something I also want to mention when we talk about our frontline officers and those workers out there is they clearly understood the challenges they were being faced with. Many of them were walking to facilities and having to don personal protective equipment for the first time, wearing some very unique garb, operating equipment and devices that were somewhat foreign to them. Yet at the end of the day, they had to take all that off, go home and function your act as if things were normal, knowing that the next day a new set of challenges were ahead. So yeah, certainly an incredible look back in this rearview mirror of what we've experienced. But more importantly, Tommy, I think looking at kind of those green lights that you and I talked about so often, we have learned so much about the impact and the capabilities of security forces as a whole. And I think what we've learned and what we've executed the past 12 months really is going to pave a way for a very unique and diverse landscape ahead of us in the protective services space. Yeah, absolutely, I agree. And I think everyone on this call would agree to your point about the instruction manual. None of us had, but I'm sure we all wish we would have had that instruction manual. Still looking for it. When the thing started. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned two things, resilience and adaptability. And I think those are two key words for us to leave with later on today. Tammy, let's kick it over to you. Share some of your perspective with us. So I definitely think innovation is another word. We all had to really just get in the trenches and decide how we were going to do things differently. I mean, we went from interviewing in person to virtual to outdoor, whatever it took really to recruit and hire the right people for locations. So innovation is probably really, really another great word. Also, when we talk about making sure we have the right people for a location as well, some locations reduce staff. So therefore we were able to kind of move staff around some increase, some decrease. So we had to get really, just get down and decide what capacity each one needed and work from there. So innovation will probably be another great word to use during this time. Agreed, and we all got to learn how to use Zoom and Teams to hold virtual calls like we're doing today. So we've had those challenges as well as we've done. Paul, let's kick it over to you. What's some of your perspectives been over the last 12 months? I have to say I've been struck by the courage and empathy that our organizations have shown. As office buildings and shopping destinations emptied, our folks couldn't go home. Our folks had to stay at work and they had to stay at risk. And some of them actually got sick doing that or on their way to and from those responsibilities. And so it took a great deal of courage for them to perform in these circumstances. And particularly in settings like healthcare, where they were manning the entrances to hospitals and other places where people went to get better or convalesced to be empathetic to the folks who had to leave them behind, who couldn't come in to visit. Those were some tough interactions. I give them all the credit in the world for exhibiting both of those skills every day. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. Lee, we'll finish this question with your perspective. I think one of the nice things, if you would say, and hopefully that continues on is it took the pandemic to have the label of essential put on a lot of the people that was there. And hopefully that's something that I hope coming out of this sticks and we treat it that way, right? Like if we can carry that on as a trend that happened coming out of this, because I don't know if we would have said that before. I think people that were steeped into it understood that, but I think the general public of understanding the definition of essential and then how that goes. Some of the other things, it's very rare, I believe that you have the pressure cooker that was created for understanding technology as it gets introduced. And when the pandemic happened, you saw things like, I think we're honest, we weren't really necessarily ready for like fever detection and visitor management systems to shift the way that they did, where they went from really about like signing NDAs to now being sort of a critical component of visibility to understanding the knowns, the unknowns and the data around it. And I would say even when you talk about the service side of the individuals that were sitting at the sites, they became a critical part of the access control systems that have historically been cards and readers and things like that. So from a business kind of, there's just a lot that happened in a short amount of time. I think we exposed a little bit of our industry being someone like we like to bring hammers to everything in a lot of cases. It's like we were just thrown at it and whether it was tested or not. But I think when retrospect, when you look back at it, coming out of it will be a good adoption of the things that are supposed to stick will stick. I think we'll like the watermark of like everything. It didn't matter. We would have, you know, if this pen would have helped we would have thrown the pen at it during the pandemic. So we did everything. Coming out of it, I think the trend sort of decreased a little bit of what we've seen. Certain things will stick, certain things will go away. And I think as an industry we're better off with the position that we're currently in now than we were a year ago. Yeah, I agree. No, we definitely saw a lot of innovation over the last 12 months and we saw our security officers almost having a sense of belonging to the clients that they were serving. So building on the last question, you know, we've all had to change how we approach our business and addressing the needs of our client. And Tammy, you mentioned this, you know, really our recruiting and the operational perspectives of our business. So, you know, Paul, we'll start with you. What challenges have you seen in our ability to recruit staff sites? And how have we overcome those challenges? Well, certainly the recruiting challenges have been, we had to staff up organizations very quickly. So not only were we looking for the right fit and the right temperament and the right individual to perform the jobs, we were looking for a lot of them at a time where most people's inclinations was to stay home. And so we were forced to invest in much more technology, much more recruiting resources in order to achieve your task. And so, you know, organizations that