We Asked Tobago What It Needed, Then Named the Company After the Answer

Most company names are decided in a room by the people who own the company. This one was decided outside, by strangers, before there was a company to name.

In 2003, before any of it existed, Vern Joseph did something most people talk about doing and very few actually do. He went around Tobago and asked.

The question was simple enough. Does this island need another security company, and if it does, what kind?

He was not fishing for encouragement. He wanted to know whether there was a gap worth filling, and if so, what shape it was.

What Tobago said

The answers came back consistent, which is the useful thing about asking enough people.

They did not ask for more security companies. They asked for a better one. One with quality. One that was outstanding. One that would turn up and do the job properly, every time, without needing to be chased.

Read that carefully, because it is not a complaint about coverage. It is a complaint about standards. Tobago in 2003 did not have a shortage of uniforms. It had a shortage of confidence that the uniform meant anything.

So that became the brief. Not to be the biggest. To be the one you did not have to worry about.

Then a name to match it

Having decided what the company was for, he went looking for a name that would carry it, and took one from scripture.

Dominion means authority over your own area. He is careful about that definition, and the care is the point. Not authority over everybody, and not authority for its own sake. Authority over what has been put in your charge, and responsibility for it.

For a security company that is close to a job description. An officer is given an area. Whatever happens there is theirs to notice, to manage and to account for.

The motto came from the same place. The difference is excellence was not written by an agency and it is not a positioning statement. It is the answer strangers gave in 2003, turned round and pointed back at the company that asked the question.

Which raises the harder question. What does excellence actually ask of somebody?

What your own area means on an ordinary Monday

That definition is not decorative. It shapes what an officer is actually asked to do.

An officer at a Dominion post is not there to wait for instructions. They are expected to take charge of the location: to walk the compound rather than sit at the front of it, to observe what is happening and what has changed, and to report it to the people who need to know before anybody has to ask for it.

That is a different posture from simply being present. Being present is a body at a gate. Taking charge of an area is somebody who notices that a door which is normally shut is open, that a vehicle has been in the same spot for three days, that the light at the back corner has gone out. None of those is an incident. All of them are the things that come before one.

It is also, as it happens, how people get promoted here. An officer who carries themselves that way does not tend to stay an officer for long, because management at Dominion is filled from inside rather than advertised outside. The person supervising a site has almost always worked one.

It starts with a shirt

Ask him and the answer is not about strategy or systems. It is about a uniform.

The rule is that the uniform is either worn properly or it is not worn at all. If an officer is not going to wear it correctly in public, he would rather they took it off and put their own clothes on. It must be clean. It must be well ironed. It must be presentable, all the way through the shift and not just at the start of it.

And it does not stop at the fabric. The same standard applies to how an officer speaks to people, how they stand at a gate, and how they sit in a chair when they think nobody is looking.

That can sound like fussiness about appearances. It is the opposite. A uniform is the only thing most people ever see of a security company. Your officer’s turnout is your company’s turnout, and a client who sees a shirt hanging out has learned something about how the rest of the operation is run, whether or not it is fair.

Where the fussiness comes from

It is worth admitting that the man setting this standard is like this about everything.

He tells a story against himself about a car he once owned, and washing it every time the rain stopped, and the rain falling again, and washing it again. His own assessment of that behaviour is that it was mad. He kept doing it.

That is not a business philosophy. It is just how somebody is made. But it does explain why the standard is specific rather than general, and why it is about ironing rather than about aspiration.

There is a second reason, and it is the one that matters more. He wore a uniform himself for eighteen years before any of this, on gates and on nights, as somebody else’s officer. He knows exactly what a client reads into a badly worn shirt, because for eighteen years he was the one being read.

You do not get that from a training manual. You get it from having stood there.

What it should mean to you

If you are choosing a provider, most of what you are being sold is difficult to verify in a meeting. Response times, supervision, training standards: all of it sounds the same across every quotation you will receive.

Turnout is the exception. It is the one thing you can check yourself, on any day, without notice, from across a car park.

So use it. Look at the officers a company already has on other sites. Are the shirts pressed? Is anyone slouching in a plastic chair with their feet up? Does the officer at the gate greet a stranger or ignore them?

None of that is cosmetic. It is a reading of whether somebody is checking. And a company where somebody checks the shirts is usually a company where somebody also checks the patrol log, the handover and the incident report.

That is what the motto is doing. It is not a promise about outcomes, which no security company can honestly make. It is a statement about standards, which any client can verify for themselves in about four seconds.

There is one more thing worth looking at, and it costs nothing. Ask a provider how their supervisors were appointed. Whether they came up through the posts or arrived from outside tells you what your site will feel like in month six, long after the quotation has stopped being interesting.

Dominion Security Services has protected Tobago businesses and institutions since 2003, approved by the Ministry of National Security as a Protective Service Agency. Most of our work is renewal rather than new business, which is the measure we pay attention to.

The founder puts the whole thing more plainly than any of the above.

I never left the ground. I never think myself better than anybody else.

Vern Joseph, founder

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Related: About Dominion · Careers at Dominion