A guard company or systems integrator will assess your security for free or cheap, but their recommendation is shaped by what they sell: more officers, or more equipment. An independent consultant charges for the assessment because the assessment is the product, which is what lets the advice be objective.
Neither arrangement requires anyone to be dishonest. The difference is structural, and understanding it tells you which one your situation calls for.
All three can produce a document titled "security assessment." They are not the same document.
When you ask a company that staffs officers whether you need more officers, you are asking someone to write a recommendation that pays them. When you ask an integrator which cameras you need, the answer is a quote wearing a report's clothing. The people involved may be entirely well-meaning. It does not matter. When a recommendation pays the person writing it, the recommendation drifts toward what they sell, every time, because that is how incentives work.
The tell is simple: a conflicted assessment almost never concludes "you are fine, do nothing" or "the fix here is free." An independent assessment reaches those conclusions regularly, because it can.
To be fair, there are situations where going straight to a guard company or integrator makes sense:
If you know you want three cameras and a patrol, you do not need a consultant to tell you so. The independent route earns its cost when the question is genuinely open, the consequences are real, or the spend is large enough that being sold the wrong thing is expensive.
This is the entire reason Wittner Security Consultants exists as an advisory-only practice, and why it staffs no guards and sells no hardware. Here is exactly how that line is drawn, including a disclosure most firms would leave out.
Structurally, it is difficult. A guard company earns its money staffing officers, so an assessment concluding that you need more officers grows its business. That is not necessarily dishonesty, it is incentive. The recommendation tends to drift toward what the company sells. For genuinely objective analysis, an independent consultant who sells no guards and no equipment removes that pull.
No. If you already know precisely what you need, the stakes are low, or you can critically evaluate a vendor's proposal yourself, going straight to a guard company or integrator can be perfectly sensible. Independence earns its cost when the question is open, the consequences are serious, or the spend is large enough that being sold the wrong solution is expensive.
Often the integrator does, in practice, because the specification is built around their products and only they can fulfill it. With an independent consultant, you own the specification and can competitively bid it to any installer. If a design can only be built by the company that wrote it, it is a sales document rather than a specification.
Tell Paul what you are protecting and what prompted the reading. He will tell you honestly what the work involves and whether he is the right person for it.