For years, I sold against the very business model I now believe represents the future of large segments of the service economy.

When prospective clients considered network-based providers, I made the same arguments many traditional operators still make today. How do you control quality? How do you ensure training standards? How do you maintain accountability? How do you know who is showing up?

At the time, those concerns seemed entirely reasonable.

Physical security is a business built on trust. Clients aren’t purchasing office supplies or commodity services. They trust providers with people, property, operations, and risk. The stakes are high, and for decades the industry reached a simple conclusion. If you want quality and accountability, you need to own the workforce.

For over a decade, I was on the inside of one of the world’s largest security companies, building and expanding a traditional, labor-heavy business. Most operators on that side of the industry, myself included, genuinely believed direct workforce ownership was a clear competitive advantage. When network-based providers surfaced in competitive situations, we positioned ownership that way in every deal. We argued that clients could only receive consistent service through employees who wore our uniform, completed our training, and operated within our management structure.

About six years ago, I was approached by a search consultant about Protos Security. I declined. Then I declined again. In my mind, this was simply another security company operating within a familiar industry. I was not interested in making a lateral move to solve the same problems using the same model. When I was called for the third time, the recruiter switched tactics.

“It is software-driven, network-orchestrated, and private equity-backed.”

That got my attention.

When I joined the company, I discovered something even more surprising. The founders had never worked in physical security. They approached the problem from a different perspective. They did not view security primarily as a labor business. They viewed it as a client experience business built on a logistics backbone. The work was matching the right resources to the right need, and giving the client flexibility, choice, and accountability that a single-owned workforce could not easily provide.

The longer I stayed, the more I realized I was not looking at a variation of the traditional model. I was looking at an entirely different approach to creating value. The model I had spent years criticizing is commonly referred to as an asset-light business model. Rather than directly employing every worker involved in service delivery, asset-light companies create value through technology, supplier networks, operational infrastructure, and systems that coordinate service at scale.

The experience forced me to confront a question that applies far beyond physical security. Why do successful industries become resistant to new business models?

Physical security is hardly unique in this regard. The taxi industry resisted ridesharing. Retailers dismissed e-commerce. Hotels scoffed at home-sharing platforms. Enterprise technology leaders questioned cloud computing. The pattern repeats itself because established industries often confuse familiar with optimal.

Why other industries embraced asset-light models

What ultimately convinced me this was not simply a security story was looking at what had already happened in other service industries which moved from an obsession with ownership to one of artful orchestration.

Facilities management embraced asset-light delivery years ago. For large corporations, it was no longer practical to demand that a facilities manager employ every HVAC technician, electrician, plumber, gardener, janitor, and snow removal contractor required for hundreds or thousands of sites. The top firms developed the systems to manage many specialized vendors while providing one point of accountability for the client.

Insurance evolved in a similar way. Modern intermediaries create value by matching carriers with brokers and customers, building advantage through knowledge, connections, and infrastructure.

Transportation and logistics followed the same path, creating value by matching supply and demand more efficiently than their competitors.

The healthcare staffing market experienced similar changes. Increasing labor shortages and fragmented geographic requirements favored technology-enabled platforms that match qualified clinicians with openings faster and more efficiently than the old way.

Similarly, even in fragmented industries like janitorial, landscaping, and field maintenance, asset-light models are proliferating. Clients increasingly care less about the party to whom they write the checks and more about whether the work is being done consistently, professionally, and at scale.

Physical security, however, remained different.

While other industries were embracing asset-light structures, much of security doubled down on workforce ownership. The prevailing belief was that trust, accountability, and quality could only be achieved through direct employment. In retrospect, this assumption likely kept the industry tied to a single delivery model longer than it needed to be.

The irony is that many industries that adopted asset-light models earlier face challenges every bit as complex as security. Healthcare involves patient care. Insurance involves risk management. Facilities management often includes life-safety systems, regulatory compliance, and critical infrastructure.