were able to deploy more resources shined and those that were not able to deploy those resources or it was slow to deploy them, struggled by. Yeah, I certainly agree with that. So, Rob, same question to you from the operational perspective. Yeah, there's time I could take a whole hour of this, but I know that you guys won't allow me that much time. So, you know, Tammy mentioned innovation earlier, as if you think about this, and that really struck home with me when I think about how we've innovated and we hear innovation, we think of technology, but procedurally, operationally, we had to innovate. Yeah, and I recall the early days of the pandemic as many were retreating per se, right? Leaving large urban areas, high population counts, and they were leaving areas, our teams were going forward. Operationally, we've had even greater challenges out there because we were being asked to staff at higher levels. In some cases, more complex, more threatening environments, but regardless, we found ways to make that happen. Something that only us in the Southern States, so Tammy and I could certainly appreciate is natural disasters. And, Tommy, you remember last year, I think we supported roughly five hurricanes in our command center here in Atlanta? Our officers still, they stepped forward and they raised their hands and they said, we're here to support, we're ready for this mission. And we have officers spread out across the Southern U.S., Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, regardless of what they were facing in terms of the pandemic, they recognized the responsibility at hand and the challenge at hand. So we certainly had to innovate, right? We had to think of creative ways to get people moved in and out of areas. Again, speaking of natural disasters, we had to think of creative ways to support the logistics, associate with deploying large numbers of uniformed officers or agents across the U.S. So the innovation piece is something that we've taken as now these lessons learned and have become part of our DNA, really the fabric of how we'll operate going forward. And that's the part that really excites me because we've learned so much from this. We're better security practitioners. We're better prepared and equally important. I think we're better prepared to support our clients regardless of the challenges we face. So when I look ahead at 2021, I think how tough could it really be? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, your word innovation today has become popular. So building on innovation, and we'll dub this as your word for the day, the same question for you, what challenges have you seen and your ability to recruit and staffing those critical sites? Yeah, so again, honestly, just the boots on the ground ability, right? I mean, we had to at some point during the pandemic, we were shut down for a few weeks. So just again, having to decide how will we do things differently, right? So everybody had to kind of decide that. And so some of those ways, as I mentioned before, really was virtual interviews. It was six feet apart outdoor interviews. So it was making sure that we were having lots of conversations and communicating constantly with our customers and potential customers on what was needed. And making sure that we had those folks staffed there. So whether that was, you had to decrease at one site and had to increase at another, whatever it took really just to make sure that we had the right staff on ground. And we'll wrap this one up with you, Leigh. Yeah, so I mean, speaking specifically to the recruiting, I haven't had the privilege of doing it in the manner that the experts are at, but when I think about it, so I'll take a different approach to it. When it comes to, I don't know if we've had to figure out how to communicate and market and tell stories the way that we have now with everything sort of going online the way it was and everybody being this size on the computer screen that it flex some different muscles that I don't know if as an industry, we've ever really had to do nor appreciate to do. And when there came to recruitment, telling our story, I mean, I go back to the essential conversation, we saw people having to communicate how they were essential in that regard. Like it was just a very, very different way of doing it. I think another area that coming out of this, I still don't know if the answer has been done yet, but I think it impacts all of that is the redefinition of safety and security. So we had an influx now of wellness and there's an aspect of it again, because we're very sort of technology driven that we're just gonna throw some things out of like fever cameras or what might be, but whether we have permission actually in the marketplace or whether we're ready to be able to handle a wellness conversation where, you know, simplifying it away, our job was to keep bad people out. So bad things didn't happen. And now it becomes about not getting people sick also. It just, it makes me think whether as an industry, you know, we are having to learn on the fly when it comes to that and how that is now gonna reshape what the expectations are of the people that we are hiring and of the industry and of the marketplace. I do think some of those things actually we possibly don't have the permission to do, if you would, longterm and we may see some of those move as things sort of normalize a little bit, but there are definitely now areas that are gonna stay. Like for instance, I used the term a lot where going from access control to access care and what that means. So it's like not keeping the bad people out but letting the right people in. That's a different dynamic of sort of how you approach a situation or a problem that, you know, is a use case that we're having to start to now as an industry respond to and change again while we're flying the plane during a pandemic with a lot of constraints and unknowns and emotions and everything else that it makes it a little bit difficult. But I do think it's a classic sort of you get stronger through these types of things and you pop out. We had 10 years of like great growth and like, you know, it was a time where you had a lot of people that were managing and now we need a lot of people leading. And I think that's been a lot of the shift that's happened. Yeah, absolutely. I think this will be one of the stories that we put in our instruction manual going for how those access control officers had to adapt to keeping people in to letting the right people in. So it's definitely been interesting to watch this past year. So getting to some more of the still good stories, we've all seen the numerous