A Family Name, a Guard Card and Proof on Every Patrol

In 2014, Santos Parinas graduated from Cal State Dominguez Hills with a degree in biochemistry and went looking for work. “Everybody wanted to pay me so cheap,” he says. So he built his own job instead.

He had worked security while he was in school, and he had picked up experience in sales, marketing and office paperwork along the way. He decided it was time to open a company. Brapga Security started on September 2, 2014, and today it covers clients from San Diego to Barstow.

What’s in a name

The name is a family affair. Parinas combined his own last name with his mother’s and his older brother’s. He liked that nobody would recognize it. Some people hear something Middle Eastern in it, others hear Russian. “People are going to be curious about it,” he figured.

His older brother is the reason he is in the United States at all. Parinas came from Peru in 1999, following his brother to El Monte. He went to El Monte High School, then Rio Hondo College and Mt. San Antonio College, before transferring to Dominguez Hills in Carson. As a kid he wanted to be a doctor, but business was in the family: his mother and father both ran businesses in Peru.

Armed, unarmed and on patrol

Brapga is headquartered in West Covina, with branches in San Bernardino and Santa Ana. The company provides unarmed and armed guards and vehicle patrols, has been asked for bicycle patrols, and is working with a city. Its core clients are shopping centers and warehouses, along with some events. One market it avoids on purpose is nightclubs. Anyone in the industry knows that managing intoxicated crowds is heavy work, he says, so the company stays away from it as much as it can.

Every security guard in California needs a state license, commonly called a guard card, which Parinas says takes at least 40 hours of training. Armed guards then need a separate firearm permit, and guards carry openly.

Proof, not drive-bys

Where Brapga stands out, Parinas says, is patrol. His guards place QR codes on the property, get out of the car, walk the site, scan each checkpoint and file a report. Many competitors, he says, drive through and leave within two or three minutes. Doing it his way costs a little more.

He tells the story of a prospective client who asked why he charged more than her current provider, which billed $300 a month and claimed four visits a day. He made her an offer: pick any day and time from the visit log, check it against her own security cameras, and if the guard was there, he would match the price and give her a month free. She picked a day. Nobody showed up. She picked another. Nobody showed up again.

On-site guarding is harder to win on quality, because contracts turn into price wars. “There is 20 security companies right now fighting for one contract,” he says. When everyone lowers prices, a company cannot always afford the experienced, fully certified guard who deserves higher pay, and has to place the third or fourth best candidate instead. He calls that the industry’s biggest problem.

Brapga tries not to start guards at minimum wage. Starting pay is around $17.50 an hour and up, depending on experience and location, and the company is always accepting applications through its website.

Back in the room

Parinas learned what a chamber could do from the Covina chamber, which held workshops and had leaders who showed new owners how to open and run a business. He went to mixers from 2014 until COVID, then on and off after that. After his father passed away, he says, he wanted to keep his mind on work, and he started going to mixers again across Southern California.

Having opened his San Bernardino branch in 2021, he wanted a chamber close by. He found BCC online the night before one of its events, called, and attended the next day. What sold him was how active the chamber is: a group chat, a member discount card, new ideas, and leaders who listen. He signed up on his second visit.

His message to owners in Bloomington, Fontana and Colton who are on the fence: “Give this chamber a chance, and you will not regret it.”

What’s next

Parinas wants Brapga across Southern California first, then Northern California, then possibly Nevada, Arizona and Texas, and one day another country such as Mexico or Peru. He is not looking for a monopoly. He welcomes the competition, because it makes everyone better. “If you want to race somebody, you have to race the best.”