Ray Redmore, the founder and MD of guarding company Security 2000 Limited, talks to Mark Rowe about his speciality – the out of hours guarding of trading and industrial estates.
Ray Redmore drove up in his deep red Jaguar and unlocked the security cabin door and once inside pulled up the blinds and invited me to sit on the sofa. As I faced the door I could take in the furniture that any night security officer – and his guard dog – would feel at home with. A desk, fax machine, digital recorder for the cabin’s CCTV, a fridge and microwave, kettle, a jar of Nescafe instant coffee, and Pot Noodle. Reflective jackets hung up. To the side of me, a big bag of dog food. Under a table, two metal dog bowls. On a pinboard on the wall behind me, a large-scale road map of Clevedon with patrols marked. Ray Redmore’s latest letter to the magazine – printed last issue – had prompted my visit to the Hither Green trading estate, first turning on the right off junction 20 of the M5, then right again. As over the last decade or more, he put the point of view of the self-made, front-line security guarding company director. My first question – as he had written before the ‘new phase’ of Security Industry Authority regulation – was: what now, if the SIA is abolished? He answered simply: “We go back to normal.” He repeated, as he wrote last issue: “To get people to do this [guarding] part-time is impossible; so we end up with lots of people who can’t speak proper English.” Ray’s point; the labour market for guards doing part-time, night and weekend, work has dried up because of the cost of the SIA badge application, and the training to be able to apply for the licence. The effect, he argued, has been a fall in standard of guards. And Ray could relate to this: “This is how I came into security. If there had been a licence available then, I would have been very reluctant to scrape together £300; I would have had to try to get something else.” <br><br>Ray has twice been penniless – not bankrupt, he is at pains to add – because of past recessions, having run companies in the building trade. The last slump, of 20 years ago, saw him in his early 50s, in a bed-sit, having to start again. Like many people who have become out of work, he became a guard. He recalls he worked for two national companies, and a large local company: “And the first one paid my wages incorrectly for 11 weeks on the trot; I had to write to the MD in London and he put it right, right away; and I decided to leave. The other companies were just as bad and I said, if I cannot run a better security company than this shower, I will eat my hat.” He set himself to offer a service that the guarding sector was not offering: for trading and industrial estates. He tried first at Avonmouth, to the north of the city (we’re talking junction 18, M5). Ray got a 40 per cent response rate to a mail-shot – in other words, he had found a market. He got off the ground, by having companies agree to pay him in advance, and one connecting his first cabin’s electricity for him, ‘because they knew I was penniless, driving a clapped out old Mini’. He chuckled at the memory. <br><br>If a trading estate is owned by one landlord, that landlord can decide that the site should have for night and weekend guarding, and pay for it by including a charge in the rents. If units have various owners, pension funds and the like, the security of each is up to the company renting the space. So if there’s to be any estate-wide security service, someone – an entrepreneur like Ray – has the thankless and long task of going door to door, several times, selling the service, negotiating a price with each. His goal: convincing enough units to part with money so that there’s enough takers to make the guarding service profitable. You are never going to get everyone to sign up, so there’s the disadvantage that you can refuse to pay and enjoy the same lower crime (such as less drug dealing, and fewer burned out vehicles or youths using the roads as a playground) as your neighbour, who has the sense or goodwill to pay. As a brief aside, trading or industrial estates – whatever you want to call them – have seldom been on the official crime reduction radar, whether the crime is of theft from lorries, or vandalism or commercial burglary. BIDs – business improvement districts, an idea of the previous Labour government, were largely taken up by town and city centres, and paid for by national retail and commercial chains. Few BIDs have been for trading estates. Leadership, whether from councils or businesses, has been lacking. <br><br>Ray said: “I have done all the marketing; my wife [Debbie, probably the person you will hear if you ring Security 2000] and I used to do a drive-around, first seeing the size and state of it [an estate] and then we would make a road plan and I would also have a drive-by video of all the premises, so we could refer to the video.” Ray would seek to persuade enough people to pay for the security. The maximum who would ever sign up, he has found, is 80 per cent; if 60 per cent, he’s lucky. “You just can’t persuade all the people to support security.” He appreciates