About

I'm Mitch Gyger. I run OPS Security Group, a contract security company based outside Philadelphia, and I lead its commercial and government sales.

What I run

Contract security is a simple business to describe and a hard one to run. We put trained, licensed, uniformed officers on client sites and we are accountable for what happens there. We bill an hourly rate per post, we pay an hourly wage, and the spread between them is the business.

OPS is roughly 650 people across two entities, working in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington DC, New York, and Nevada — commercial office and lobby, residential and mixed-use, industrial, education, retail, healthcare, and federal and state government sites.

I co-founded the company, and I hold two jobs in it at once. I'm responsible for the P&L as president, and as chief revenue officer I lead sales across both motions: commercial accounts, which are sold and renewed annually, and government work, which is won through RFPs on multi-year terms. Those two jobs are usually held by two different people. Holding both changes how you think, and most of what I write comes out of that.

And the software

I'm also co-founder of Curo Shift, a workforce management platform built for security guard companies — by a security guard company. It exists because we needed it and nothing on the market did the job. Scheduling, coverage, and the administrative weight of running a distributed hourly workforce are the daily reality of this industry, and they were being handled with tools designed for something else entirely.

Building the software changed how I read my own operation. You cannot model a business you do not understand, and you find out fast which of your assumptions were never true.

How I got here

I studied psychology at Drexel and worked security part-time for all four years of it. There was nothing noble about the choice. It was an easy job that paid well for two or three days a week, which is exactly the right arrangement when you are trying to get through school.

I mention that because it is the same calculation almost every officer we hire is making right now. Flexible hours, decent money, no barrier to entry. I took this job for those reasons before I ever tried to convince anyone else to. I have been on both sides of that transaction, and it is hard to overstate how much it changes what you think you are selling.

The psychology turned out to matter more than I expected. The central problem in this business is not guarding — it is why people take a job, what makes them stay, and what quietly makes them leave. I spent four years studying exactly that, and every year since watching it play out on real schedules, with real people, at scale.

It stopped being a job when I went full-time and moved into management. That is the point where you stop thinking about your own shift and start thinking about eighty other people's, and it is a different job wearing the same uniform. I came up through the field from there — district manager, then director of operations at another firm — learning the work at the level where it actually happens, which is the only level where you find out what is true.

It became my future in 2013, when we launched OPS and signed our first customers. We did it without a business plan. I don't recommend that, but I'd be lying if I said we had one. I was chief operating officer for the first six years and have been president since 2019.

Along the way I went back for a master's in homeland security at Saint Joseph's, while building the company rather than instead of it. In 2020 I co-founded Curo Shift, because the software this industry needed did not exist and I got tired of waiting for somebody else to build it.

The decision that shaped the company more than any other was choosing to put our own people first — in what we pay, what we schedule, and who we are willing to serve. That single choice rules out roughly half of the customers we could otherwise sell to. It is also why the ones who stay, stay.

What I'm good at

Carrying a number and a P&L at the same time, and letting the P&L win the argument. It is very easy to book revenue that costs more to serve than it earns. When the same person owns both, that stops being someone else's problem.

Reading a labor business as one system instead of seven departments. Recruiting failures show up as coverage failures; coverage failures show up as overtime and churn. Most companies measure those in different systems, on different calendars, owned by different people — and so never see that they're one problem.

Finding the specific post, shift, or week where the money actually leaks. Aggregate numbers hide it. And changing my mind when the second month of data disagrees with the first, which happens more than I'd like.

What I believe about this industry

Retention and coverage are not an HR concern sitting beside the financials. They are the financials. Turnover produces vacancies, vacancies get covered with overtime or not covered at all, and both come straight out of margin. Most of the industry manages these as separate problems and cannot see that they're the same one.

A contract you can't staff is worse than one you never won.I say that as the person who owns the bookings, which is the only reason it's worth anything. An unstaffed contract costs you the revenue, the client, the reputation, and the overtime you burned trying to cover it.

Commercial and government security are two businesses with two scorecards. One is judged on gross profit, wages, and quality of work. The other is closer to a return-on-capital decision — the highest-paid posts in the industry, multi-year terms, dedicated management, and turnover an order of magnitude below the commercial side. Judging one by the other's metrics is a category error, and the gap between them is the clearest evidence I've seen of what actually keeps people in this job.

This industry's real constraint is that it can't see itself.The data lives in people's heads, in text messages, and in spreadsheets. Most operators genuinely cannot answer basic questions about their own business. That's the problem I spend my time on.

I write about this at /writing. The fastest way to reach me is email.