Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
Born in Montreal and raised in Toronto, Mr. Campbell’s life changed dramatically when his father passed away in 1994. “We were a middle-class suburban family and my dad had been in a business that had been declining for years, but he never told anybody,” he recalls. As a result, Mr. Campbell - then just 17 years old - was forced to drop out of high school to support himself and help his family make ends meet.
He took a low-level security guard position at Toronto’s Eaton Centre and proved capable for his age. The young Mr. Campbell was soon given greater responsibility. “After a couple of night shifts I was handed a pair of handcuffs and a bullet-proof vest and they told me to go out and help the police catch people doing bad stuff.”
The thrill of nabbing thieves led him to consider a career as a police officer. Trouble was, applicants had to be at least 21.
So, Mr. Campbell took on a security manager position at Great Blue Heron Charity Casino in Port Perry, Ont., in 1996, before landing a sales job for a now-defunct security systems firm in Toronto a year later. He was expected to sell $500,000 in equipment in the commission-based role - instead, he sold $2.8-million and realized the security business was not only something he could master, but was also extremely lucrative.
“Security touches every business in many different ways,” he explains. “Every day is different … it never ceases to amaze me how people come up with inventive ways to trick, deceive, steal from and manipulate companies.”
So, on the advice of a friend, Mr. Campbell formed his own firm, CBC Security, in mid-1998. He would later rename the company Total Security Management Services Inc. He quickly found his niche providing an all-around security service - everything from guards to employee background checks - to Canada’s major financial institutions.
The company has since expanded its client list and its footprint to include offices in eight cities in North America, boasts a compounded annual growth rate of 23.5 per cent and revenue that Mr. Campbell predicts will reach $100-million this year.
“We’ve raised capital and we intend to stay private,” he says, “But 10 years from now I have aspirations to be globally recognized as a leader in our field.”
More winners:
