Anthony King is MD of the security company Kings Security Systems. He described what his Bradford-based family firm is doing – without making acquisitions – in guarding, electronic security, and beyond.
The windows on two sides of the Kings boardroom give wide views of the city of Bradford as far as the (not that distant) West Yorkshire moors. Anthony King was wearing blue jeans and a grey top, no tie. But then his is the surname on the building. It’s a working informality typical of the place. This is a building with downstairs a warehouse given over to cashpoint machines. The company’s ATM division has installed thousands of the machines, offering from site negotiation to installation and security of the ATM. Anthony King’s father James began in the 1970s in TV aerial installation days; the company moved into intruder alarm installation. Besides electronic security, an alarm receiving centre (ARC), a fire and a manned guarding division have followed. <br><br>Moves are based, Anthony King said, on feedback from clients and the way they see change in the market-place: “People looking for a genuine one stop shop.” One example he gave: suppression systems, after the company moved into fire safety, as it did two or three years ago. Anthony King described it as an exciting move; requiring new skill-sets. “We have brought in a specialist engineer and designer and are working on suppression systems which are getting encompassed in the whole security and fire package. Some of those systems are enormous when you talk of revenue.” He gave the example of a data centre requiring water mist for example as fire suppression. “It opens up completely new revenue streams for us, but also challenges the business; always being dynamic and looking for the opportunities and what the customer is wanting to do.” More and more tenders encompass guarding, security systems; CCTV, access control, fire suppression – he counts them off on his fingers – and monitoring. “And there’s not that many companies in the industry, if any, that can respond to that as a single source, without contracting out to other companies.” The mindset of a lot of companies, he went on, is that they just do not have the resources to manage multiple suppliers. “And the option is to take on a facilities management company; there’s an extra cost for doing that, and you are effectively putting in another layer of management.” Kings’ idea; to offer to companies to get rid of that extra margin, to be ready with the whole package. <br><br>Another change lately at Kings has arisen out of being involved in data centres, “and seeing the market-place when it comes to secure data. We have a whole redundant ARC we moved out of [to centralise in their current building] two or three years ago.” It’s being converted into a secure data centre, for secure back-ups, and disaster recovery for clients: “Again, this is something that our current client base has already been talking to us about.” Clients are saying, Anthony King gave as an example: when they are buying a computer server, who is the server company?! Beyond a web address? If you are going to upload all your data to a company, do you even know which country it’s in? Which continent? “And so leveraging again on the name of Kings and the fact that we do take security seriously, and we do secure a lot of household names on the high street; we are trying to give the customers the confidence that looking after their data is a serious business for us; and a safe pair of hands.” That side of Kings is due for launch in April. “We are going in partnership with Cisco, going through Cisco approval, to be an approved partner.” <br><br>Everyone talks about integrated systems – but there’s a whole new level of integration, Anthony King said. It isn’t just about integrating CCTV and access control and intruder alarms. It’s about integrating sets of systems with other sets of systems, onto a customer’s wireless area network; and a client is looking for a company that doesn’t still see integration as connecting a digital recorder to a network port. Integration in other words, in the view of the IT guys (that may well be who you talk to at your client?) is more than cameras and alarms talking to each other. It’s about bandwidth. As a security company, being able to pull out a product with the name Cisco on can by itself bring a smile of recognition to the face of the IT man the security contractor talks to, Anthony King suggests. His company is now dealing with energy companies, parts of the national infrastructure and Kings as a result has had to screen all staff to a higher level of clearance. <br><br>“There’s a reason for everything we do,” Anthony King went on. “Every time we open up a new door and avenue, it seems to open up another three at the same time. I think the beauty of Kings is that we never put any kind of restriction on what we can do and where we can go.” As he said, you can have a (Kings) guard on the front gate, another Kings person fitting the gates and access control and so on; and managing the