How to Develop Your Security Guard Company’s Unique Selling Proposition

As you already probably know, it can be extremely difficult to stand out as a security  guard company in the security industry. It is a fairly straightforward business, and many people still mistakenly believe that simply “providing good service” is enough to win new clients.

If you truly want to be successful, you will have to identify and develop your company’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition). Developing your unique selling proposition is a two-step process: 1) Identify your niche and then 2) excel in that area. “Today everyone wants to know where the almighty dollar goes,” says Mark Hingston of Elite Protective Services, and your unique selling proposition will make that clear to clients.

Here is how to identify it and use it to win new business.

Find Your Niche

Your niche — the specific audience you serve — will likely depend on your own background and experience. First, determine what kind of service will be your primary focus, such as property monitoring or personal protection. Then determine the audience that you will target in that service. For standing guard security, that may consist of certain kinds of clients, such as power plants or medium-sized warehouses. For personal protection, it may be crime victims or celebrities.

Identifying your niche helps establish upfront the kind of services you provide and who you provide them to. “It builds a stronghold between the client and security company to maintain a working base with each other and be comfortable about it,” Hingston says. His company serves high-end clients that require officers with a high level of training. “If you’re going to stand out in the industry, you have to find a niche and what you want to give to the client. Then productivity will come.”

Hire and Train for Professionalism

For Hingston’s clients, hiring experienced officers and training them regularly means you don’t have to worry about what they’re doing on or off the job, Hingston says. And that makes a great selling point when talking with potential clients. “It’s important that you have some kind of internal control for officers that you can sell to a client,” he says.

For Elite Protective Services, that means a transparent disciplinary process, competitive wages, and ongoing training. The company has its own on-site training facility, and the education it gives officers includes tactics, terrorism awareness, report writing and ethics. Enhancing professionalism goes a long way toward standing out, Kingston says. “Knowing how to relay what you did and how you handled yourself is a crucial area of the business, and the ethics class helps people understand the morals and character of who they are and who they want to be,” he says.

Establish Accountability

Showing the client exactly what your officers are doing and how and when they are doing it establishes transparency, trust, and accountability. “In the old days, you’d shake someone’s hand, then go out and do your thing,” Hingston says. “Now you need your company to show the client exactly what you’re doing.”

Build a culture of transparency around your work, both internally and externally. Elite Protective Services is open about its discipline process and the productivity of its officers, and it uses OfficerReports to give clients an inside view of how its officers work. “Clients want to know what they’re paying for,” Hingston says. “Are they paying for officers to ride around in a parking lot? No, they’re doing tours, and they can see that. It gives the client a little more ease, we’re getting more out of the officer, and the officer has accountability. It helps all of us.”

 

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By Courtney Sparkman


OfficerReports.com logoOfficerReports.com is a software company that provides security guard companies with an easy way to monitor their officers, better manage their operations, and win new business. Take a tour of our software to see how we combine Electronic Reporting, Real-Time GPS based Tour Tracking, and GPS based Clock In and Out into one easy to use platform.


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