Building Safer Businesses Through Smarter Security with August Hellwich of ILLUNO

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down how to build safer businesses through smarter security. And to drop these vibe bombs, I brought August Hellwick into EO Fire Studios. August is the founder of Illuno, a platform connecting businesses and individuals with vetted off-duty law enforcement professionals to deliver proactive, trusted security solutions nationwide. And today we'll talk about traditional security models, why they're breaking, vetting and trust at scale, proactive versus reactive security, and oh, so much more.

0:39John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to August and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, if you have a high-ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month then train you to run the system yourself.

1:18John Lee Dumas:Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you. August, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I love it. Thanks for having me, John. The thing that I disagree with or the thing that I believe that most people disagree with is to avoid all sensitive topics, all hot button issues in the attempt to make sure that you are able to please everybody. I don't think that's actually possible in today's society, unfortunately. So we do our best to take care of everyone. But working in law enforcement over the last 10 years started as a non-device issue, which has since become a divisive issue, unfortunately.

2:08But I believe that you can carve out your own lane in whatever space you're in and you don't have to avoid certain issues, certain topics.

2:16John Lee Dumas:August, I like to say, love me or hate me because there's no money in the middle. I'm not playing for the middle, buddy. I'm not trying to please everybody. Love me or hate me. In Fire Nation, we're talking about building safer businesses through what? Through smarter security. And I want to talk about why. Why traditional security models are literally breaking in front of our eyes. So let's be honest, August. I mean, traditional private security staffing models, they are failing modern businesses, left, right, center. What's changing in the industry? It's a great question. So what we really learned five years ago is that your standard security guard is no better than a scarecrow.

2:57And once the crows in the field learned that it's not Farmer John standing there, but it's a straw hat, the entire gimmick breaks down, right? So we have people going into major retail stores, walking out with thousands of dollars in their shopping cart, and your standard security guard from your traditional security company shouts at them, tells them to stop, and it ultimately waves them on their way and might as well help them load the stuff into the back of the car. The difference is when you have a sworn police officer there, they actually have arrest powers. So they're not only a deterrent presence, but they actually will arrest the perpetrators and actually protect the assets.

3:39Although most security guards are there under the guise of loss prevention or asset protection, but they're not doing either.

3:45John Lee Dumas:You know, that just kind of reminds me of that great movie, Wizard of Oz, If I Only Had a Brain. I mean, that poor scarecrow knew that he couldn't even scare away the crows. I mean, let alone, he was actually attracting the crows as it was. So, you know, these companies, they want to save a few bucks an hour. They're like, we're just going to hire this guy, save a few bucks an hour. And it's costing them thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per incident. It's not even comparable. So it'd be really cool if at some point, like you really like broke down those numbers of like what a non-police officer in a situation like that could end up costing you.

4:24John Lee Dumas:And that kind of goes to my next topic, which is about vetting and trust at scale. I want to know specifically how your company, how Aluno vets off-duty law enforcement officers and clients differently than the rest of the market. And of course, there's that Jasmine Crockett story that I want you to share. So take it away. The Jasmine Crockett story really highlights one of the differences of what we've done. Honestly, as we were walking through it, two years ago, Jasmine Crockett's bodyguard at that time under the pseudonym mike king applied to work as an officer on our platform he told us that he was a federal police officer out of washington dc sent forged police credentials from dc training documents his law enforcement certification documents that were all fake it really raised the hair on the back of our necks we looked at him something didn't smell right at that time.

5:18So we had a former federal officer who worked for us. We sent all the documents to just for a second verification. And he immediately said, none of this is real. This guy's completely impersonating a federal officer. Don't hire him. In fact, you should report him to the FBI field office in Dallas, which we did in the beginning of 2024. We sent a full report to the FBI field office in Dallas. We also sent a full report to all of our local competitors in the Dallas market, just, hey, this guy applied for our company. He probably applied for yours too. Unfortunately, those warnings weren't heated and the big company that made the news for letting him on the platform, we had actually emailed all of their executives saying, hey, don't let this guy on the platform, who still slipped through.

6:05We really were awestruck by that moment. And back in 2024, right when this happened, we thought, hey, we need a better platform to verify officers, something that's not as manual for us. So we went and formed a partnership with ID.me, who is the nation's leader in identity management and identity verification. The problem today is you have businesses that are using AI tools to verify identity, but then you have other AI tools creating digital fakes, right? So you have an AI system trying to verify another AI system's work. And a lot of times it just spits out a green checkmark. What ID.me will do is actually put a human in the loop if there's anything off.

6:54So we outsourced all of the identity management straight to the government leader. If you have an IRS account, you pay taxes, you have an IDME account. They do all of the VA. Really, every government system is held and managed through IDME, as well as all the police officers. So it also gave us access to nearly 500 ,000 of the 900 ,000 officers on the platform who can now two-click sign up for our system. So all of our identity management is done through the cream of the crop system, really to prevent exactly what happened with the Jasmine Crockett story. I mean, there was a guy impersonating a police officer for years, working for dozens of businesses, putting everyone's life at risk.

7:30John Lee Dumas:I mean, being in the VA system myself, I mean, I know the ID.me platform. It's something that when they moved that I was like, it's about time. Like this is the kind of stuff that we need to be doing here to protect, you know, the fact that people are who they say they are. And I want to kind of move into being proactive versus reactive security. Now, why August is proactive security becoming actually more important than reactive response? And we're talking about during these high demand events, they're incredibly volatile environments that if you just are scrolling social media these days, they seem to be coming so commonplace.

8:08John Lee Dumas:So talk about that. Unfortunately, most businesses do take a reactive approach today still to security in general. And you got to think about reactive, which is the same thing as calling 911 because somebody broke into your house, where a proactive approach would be locking the door. Right. So what the smart businesses are doing in the country, the ones that are contacting us now are saying, hey, before we have issues or we know that there's issues coming around this local area. Let's take FIFA, for example. They go, hey, we know that we're going to be short officers. Maybe we have 10 or 20 guys that we typically know are going to come, but we're in Houston or we're in Philadelphia.

8:50Those officers are not going to be available because they're going to be in a mandatory overtime situation for public safety. What do we do? What I've been telling businesses is the World Cup's coming to town. Your regular officers won't be. They're not going to be available. So what do you do? You can reach out to someone like us. We're going to syndicate that job out to every local agency, state, county, surrounding department to make sure that our customers are covered. But what that does, as you can understand, I mean, paying between, you know, around the country, typically between 70 and 100,$120 an hour for a police officer during FIFA is going to be a lot more cost effective than watching$20 ,000 worth of merchandise run out the door.

9:37John Lee Dumas:Such a great point. And, you know, I think a little maybe improvement to your analogy about calling 911 versus a locked door is like calling 911 would be reactive, like being proactive would actually be having would be having a security system installed, cameras out there and a sign that says this house is being monitored 24 seven by, you know, whoever. And what's going to happen then? Well, the guy's going to go, well, that house is jacked up with security. and the one right next to it is not, I think I'm going to the next one. They're going to go to the lower hanging fruit. Common smash and grab thief is always looking for the path of least resistance.

10:17Yes. They don't want a confrontation with an officer. As much as a lot of them have the bravado, especially in school shooting situations, if there was an armed officer in the front specifically with a long arm in that scenario, they don't want to get shot, right? I'm talking about the perpetrator, right? They don't want the violence. So it's the same thing if you're a retailer, if you're in the hospitality space, even if you're a bar and restaurant, or someone throwing a private party, if someone's going to come do something harmful, or steal, or there's any amount of crime, the criminal's looking for the path of least resistance.

10:57John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we're going to talk about technology, accountability, security gaps the businesses miss. You don't want to miss that one. And a lot more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer, but you are not getting enough quality sales calls on the calendar, Nexus install is exactly what you need. This is a custom LinkedIn client acquisition system built to help you connect with the right prospects, start real conversations, and turn those conversations into booked calls. Here is what makes it different. We do not just hand you a bunch of theory and tell you, good luck.

11:28John Lee Dumas:We build the system with you. dial in your audience, sharpen the messaging, run the outreach, and aim to book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month. Then once the system is proven and installed, we train you on how to run it yourself so you are not dependent on another agency forever. If you have a strong offer, a clear result, and are ready for more quality conversations with real prospects, email my team at john at eofire.com and then we'll set up a call to see if Nexus install is the right fit for you. Simple, focused, and built for predictable, long-term, quality lead flow. Fire Nation, if you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure.

12:09John Lee Dumas:That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed, all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business. And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more.

12:52John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. August, we're back and I want to talk about technology. I want to talk about accountability. I mean, how are technology and specifically identity verification, how is that transforming trust, accountability, and hiring in the security industry? By the time a business decides to hire a police officer, which as we've established, is sometimes two times as expensive as hiring your standard security guard on an hourly basis. They've determined that the threat level is high enough that it justifies the cost, right? Either in terms of goods and services or employee retention or customer retention in some spaces, work with some retailers, that really the officer is not about the loss of goods.

13:46It's more about employee and client retention, making their area the safest place to work and shop in that city. With technology, what we need to do is we need to make sure that every officer on that site is actually who they say they are. Because when the business determines we need an officer here, we're willing to pay the premium to get an officer here. it means that they've run their own independent analysis that this is a higher risk store right or there's a higher crime potential here and if we go to that location and we put an individual there that they're trusting us that he's a police officer and he happens to be a john doe non-sworn officer and there's an incident right someone comes in to rob the store maybe they're armed or there's a situation that an officer was trained in de-escalation that this standard person does not have that training, they're not only putting their own life in harm's way, they're putting all of the shoppers there, all of the people at that event in harm's way.

