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Ashley Cooper: Focus on your employees and success will follow, says CEO

Paladin Security makes sure its personnel get the training they need
ashley_cooper
Ashley Cooper, president and CEO, Paladin Security Group | Photo: Dominic Schaefer

For Ashley Cooper, getting in on the ground floor is more than a cliché. He started his corporate life there – sweeping the dust and dirt off the floor of his company’s single client, a North Vancouver-based wood fibre products exporter.

Back in 1976, when Paladin Security was started by his older brother, it had only five employees. Today, Cooper is chief executive officer of the company, which under his guiding hand has grown into a Canada-wide enterprise with more than 7,000 employees.

“I worked as a janitor because I could get flexible hours while going to university,” Cooper said. After he finished with a commerce degree, he decided to buy the company from his brother, “because no one was trying to manage it or grow it.”

He didn’t come to the task totally inexperienced. Like many entrepreneurs, he showed a skill for starting businesses at an early age. “Pretty much every summer through school I had some kind of company going, either gardening or landscaping or painting.”

But that experience probably influenced how he expanded his company over the next several years – by paying attention to people. He said Paladin looked at clients and saw different needs that needed to be met. And meeting those needs meant regarding his employees as more than pawns to be moved to fill any spot. He saw them as a resource to be cultivated through training and education.

“A lot of our competitors take the position that ‘a guard is a guard is a guard.’  They put someone into the first available hole – it might be a shopping mall or might be a hospital or an office tower or a construction site.

“When I started in the business there was literally no training. A person could go and get a job as a security person and clear a criminal record check. That’s it. If you didn’t have a noteworthy criminal record, you could get a job as a security guard.”

Today, the provincial government in B.C. requires the industry to provide a minimum of 40 hours of training, but Paladin far surpasses that standard, he said. “There are a number of people in our firm who have to take 200 hours of training before they are able to work in a billable position.”

The company also recognizes that the type of training needed for keeping an office tower secure is different from the needs of a shopping mall, an educational institution or a hospital, he said.

Ultimately, Paladin’s strength is its people, said Cooper.

“Happy employees create happy customers,” he said. “If we engage our employees and empower them and have programs in place that make them feel comfortable with what they are doing, and they have opportunities for advancement, and to grow their career, they are going to provide much better service than a person who looks at it as a dead-end job.” •


Q&A

What sort of character traits or leadership styles do CEOs have to cultivate in the 21st century?

Honesty, integrity, dedication and hard work will never go out of style and will always be requisite traits for a successful person. I think that in today’s world, though, the single most important trait for a successful leader is empathy. Successful CEOs need to be able to listen to and care for all of their people, while also facilitating the needs of their customers and the community as a whole.

I am a big believer in win-win relationships and helping people to achieve their goals. When goals are aligned, great things happen.

What accomplishments are you most proud of?

Watching Paladin win the Canadian BOMA [Building Owners and Managers Association] Pinnacle Award for Customer Service, being named a Best Managed Company and being recognized as a Top 10 Most Admired Corporate Culture were very proud moments for me.  What makes me most proud, however, are the great people that I see at sites and offices across the country representing our brand. We have so many incredible members of our company, and they are on our team because they want to build a future in Paladin and change the world in their own way. For me, to be a part of this is truly amazing.

What is the biggest challenge you have faced?

By far, my biggest challenge has been educating the market that there is a significant difference between security providers. Unfortunately, too many people view security as a commodity when nothing could be further from the truth. Organizations hire a security company to protect their most important things – their people, their assets and their information – yet too many of them engage on price and not quality.

We have invested millions of dollars into our operations centres, our human resources programs, our training programs and our support mechanisms so that we are industry-leading in everything that we do. My challenge is helping prospective customers understand how that differentiation will provide better value for them.

What is the one business lesson you’d like to pass on to others?

I cringe when I hear people say they need to work “smarter” and not “harder.” As much as people want to create shortcuts in this world, there is no substitute for hard work. Period.

Celebrate exceptional leadership at Business in Vancouver's 2014 BC CEO Awards.