Geoff Zeidler, the UK MD of contractor Securitas, was last interviewed in our October 2011 issue. Mark Rowe met him at the security company’s UK head office at Uxbridge on the outskirts of north-west London. He is pictured speaking at IFSEC 2012; he was also a speaker at IFSEC 2013.
Much has happened since the first interview with Geoff Zeidler at the Securitas office in suburban Birmingham in 2011. The tough economy for all services has lingered; the Olympics went off; and Geoff Zeidler has become chairman of the BSIA trade body. All of these topics cropped up. He began by recalling a presentation to the Securitas board in December 2012, and describing the UK guarding market. Now at the 2011 interview he spoke much of the company’s acquisition of the guarding arms of Reliance and Chubb, each sizeable, which took time to digest. Both those acquired companies, Geoff Zeidler recalls, had seen declining revenues over the two previous years to acquisition; and declining margins, “to the point where the Reliance business wasn’t making any money”. And so while they had absolutely some good points, they had some challenges. “Securitas was doing reasonably but not growing fast enough and was at risk of losing its largest customer through a supplier consolidation program.” The three businesses came together, because – as Geoff Zeidler remembers saying in 2011 – ‘As a global company Securitas absolutely believed in the strategic importance of the UK market both to international customers, and how the Security market would develop across Europe’. He also emphasized belief in what he terms ‘the local branch security model, which a lot of people have gone away from’. Here was another topic covered in the 2011 interview; Securitas, one of the world’s largest security companies, able to do business with multi-nationals requiring protection across the UK, or with a single UK site, precisely because of offering a locally-based service with good common processes and systems. That’s for readers; the Securitas board hearing Geoff Zeidler in December wouldn’t need telling about their own company.
He did remind the Board of the UK economic forecasts in August 2010, when the Reliance and Chubb buys were going through. These suggested that the UK was through the recession and would grow. It wasn’t and hasn’t. However Geoff Zeidler says: “I personally am actually pleased how things have gone considering.” One key measure in any security acquisition (or indeed when a company seeks a buyer) is how much of the portfolio you lose. Securitas haven’t lost a lot of customers, and that means, Geoff Zeidler argues, that despite a lot of change, the company has managed to keep focus on service ‘and actually keep delivering a good service and generally have customers who are feeling positive about what Securitas is doing, and its capabilities. That’s the thing I am proud of, the commitment that our people have shown to do this – as it isn’t something a company can deliver.’
“However, when the Board agreed to the acquisitions we had aspirations that the business was going to grow quite significantly with improvements to margins and profitability. Due to the market, we haven’t fully achieved what we would have aspired to do in terms of profitability. In December we did explain this to the Board, outlining how things have changed. This covered where we had won business including some really good significant contracts, many of them global (which is one of the reasons we bought the Reliance and Chubb businesses), and quite a lot of it local’. To Geoff this is good news, as it shows the local branch manager model at work. As for the losses in portfolio, about a quarter were reductions or closures – ‘in other words, people saying, I have got to remove hours, close shops, close facilities, that was the market reducing’ – and about a quarter was some losses to bundled FM (facilities management), ‘where we don’t even get a chance to re-tender, because we don’t do FM, we are still absolutely clear, we just do security’; and about half to competitors, and ‘in quite a few cases, small competitors’.
Overall, he told the board, the market in volume terms has probably declined by three to 5pc, ‘and when you put in the margin and pricing pressures’, the value in the market has declined five to 10pc, ‘at least in terms of the profits actually in this market; and possibly more’. In sum, as Geoff puts it, ‘this is an extremely challenging market which is why I feel pleased with progress even if we have not fully met expectations.