14:54And most businesses don't think, they just call a security company, they assume the security company does their own vetting, their own due diligence on all of their employees. But specifically when you're talking about law enforcement, we're not handling a lot trainings and firearms qualifications for our officers that gets handled by the police department my sole job at Illumina was not only to make the process easy for our customers and provide good service to the officers but to make sure that the people on our platform are who they say they are and really that's it's the call for every marketplace right now but it's even more and more important in the security space because we're not talking about who's delivering your chipotle to your house.

15:35We're talking about who's protecting your life, your family's life, your employees' or customers' lives.

15:40John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about these security gaps that businesses just miss. And now listen, people love hearing about this because it's so important. But let's talk about the biggest real world security blind spots that businesses overlook industries like hospitality, retail, and of course, live events, sports, music, et cetera. The biggest security gap really comes back to using, I mean, really, I guess it's twofold. It's either using security guards instead of sworn officers, or it's not vetting the sworn officers or the platform that are providing the sworn officers. and you know not to harp again back to the last question but you have to ensure that you're covered by the most qualified person in the room if it's a live event let's make sure that our staffing levels are adequate right we're not half staffing or trying to cut spend and say instead of hiring 20 officers for this event we'll get five officers and you know 10 traffic control security guys that are non-sworn and maybe a couple other people that are from our internal team.

16:52Really, that puts everyone in the event at risk. We've seen it over and over again from, you know, smaller things that don't make national news all the way up to like the astral world tragedy in Houston. There wasn't enough law enforcement presence there. So we're talking about live events. We need to make sure that it's adequately staffed and it's staffed by the local officers. That's a really big breakdown. A lot of the companies that are in our space are really no more than a call center in New Jersey trying to staff officers in downtown Detroit or in the outskirts of Houston who don't understand the local market, which is why with us, we always partner with a local coordinator that has the on-the-ground knowledge that can make sure that the staffing levels are adequate and that the officers working to shift are qualified for that level of protection.

17:43John Lee Dumas:I want to move into building a scalable marketplace because that's exactly what you've done. And I want to know what you've learned from building a platform that supports both the businesses and of course, the law enforcement professionals at scale, because that's one thing that a lot of people struggle with is the at scale part. So break that down for us. I'm selfishly blessed that we were able to avoid the standard marketplace chicken and egg problem of supply balancing supply and demand how many businesses versus how many officers on our platform we've taken the mantra if you build it they will come and we've been able to get officers to work every event that's come through the platform so we're 100 focused on business acquisition and then just making sure that we have the right law enforcement contacts.

18:37You know, we've worked with a lot of the national law enforcement unions and associations. We built really deep relationships in the law enforcement space, which I guess speaks to that side of the marketplace. But we have not had a job come in from a customer where, you know, let's say, take an Uber analogy, and we had 50 people needing a ride in Manhattan and only 10 drivers. We've been able to avoid that situation because really of the relationships that we have and our availability to quickly scale up officers.

19:06John Lee Dumas:So August, we talked about a lot of stuff today. I mean, we've gone through why traditional security models are breaking, vetting and trust at scale, proactive versus reactive, technology accountability, security gaps that businesses miss, building a scalable marketplace. What is one thing our listeners should understand about safety, trust, and the future of modern security? The future of modern security, in my opinion, is going one way and two ways that it's being solved. The future of modern security is moving exclusively into AI and robotics backed by law enforcement. So in my opinion, from what I'm seeing in the macro trends, the security guard industry, the traditional security guard industry is dying a slow and painful death, moving towards cameras, robotics, dogs, and then ultimately the law enforcement professionals that have the arrest powers and have the real deterrent presence.

20:07So what I think everyone should know is be proactive. Don't wait for something to hit your area or hit your neighbor or hit the business down the road. Make sure you have the right partners in place, the right vendors on call, so that when you decide you need to level up your security, you don't have to start the search then, but you can immediately pull on those resources.

20:30John Lee Dumas:So August, if Fire Nation is listening to this and they're like, man, I need to learn more about this topic. I want to connect with you, with your company. What is your call to action for our listeners today? You can go to aluno.com, read all about who we are, what we do. And then ultimately, like any app, you can find it in the app store, Apple or Android. On our website, if you want more information, an exact plan of how we can help your business support that, you just hit the contact us link right on the website. but ultimately our goal is to make security as easy as hailing the ride from Manhattan to JFK.

21:08And you can go right on the app store, download the app, put in an event and you can have officers on location within minutes.

21:14John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with AH and JLD today so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, his company, all that jazz, visit eofire.com. Just type August, A-U-G-U-S-T in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And August, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and August for sponsoring today's episode.

21:47John Lee Dumas:And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. So to learn more about becoming a guest, visit EOFire.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com.

22:23John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, if you have a high-ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you 8 to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself. Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you.