The Journal of Business hosted Harry Sladich, co-founder and chief development officer for GoJoe Patrol Inc., for its most recent Elevating The Conversation podcast.

The Elevating The Conversation podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and elsewhere. Search for it on any of those platforms or the Journal's website to hear the entire conversation, but for now, here are five takeaways from the episode, which runs just under 50 minutes.

1. Demand for private security services has expanded. It has exploded. That's a better word. We sometimes look around and say, I just can't believe this.

We live in this community. We are very connected in this community, and we're pretty picky about who can work for us. But if we could find a hundred more qualified people today that we thought would represent us well, we could hire them today.

The demand is due to the pressure that's been put on law enforcement agencies, due to the resignations and the lack of desire to be a police officer anymore.

Last summer, we were in Las Vegas at the Fraternal Order of Police convention. They meet on a biannual basis, and we wanted to talk to folks that might be leaving law enforcement that might want to look at a franchise with Go Joe.

Without exception, every one of the folks that were in law enforcement that was walking by was saying, "I can't wait to get out." Or, "I'm gonna get out as soon as I can." There's no thought of staying a little bit longer.

The other thing that's happening is that no one wants to be a police officer in today's age, where you're being filmed and being baited. There are some really bad cops out there, but the majority of the individuals are trying to do a good job.

So, the candidate pool is down, and some of the candidates that they do look at are not eligible.

2. Private security is doing work that used to go to off-duty officers. We were just in Savannah, Georgia, opening a new franchise. There, instead of hiring private security, they would hire off-duty police, and they did that for decades.

Well, what they're finding—and the reason we're having some success there—is the off-duty police don't have the time to do off-duty work because they're working so many shifts and so much overtime within the department.

In addition to that, there was one of the police forces down there that I won't name that basically would look and say, "where do we have off-duty police stationed? Okay. And then let's deploy our guys elsewhere." It's like private business is paying for those police officers, but they're using them to their advantage while they deploy elsewhere. Businesses are getting resentful of that.

3. Private security is intended to deter crime, not solve it. Our job is really to observe and report. What we do is we make it inconvenient for the bad guys and the bad girls. They want convenience. So if you keep driving by or you're there, they're going to go somewhere else because they don't want the hassle.

They don't want to have the police called on them and be caught in the middle of the night because they may have a warrant. All the stuff that they have with them is going to get taken away. And so we remind them of that, by the way. And that came from Major Bambino (Go Joe's co-founder and a former law-enforcement officer). He said, "Just tell them, 'Look, If I call the police, you'll probably have a warrant and you're gonna have all your stuff taken away.'" They've trespassed. We have technology now where we can take their picture.

We can trespass them. We make a report, and if they come back again, we can show the police, "Look, they've been trespassing, and they're here again." Data and technology is helping us there. 

With our clients, we're like a big broom. I'm not solving crime, but we're going to make sure that we sweep everything out. And I don't mean that in a derogatory term. We move them off the property, take away the temptation, and they go someplace else. I don't know where they go, but they're not going to be with our clients.

4. Collaboration would benefit downtown Spokane. Collaborations are key. I say, let's see what we can do to collect data, study the data, share the data, and have conversations with the community. 

There's a fractured security industry. We might have two buildings, and another security company has four next door. The police are at some. We should all be meeting somewhere once a month and talking about, "What are you seeing?" You know, let's show a picture of the folks that we think are causing most of the problems. I'll bet you that it's a handful of people that are causing 80% of the problems.

It'll be interesting to see what the folks come up with as we move along. But we've always said, "Bring us to the table. We'll share what we see out there."

5. Franchising leverages resources. I learned franchising  through Red Lion Hotels. I was overseeing and supporting our 1,300 franchises in the system when I worked there.

 So with Go Joe, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is interesting. Why don't we do that with security with the boom that we're seeing?" 

It was a very costly endeavor to become a franchisor. You have to come up with what's called a franchise disclosure document. You have to hire an attorney who specializes in that. You can't mess around.

Then you've got to file your disclosure document with every state. There's 14 registration states. Idaho is not one. Idaho says you're good to go; just sign a contract. God love Idaho. The state of Washington and the state of California are probably two of the worst to to get that passed, in terms of the highest bar.

Most businesses you see are a franchise, and what it does is it lets them buy the business in a box. Marketing is all done. It's been proven out. It has a track record. You have all of the support, everything behind it. With the folks that the franchise with us, we're on the phone with them every week, telling them best practices. Don't do this. Don't do that. 

As the franchisor, you can expand much more quickly by doing that rather than deploying capital into all these different markets. That's why people do franchising, and it has been around for over a hundred years. 

Luckily, I'm in a good vertical that isn't saturated. If I was with GoJoe's Hamburgers, I'd be dead because the competition for that space is so intense. When you're Googling "start my own security business," there's only a couple that would pop up, with us being one of them.