Case study · Build
Surveillance & Security
~500 guards · North America
~90% of manual back-office work collapsed
A North American security firm with around 500 guards, run by a four-person back office.
The operation.
A North American physical security firm with roughly 500 guards across hospitals, schools, embassies, and retail sites. Revenue is guard hours billed to clients. Margins are thin, and a four-person back office runs the whole operation.
The owner also delivers a high-value line of work himself, in the mid five figures per engagement. Operations were eating the time he needed for it, so he was turning that work away.
The problem.
Everything ran on spreadsheets and one scheduling tool built for hospitality, not security. The admin assistant spent 2.5 days a week turning schedule exports into invoices, then another 1.5 days every fortnight on payroll.
Guards were occasionally sent to sites where the contract had lapsed, and the company quietly ate the cost. The knowledge that held it together lived in one person's spreadsheets, not in any system.
What we did.
We rebuilt the invoicing and pay pipeline. It reads the schedule export, applies each contract's rates and premiums, produces client invoices for QuickBooks, and assembles the payroll file the bank needs.
Banked hours moved from a colour-coded spreadsheet to an auditable ledger. The pipeline is deterministic, with exceptions flagged for a person to check rather than processed blindly.
What changed.
Exponential Partners understood very quickly that our problem wasn't a lack of effort; it was the amount of time our team was losing moving information between schedules, spreadsheets, invoicing and payroll. What they built reduced work that took days to minutes.
Owner, security firm
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