Guarding

London visit

by msecadm4921

Among the guarding contractors that have joined a larger facilities management (FM) group – and there are a number of them now – are the London-based Incentive Lynx Security. Mark Rowe visited for an update. 

 

If you can ever for whatever reason visit the offices of Incentive Lynx Security and you are the sort of person who likes sports memorabilia, make sure you go. In the tourist season, it’s not many minutes walk from a packed South Bank to the Incentive Lynx base in SE1 (the nearest Tube station is Southwark, or Borough – indeed, the Incentive Lynx contract win at Borough Market nearby featured in the August issue of Professional Security). The entrance to the offices is discreet and access is remotely-controlled. Inside, on elegant white walls you face signed shirts by recent England cricket and rugby union teams. Only later did it occur to me that the shirts – of individuals with specialisms coming together in a group – found an echo in how Lynx Security joined Incentive, the contact cleaning and facilities management company. Craig Pickard, the MD of Incentive Lynx, remains, and the two companies stressed at the time of acquisition in February how Craig continued to lead his team; he and Jeremy Waud, MD of Incentive FM Group have been friends for years; and the security contractor and FM firm were complimentary. 

 

Speaking in a meeting room along the corridor from Incentive Lynx’s neat control room, Craig Pickard made plain that he was alive to how a security contractor’s acquisition by an FM firm could go wrong. “I think some companies, by combining, diluted the individual parts; so when we thought we would be stronger in that sort of situation [in an FM group] we wanted a situation where each constituent part keeps its own identity; and I think that is what we have achieved with the Incentive Group.” In brief, Incentive Lynx and Incentive are separate, but can operate together. There was, he acknowledges, attention from customers and beyond about how the acquisition would work; other guarding companies have done something similar: VSG, now part of Compass Group; and Knightsbridge Guarding, acquired by Rentokil Initial. Readers with longer memories will recall the sale by Rentokil Initial of the guarding arm Initial Security to the outsourced services company MITIE in 2006, that made that firm one of the largest in UK contract guarding. To sum up, each acquisition has its own story. “I am happy to say there has been no effect,” Craig Pickard said of the acquisition by Incentive. “Lynx has cruised right through it, simply because of the strategy of keeping everything separate. And it has worked really, really well. We have had no shrinkage at all from our previous contract base. And we have some very good things in the pipeline.” 

 

As the debate at IFSEC showed on contract guarding as a single service versus security as one of multiple ‘bundled’ services, there is not a right or wrong answer, only what the market asks for. It has to be said that there can be an element of fashion about one or the other. Craig Pickard said: “At the same time I think there are a large number of buyers and customers who are wary of this dilution, of both services and contract longevity.” If asked to do a bundled service, if it meant selling a compromised individual service, ‘if it came to that, we would withdraw,’ Craig Pickard said. ‘Because we wouldn’t want to win a contract and then lose it because the infrastructure wasn’t there to support it and to manage it. Because as you know, reputation is everything, and people hear more about lost contracts than won contracts.’ It is, I suggested to him, very hard to win a contract, and very easy to lose one? “Absolutely. With respect to sales people, your best sales people are your customers or previous customers who have moved on, because they have a totally independent view, and if they are talking to colleagues or other buyers in the industry, if they say good things about your company, it’s a fantastic reference. And a large amount of our growth has been from word of mouth.” As an example, the only extra Olympics work Lynx took was for existing customers; for instance, the open-air giant screen showing the Games at Potters Fields on the South Bank near Tower Bridge and City Hall prompted a client nearby, More London, to ask for more guarding.  

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