Most of those employees wear a uniform and badge: They’re professional security guards, controlling access to dozens of industrial facilities across the country. It’s Treadwell’s job to see to it that they’re all trained, paid, and following protocol.
“When I showed up for the interview 18 years ago, I misread the ad and thought the job was in the securities business,” she says, laughing. The then-fledgling company, Vescom, provided professional security guard services to industrial facilities, mostly on the East Coast. Owner Michael Baer had decided to move to Maine to be closer to some of his key clients and needed someone to handle the administration of the company. “I was so inspired by Mike’s enthusiasm,” Treadwell remembers, “I knew he was someone I could work with
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In the past two decades, while Baer has been on the road 90% of the time, Treadwell has overseen teams of guards and their supervisors who work literally around the clock protecting the people and property at mills, chemical plants, electric generation facilities, and even a Fortune 100 world headquarters, for companies like Georgia-Pacific and Alcoa. Treadwell does most of her human resources management over the telephone—and, in recent years, with the additional help of email. “I am literally on the phone all day, “ she says, “and the staff people downstairs don’t want to interrupt me when I’m on the phone with a client or a regional manager. So they email me.”
This kind of creative problem solving is par for the course at Vescom; over the years, Treadwell has customized their Peachtree accounting software to handle the complex cost accounting and payroll needs in 21 states. When workers’ compensation problems reached a crisis point in Maine in the early ‘90s, Treadwell and her team took on the system when an unfair rating threatened their business. Armed with scrupulous paperwork, she and Baer went before the Maine Bureau of Insurance and won their case. Later, she was asked by the King administration to join a task force to clean up the system. Ten years down the road, Treadwell still keeps a close watch on workers’ comp. “It’s not something any of us in Maine can ever take our eyes off of.”
Something else Treadwell must constantly watch is keeping quality high and costs low. “We have to do both to survive.” Companies in the manufacturing sector are under tremendous pressure to cut costs, she says, and before 9/11, those cost reductions sometimes came through taking security services in-house, or by opting for the lowest bidder. “After September 11, there was an instant focus change. . . and a much higher concern for quality and caliber of personnel.”
That’s just fine with Treadwell, as Vescom has always chosen to compete on quality rather than rock-bottom pricing. It’s not just a business strategy: “If we didn’t have great people working for us, we couldn’t sleep at night,” she says. “You can’t keep professionals if you don’t pay them a decent wage.” Their approach has worked: In an industry where a 200% employee turnover rate is the industry norm, Vescom’s is less than 50%. A recent coup was when one of their largest clients, Georgia Pacific, named Vescom as one of its five preferred vendors. This came, she believes, “quite literally from doing what we say we’ll do.”
For the individual Vescom guard, that sometimes means holding down the fort alone. It happened during Hurricanes Charlie and Ivan, and again with Katrina. “During Katrina, we had four facilities that were in the hardest-hit areas in Mississippi,” she says. “I couldn’t reach anyone for days. I was panicking.” She needn’t have worried; no guards deserted their posts. “One gentleman had stayed at his post for 48 hours straight because he wasn’t going to leave his facility unattended. That’s the kind of people I’m working with.”
