On January 2, 2020, a Thursday, the biggest problem facing most Memphis security companies was finding enough guards to cover their New Year’s weekend shifts. Turnover was high. Wages were low. Clients wanted more hours for less money, and the industry’s margins were thin enough that saying no felt like a luxury.
Eleven months later, the industry looks nothing like it did on that Thursday.
COVID-19 created entirely new categories of security work that didn’t exist in February. A record-shattering homicide count pushed demand for private protection to levels nobody anticipated. A national reckoning over policing changed the public’s relationship with uniformed officers of every kind. And through all of it, the guards themselves worked through a pandemic that put them in direct contact with the public every single day.
This is the year the Memphis security industry would like to forget and can’t afford to. Because what happened in 2020 didn’t just test the industry. It rewired it.
Q1: The World Before
January and February felt normal. Security companies were grinding through the usual post-holiday slowdown, picking up contracts from property managers who’d made New Year’s resolutions about safety, losing a few guards to the FedEx hub and Amazon warehouse jobs that always compete for the same labor pool.
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance processed guard registration renewals at the typical pace. TDCI’s private protective services division, which oversees the licensing of contract security companies under T.C.A. SS 62-35-101, reported no unusual activity in the first quarter.
Then March arrived.
The first confirmed COVID-19 case in Shelby County came on March 8. By March 23, Mayor Jim Strickland had issued a shelter-in-place order. Restaurants closed. Offices emptied. Retail went dark. And the security industry split in two: companies that had contracts to protect now-vacant buildings, and companies whose clients had simply shut down and stopped paying.
The first group scrambled to adapt. Vacant properties still needed patrol, and in some cases needed more attention than when they were occupied. Break-ins at shuttered restaurants and retail locations spiked in April and May, particularly along the Beale Street corridor and in the medical district where construction sites sat idle.
The second group suffered. Small firms that depended on event security, bar and club door work, or temporary retail contracts saw their revenue drop to zero almost overnight. Several Memphis-area companies I’ve spoken with laid off 40% to 60% of their guards between March and May.
Q2: New Work, New Rules
By late April, the work started coming back, and it looked nothing like the work that had disappeared.
Hospitals needed guards to screen visitors at entrances. Temperature checks, mask enforcement, capacity limits. Baptist Memorial, Methodist Le Bonheur, and Regional One all expanded their security contracts to cover COVID screening stations at every public entrance. The work was tedious, low-skill, and absolutely essential.
Grocery stores and pharmacies followed. Kroger locations across Shelby County posted guards at doors to manage capacity and enforce the mask mandate. The guards weren’t there to stop shoplifters. They were there to count heads and tell people to cover their faces.
This was new territory for an industry built around theft prevention and access control. Guards trained to watch for concealed merchandise were now watching for exposed noses. The skill set was different. The confrontations were different. And the volume was relentless.
By June, health screening and compliance enforcement accounted for a significant share of new security contracts in the Memphis market. Companies that pivoted quickly, retrained their guards, and pitched these services to hospitals, retailers, and office buildings picked up business they never would have won in a normal year.
Companies that waited, assuming the pandemic would be short-lived and normal security work would resume, found themselves chasing contracts that had already been awarded to faster competitors.
The Summer of Uncertainty
June and July brought a different kind of pressure. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May set off protests across the country, including in Memphis. Downtown saw several weeks of demonstrations, some peaceful, some not. Businesses along Main Street and in the South Main district boarded up windows. A few hired security. Most just waited it out.
For private security companies, the summer was complicated. The public mood toward uniformed authority figures, even private ones, shifted in ways that are hard to quantify. Guards reported more verbal confrontations with civilians. Mask enforcement became politically charged. A guard asking someone to put on a face covering could trigger a five-minute argument or a threat.
Several company owners I spoke with said their guard turnover rate in Q3 was the highest they’d ever recorded. Not because of pay (wages were actually rising). Because the job had become harder, more confrontational, and less safe than it had ever been.
And underneath all of it, the city’s violent crime numbers were climbing.
Record Violence, Record Demand
Memphis recorded its 200th homicide of 2020 before Labor Day. By October, the count had passed 270, well ahead of the pace needed to break the previous annual record. As of this week, with a full week left in December, the city has recorded more than 320 homicides. The final number will almost certainly exceed 330.
That’s a record. Not by a small margin.
The effect on private security demand has been direct and measurable. Property managers who considered guard services optional in January were signing contracts by September. Apartment complexes in Hickory Hill and Parkway Village, neighborhoods hit hard by violent crime, added overnight patrol. Churches on Winchester Road and in the Raleigh area hired armed guards for Sunday services. Warehouses along the I-40 corridor east of the city started posting guards on loading docks where they’d never had them before.
The demand spike created a problem the industry had been warning about for years: there aren’t enough guards.
