Twelve months ago, the biggest worry for Tennessee’s security industry was a tight labor market. Companies couldn’t hire guards fast enough, turnover was brutal, and wages were stagnant. Those problems haven’t gone away. They’ve been joined by a pandemic, a homicide crisis in Memphis, a nationwide reckoning over policing, and an economic disruption that split the industry into winners and losers more decisively than anything in recent memory.
Here’s what happened. Here’s who survived. Here’s what comes next.
The Timeline Nobody Planned For
January and February 2020 were normal months. Companies were hiring, contracts were stable, and the biggest operational headache was the perennial struggle to find guards willing to work overnight shifts for $10.50 an hour.
March changed everything. Tennessee’s stay-at-home order took effect March 31, though many businesses began closing earlier. Within two weeks, event security companies lost 80% to 100% of their revenue. Hotel and hospitality security staffing collapsed. Convention center security contracts, worth significant annual revenue for several Tennessee firms, evaporated overnight.
The companies that survived March were the ones with diversified client bases. If you had healthcare clients, they needed more security, not less. If you had warehouse and logistics accounts, demand actually increased. If your book of business was concentrated in entertainment, events, and hospitality, you were in serious trouble.
April through June was the great sorting period. Companies with the right client mix hired aggressively (or tried to, given the labor shortage). Companies with the wrong mix laid off staff, furloughed guards, and in some cases shut down entirely. I’m aware of at least three Tennessee security companies that closed permanently during this window, all of them small firms with fewer than 50 employees and heavy exposure to the event and hospitality sectors.
The summer brought a different crisis. Memphis homicides surged past 150 by August, ultimately reaching approximately 330 by year’s end. That number is near the city’s all-time record and represents a roughly 30% increase over 2019. The violence drove commercial property owners, apartment complexes, and retail businesses to increase security spending, creating demand that partially offset losses in other sectors.
Fall brought the election, with its own set of security requirements, and the holiday retail shift from storefronts to warehouses. By December, the industry’s shape had changed in ways that won’t reverse when the pandemic ends.
The Winners
Healthcare security had the most dramatic year of any segment. Hospitals across Tennessee added screening posts at every entrance, sometimes doubling their security headcount practically overnight. Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Erlanger in Chattanooga, UT Medical Center in Knoxville: all expanded security operations significantly.
The work was hard. Guards at hospital entrances checked temperatures, enforced mask requirements, managed visitor restrictions, and dealt with the emotional fallout of turning away family members who wanted to see patients. The confrontations were frequent and sometimes violent. Several Tennessee hospitals reported assaults against security officers during 2020, though exact numbers are difficult to obtain.
Healthcare security contracts tend to be stable and well-paying relative to other security work. Companies that held hospital accounts entering 2020 saw those accounts grow. Companies that won new hospital business during the pandemic will likely retain it. The expanded security posture at healthcare facilities is the new baseline.
Logistics and warehouse security grew for simpler reasons: e-commerce volume exploded. Memphis, as the nation’s cargo hub, experienced this more intensely than almost anywhere. FedEx’s holiday volume shattered records. Amazon continued building fulfillment centers across the state. Distribution operations for Nike, AutoZone, Williams-Sonoma, and others all ran extended shifts to handle online orders.
Every warehouse needs security: access control, perimeter patrol, package integrity monitoring, employee screening. More shifts means more guard hours. More temporary seasonal workers means more background checks and more access control processing. The math is straightforward.
Residential patrol and neighborhood security saw steady growth throughout the year. Homeowners and HOAs in suburban communities around Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville contracted with patrol companies at higher rates than in previous years. The drivers were multiple: more people working from home meant more people noticing daytime activity in their neighborhoods, rising crime rates increased anxiety, and the reduced police response to non-emergency calls pushed residents toward private alternatives.
The Losers
Event security essentially ceased to exist for most of 2020. Nashville’s entertainment industry, which employed hundreds of security workers across Lower Broadway, the Bridgestone Arena, Nissan Stadium, the Ryman Auditorium, and dozens of smaller venues, shut down in March. Some venues reopened at limited capacity during the summer and fall, requiring a fraction of their normal security staffing. Most stayed dark.
Event security companies face a particular challenge: their workforce is largely part-time and event-based. When events stopped, those workers found other jobs. Rebuilding that workforce when events return will require recruiting, training, and rehiring on a massive scale. Several event security company owners told me they expect it will take 12 to 18 months after events fully resume to reach pre-pandemic staffing levels.
Hospitality security followed a parallel path. Hotel occupancy in Nashville dropped below 20% during the spring lockdown. Memphis and Knoxville hotels fared slightly better, and occupancy remained well below 2019 levels through the entire year. Hotels that maintained some security typically used existing employees in reduced capacities rather than maintaining contracts with external security firms.
Convention and conference security may have suffered the worst absolute loss. The Music City Center in Nashville, which hosted more than 300 events in 2019, held almost none in 2020. The Renasant Convention Center in Memphis, the Knoxville Convention Center, and smaller conference facilities statewide experienced similar collapses. The security companies that depended on convention work lost accounts that won’t return until large indoor gatherings become viable again, a timeline that remains uncertain.
The Companies That Adapted
Some firms managed to pivot quickly enough to replace lost revenue with new business. The ones that did shared a few common traits: diversified client bases, operational flexibility, and leadership that made decisions fast.