As reported last autumn, Securitas has gone through a group-wide re-structure. Geoff harked back to 2006 and ‘Project Sunflower’ when the company went into divisions: mobile response, static guarding, monitoring; cash in transit (Loomis) and electronic installation (Niscayah). Those last two businesses have since been listed separately, leaving the UK with three separate organizations for static, mobile, and monitoring. October saw the end of those divisional structures in the UK, ‘for two reasons’, Geoff says. ‘The main reason, which was really important in the UK, was that we had quite a lot of large customers, that were being served by the mobile division and the services division, and it’s quite difficult to co-ordinate between the two independently.’ Besides bringing those two together, there was the saving on overheads. Each country did the re-structure in the way that made most sense ‘so in the UK we kept all of the mobile branches, making no change to the operating structure or who was running the business’. Something else new is a chief technology officer in each country, whose job is to look at application of technology including CCTV, access control, handheld PDAs and so forth, ‘to enable customers to manage their risk, their safety, security, most effectively’. This was re-inforced by, a major investment in a centre in Malmo’, in Sweden, Securitas’ home country, to develop remote video surveillance services. Although this seems to suggest a move towards becoming more technology-based, Geoff makes the point that in fact the key thing that matters is the people, whether the static guard on a site or patrollers in cars or the operative in the alarm receiving centre. In the end the technology is an enabler, so the customer gets more effective risk management from their Security spend, and not only pure security, but in terms of business continuity or management generally. Which brought Geoff onto bundling and FM.
As reported last year, Geoff was among speakers at IFSEC debating, good-naturedly, the pros and cons of security as a sole service, and security as one service among several (cleaning, catering, building reception) in a ‘bundle’. At that debate, and still, Geoff believes the security officer and service have to respond to ‘external environment’. Some 363 days of the year, nothing may happen, ‘and actually it probably takes quite a lot to make sure nothing happens’; but those two days of the year something goes wrong, there’s the difference between a correct response or not, which can have an impact on the customer’s business. If something goes wrong with some other FM service, Geoff argues, it doesn’t necessarily have that same impact. “Now you can say, well, you could manage security along with all of the other services and yes, you can; whether it’s as effective, is a decision for the customer.” He recalls Securitas held a seminar for invited customers, who were ‘highly sceptical of the ability to actually manage the separate [FM] services. “We talked to a major customer that has recently bundled their services supply, and the comment that they made when we saw them really implied to us that they were now managing the security themselves; all that was happening now, was somebody else was paying the wages. If that is the model people want, maybe that can work; it is effectively an agency business delivering staff, but that isn’t what we offer though. Separately, we believe there is an awful lot of marketing talk about bundling, but actually when we go to customers and see them, we probably see more unbundling than bundling; we see quite a lot of dissatisfaction with the security and ability to manage costs in bundled services.” Referring to the recent scandal over horse-meat found in beef meals, Geoff suggests that the upshot is the security equivalent of ‘horse-meat in burgers’, which – as he adds – does not matter for 363 days of the year. But no doubt for the same sorts of reasons as lower-cost horse found itself into ready meals, security guarding firms are reducing cost as they respond to prices being driven lower. As Geoff put it: “We have seen some e-auctions with ridiculous prices quoted; we have seen smaller companies going out of business,” because prices and cash flow are low. The customer, Geoff adds, has to take some responsibility. He argues that customers do realise, that though Securitas are not the cheapest, and have come under price pressure, customers realise that if they pull the alarm chord, ‘someone will come’. If you want to save money: where? If 85 per cent of your costs are labour, you bring in officers not as good, or reduce your commitment to them by giving them a zero-hours contract. Not good for the security industry reputation and for customers, ‘but a legitimate option, as long as customers realise’ Geoff says. Another option is to cut the internal management. But, as Geoff adds, if you cut the visit to a site guard to once a month, can you really say you are giving value, or that a guard feels valued? Geoff speaks of a competitor proposing managers to ‘visit’ guards by Skype. “Legitimate, but it’s horse-meat,” he says. To return to the Securitas argument; it focuses on security, which might involve technology that might mean fewer officers, ‘but hopefully they will be more technically skilled; they will have tools that enable them to do things that are effective for the customer’, and by tools, Geoff says (rubbing in the no-FM message) not brooms or wash-wipes.
I wondered if Geoff would raise the G4S-Olympics affair, or I would. It turned out that Geoff did, describing the highly-public shortfall of guards last summer as ‘highly damaging for the industry’s reputation’. He described G4S as ‘a good business’ but added that in the UK it was not really focused on being a security business, as it is so widely extended into other FM, meter-reading and similar services.