The Guard Shortage
Even before 2020, the Memphis security labor market was tight. The industry pays entry-level wages for work that requires standing for hours, dealing with difficult people, and occasionally facing real danger. FedEx’s Memphis hub, the largest in the world, offers starting wages that compete directly with security companies and comes with benefits most guard firms can’t match. Amazon’s expanding presence in the metro area added another competitor for the same workforce.
In 2020, the math got worse. Demand for guards surged while the labor pool shrank. Unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and legitimate fear of catching COVID kept potential applicants home. Guards who had been working through the pandemic burned out and quit. New hires needed TDCI registration, background checks, and at least minimal training before they could start, and the processing timeline stretched as state offices dealt with their own pandemic disruptions.
The result: wages climbed. Starting pay for unarmed guards in Memphis moved from $10 to $11 an hour in early 2020 to $13 to $15 by fall. Armed positions jumped from a $14 floor to $18 to $20. Companies that couldn’t raise rates fast enough lost guards to competitors.
Allied Universal, the largest private security company in the world, expanded its Memphis recruiting operation this year, posting dozens of local positions on job boards throughout the fall. GardaWorld, the Canadian firm with a growing U.S. presence, maintained steady operations out of its Memphis branch. Securitas, the Swedish multinational, held its existing contracts and picked up a few new ones.
The big nationals have advantages in a labor crunch: deeper pockets, better benefits, and the ability to shift guards between accounts. Local firms like Phelps Security and Imperial Security, which have been part of the Memphis market for years, held their ground through reputation and client relationships. They know the city. Their guards know the properties. That matters when you’re trying to keep a client who has options.
Still, the staffing pressure hit everyone. Every company I talked to this fall said the same thing: they could sell twice the contracts they’re selling if they had the guards to fill them.
What the Industry Learned
Not every lesson from 2020 is grim. The companies that survived and grew this year share a few common traits worth noting.
They diversified fast. The firms that added health screening, temperature checks, and compliance enforcement to their service menus in April and May captured revenue that sustained them through the summer slump in traditional security work. Diversification wasn’t a strategy. It was survival.
They raised wages before they had to. Companies that bumped pay proactively in the spring kept their best guards. Companies that waited until guards started leaving paid more to recruit replacements who were less experienced and less reliable.
They invested in their guards. PPE, hazard pay, flexible scheduling for guards with childcare challenges: the companies that treated 2020 as a year when their workforce needed support, not just management, held onto people longer. Retention in this industry has always been the real competitive advantage. This year proved it.
The Toll on the Guards
This part doesn’t get talked about enough.
Security guards in Memphis worked through the entire pandemic. They stood at hospital entrances when the case counts were rising and nobody knew how the virus spread. They enforced mask rules and got screamed at for it. They patrolled parking lots at businesses closed for the night and found homeless encampments where there used to be customer cars.
Several guards contracted COVID on the job. At least two that I’m aware of were hospitalized. I haven’t been able to confirm any guard deaths in the Memphis area directly linked to workplace exposure, and I hope the final tally stays at zero. The data is incomplete.
The mental health toll is harder to track. Guards work alone. They work nights. They work holidays. They don’t have union representation in most cases, and the companies that employ them don’t typically offer mental health benefits. A guard who’s been working 50-hour weeks through a pandemic, getting yelled at over mask enforcement, and watching the city’s murder count climb past 300 is carrying a load that nobody’s measuring.
When this industry talks about 2020 as a growth year, and in revenue terms it was, someone should mention what that growth cost the people doing the actual work.
Looking Into January
The honest answer to “what happens next” is that nobody knows.
The pandemic is still raging. Shelby County’s case numbers in December are higher than they’ve been at any point this year. Hospitals are strained. The economy is fragile. The crime numbers show no sign of leveling off.
Demand for private security will almost certainly stay elevated through the first quarter of 2021 and probably longer. The contracts signed in 2020 don’t expire on New Year’s Eve. The conditions that drove those contracts haven’t changed.
The guard shortage will get worse before it gets better. The labor market dynamics pushing wages up haven’t reversed. Companies that can’t raise their billing rates to match rising guard wages will get squeezed on margins or lose staff to competitors. Some small firms won’t make it.
The big question the industry hasn’t answered is whether 2020’s changes are permanent. Will health screening and compliance enforcement remain standard parts of the security service menu, or will they fade as the pandemic recedes? Will the businesses that hired guards this year keep them on when the immediate crisis passes? Will the public’s complicated relationship with uniformed authority settle into something stable?
I’ve covered this industry in Memphis for a long time. I’ve never seen a year like this one. The security business in this city is larger, better-paid, and more central to daily commerce than it was 12 months ago. It’s also more stretched, more exhausted, and more uncertain about its own future than at any point I can remember.
2020 didn’t just test Memphis security companies. It changed what the job means.
That change isn’t going back in the box.