stories and videos around the country, around the world really showing the work of our frontline officers. You know, Tammy, I'll start with you. Tell us about some of those stories you've seen and really the ones that resonated the most with you. Sure. So honestly, there are just so many stories, right? With men and women who have done just exceptional work during this time. So I don't have one story in particular, but instead what I'd like to say is great job to all of the officers, both men and women and especially with it being Women's History Month and actually 25% of the industry is women. I'd like to say a hat's off to all the women officers who've been boots on the ground during this time, who've been doing the work and also going home and being a teacher's aide at the same time. So there's not one particular story. There are many stories with officers from, you know, from being at medical facilities and being right there in the midst of COVID to just, you know, being at manufacturing facilities. So whatever the case may be to all of the officers, both men and women, great job. Yeah, I agree. A lot of these officers are now wearing multiple hats. They have their day jobs and they're teaching kids in the evening. So Paul, any stories that resonated or stood out for you? I'm particularly struck by the folks that worked in healthcare environments, the individuals who knew that they were gonna be approached by people who were likely not well every day. I hat's off to those folks, you know, they are at the front door and nothing in between them and the individuals coming and seeking help or the individuals worried about people who saw it help. That was, I think, among the most touching stories of the folks who just came and did duty every day. Yeah, agreed. Lee, same question for you. Any stories that resonated with you over the past year? Yeah, I believe being in the DC metro area, so on top of the pandemic, seeing everything that happened at the Capitol and what's going on, we live a couple blocks from NIH and just seeing the response that's happened in that area to making sure people were comfortable and were in the right places and responding to a lot of what goes on. So as somebody who, you know, it gave me, and it's interesting sometimes when you do these things, you see them through, if you have children, you see them through their eyes and their response and having to explain who these people were that I don't know, sometimes they fall into the back in some cases. I know that's part of what people are looking for, that they were sort of front and center with some of the images that were coming out and to have those conversations with my children, to have them, you know, again, I speak a lot to access control from the technology standpoint side, but not to put a human face to it and sort of how that blend comes together. It's just, I don't know, it gives you more pride into the industry and it's like a team mentality that comes out of it that you, it's just touching and it's great to see and I'm thrilled and again, I'll just repeat it. I'm thrilled to see that we've labeled it as essential coming out of it and that the people are getting the credit that they deserve. Yeah, absolutely agree. Rob, we'll close this one with you. Certainly, I like that. The humanizing of protective services, which, you know, historically and traditionally has been very somewhat stoic, right? Very, that command presence, that authoritarian look and our officers have had to really begin to hone their interpersonal skills and when you think about the importance of creating a safe, secure and inviting environment, whether it's a hospital or a manufacturing facility or an event venue, we have to ensure that our officers have that capacity to make people feel good about coming into an environment and or leaving an environment. So, you know, Tommy, I like to talk about shared consciousness, right? Think about how many uniformed officers we have across the country right now that have stood post for hours and days and weeks at a time during very challenging conditions and they all had this shared consciousness that maybe they weren't even aware of, but their responsibility was to protect the well-being of that environment and really to support that idea of a safe, secure and inviting environment. We had an officer at a hospital on the West Coast that actually made national news. You guys probably have seen this one. He was the dancing security officer and it just, it feels good to see officers like that and take away the brand, you know, Securitas and just think about the person behind that. That officer showed up at that hospital every day, knowing that it was going to be a long day, a tough day, but he also realized that the people coming into that a hospital and out of that hospital were going to be facing some pretty tough conditions. So, he wanted them to feel good about that and he found a way to do it through his, just his energy, right? The dancing and just the big smile. And it really has made me look at the world differently as well. Making sure that I remember that, you know what? We're all up against something that's pretty unique, but how do we promote wellness and happiness and that energy amongst us? And not whether we're in a uniform or not, it's our responsibility, right? We certainly can agree that we have a shared consciousness that we understand what we're up against, but we understand that we truly are committed to providing an environment that is safe and secure, but that people feel welcome coming into and they understand that you're there to protect them and to ensure the wellbeing of that environment. So, great things ahead, Tommy. Yeah, no, that was a great story. I saw that too. And to bring this close to home in Hawaii, I saw a video a couple of days ago of an officer in Maui who bikes I think over three miles to return a wallet to a lost woman. The family offered that officer money and he said no. The family posted about it on social media. A few days later, a GoFundMe page was started and they raised $25,000 and they bought this officer a brand new car. So this officer I think had been biking to work for six years and was saving up to buy a new bike and now he has a car. So it's the little things like that and I think humanizing security, right? I think that's a good takeaway and that's what we've done over the past year. So we're coming through a close. I believe our outlook is very promising, very exciting. The future of the industry seems very exciting. So really I wanna thank all of you guys for your time today. Thank you to all of our viewers and we'll see you next time.