Securitas UK ran a ‘leadership conference’ in January, at Whittlebury Hall in Northamptonshire. Some 250 attended the two-day event. Such conferences began when Geoff came in as UK MD in 2008. He knows well that a day of listening to Powerpoint is ‘not that useful’; hence a mix of workshops and team events, and talks by Geoff Zeidler and Erik Jansen, the European chief operating officer. Rob Richardson, the captain of the Great Britain sitting volleyball team at the 2012 Paralympics, took part in a sitting volleyball contest between the company’s area teams. The aims of such a competition, and the away-day (or away-two-days to be exact) as ever are to build team spirit, to send the attenders away to do things better, differently. Geoff says: “The hardest thing for people to realise is the amount of responsibility they have, as a branch manager. They really are the people who have responsibility.” Securitas hails its ‘flat structure’; if a branch needs some uniforms; control is delegated to the local manager. The company’s argument is that the people in the field know how to control costs, and head office is there to support, not tell. Such conferences are also a time to take stock, to ask: now what?! During the event the Securitas people worked on a (still to be finalised) mission statement, speaking of Securitas’ mission to be the ‘lead security specialist’ in the UK and Ireland. Workshops asked what ‘leading’ meant, and how to achieve that.
The January issue of Professional Security featured Securitas’ crime scene guards as used by police forces in the south west. Asking about that, Geoff put on his BSIA chairman hat (metaphorically, not literally) and spoke of the BSIA roundtable chaired by Hazel Blears in February. Before the election of police and crime commissioners in November 2012, police budgets were on hold. Geoff raised the issue of public trust in the private security sector if it were to do public policing, ‘and that is where the damage has come from the Olympics, because it has created a bit of an easy shot [for critics]’. He adds that some Labour PCCs have taken the line of resisting privatisation in the police (as featured in Professional Security last April). Geoff describes the discussion with Hazel Blears and the PCCs as ‘very constructive’, ‘about all the things that the private security industry does’. Police and private sector work together on such counter-terror projects as Griffin and Argus. Geoff’s point to Labour PCCs, and about the crime scene guards; if private security is not guarding crime scenes and the like, much cheaper than a police officer, how does a PCC protect the front-line police budget?! Interestingly he speaks not of front-line or non-front-line but community policing (where private security can get involved) and major crime (not for outsourcing). In brief, and the message at the roundtable: private security can do a lot. Private security officers guarding a scene of crime makes sense, Geoff argues, and works; and it’s something Securitas does a lot of on the Continent. It does come down to trust between police and private security. Down to superintendent, everyone gets it, he suggests (even though the number of CSAS agreements is disappointing); but sergeants and the rank and file police – understandably see it as a risk to jobs. Geoff mentions also the ‘retail support unit’ (RSU) set up by Securitas in Manchester offering response to city centre retailers who sign up for the shared security service similar to that delivered on the Continent. Predictably, the Police Federation objected. The very nature of public policing – the RSU answering panic alarms in Manchester city centre – requires public trust, besides making the sums add up in this decade of austerity. Geoff Zeidler does not envy PCCs. Hence a reason why he became BSIA chairman in June 2012, for two years, to contribute to the wider industry; though being Securitas UK MD is surely a full-time job, without the time and effort heading, and steering policy at, a trade association.
The March issue of Professional Security reported the return of Skills for Security (SfS) under the umbrella, and physically into the offices of, the BSIA in Worcester. As Geoff admits, one question was: who owns SfS? There were four shareholders: the BSIA, GMB union, Security Industry Authority, and the Security Institute. As generally with training, money is scarce and Government funding scarcer. Besides the risk that SfS might have to become part of a non-security skills body (with implications for security being watered down), Geoff raises the argument for linking more to the training company members of the BSIA; and for members to make more use of SfS.
So what for the next few years? Geoff is undoubtably optimistic, but cautious. “The private Security Industry has a lot to offer at a time when all public services are under cost pressure. However, it is also in a dangerous place as the industry is allowing itself to become a commodity, very different to perceptions in Europe. In the next few years we will see whether Security can believe in itself and charge accordingly for both innovation and the real value it adds to customers as a professional service, in which case it has a bright future. If it cannot do this then I suspect the Security Officer will never become a generally respected individual in a career others aspire to.”
