BC Business
A member of the Qalipu Mi'kmaq First Nation, Ryder Davis wanted to go into security after a break-in at his Surrey home.
Life Story: Ryder Davis doesn’t give off the vibe of someone who works around the clock to run a company hitting $300,000 in monthly revenues. He’s about as calm, cool and collected as possible, even when talking about why he got into security in the first place.
“We had one incident where our house was broken into,” he recalls of his Surrey home. Although it was over a decade ago, the break-in left an impression on him. “The gentleman that came in afterwards was an alarm installer and he decked out our entire house with security equipment. After that, I would go to sleep each night with peace of mind.”
As a 22-year-old, it wasn’t easy to convince people that he was capable of securing their multimillion-dollar construction site. “I didn’t even have peach fuzz on my face,” he says with a laugh. At the time, Davis was studying economics at UVic while setting up the security license for Heathrow Security. It was actually his mom’s entrepreneurial spirit that inspired him to dive in and officially launch it with Caleb Nasadyk in 2017.
A member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation, Davis also acts as CEO of RWC Industries, an Indigenous-led medical supply store in Surrey that sells and manufactures personal protective equipment (PPE) and safety gear. RWC has been committed to providing vulnerable Indigenous communities and seniors with N95 masks and rapid antigen tests throughout the pandemic, and it has sold 1.5 million masks and PPE to date.
Bottom Line: Surrey-based Heathrow Security started off with two guards and some $60,000 in 2018 revenue. The business now has 80 employees, is projected to bring in $5 million at the end of 2023, and is equipped with software from Montreal-based TrackTik that tracks GPS locations of guards on site and sends out prompt reports. Clients are able to see real-time incidents like floods and fires through the app. “We expect a seven-minute police arrival time,” Davis says. “Our false alarm rate is way down, so it’s almost a 100 percent guarantee that it’s a trespassing alert.”