Professional Security is one of the more widespread UK contractors due to its origins and specialism in hospitality – pub and club doors, and inside QSRs (quick service restaurants). That had to change sharpish in the covid pandemic lockdown of 2020, and it duly did. We visit the company’s Leeds head office to hear about the company’s ambitions to do more than hospitality. With true national coverage and officer base, Professional have the platform to expand their newly formed security guarding and events division.
Among the first words we hear, from one of those we speak to inside the company, from the commercial director Martin Woollam, are: “We do genuinely want to be different from the security companies out there, in terms of what we do and how we do it.” What he and others go on to tell us about the firm backs that up: the gathering, use and presentation of data (each of the three being necessary – because how many in security and other lines of business take pains to gather, without considering what to make of it?!), the customer service of people, the allying of people to tech. Woollam makes an ‘M&M’ team with guarding and events director, Martin Leeder, who says, ‘if you are in the hospitality industry, there isn’t anyone who doesn’t know who Professional Security is’; but that’s not so for guarding – so far.
Professional (to use just the one word, as some at the firm do as shorthand) are looking to become a top 20 guarding firm, and while that would not see them taking a pop at the proverbial big boys, a striking number we’re given is that Professional has seen some 114,000 SIA-badged officers register for work, compared with (very roughly) 430,000 so badged in the country. The firm’s hospitality division has area managers from the far southwest of England to Lossiemouth in northern Scotland. All along pub and club door security has been a staple of UK security, and yet few companies have crossed over from hospitality to other sectors, or indeed vice versa, even while the SIA door badge holder can do contract guarding work (but not the other way round).
As for what a hospitality security firm has to offer, Professional can point to its coverage rates over Christmas and into the new year holiday of 99.8 per cent, which Leeder describes as a fantastic achievement and which, we can add, for a guarding firm would be fabulous (where 90 per cent is more like it). He goes on to talk of company culture; ‘we are not grey suits, it’s a different way of going about things. That’s reflected both in Leeder’s open neck shirt and approaching the work of security as more than filling a rota (and a paper one at that, on some doors). Instead, the approach is of asking what the problems and challenges are, and of finding solutions (which is why, while the word ‘guarding’ and indeed ‘security’, like ‘CCTV’ are hard to avoid, because they serve a purpose, Professional like some others in the sector would like to get away from those old words altogether).
Just to introduce Leeder a little: “I’ve always been in the security industry, boy and man,” he recalls, “one of the great things about the industry is you show aptitude, you can go a long way.” He’s been on both sides of the fence, as end user and supplier; he was for example Head of Security at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and a member of the campus security managers’ association Ausco; and gained the CSMP (Certified Security Management Professional) qualification through David Cresswell’s ISMI, a course he looks back on as really enjoying and for giving ‘a fantastic insight into risk’. That comes through when Leeder talks us through the crime mapping tool, he has developed to assist in planning for client needs. His qualifications in Risk and Security management combined with his stewardship and delivery of the guarding transformation project at Tesco over a truly nationwide portfolio broken into mini crime eco systems enabled him to create the risk management tool we saw, enabling Professional Security to drive maximum return on investment.
This tool can determine what number of security officers may be required for a location and when to deploy them, according to the crime & Incident statistics. To round off, he also went through Bucks New University for a certificate in event management; and Andy Hollinson of Square Metre’s crowd safety level five qualification (‘another really good course’).
Next: talent.
