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Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Larry Gomes’ nephew forms personal security consultancy

by

Andrea Perez-Sobers
25 days ago
20250129

The in­crease in home in­va­sions, some with fa­tal con­se­quences, has led to the es­tab­lish­ment of a new busi­ness, Quin­tus Per­son­al Se­cu­ri­ty Con­sul­tan­cy Ser­vices.

In a sit-down in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian, Quin­tus founder Mark Gomes said form­ing the com­pa­ny came to him af­ter his fam­i­ly was vic­tim of a home in­va­sion 12 years ago.

“Since then, I’ve been very up­set see­ing how, in our coun­try, the crim­i­nal el­e­ment has con­tin­ued to evolve, and we tend to play catch-up all the time.  So, every­one around me, even through my busi­ness­es, I’ve al­ways had a very in­tense fin­ger on se­cu­ri­ty, on sys­tems, on the pre­ven­ta­tive as­pect and Quin­tus was an idea three years ago,” Gomes said.

He ad­mit­ted that he did ap­proach, through a busi­ness re­la­tion­ship, a few mem­bers of the Gov­ern­ment, by writ­ing emails, as to how Quin­tus can be used as a pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sure for home in­va­sions, but there was nev­er any re­sponse.

“I said, okay, the Gov­ern­ment tends to pro­vide a ser­vice when there’s a ben­e­fit for them. While many peo­ple are no­ble, peo­ple just give ser­vice to reg­u­lar folks.”

Gomes in­di­cat­ed that he tried to de­vel­op a mod­el where if Quin­tus is suc­cess­ful and the com­pa­ny ed­u­cates and trains peo­ple on how best they can be aware of their sur­round­ings, the brand ould be­come vi­able and vis­i­ble.  

He said it on­ly took sev­en sec­onds for the home in­vaders to run off with his fam­i­ly’s valu­ables and mon­ey.

Gomes, 51, said the com­pa­ny will of­fi­cial­ly launch the first week of Feb­ru­ary along with part­ners such as Crime Stop­pers di­rec­tor, Dar­rin Carmichael, crim­i­nol­o­gist Robert Singh, self de­fence train­er Deck­lon Man­son and brand am­bas­sador crick­et leg­end Lar­ry Gomes, who is his un­cle.

Delv­ing in­to how Quin­tus will op­er­ate, he said it has three mod­ules for homes.

Pre­ven­ta­tive, in which the com­pa­ny would spend about two hours do­ing a se­cu­ri­ty au­dit from light­ing, doors, win­dows, and land­scap­ing. Sit­u­a­tion­al and post-trau­ma which he said would cost $2,500 and a cash back cus­tomer in­cen­tive of $500 for every pay­ing ref­er­ence.

He al­so high­light­ed that the com­pa­ny has cre­at­ed a non-dis­clo­sure agree­ment, which the home­own­er signs first of all.  

“Be­cause you in­vit­ed me in­to your home is the as­pect of trust. With that trust, there’s a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty that I don’t dis­close any in­for­ma­tion about your home.”

The cor­po­rate pack­age, Gomes not­ed, will in­clude an on­site ser­vice or off­site board­room ser­vice avail­able at a cost of $6,000 for up to six em­ploy­ees and $10,000 for sev­en to 20 em­ploy­ees.

Once home­own­ers and busi­ness­es sign up, they will be giv­en a Quin­tus pack with var­i­ous de­vices to pro­tect them­selves in an emer­gency.

Gomes, who was a prop­er­ty man­ag­er at Loveridge En­ter­pris­es in Southamp­ton Eng­land from 2005, said his du­ties in­clud­ed home se­cu­ri­ty de­sign and in­stal­la­tion, pro­tec­tion and se­cur­ing of hu­man/ma­te­r­i­al as­sets. His ex­pe­ri­ence in Eng­land ex­plains his metic­u­lous­ness in cre­at­ing the se­cu­ri­ty con­sul­tan­cy ser­vice.

Asked how much mon­ey was in­vest­ed in the es­tab­lish­ment of Quin­tus, Gomes said his in­vest­ment was $50,000.

“I told my­self that this is an in­vest­ment which I’m will­ing to not earn a dol­lar from. If Quin­tus falls flat, the worst-case sce­nario, the num­ber of cus­tomers is ze­ro. I did my best.

“The more peo­ple who can be ed­u­cat­ed, the bet­ter it is for us. So in­stead of just sit­ting back and say­ing, hey, we have a crime prob­lem, lock my doors. This took two years of plan­ning. It was thought through and well analysed, and as I said, the cash­back com­po­nent was where I felt the busi­ness could spread the mes­sage,” he de­tailed.

Asked if there are al­ready prospects on board, Gomes said “I have got­ten a lot of good re­views com­ing out of that.  I do an­tic­i­pate that when we do launch, we should have a few cus­tomers al­ready lined up and ready to go. So yes, the re­sponse has been pos­i­tive be­cause like I said, crime right now is like oxy­gen. It is every­where. It’s af­fect­ing every­body. Peo­ple are not go­ing out as much any­more.”

And in terms of part­ner­ing with se­cu­ri­ty firms, Gomes said the Quin­tus mod­el right now has not looked at that as­pect sim­ply be­cause he wants the con­sul­tan­cy brand to be of a very high stan­dard.  

“If I can’t put my fin­ger­print on who the se­cu­ri­ty firm is hir­ing, the qual­i­ty of the in­di­vid­ual who is do­ing that, I can­not put the Quin­tus brand out there to part­ner with a se­cu­ri­ty firm at this point.”  

“If Quin­tus builds its cred­i­bil­i­ty, the brand be­comes strong, maybe then we can part­ner with a firm that al­lows me to be part of the vet­ting process of what I ex­pect from the guards, what are the con­se­quences if the guards do not per­form, and then we can have that con­ver­sa­tion,” he em­pha­sised.  

But hon­est­ly, Gomes said his ex­pe­ri­ence with se­cu­ri­ty guards at his busi­ness­es is that a few in­di­vid­u­als are very good, but there are a few who are very poor.  

On whether Quin­tus would be look­ing to team up with an in­sur­ance com­pa­ny, Gomes said “The de­sire of Quin­tus would be to part­ner with an in­sur­ance com­pa­ny, be­cause when we are able to pro­vide this lev­el of ed­u­ca­tion and this lev­el of aware­ness for the client, the client should be able to go to an in­sur­ance com­pa­ny and say, okay, I have done a con­sul­tan­cy with Quin­tus. I have my ref­er­ence num­ber.”

The brand am­bas­sador Lar­ry Gomes aka Mr. De­pend­able said he saw it nec­es­sary to be part of Quin­tus as it is the first time such a com­pa­ny has been de­vel­oped in this coun­try.

The se­nior Gomes said it is im­por­tant that ini­tia­tives like this are giv­en the time of day as it would bet­ter equip home­own­ers with the knowl­edge dur­ing the rob­bery.

“My aim is al­so to bring in as many cus­tomers for the busi­ness. I have a friend who has mul­ti­ple busi­ness­es and Mark is cur­rent­ly in talks with him. In my crick­et cir­cles, I tend to ed­u­cate them about the com­pa­ny. We are no longer spring chick­ens so every op­por­tu­ni­ty to se­cure one’s self is very im­por­tant,” Gomes added.


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