Kevlar Security Solutions | TasGuard | Athena Training
Static guarding, crowd control, event security, patrols, and alarm response. Tasmania, expanding into Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria
The Business
Alex Jarvis administers three linked Guardhouse profiles: Kevlar Security Solutions, TasGuard and Athena Training, with a fourth on the way as the business expands beyond Tasmania. Kevlar manages around 400 guards across static guarding, crowd control, event security, patrols, and alarm response.
The Problem
In 2019, rostering ran on a Word document. Shifts and times were written down and emailed through before anyone got paid.
COVID accelerated growth fast. Kevlar moved to Deputy for rostering and MYOB for payroll. Both hit a ceiling. MYOB couldn't process a single pay run above a certain headcount. Deputy could log shifts and copy them over, but nothing more.
“But in terms of that compliance, follow up. that attaching SOP's memos to sites, we couldn't do any of that.”
Compliance tracking sat in OneDrive folders with no expiry alerts. With 400 guards, some working events with vulnerable people, that meant manually checking whether a licence or visa was still current:
Why Guardhouse
Alex evaluated Guardhouse alongside Securecy, an Australian platform he'd used as a subcontractor. Securecy had a patrol and alarm response module Guardhouse didn't have at the time. But he judged it under-developed overall. Guardhouse's potential, and its ability to build customised reports and share them directly with clients, won him over.
Onboarding meant migrating 300-400 staff records out of Deputy in one go. Guardhouse's team, working with Kevlar's office manager, took on the bulk of that manual setup: entering names, mobile numbers and emails for hundreds of people, and staged the go-live by site and client so no shifts were missed. The technical cutover took about three hours.
"Probably the best experience I've had of implementation of software, because it was so personalised. If something was needed from us, we were told."
The Impact
Compliance, off the plate. Once a licence or document is logged, Guardhouse tracks its expiry automatically. No more manual checks, no more guesswork.
"We either get the new one or we don't. There's none of this guesswork of is it current, have they replaced it."
Time back. Alex estimates running today's compliance and onboarding workload the 2019 way would take two full-time administrators, roughly 80 to 100 hours a week. Handwritten alarm response dockets are now a digital file sent to the client the next business day. The old end-of-month billing run, which meant three staff spending a full day sorting and scanning around 500 pieces of paper, no longer happens at all.
Pay done right. Award rates are configured once in Guardhouse and flow through to Xero, so guards are paid correctly without checking rates run by run. Hour-limit warnings, which require an administrator password to override, have stopped guards being rostered beyond permitted hours on roughly half a dozen real occasions, catching a Fair Work risk before it became one.
"Someone slips through and things don't just happen. The system goes, hey, this isn't right. And it's great."
A commercial edge. Alex built his own tender capability document around the Guardhouse platform and has used it in his last four or five submissions. Live customer portal access to reporting helped win at least one client outright.
"This is what the platform we use can do, this is how it's going to benefit you."
A different standard of professionalism. What used to be an occasional nice-to-have, photographing a broken window, say, is now standard practice across every site.
"It's forcing us to be more accountable and better at the jobs that we do. I don't have to deal with clients going, where, you know, you missed something."
The Relationship
Alex points to the product team as much as the product itself:
"I think that the people involved genuinely care about what they are doing. They are interested in pursuing a solution rather than being very hands-off with the products."
He raises issues directly and sees them acted on:
"When I'm like, hey, this is silly, I go, yep, it is silly. It's in our update list for the next one."
Support, particularly a Customer Care contact named Alex, is named repeatedly, including a Sunday call-out before a major event, when a deactivated site's name hadn't been reallocated correctly and shifts were showing the wrong location.
Asked what he'd tell another security business owner:
"Anyone who talks to me about it and goes, is it worth it? I'm like, absolutely. If we lost Guardhouse today, I would go off my tree having to rebuild what we've done. If we had to go back to spreadsheets for six weeks while we figured that out, I would cry."
By replacing fragmented processes with a more connected operational system, Guardhouse has helped the team build the foundations needed to continue scaling while maintaining visibility, accountability and service quality.