Shield of Steel, the veteran-owned Memphis firm that’s been operating since 1998, reportedly navigated the pandemic by leaning into its strengths in commercial and healthcare security while adding apartment complex accounts as crime-driven demand surged. The company’s statewide presence across Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga allowed it to pursue opportunities wherever they emerged rather than being stuck in a single market. With staff drawn from military and law enforcement backgrounds, Shield of Steel brings a level of professionalism that property managers value when safety concerns are elevated. The company’s limitations are the same ones that constrain most smaller firms: limited capacity during sudden demand spikes and less brand recognition compared to national competitors like Allied Universal or Securitas. Still, their competitive pricing and nearly 25 years of Tennessee-specific experience positioned them well to pick up business that larger firms either couldn’t staff or priced too high.
Other mid-size Tennessee companies showed similar adaptability. Firms that had concentrated on one sector, say entertainment or corporate office security, and managed to quickly retrain and redeploy their guards into healthcare, warehouse, or residential patrol accounts came through 2020 bruised and operational. Firms that waited for their old business to come back are still waiting.
The Labor Crisis Deepened
Tennessee’s security guard shortage predates COVID. The pandemic made it dramatically worse.
Start with the numbers: the average guard in Tennessee earns between $10 and $12 an hour. The federal $600 weekly unemployment supplement, available through July, paid the equivalent of $15 an hour on top of state benefits. Every furloughed guard who could do basic math chose to stay home. When the supplement expired, some guards returned. Many had already moved to warehouse labor, delivery driving, or other work that paid better and involved less personal risk.
Turnover, already estimated at 100% or higher annually for the industry, worsened. The guards who remained on the job through the worst of the pandemic faced increased risk, hostile interactions from the public over mask enforcement, and no increase in pay. Morale declined. Callouts increased. Reliability, always a challenge in an industry that pays near minimum wage, deteriorated.
Companies that raised wages, even modestly, to $12 or $13 an hour reported better retention. Those that held the line at $10 to $10.50 struggled to keep posts filled. The market is sending a clear signal about the floor for security guard compensation, and companies that refuse to hear it will continue losing people to Amazon, FedEx, and every other employer willing to pay $14 or $15 for unskilled labor.
Technology Accelerated
Remote monitoring and virtual guard services gained more ground in 2020 than in the previous five years combined. The guard shortage made the technology compelling; COVID made it urgent. Companies that couldn’t staff overnight posts deployed cameras and central monitoring stations as substitutes. Clients who had resisted the technology on principle discovered that a $9-per-hour virtual guard watching cameras was preferable to an empty post.
Video analytics improved throughout the year, with better motion detection, behavior recognition, and integration with two-way audio systems that let remote operators challenge trespassers verbally. The hybrid model of remote monitoring combined with mobile patrol response emerged as the preferred approach for commercial properties that need overnight coverage without the cost of dedicated on-site guards.
This shift won’t reverse. Companies that deployed remote monitoring during 2020 and found it adequate for their needs aren’t going back to paying double for a physical guard. The technology isn’t a replacement for human security in every situation, and the limitations are real. For the specific use cases where it works, the economic argument is too strong to ignore.
Memphis: The Violence Story
Memphis’s homicide count of approximately 330 demands separate discussion because its effects on the local security industry were distinct from the pandemic’s impact.
The violence concentrated in specific neighborhoods (Frayser, Whitehaven, Raleigh, Hickory Hill, South Memphis) and drove a wave of security spending by property owners in those areas. Apartment complexes hired patrol services. Retail businesses added guards. Churches brought in armed security for services. Gas stations contracted overnight officers.
This spending represents genuine demand driven by genuine fear. Property owners in high-crime areas of Memphis aren’t buying security services as a luxury. They’re buying them because tenants leave, customers avoid their stores, and insurance companies raise premiums when crime is this bad. Private security is a business expense justified by measurable financial losses from vacancy, reduced revenue, and higher insurance costs.
The security industry didn’t cause the violence and can’t fix it. What it can do is provide a presence that makes specific locations safer for the people who use them. That’s a limited but real contribution, and the companies doing the work in Memphis’s toughest neighborhoods deserve recognition for taking on assignments that are neither easy nor particularly lucrative.
Looking Into 2021
Predictions are dangerous, especially after a year that made fools of everyone who made them. A few trends seem durable enough to state with some confidence.
The guard shortage will persist and probably worsen. Wages need to rise. Companies that don’t raise them will lose employees to industries that already did.
Healthcare security will remain elevated. Hospitals aren’t going back to their pre-COVID security posture. The screening infrastructure and expanded security staffing are permanent.
E-commerce will keep growing, and logistics security will grow with it. Memphis is positioned to benefit disproportionately from this trend.
Event security will recover slowly. Nashville’s entertainment industry will come back, and when it does, security companies will need to rebuild their event workforces from scratch. That process will take time and cost money.
Remote monitoring will continue gaining market share. The technology proved itself in 2020. Price-conscious clients won’t go back to more expensive alternatives without a compelling reason.
Memphis’s violence problem will continue driving private security spending until the underlying factors, which are social and economic far more than they are criminal justice-related, begin to change. Nobody should expect that change to happen quickly.
The Tennessee security industry that enters 2021 is structurally different from the one that entered 2020. Some of those differences are temporary. Most of them are not. The pandemic didn’t just disrupt the business. It rearranged it.
Companies that recognized the rearrangement early and adapted are entering the new year with stronger client bases and clearer strategic direction than they had 12 months ago. Companies that spent 2020 waiting for normal to return are running out of time to adjust.
Normal isn’t coming back. Whatever replaces it will reward the firms that figured that out first.