Yet those industries discovered something important. Accountability does not necessarily come from ownership. It comes from visibility, standards, measurement, and execution.

Why private equity loves asset-light platforms

Looking back, I understand why the words “private equity-backed” caught my attention during that third recruiting call.

Investors had already recognized a pattern that many physical security leaders had not.

Private equity firms have been investing heavily in asset-light service businesses for years because they solve one of the most difficult challenges in services. How to grow revenue faster than overhead.

Traditional service businesses often face a near-linear relationship between growth and labor. More customers require more employees, and more employees require more supervisors, recruiters, branch managers, and infrastructure. Growth is possible, but scaling efficiently becomes increasingly difficult.

Asset-light businesses operate differently. Rather than building larger workforces, they build stronger networks and more sophisticated operating systems. Technology, supplier relationships, operating know-how, and data are appreciating assets as the network grows.

The 50th customer in a market is more valuable than the first, because the infrastructure is already in place. The network becomes stronger, the data becomes richer, and the operating model becomes more efficient.

The moat is no longer just the workforce. The moat is the ecosystem.

What many savvy investors have recognized is that successful asset-light businesses behave less like labor providers and more like logistics companies. Their value comes from efficiently matching supply and demand through technology, data, and operational infrastructure.

How technology changed the equation

If workforce ownership was the foundation of physical security’s traditional operating model, technology was the force that began to challenge it.

One of the biggest surprises during my transition was discovering how many of the industry’s long-held objections to asset-light service delivery were no longer operational problems. They were legacy perceptions.

For years, the industry’s skepticism was understandable. Managing a distributed workforce requires significant administrative oversight. It was hard to track training, certifications, compliance, and performance across numerous providers. Visibility was nonexistent, records were inconsistent and dispersed, and accountabilities were rarely defined by automated processes.

The advent of modern platforms has made it possible to record training completions, certifications, compliance requirements, attendance, and service delivery levels at a scale that would have been impossible in previous years.

That does not mean direct employment is obsolete. Specialized security functions, highly regulated environments, and situations requiring extensive oversight may continue to benefit from traditional operating structures.

But technology has fundamentally altered the conversation. The question is no longer whether a company directly employs every individual involved in service delivery. The question is whether the company can consistently deliver outcomes.

I witnessed this evolution firsthand.

Early in my tenure at Protos, we secured a meeting with a major enterprise prospect. Before we had a chance to fully explain our model, the executive on the other side of the table dismissed the concept outright. He had never used a network-based provider and had no interest in starting. The meeting was effectively over before it began.

Thirty-six months later, that executive retired and new leadership arrived. The same organization revisited the model and became a customer.

What changed? Not the service or the technology, but the mindset. A new generation of leaders entered the industry with fewer assumptions about how services must be delivered and greater interest in how services could be delivered.

Recently, I attended one of our supplier conferences and met the owner of a small business that joined our network only a few years earlier. What started as a small operation had become a multi-million-dollar revenue stream for its owner, hiring employees and building careers. What struck me was not the revenue itself. It was what it represented.

A local entrepreneur had gained access to opportunities that would have been difficult to reach independently. Employees were hired. Careers were created. A small business expanded because it became part of a larger ecosystem.

That experience reinforced something I have come to believe strongly. The most interesting work happening in service industries today is not occurring inside individual organizations. It is occurring across networks.

Looking back, the biggest lesson was not that one business model is inherently better than another. It was realizing how easily successful industries become captive to their own assumptions.

For decades, physical security assumed that owning the workforce was the only way to ensure quality, accountability, and trust. Many of us, me included, built successful careers around that belief.

What changed was not the importance of those outcomes. What changed was our ability to achieve them differently. Innovation rarely comes by asking how to do the same thing better. More often, it arrives by challenging assumptions so deeply embedded that nobody thinks to question them.

Physical security may have been one of the last service industries to begin that journey. It will not be the last industry asked to. And the leaders who recognize the shift early, in whatever industry they happen to operate, will be the ones who define what comes next.