ProfSec27-09ps

London Interview
guarding firm:
Deputy MD
joins team
We have another lunch with senior
guarding people in London; this time,
south of the river. The invite came from
Incentive Lynx, whose MD Craig Pickard we
last dined with in August 2012, during the
Olympics. Time flies. The occasion was to
meet the company’s new deputy MD, Sara
Taylor, as featured last issue.
Right: Sara Taylor
Photo courtesy of Incentive
Lynx
30
HAPPY
‘Let’s remember that
technology in itself is
not good or bad – it is
either used well or
poorly by humans.’
Cyber researcher Dr
Mary Aiken.
We were at Borough Market,
scene of the June terror
attack, as that happened
to be quite near the head office of
Incentive Lynx in SE1.
A first
Our first question was how she came
to be in the guarding sector; her
smiling reply was - like so many
others who’ve stayed in it for years,
and risen through the ranks - that
she ‘fell into it’. The only possible
connection with private security
was that her father was a 30-years
policeman. She recalls she had been
made redundant from a sales job and
went for another one at a security
company; Securiguard, later bought
by the services firm Rentokil Initial.
The interviewer, like her, was a
Liverpool football fan. To leave Sara
for a minute - we were in a Levant
restaurant at one end of the market,
and could hear the rumble of trains
above going in and out of London
Bridge station - as she acknowledges,
by being a woman in security in the
1990s made her something of a first.
And she and her sales team racked
up successes; including a Rentokil
chief executive’s award. She was in
sales until 1999, though had already
been going into account management,
and working with what was then the
Lord Chancellor’s department. She
went into international accounts in
2000. Originally based in the north,
in Manchester, she moved to Milton
Keynes, albeit mainly working from
home. She was looking after courts
security contracts for 19 years, sales,
SEPTEMBER 2017 PROFESSIONAL SECURITY
account managing and developing
operations; ‘the whole thing ... I was
instrumental in setting up the national
accounts team’. Other contracts she
was looking after were corporate
ones, for the likes of De La Rue; and
Johnson Controls.
Courts contract
In 2007 came a national contract for
courts, that she mobilised and ran;
‘which was 525 courts across the
country, 2500 staff, 35 managers’,
and worth £32m. On day one, she
recalls, there were no missed shifts
anywhere. “It had helped that we had
done most, well, half of it already.
But we had really good mobilisation.
It taught me a lot, that we had to
have everybody completely on plan.
Because there was no room for error
for a contract of that size. But I was
really lucky, I had a fantastic team;
yes, a really good team.” As anyone
who has worked on a large project
to a timetable like that, there’s hard
work that can even take you and
others to the edge of madness. That
we happened to remember the London
Olympics, when all the talk was of the
high-profile fiasco by sole Olympic
guarding contractor G4S, who
notoriously could not mobilise, made
us ask how do you mobilise properly.
In the detail
Sara had already answered, in
fairness. But she agreed that it
was about attention to detail, and
exercising control over that detail;
and keeping the client well-informed
too, she added. Because if you don’t,
the client can do one of two things,
as Sara said. Either they assume that
everything is all right (and, though
she didn’t add, we can add that if
something unexpected rears up, it
becomes an extra problem that the
client was in the dark). Or, they feel
panicky, fearing the worst needlessly.
“It helped we already had three of the
five regions; we had already worked
for them, in the north, Midlands and
the south west. London was one of
the biggest regions that we took over,
and it wasn’t particularly - I have
to be careful, but we faced some
challenges, shall I say, with quality
and numbers of staff; but like I say, I
had an absolutely brilliant team.”
There for growth
On Sara’s appointment, Incentive
Lynx - the security part of a larger
facilities management contractor
Incentive FM Group - very much
made the point that she was there to
drive growth. The Group in recent
years, since it acquired Lynx, indeed,
has further added to its services, a
building engineering and windowcleaning
business. Clients can either
have a single security, a bundle of
services, or to use the jargon ‘total
facilities management’. Professional
Security raised the recent launch
by another, larger, FM contractor,
Mitie, of their ‘City Class’ service, of
particularly smart-looking corporate
security officers for City customers.
“Which we do already,” Sara
said promptly. It’s fair to say
that Incentive Lynx have been
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