Business
Get Me Security
By John Burns published May 1, 2009
The chief of the Downtown Ambassadors aims to serve and protect—whether you want him to or not
Camil Dubuc didn’t set out to command a small private army. Nor did he mean to enter a public controversy. When he hatched the Downtown Ambassadors project back in 2000, he was just following the entrepreneurial instincts he’d had since he was a kid in suburban Montreal. “I’ve been in business since 17,” says the clean-cut, solidly built 48-year-old, in the boardroom of Genesis Security, a glass-enclosed space near the Burrard Bridge. “Dry-cleaner business, fashion shows—so many different businesses. At 13, I had a company for disco, like DJ.” When a nightclub manager offered Dubuc a spot as a bouncer (he has black belts in jujitsu and tae kwon do), he found himself entering the world of dress codes and velvet ropes.
When Dubuc moved to Vancouver, in 1993, he signed on with a local security firm; he started Genesis in 1998 with a single client (a Burnaby nightclub) and six doormen. “I never expected to be in security,” he says. “My dad taught me customer service. And what I found out is this is all about customer service. It’s not about being a goon—I hate that idea.”
Dubuc wants to expand “customer service” to provide security for the whole city—whether citizens are clients or not. In 2005, Genesis security guards began driving the streets of Kerrisdale, doing round-the-clock community patrol, phoning in suspicious behaviour to 911. The service, which then cost Genesis about $150,000 a year, started with money from the marketing budget but is now supported by the company’s home-monitoring contracts. The more residences Dubuc signs up, the more hours he puts back into community patrol, which today keeps an eye on 61,000 houses west of Granville. The relationship between community patrol and residential monitoring is symbiotic: if Genesis guards are patrolling the streets anyway—24/7 means they have to replace their Toyota Yarises every two years—they’re never far. It takes about 700 clients, $160,000 a year, to fund a car.
