End Users '20 under 40' 2014—Jon Shimp

Jon Shimp, 40

Vice president of asset protection, Louis Vuitton, Americas, New York

Shimp is responsible for a fraud investigations and�physical security team covering upwards of 2,000 employees and clients in North America and Latin America, along with 10 regional offices, two warehouses and two manufacturing facilities. Inventory and cargo theft and the design and layout of alarms, cameras and card access all are under his purview.

What inspired you to get into the security industry?

It's a funny thing. My brother is a lieutenant in a police force in New Jersey, and I've always looked up to him. When I got out of college with a criminal justice degree, there was a fork in the road. I was accepted into the NYPD Academy and also applied for a few jobs. My brother convinced me to go private. To be honest, back then pay was more intriguing on the private security side. I don't listen to my brother too often, but this time I did. I got a start in the LP field at Ralph Lauren.

If you could have any technology you wanted, without regard to budget, what would it be?

Everybody has iPhones and iPads and wants instant access, to have information at their fingertips and be able to see what the cameras are seeing. And they should. We're working (now) on getting everyone connected. For us, technology can be used for store planning and shouldn't be looked at as just a security-minded platform.

What's your biggest physical security challenge today, and what do you think it will be five years from now?

Because of our value and brand recognition, we are a target of burglaries. We need to work on hardening our targets, especially in high crime locations. Because of our brand, everything is image, you can't just stick any type of camera in a store. The brand manager tells me what the camera has to look like, and we have to get the aesthetics right while still not compromising safety. There are no specified cookie-cutter answers. But because technology (equipment) is getting smaller and smaller, that'll be easier for us to figure out, design-wise, in five years. Five years from now, criminals will still be coming in to steal, whether it's in the day or the night. So how do we protect our product and keep the bad guys out?