Ask any client, risk manager, store manager or LP representative what frustrates them most about their security vendor, and you will hear the same answer. Nobody stays. Security guard turnover is the quiet failure in this industry. Alimar has been contradicting that problem for years!
A new face every few weeks is an officer who does not know your building, does not know your people, and does not know which door never latches right. The guard company calls that staffing, and while the guard industry has always struggled with retention, you, the client, carry the added risk of new guards on site who are not properly trained. At Alimar Security we take retention and site training seriously, and our numbers show it.
Turnover is the quiet failure in our industry, and if you’re reading this right now, you already know that. A guard who has worked your site for two years notices the car that does not belong, knows which employees work late, and knows how to handle that faulty alarm panel. Every time your security company replaces an officer, your site starts over at zero.
Officers leave guard companies for reasons nobody in this industry likes to say out loud…but I know. They wait two weeks or more to get paid, on wages that are not even up to the industry standard. They get handed a post and maybe a radio but then nobody checks on them again. So the first job they see on Ziprecruiter paying fifty cents more takes them away, often without a two-week notice, and your building gets a stranger. The number of former officers who ask to come back tells me more about our company than any survey could. People ask me why Officers come back and I that answer immediately. Weekly pay, fair wages, and appreciation for their work. We do not take our officers or anything they do for granted.
We started and built Alimar to hold onto people. Every Alimar officer is paid weekly which by far, is number one in retention. Our annual officer retention is at about 75 percent, and our average officer has been with us an average five years. Those are not perks we have sell to clients (although we do and could!). Those are facts, and they are the reason the officer at your site in January is the same one who was there in March and is still there in September 2026.
Pay keeps an officer. Supervision makes the officer worth keeping. We do not send our people to a classroom once a year and call it training. Our supervisors are on site, going over incident reports with officers at the post, correcting what is missing while the details are still fresh. That is where an officer learns what belongs in a report. I learned report writing 40 years ago on the who, what, when, where and how, and on leaving out speculation and opinion and at Alimar, we pass that on to every officer on the street. When your Risk Manager, insurance carrier, attorney, or a police detective reads that report a year from now, it has to hold up.
We also built our own reporting system rather than buying something from the Playstore. Over the past few months I created an internal app for our officers for both ease of use and instant documentation. They file incident reports from the field the moment something happens, with photos attached, a signature, and the time stamped as it occurs. It comes straight to our supervisors and to me in real time, gets proofread, and goes to the client by email. Nobody waits for a paper report to come in at shift change, and I am not finding out Monday about something that happened Saturday night. Add our 24/7 dispatch to that, and all of us are accountable and reachable, as we should be.
None of this shows up on a proposal comparison sheet, though it does show up in our client retention. Every guard company in Detroit will quote you an hourly rate, and most will land within a dollar of each other. What those rates never tell you is whether the officer standing at your door will still be there in six months, or whether he will know what to do when something goes wrong.
Ask the companies bidding your site three questions. How often do you pay your officers. What is your average officer tenure. Can you show me a real incident report with the names removed, right now, from your phone. At Alimar, we can. Those answers separate them faster than the rate does, so call me for the truth, the service, the trust and the communication you deserve.
We have protected Detroit, Grand Rapids, northern Indiana and Southeast Michigan businesses since 2001. Armed officers, unarmed officers, mobile patrols and camera trailers, all run from one office in Warren. If you want to talk about what your site actually needs, call our 24/7 dispatch line at 586.755.3847 and ask for me or email me at pmartinelli@alimarsecurity.com.