A security company in Manhattan transformed invisible guards into attention-grabbing figures by dressing one in a suit, sunglasses, and earpiece. The unexpected appearance made tenants notice and talk, raising occupancy rates and letting the company charge $6 more per hour. The lesson: win by being the biggest fish in your customer's specific view, not the best in the world.
You guys remember the Beijing Olympics with Michael Phelps? He was going for the 7th gold medal. Mark Spitz was the only other racer up to that point to win 7 medals. So if he got a gold in this event, he would win. And this was the event where he won by hitting the wall as hard as he could and the other guy was gliding in. Mike Phelps won by 1/100th of a second. Number 1 gets everything. Number 2, we don't even remember his name. Milorad Šerbock, by the way. I interviewed him. The best in the world. If you're not the best in the world, you're number 2, which means you're a loser. Right? All the winnings go to the number 1 guy. Number 2 gets the scraps, and number 3 and everyone else, you know, gets the bone if there's even a bone left. There's nothing that goes to the losers. You gotta be first or you're done. At least that's what I thought. My son Jake was 7 years old at the time. I went to Jake, I said, "This is horrible. It's over for everybody else." I said, "Jake, you just witnessed the best in the world." And it's amazing what you can learn from 7-year-olds. 'Cause my son Jake looks up at me, he goes, "He's not the best in the world." He goes, "Jimmy Mickledork is." I'm like, "Who's Jimmy Mickledork?" He's like, "He's the guy at the lake. He can swim the entire lake. He's the best in the world, Dad." I'm like, "Haha, 7-year-old Jimmy Mickledork. He's a kindergartner and he can swim the lake." I said, "If Michael Phelps came to that lake, he would kick Dork's ass." Which you shouldn't say to a 7-year-old with your wife there, because she was pissed when I said that. And then Jake said the most profound thing he ever could have said to me. He looks at me and he goes, "Michael Phelps has never been to our lake, Dad." The best isn't the best in the world. It's the best in the consumer's vision of the world, the lake. Are you the biggest fish in what the consumers see as the lake? I got a call from a security company. A company that provides security guards. The problem with a security guard is they're very unnoticeable. You go to a New York City building, you don't see the person in their blue suit just sitting there. You don't acknowledge them, they don't acknowledge you. And the problem if you own a security company is significant. The bill rate for a security guard is about $14 an hour, maybe $15 an hour. Those guys get paid $10 an hour, and then you have the costs, the COGS, above that of overhead, insurance, and so forth. Some of these insurance companies literally make a dollar an hour per guy. So how you win in the security business is more guys. If you can get 1,000 guys out there, now you're making 1,000 bucks an hour. Well, this small security company in New Jersey called, and they were providing services in Manhattan. They had 100 security guards, and they were getting squeezed on the price too. So what you do when you want to be the S is first you have to observe what you're doing. So I went to the building that they had one of their guards in just to watch how it worked. And what would happen is if someone walked in, a new person going to their office would walk in, you had to take a turn to get to the elevators, and that's where the security guard was. And I was hiding behind like this bush, which is very awkward. So I'm sitting there behind this bush, which freaked out people in the first place. Lesson 1. So I'm sitting there. And the first guy comes in, his name was Joe Spano. Hey, Joey Spano! Joey, how you doing? And then there was this really elderly woman too, just come in, it must have taken her an hour to get to the elevators. Unnoticeable. And we sat back and we said, what can we do to be the est, the biggest fish in our little lake in this building? Well, there's a behavioral thing. And there's a behavioral tendency we all have, it's hardwired into us from caveman days, that when something unexpected happens, we catch it. You know, as we're sitting here right now, we're all kind of looking, some making notes, maybe a few people texting. It's kind of expected, it's noise. But if someone walks in that side door, all of our heads automatically turn. We actually can't even prevent ourselves from turning because it's unexpected. So knowing that behaviorally, we said we're gonna change things in the security company. We took that guy, his name was Frank, we took him out of his blue uniform and put him in a suit. We get him a briefcase, We get him sunglasses and we got him one of those little ear doohickey things. And we said, just sit there. This is true. It was freaking hysterical. Because it was around the corner, when people came, I wanted Frank to be on his ear doohickey going, mm-hmm, uh-huh, mm-hmm, like being CIA-ish. But he couldn't see them coming. So we had this app on iPhone where you shake the app, like the phone, and it'll shake his phone in his pocket. And I was sitting behind the bush in the corner like this, and I was just gonna shake the phone, right? Which I'll tell you, as people come in and you're shaking a phone like this, it's not good. Tony comes in, he's like, "Hey, how you doing?" Right? And so I start shaking the phone. So I'm sitting there shaking, and Frank doesn't feel it in his pocket. So then I start saying, "Touch yourself! Touch yourself!" Like this. Which, never do that. Tony comes around the corner, Frank touches his ear, and Tony goes, "Uh, do I— I gotta go, I gotta go," and puts his phone down and runs into the elevator. More miraculous, this elderly woman, she comes around the corner, she sees it, becomes like an Olympic hurdler, she dives over, runs into the elevator and goes up. And we all know what was going on upstairs. The talk around the water cooler. You know, it was like, "The CIA here? Is Obama?" Visiting! This building started becoming the talk of the town. Occupancy rates, as you know, this was quite a while back, 2008-ish, horrible. This building was experiencing 50% occupancy rate, which Michael, you can speak to, is bad. Yeah, very bad. This building over the next 6 months, we did this for a 6-month beta, started getting more occupants. After 6 months, the building management called the security company and said, "Hey, we got something going on here. We know what you guys are doing. You're packing the building because you're dressed like the CIA. You have become our best marketing piece. What do we have to pay you to keep this going?" And we moved our rates up about $6 an hour just by dressing differently. That's how you become the est. No one cares we're a security company. No one cares about accounting or jewelry or anything. What we care about is that little thing that makes the difference because it catches our attention. How can you be radically different so people turn their head and look at you?