that companies renting estate units may be stretched financially; or, they may feel they have secure enough premises without needing extra patrols. It is hard work to get an estate off the ground with security. I have succeeded with only nine estates out of the 20 I have marketed.” They are in and around Bristol – he’s based where he started, at Avonmouth. <br><br>So what do you get, for signing up to Security 2000? Patrol visits and alarms answered, within a couple of minutes, maximum: “That’s such a deterrent to villains if they know we are about; because they [villains] will have some with a dog breathing down their neck within a couple of minutes.” He can point to arrests, crime drastically reduced, excellent relations with local police – ‘if we call the police, they are around like a shot, because they know it’s a verified alarm’. He reckons that his guards have answered 32,000 false alarms in the company’s 17 years – ‘what a waste of time that is’. Security 2000 doesn’t charge for call-outs, ‘they pay us a set fee for all our services; we will even attend late working females, they only have to ring our cabin and they will be escorted’. <br><br>When Ray began in the 1990s, as now, there seems no getting around the fact that out of hours guarding of industrial estates, business parks and the like, means 12-hour night shifts at unsocial hours for the guards. Ray says: “We don’t have any young people; in fact it got to a point where we would not employ anybody under 25.” If students are looking to earn some money, he goes on, they just want to sit around and do nothing, ‘except one or two, perhaps; but they are only temporarily using it as a financial back-stop; well, that’s not what we want.” In any case, under 21s cannot be insured to drive the security patrol vans. <br><br>It’s guarding with a personal touch – and not only a reliable guard checking your doors and windows four if not more times a night, and not going to sleep – “because guards are notorious for not doing their job properly, and going to sleep on the job; well, that’s not the sort of security we do”. <br><br>Would he seek to cover a shop, or a bank, beyond an estate? I asked. Ray replied that he would consider it on its merits, such as if the shop or whatever was near one of ‘his’ industrial estates. What Ray offers is not on-site security inside a block of offices, fully alarmed, with the guards required to patrol every couple of hours. As Ray said, there’s no-one around but the guard, it’s boring, and there is nothing but the television or going to sleep. “But ours is a very active security; all our vehicles are satellite tracked, so we know exactly where the guards are. For their benefit and ours and our customers, so if any of our customers want to know he [the guard] was around there, we can say.” <br><br>Expanding, taking the service, the idea, nationwide, clearly has crossed his mind. But he has turned 73, albeit a young-looking and trim 73: “You see I am at a point in my life where I cannot take risk, the risk of losing what I have built up. I have built up a very nice living with about 300 regular customers who pay me every month. I have a team of about 25 to 30 guards. My wife is company secretary, she is brilliant. A nice office with book-keeper and typist, my wife runs the office. And all that is going along very nicely, thank you. It will not make me a millionaire, but I have paid off my mortgage. It was a salutary moment in my life, I was at last safe. And my wife was safe, if anything happened to me.” <br><br>Could he franchise?<br><br>Ray Redmore is the marketing man you meet face to face, as one MD to another, who wins you over to the service in the first place. So to get the service off the ground in any place takes intense marketing. Could he franchise it? He’s tried, by employing marketers and ops people, but it hasn’t worked. He needs copies of himself. He has had rivals trying to under-cut his prices (who hasn’t?!), but Ray has been able to see them off because of the personal relationship he has with his customers, for instance ringing him to tell him of the rival efforts. He spoke of spending ‘what probably amounted to approaching £100,000 on five marketing execs salaries and expenses over a period of about five years; it would seem that it is only myself that can actually give chief executives enough confidence to place their faith in my company to protect their assets. It takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings with chief executives to get to a point where one has to realise that either there is or there is not going to be enough funds to support the security. My first estate took six months from initial communication to starting the patrol. It took unbelievable perseverance. One has to speculate to accumulate. In this case, of employing other people to replicate what I had done, it was a costly lesson that speculation is not always successful. On top of the fact that I am not getting any younger, my decision was to consolidate and concentrate on what we already had. Therefore I concluded that franchising would be complicated and impossible to implement.”
