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 graduated into the 2009 recession, which is a polite way of saying there was nothing to graduate into. I took a job as a security guard because it was the job available. I did not plan on a career in it.

That turned out to be the whole education. Standing a post teaches you things about this business that no amount of managing it later will — what the work actually asks of a person, what a bad schedule does to someone's week, why officers leave and rarely tell you the real reason. I came up through the field: district manager, then director of operations, then president. I hold Act 235 from the Pennsylvania State Police and SORA from New Jersey, along with training in executive protection and emergency response planning.

We co-founded OPS in 2013 without a business plan. I don't recommend that, but I'd be lying if I said we had one. We learned it by getting things wrong and fixing them, which is slower than knowing and considerably more memorable.

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.