After an interview featured in the February print issue of Professional Security magazine, we return to speak to a guarding company founder, to hear this time about the importance of signage to get the message across to anyone thinking of burglary.
In Bristol as elsewhere you can spot various guarding contractors’ signs on the fences and walls of client properties. At Avonmouth to the north of the city, however, you’ll only spot one guarding name around the light industrial area: Security 2000. As the company founder Ray Redmore (pictured) drove me around, the call for out of hours guarding was plain; there’s no housing around, no prospect of a neighbourhood watch, maybe not even any passing traffic (on a cul-de-sac, for example) to provide, in the jargon of crime prevention, natural surveillance.
Ray remembered a call in the early years of his guard firm from a business near Weston super Mare; Security 2000 did not work there and patrols would have been expensive in any case. What was the problem? Children entering the site and doing damage. Ray went to look, and offered to put up a sign, warning of random dog patrols. ‘If faced by dog, stand stil land put your hands in your pockets.’ Ray laughed at the memory. “And do you know, after that, that’s all it cost them, putting up this sign, and they had no further bother on the site.” Does that work only for children? I asked. Ray suggested it works against adults as well. He gave a similar example of intruders regularly entering a site through a fence to steal from vehicles. A similar warning sign – on the lines of ‘we are not responsible for any injury due to dog attack but we will call an ambulance’ – did the trick. “That’s what our cabins are, on the beginning of the estate,” Ray said. They are your standard white portable cabins, with the Security 2000 logo and other black lettering. Ray recalled his very first patrolling – “I was actually on duty because I started with another guard; he and I shared the shifts.” One Saturday night a car zoomed around the corner into the road; as soon as the driver saw the cabin (not the current one; and in a slightly different spot) and Ray in the cabin looking at him, through binoculars: “I could almost lip-read what they were saying; and they did a u-turn … I realised then that this was the way to do it.” Apart from the deterrent value of the cabin and its wording, Ray made the point that – as with any business – the guard cabin with your name on is your first advertisement. Similarly Ray queries the effectiveness of a business name that does not say what you do, whether a builder or anything.
His vans, likewise, are white with black lettering. He had a couple of new Citroen vans that awaited their livery. Vehicle tracking does the job of lone worker protection, and acts as a guard tour, monitoring where guards are, when; you can even tell which way the vehicle is facing. This industrial estate guarding is different, Ray pointed out, from static guarding with site or perimeter patrols on foot. Ray’s guards have scores of businesses to go around checking, four or more times a night. Static guards would require clocking points, to be sure that the guard is going on patrol rather than sitting and watching television all night: “Because it’s so competitive, they can’t afford proper supervision.” And so you might have a guard putting the guard tour product in a microwave oven – and if it breaks as a result, you cannot prove any wrong-doing. Or, and here Ray recalled his work 20 or so years ago for a national company when he started in security guarding, a guard went around a site the first time in the night, taking the clocking devices off the fence that the clocks were wired to. The guard put them on a desk, to press the clocks at the required times, until the last tour of the night, when the guard walked around and returned the devices to their proper place on the fence.
In his upstairs office I asked about the economy. “We’re marketing now, to get more support from companies that aren’t supporting us,” and indeed there were white envelopes on his desk. “Everybody is cautious,” Ray reported. “Our security costs are embedded into their [his customers’] organisations, and they knew the value of it.” Very few customers have dropped out saying they cannot afford the guarding; apart from the ones that have gone out of business. Even then, security contractors can be fairly fortunate as there may be work – and on the drive Ray pointed one out – in guarding the now flattened site of a former business. Behind Ray’s desk and swivel chair on the wall, in the centre of several certificates such as one for membership of the Federation of Small Businesses, was the plaque for SIA approved contractor status. I asked about ACS. Ray does not think it has any effect on his business; but he cannot tell. Customers might not understand it, or may not have heard of if. But he does not want to be without it. The conversation turned to more general topics: how young people have nothing to look forward to: “There is no industry.” And how can we compete with India, and China?
