Todd Mares

He Spent Thirty Years Working for Himself. Then He Made Pine Cove a Promise.

By the time Todd Mares went looking for a job, he hadn't had one in about thirty years.

He'd run his own low voltage cabling company: infrastructure work, the wire and pathway that every other system in a building quietly depends on. He was good at it, and for a long stretch it worked. Then the Denver market turned on him.

"It just got real cutthroat. People wanted you to do work for basically cost. And I couldn't do it."

He'd been subcontracting for Pine Cove for about five years by that point, which is how he knew Ronda. Pine Cove brought the parts and the smarts, as he puts it, and he pulled the cable. They got to talking one day and she mentioned the company was looking for somebody in-house.

Three or four years later (he genuinely isn't sure which, and that tells you something about how the time has gone) he's on Pine Cove's physical security team.

Seven Employees, and Then Not

The thirty years before Pine Cove covered a lot of ground, most of it in Colorado.

Todd met his wife about twenty-eight years ago. They were living in the Denver area when her job moved them west, out past Grand Junction to Collbran, at the foot of the Grand Mesa. They stayed about five years. Then circumstances sent them back to the Front Range.

He was running the cabling business through all of it, with around seven employees at the peak, doing mostly commercial work. What ended that wasn't a bad decision on his part. It was every one of his customers making the same reasonable one at the same time.

Businesses stopped putting money into infrastructure because they were busy trying to stay open at all. Cabling is the first line item to go when a company is protecting payroll. So he downsized, and he kept going, and eventually the math stopped working.

He and his wife have been in Arvada for more than ten years now.

He Knows Exactly What the Alternative Looks Like

What sold Todd on Pine Cove wasn't the compensation or the pipeline. It was Ronda, who has spent a long career in physical security across a lot of different companies, and who could not stop raving about this one. Then he met Brandon and Colby.

"Their attitude toward family, that's kind of how their business structure works. They treat everybody like family and not just another employee. And they don't micromanage."

You give them updates. They might have questions. What they don't do, he says, is pound on you asking why it isn't done yet.

That distinction lands harder when you know what he's comparing it to. Todd spent decades subcontracting in construction, general contracting, and electrical, and he has a specific memory of how those relationships worked. A large building systems contractor would tell him what he was doing and when. If they wanted him to travel, he traveled.

"They didn't care if you had a funeral or a wedding to go to. You were expected to put them first. A lot of those companies expect you to put the company first and your personal life second. And I don't think Colby and Brandon do that."

Put It Out There, and Somebody Answers

Nick asked Todd whether he feels empowered in his role. His answer didn't go anywhere near the org chart.

"I feel empowered because of all the other employees."

The mechanic of it is simple. He can put a request out generally, to nobody in particular: here's what I need, can somebody help me?

"And within minutes, somebody says, hey, I got some time, I'll give you a hand. That makes me, in the field, feel important."

Todd is on the physical security side, so he has his own crew. But the way he describes it, the team is everybody. Someone is always responsive, and someone is always willing.

For a guy who is often the only Pine Cove employee standing in a building, that matters more than it sounds.

It Opens Up a Lot More Doors

Ask Todd what Pine Cove does and he gives you the field version: a full service security company. He only works the physical security side himself, but between that, cybersecurity, and IT, he calls the whole thing one security platform.

The growth he's watched from inside is not subtle.

"It seems like the more work we do, the more we get in the pipeline. Every business, every school district, everything's turning more toward security. It's phenomenal how it's grown."

Nick pointed out that's a good problem to have. Todd's response was immediate: better than the alternative.

His read on why it compounds is worth paying attention to, because it comes from someone who sees the customer's building rather than the customer's contract. Technology keeps changing, and clients have their actual jobs to do. They can't keep up, and they know it. So the thing they're really buying is responsiveness. Once Pine Cove is in on the IT or cyber side and the client sees how the company answers, the questions start arriving unprompted. Do you guys do this? Can you help me with a camera system? A door system?

"Once we get in there and they see what we can do, it opens up a lot more doors."

Coming from the man who installs the door systems, that one is free.

On the vendor side, he has a favorite. Verkada was the only real cloud-based physical security platform for a while, and he likes how it integrates. What he rates it on is reliability, which for a technician who is the one going back out to fix things is the measure that counts.

He Doesn't Like AI. He Also Knows It Isn't Leaving.

Asked for a crystal ball on the industry, Todd didn't perform enthusiasm.

"From what I've heard, it's going to take a human to fact-check AI."

He'll tell you straight out that he doesn't love it, and he's equally unsentimental about where that leaves him. It's a catch-22, he says. People either love it or hate it, and there's no middle of the road. But it isn't going away, and he thinks a lot of the objection is people arguing against something they've already accepted. In Colorado, he points out, plenty of the folks who don't want data centers and don't like AI are carrying it in their pocket twenty-four hours a day.

"AI is only going to be as good as the person that's asking it the question, and what you're using it for."

Then he shows you what he means, using the tool he actually knows. Camera resolution keeps climbing. He can open a camera platform and ask it to show him every person wearing a red t-shirt in a building, and it will search every camera on the system and hand back the snapshots.

A customer who used to lose an afternoon scrolling through footage now asks a question and gets an answer.

"It's a big step from what it used to be."

Skeptical and current at the same time. That's a harder combination to find than either one alone.

Outside of Work

Todd and his wife camp. Lake McConaughy in the spring and fall, once or twice a year, and the mountains in the summer, where the goal is straightforwardly to get away. He'll admit the getting-away part has gotten harder. Places that used to be quiet now have twice as many people in them.

Since he travels for work, the good weekends are usually the simple ones: time together, and walking the dogs. The dogs are a Bernese Mountain Dog and a Bernedoodle, which he describes, accurately, as a handful.

The family is all out here. He married into a daughter and a son who are grown now with kids of their own, which makes him a grandfather.

"Watching them grow up and spending time with them has been a blessing in my life."

He Said He'd Treat It Like His Own

Ask Todd what Pine Cove could do better for its employees and he comes up empty. The company gets everyone together once a year, and he rates the benefits as outstanding compared to what he's seen elsewhere. On the customer side he does have one, and it's the same thing he'd tell any company: a client has occasionally left a message and not heard back fast enough. Everybody has issues eventually. What separates companies is how they communicate about them.

Then he circled back to something he'd said when he was hired, and it's the line the whole interview turns out to be about. This is the first company Todd has worked for in three decades. Before Pine Cove, the only boss he'd ever had was himself.

"That's one thing I told them when I hired on. I'll treat your company the same way as I would treat my own."

He means it as an offer. It reads more like a standard.

"I don't have the words to express my gratitude that they gave me a chance. I don't know if I could work for anybody else."