Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/488002
There are two types of entrepreneurs in the world, according to Stephan Cretier, the founding president and CEO of Montreal-based security services provider GardaWorld. "There are the Steve Jobs types, the inventers," says Cretier, who launched his firm in 1995 with a $25,000 second mortgage on his home and has grown it into a global, 48,000-employee, $2-bil- lion industry leader. "And then there are those who look at the existing model, find ways to adapt it and make it better," he says. "That's me." Indeed, "finding ways to make it bet- ter" is exactly what Cretier has done to the entire armored vehicle services indus- try. It's now more accurately known, at least at GardaWorld, as "Cash Services," and that's no mere exercise in semantics. Cretier and his team justifiably use the word "transformation" often in describ- ing their effect on the industry. But in order to transform an industry, GardaWorld first had to transform many of its own processes and perceptions. Among those processes was equipping their drivers with trucks, and that trans- formation will eventually result in the integration of 1,000 Peterbilt Model 330s into the GardaWorld fleet. And that process started with Cretier looking at a model — and breaking it. Business people in security Understanding why 1,000 Peterbilt Model 330s are ideally suited to serve GardaWorld and its 12,500 North American clients begins with an understanding of how trucks fit the GardaWorld operations model. When Cretier first launched his business in 1995 — after a few years working in the security industry that followed a few years as a baseball umpire — he launched it with the confidence that the way the industry then worked was deeply flawed and ripe for a major makeover. "I looked at the older brands, and decided we could offer better service in a business-to-business environment," he says. "Instead of security people in busi- ness, like the retired police officer types you'd so often find, I wanted business people to learn the security business and provide our clientele with business-orient- ed solutions. "Yes, I was confident I had the right model. But our first challenge was over- coming our clients' expectations that what we were going to be providing them was simply a truck driven by a warm body in a uniform." Typically, that truck provided the transportation link for a driver team to deliver cash from a client, such as a retail- er or a restaurant, to the bank, or from the bank to an ATM. But Cretier envi- sioned GardaWorld replacing the bank as the central link of the model, from which it could offer services traditionally per- formed by a bank, such as secure storage and cash processing. "The rationale for banks maintain- ing an in-house money room, or a cash vault, didn't exist," explains Chris Jamroz, President and COO of GardaWorld. "It wasn't cost effective for banks to commit that kind of infrastructure. So we offered fully outsourced cash processing, became one of the largest currency processors in the world, and are now the fastest-grow- ing proponent of this new model." 10 l FIRST CLASS Breaking Models GardaWorld — and 1,000 Peterbilts — reinvent an industry Gardaworld "And then there are those who look at the existing model, find ways to adapt it and make it better. That's me." — Stephan Cretier