firewall. Contracts evolve. A contract might start with guards and develop by making the client’s life easier. In a word, holistic, although Anthony King smiled at what has (as he said) become a cliché. To insert some background: many guarding companies have sought to offer electronic security also, whether by acquiring an electronic installer or setting up an electronic arm to their business. Kings you note have gone the other way, from first electronic security to adding guarding. How, though, does the security contractor manage the one client, if the contractor is providing several disciplines? Anthony King stressed that the client deals with one Kings person. The account manager is not allowed to say, ‘nothing to do with me’. <br><br>To return to Cisco; becoming a Cisco partner has meant going into the IT world, with qualified people, Anthony King said. He suggtesed that electronic security installers fail to do something about the IT sector at their peril: “If the industry does not react to the fact that that is where the market is going, we are very shortly going to see how IT companies fitting the Cisco readers will fit cameras in the major projects; and security companies will be pushed out … unless the security company evolves dynamically to retain that market-place and to be able to give that service.” He likened it to a jigsaw, with everything with a purpose. “It’s an exciting time. Last year was the best year we have ever had. We had a fabulous year last year; lots of new projects … you can’t stand still for two minutes; there has to be a constant evolution of the business, and an openness, to embrace change constantly; and what you were doing last week you might not be doing the week after. What is cutting edge technology now may not be in six months. And you have to be brave enough also to be involved in what is an emerging technology.” Cisco and its network technology is emerging technology, “but you have to be in right at the beginning; otherwise you are too late”. In this case, be too late and IT companies will take access control in the big projects, in universities for example. Intruder alarm installers might find themselves fitting solely alarms, but before you know it, Anthony King suggested, intruder alarms will be hanging on a network. And what then for the installer of alarms?!<br><br>He gave the example of his company’s seven-year-old Internet Protocol (IP) signalling project for 1200 sites for the retailer Dixons. “We are the largest IP monitoring centre in the UK, because we were right at the beginning of the curve. We are the second largest in Europe.” This embrace of technology extends to the PDAs for the company’s engineers. “The days of signing dockets and pieces of paper went for us a long time ago.” The engineers’ first electronic assistants were satchel-sized. Now they’re far smaller and have barcode readers. Anthony King gave the example of a maintenance engineer scanning an alarm’s barcode. It’s hardly only true of a security installer that can potter around with a ladder, ask for a receptionist’s signature, and no-one at the client can tell what the engineer has checked, if anything. Hence barcodes all the way around a system; so that when the engineer arrives he has to scan each part of the system; he has to physically be there with his reader. The client can be sure that the engineer has done what he is supposed to do and what (after all) the client is paying for. Or as Anthony King put it, to genuinely exceed customer expectation; rather than what you can get away with. He spoke of wanting to get rid of the electronic security (like other services) as a mystic black art. <br><br>He gave another example, of a loss prevention manager wanting photographic evidence if there’s damage to a gate, or a vehicle parked inappropriately. The client’s manager can have it within seconds. Talking of guarding, I spoke earlier with Tony Goldstein, the ex-G4S man now head of sales – guarding division, and head of ops Gary Shuttleworth. Tony spoke of being able to offset the revenue spend in manned guarding, or reducing it, against the capital expenditure for CCTV, or remote monitoring. He gave the example of a site of 336 hours a week – that is, two security officers, 24-7. “We are quite happy about going to the client [and saying]: ‘We can reduce your revenue costs by 50 per cent, just have one guy on site 24 hours, and replace him with an investment in technology, in CCTV or remote monitoring; we will do the patrols from the control centre. We will direct security personnel on site to the incident and continually monitor it on CCTV; and you have a very robust operating security system that’s very modern.” At a cost, to repeat, of half the revenue spend. “And your claw back on capital can come in as little or as soon as six months … it’s an absolute no-brainer.” And just to add, if Kings comes across as a firm of individualists: they have hosted the BSIA regional guarding section meetings for the last couple of years. They too can take in the view from the boardroom. <br><br>Visit –
