Meet Jamine Moton of Skylar Security in Downtown Atlanta

Thanks for sharing your story with us Jamine. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Where do I begin?!? This is such a long story. Haha! When I was younger (high school), I was a bully’s bully and enjoyed protecting my classmates from people who would taunt them and make fun of how they looked and even talked. I was always taller and large in size compared to my classmates. Even now, I am 6’0 and 280 lbs. Obviously, some things haven’t changed…

I was also an athlete so — I used that influence and impact to protect others. Even when I was in High School, I took pride in making sure that everyone was safe.

In 1997, I attended Clemson University on a track and field and basketball scholarship. Good times! I trained professionally after college and finally realized it was time to move my drive and motivation to another area of my life – entrepreneurship. I have always helped others develop their businesses and felt it was time to launch something I could build that reflected my values and passion for safety and security.

In 2013, I continued my passion for protecting people (‘bullies bully’) and pursued a career in Law Enforcement. My goal was to apply to the FBI as a Behavior Analyst. I applied to the Clayton County Police Department and graduated the Police Academy as the valedictorian of my class.

During that time, I didn’t realize that the next five years would be the mold, the foundation, the start of a business that would eventually turn into the foundation of my security company. My goal was to take my police strategy and develop a security company on that philosophy. Changing behavior is less effective when you have an oppositional and argumentative tone. Rather than fighting and arguing, which only makes things worse, develop a rapport and have empathy.

I saw the vision to create an opportunity where clients and providers have a better customer experience and a highly qualified provider that is paid more than the industry standard and worked shifts on their own terms – Skylar Security.

I processed through the FBI as ‘highly qualified’ and receded my application when I saw the vision as clear as seeing the nose in front of my face. Skylar was launched in 2015 with a vision of changing the way the Atlanta community experience security companies. I started Skylar Security as a non-traditional company, a hospitality company of sorts, that had a purpose of offering customized security services to our clients and the flexibility of security guards choosing which shifts they want to work. We immediately started building our team of security guards. We piloted our concept and were open for business. Security is an emotion. Everyone deserves to be safe. We have one clear motivation – not to become the problems we were called to solve.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Our ‘struggle’ is our advantage. Why? Because we are willing to put the time in to listen, wait and learn until we get it right. The security industry in Atlanta has many pain points that Skylar addresses head-on. The struggles that we have is in our obsession for our team members to be quality providers and building teams for our clients that mimic their brand. We have a policy – we don’t recruit providers and we don’t market to clients. You won’t see us on Indeed or Monstor.com. We are a boutique company that hand picks our providers and clients as much as the industry hand pick us to work with them. We take this process very seriously.

Security is an emotion. That’s our motto. We don’t want to give that responsibility to just any security guard. We are literally changing the culture of the security industry. Culture change takes time. I wouldn’t say this is a ‘struggle’ but more part of our calling, our process. The other security companies may call this a struggle but we call it our purpose – to go the extra mile. Because of this focus, Skylar won’t grow as fast as other ‘big box’ security companies. We don’t focus on volume of contracts but the quality of providers and the customer satisfaction of our clients. We will only scale as far as our provider quality will take us. That’s our commitment to the industry, our clients and our team of providers.

Skylar Security – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
When people ask about our company, we share our story. We are a hospitality company that sells security services. They say, ‘Ahh, I see what you mean. I like that. I prefer that. What sets us apart is that our business model was developed from the perspective of cost effective services to our client and above average internal process for our providers – not making money. We are a different type of company. We take pride in the customer experience and value our security providers who serve our clients. Because of that, we attract a different type of security guard. Most of ours are emerging business owners themselves who have a passion in the security industry. When I interview a new applicant, I tell them… I don’t expect them to work as a security guard long. Our Skylar providers protect our clients while we push them to pursue entrepreneurship. We are a team. A family who takes care of each other and takes pride in the individual growth and community impact. As the CEO of Skylar, they are as hard on me as I am on them. Sometimes, it’s funny because —  We demand excellence from each other. It’s an interesting dichotomy compared to what Atlanta security guards are conditioned to experience from security companies. We are just getting started but very proud of the foundation that our team has laid.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
What is success for us? That’s is a question that we ask ourselves every single day. Our team and our providers are never content and always learning from our clients and growing to be better We will never reach a point of true success. It can’t be defined in materialistic things or even revenue goals or client projection. We define success by the quality of our customer experience. Every week, we listen to our clients and sharpen our systems to change for the better. We listen to our clients and constantly raise the bar for ourselves. It’s a daily challenge. Do I want to be successful? Yes. I want to wake up and look at a provider and say, “Look at that… we did it and we did it together.” We have a way to go to be ‘successful’ but were on the way.