Episode Details

Ian Dahlberg got out of the Coast Guard and was trying to figure out what he was doing next. He picked up a security guard license on a whim while going to college on the GI Bill, and it got him hired at the Waldorf Astoria in 2012 as a security manager trainee. He says he's got more stories from that one year than from six years in the military. Seven incident reports a day was the average.

Then he did the thing I keep telling people to do. He went back to being a guard. Night shift, shipping container terminal, so he could learn the side of the business he'd been managing from above. He wrote the business plan for Dahlcore in the guard booth. He didn't know what a bill rate was. He couldn't read a P&L.

Six more years inside the industry after that. Branch manager at Securitas, a mobile unit for Chase Bank, then Brooklyn: 300 people and 10,000 guard hours a week. He brought in seven figures of business and his salary went up $5,000. Two employers after that, data centers and then Chelsea Market, six days a week and twelve-hour days. He started Dahlcore in April 2018 by calling cemeteries, because he was looking for somewhere the big companies weren't.

First year, $90,000. Second year, $670,000. Then COVID took him down to three clients and about $8,000 a week. This year he's projected a little over $4 million, on 7% margins.

He also told me he bid roughly $100 million of RFPs this year and won none of them.

We break down:

• Why cemeteries were the right first client for a company with no track record: weekends only, no staff on site, and nobody else was bothering to call them
• The Winter Lantern Festival, where he was hired for four guards and found out at the precinct meeting that he needed thirteen per shift, with two weeks to hire them and two employees on Staten Island to start from
• Why the moment he knew it was real wasn't the $19,000 deposit check, it was standing in the field looking at thirteen people wearing a logo he'd designed himself
• What 7% margins actually mean: $8,000 a week sounds like $400K a year until you work out that it leaves him $28,000
• Why he deliberately carries the overhead of a $10 million company at $4 million, because that's how he was trained to run a branch at Securitas and he'd rather buy the capacity early
• The race to the bottom, and how it actually works: PE firms buying agencies state by state to qualify for national accounts, and a new facilities director who's told to cut 10% and goes shopping instead of picking up the phone
• Where I pushed him hardest. What do you offer that your competition can't? He's got real answers, and he still hadn't sold me by the end of it
• Retention, where we disagree. He says his is strong and the clients he lost lost their funding. My definition is simpler: is this revenue I can count on next year, yes or no, and the reason doesn't change the number
• The marketing agency he built to sell his own playbook to security companies outside New York, which now pays for the $135K a year he spends marketing Dahlcore
• Why hiring one salesperson and teaching them his method produced a $1.2 million contract in Q1, after years of sales being entirely him

What transfers from Ian's story is the order he did it in. He used the military to get into something adjacent, worked inside the industry until he understood it, and only then went out on his own against the companies he used to work for. I don't think he makes it without that.

What he's up against now is a different problem. He can have a $10 million business he runs himself, or a $10 million business that runs without him, and only one of those is worth anything to the family he wants to hand it to. He's closer to the first one. That's normal. It's also the whole job from here.