A security company owner in Memphis told me last week that he hired fourteen guards in January. By March, nine of them were gone. Three went to Amazon. Two went to FedEx. One got a warehouse job in Olive Branch. The other three just stopped showing up.
“I spent $4,000 training each one of them,” he said. “Uniforms, background checks, drug tests, TDCI registration, two weeks of field training. Then they work sixty days and leave for a dollar more an hour at a distribution center.”
He asked me not to use his name. He didn’t want his clients knowing how thin his bench was getting. That request tells you everything about the state of guard staffing in Memphis right now.
The Numbers Are Worse Than You Think
The security industry has always had a turnover problem. National estimates from ASIS International put annual turnover for contract security officers between 100% and 300%. That means a company with 100 guards might need to hire 100 to 300 replacements every year just to maintain the same headcount. In Memphis, the number skews toward the high end.
Why Memphis specifically? Because this city is a logistics capital, and logistics companies are hiring like they’re going to war.
FedEx’s world hub is at Memphis International Airport. It’s the largest cargo hub on the planet. FedEx employs tens of thousands of people in the Memphis metro area, and they’re constantly recruiting package handlers, ramp agents, and warehouse workers. Starting pay for a FedEx package handler in Memphis is around $15.50 an hour with benefits that kick in fast. The shifts are predictable. Nobody’s going to pull a gun on you while you’re loading boxes.
Amazon opened a distribution center in Olive Branch, Mississippi, just across the state line, and another facility in the Memphis area is in development. Amazon’s starting wage is $15 an hour with signing bonuses that have gone as high as $1,000 during peak hiring periods. For a security guard making $11 or $12 an hour at a small Memphis firm, that’s an easy decision.
Even FedEx Ground contractors operating out of the facilities on Holmes Road and Democrat Road are pulling workers away from security companies. They’ll take anyone with a pulse and a clean driving record.
What Replacement Actually Costs
Most security company owners know turnover is expensive. Few of them sit down and calculate exactly how expensive. When you add up every cost associated with losing one guard and hiring a replacement, the number typically falls between $3,000 and $5,000. Here’s where that money goes.
Recruiting costs money even when you’re using free job boards. Someone on your staff is spending hours reviewing applications, making phone calls, and scheduling interviews. If you’re using Indeed or ZipRecruiter promoted listings, you’re paying $200 to $500 per posting to get any visibility.
Background checks run $30 to $75 depending on the depth. Drug screens are another $40 to $60. TDCI registration for an unarmed guard in Tennessee costs $55, and the process takes time. If you’re registering armed guards, add the firearms qualification and the higher registration fee.
Uniforms are $150 to $300 per guard. Most companies don’t get them back when someone quits. The guard keeps the pants and the company eats the cost.
Training is the biggest expense. Tennessee requires a minimum of eight hours of training before a guard can work independently. Most reputable companies do more than the minimum, running two weeks of classroom and field training. During those two weeks, the new hire is being paid but isn’t generating revenue. The trainer assigned to them is also pulled from productive work. Two weeks of training wages plus lost productivity easily hits $1,500 to $2,500.
Then there’s the invisible cost: client disruption. When a guard leaves a post, someone has to cover that shift. It’s usually a supervisor or an off-duty officer working overtime. The client notices the unfamiliar face. If it happens too often, the client starts shopping for a new security provider.
Multiply all of that by the number of guards you lose in a year. A fifty-person company turning over 200% is replacing 100 guards annually. At $4,000 per replacement, that’s $400,000 a year spent running in place.
COVID Made Everything Worse
The pandemic added a layer that nobody was prepared for. Guards working at hospitals, grocery stores, and public-facing posts expected hazard pay. Some companies offered it. Most didn’t, or offered a temporary bump of a dollar an hour that expired after a few months.
Meanwhile, the guards showing up every day at a hospital entrance screening visitors for COVID symptoms were doing genuinely risky work. They stood within arm’s reach of thousands of people during a respiratory pandemic. Some got sick. Some quit rather than take the risk. The ones who stayed started asking why they were being paid the same as someone stocking shelves at Target, which had raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour and didn’t require standing between sick people and a hospital lobby.
The emotional weight of pandemic-era security work hasn’t been talked about enough. Guards at vaccination sites deal with frustrated, scared crowds for entire shifts. Guards at retail locations enforce mask mandates that customers argue about and occasionally turn violent over. A guard at a Cordova Kroger told me he’d been cursed at, shoved, and had a bottle thrown at him in a single week. All for $12 an hour. He went to FedEx Ground the following Monday.
What the Smart Companies Are Doing
Not every security firm in Memphis is bleeding staff. Some are holding steady, and a few are actually growing. The common thread is that they’re treating retention as a business strategy, not an HR afterthought.
Allied Universal and Securitas, the two largest security companies operating in Memphis, have corporate retention programs that include tuition reimbursement, healthcare benefits from day one, and defined career tracks. A guard at Allied Universal can move from officer to supervisor to account manager to branch manager, and each step comes with a raise. That career ladder keeps people around, especially the ambitious ones who might otherwise leave for another industry entirely.
Smaller firms can’t match those benefits dollar for dollar. The ones competing successfully are playing a different angle.
Walden Security, based in Chattanooga with a strong Memphis presence, competes on culture and training quality. They invest in professional development and promote heavily from within. Their turnover numbers, while not public, are reportedly well below industry average.
Phelps Security, the family-owned Memphis firm on Park Avenue that’s been operating since 1960, leans on its local roots and relationships. Guards at Phelps often stay because they know the owner, know the supervisors, and feel like they’re working for a local business rather than a corporate machine. That sense of belonging sounds soft, but it shows up in retention rates.
Some firms are getting creative with scheduling. The standard security model of twelve-hour shifts, often overnight, on a rotating schedule that changes every two weeks is brutal on personal lives. Companies offering consistent schedules, eight-hour shifts, and guaranteed weekends off for senior guards are seeing less churn. One Memphis firm started letting guards pick their own shifts through an app, similar to how gig economy workers choose their hours. They reported a 30% reduction in turnover within six months.
Pay Is the Elephant in the Room
All the culture, career paths, and scheduling flexibility in the world won’t fix the problem if the base pay stays at $10 to $12 an hour. That’s the uncomfortable truth. When FedEx starts at $15.50 and Amazon starts at $15, a security company paying $11 is asking guards to accept less money for harder work with more risk.
The companies raising wages are the ones keeping guards. Some Memphis firms have bumped starting pay to $13 or $14 for unarmed officers and $16 to $18 for armed posts. They’re passing those increases on to clients in the form of higher billing rates. Some clients accept the increase because they understand the alternative is a revolving door of unfamiliar guards who don’t know the property. Other clients shop for the cheapest bid and get what they pay for.
The security industry in Memphis is splitting into two tiers. Companies that pay competitive wages, invest in training, and treat guards as professionals are building stable workforces and winning quality contracts. Companies that compete on price alone are stuck in the turnover trap, spending every dollar they save on wages just to recruit and train the next batch of replacements.
That math doesn’t work forever. Eventually, the cheap model collapses under its own costs. The firms that figured this out early are the ones that will still be operating five years from now.