How one entrepreneur turned a construction bottleneck into a growth business

Few notice the person directing traffic at a worksite – until no one shows up for the job. Without a traffic marshal, an entire worksite can grind to a halt, timelines get delayed and costs quickly rise. This was a recurring problem that Mr Shane Shi knew all too well.

Back in 2019, while running a pipeline construction firm, he often struggled to find traffic marshals for roadworks.

That gap eventually became the starting point for his own company – A+ Officers Security, which provides services in traffic marshalling and construction safety management.

The traffic marshal services industry, he observed, ran on gig-style labour – short-term and ad hoc. Mr Shi set out to build a more stable model built on a formal structure, full-time staff and a core group of trusted part-timers. Proper training, he felt, was more important than just having the numbers to fill the roles.

“Contractors do not want issues on their sites. What they want is the trust and assurance that their projects can carry on smoothly – which is what we aim to deliver through our large full-time force of trained traffic marshals.”

Growing the company post-pandemic

A+ Officers Security was founded in 2020 with five full-time administrative employees. In those early days, Mr Shi would spend many nights on the ground to understand traffic flow, clients’ pain points and on-the-job challenges.

“We might be small then, but we had a strong sense of commitment and discipline and that foundation shaped the company’s culture today.”

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, work at construction sites came to a stop. To keep his team of traffic marshals gainfully employed, he quickly reassigned them to guard duty jobs.

“Our traffic marshals stood in the rain and sun for us. The least I could do during the pandemic was stand by them. When employees feel secure, they become committed partners and that is why our clients can depend on us,” he says.

Once

public housing and infrastructure construction projects resumed following the lifting of pandemic restrictions, construction activity surged. Businesses picked up and so did the demand for manpower.

By then, A+ Officers Security was able to fill vacancies more quickly as pandemic-driven layoffs swelled the pool of available workers.

Between FY2021 and FY2024, the company’s revenue more than doubled, increasing from $4.3 million to over $9 million, a rapid growth that placed A+ Officers Security on the 2026 list of Singapore’s Fastest Growing Companies, compiled by The Straits Times and global research firm Statista.

Now, the company deploys 150 traffic marshals daily and has a client base of 30 to 40 contractors that use their services on a regular basis. In 2025 alone, A+ Officers Security clocked 1.1 million accumulative manhours on projects.

Staying innovative

Today, A+ Officers Security is made up of 10 full-time administrative staff, including sales, operations, human resources and finance, and 40 to 50 full-time security officers. Mr Shi has also recently introduced a team of four quality control supervisors who travel to job sites daily to ensure operations go smoothly.

Digitalisation, of which Mr Shi is a strong advocate, has played an important role in the company’s growth. In an industry that was still largely paper-based in its operations, A+ Officers Security was among the first to digitise daily deployment operations.

In 2021, he launched a custom-built deployment management app that he had a hand in coding himself.

In the past, the operations manager had to bring paper timesheets to job sites for traffic marshals to sign at the start and end of each day. The process was not only time consuming, but also prone to human error.

By digitalising this process and making it easily accessible on an app, the company managed to simplify attendance taking and cut the time spent manually recording hours worked.

The streamlined process also allowed workers to be paid a day after each job instead of having to wait two weeks – a move many part-time staff appreciate. Digitalising the administrative processes has also reduced administrative errors by 30 to 40 per cent.

Had the company continued with manual processing, it would have needed at least double the number of sales and finance staff. Manpower savings are reinvested in workforce planning and training.

The company is also preparing to launch A+ Connect, a new app for clients and traffic marshals. Clients can post job listings, while marshals can select assignments, which improves project visibility. The platform will eventually integrate analytics and AI-assisted scheduling.

Even as new digital tools emerge and operations evolve, Mr Shi says the company’s fundamentals remain unchanged. “We may be in the security field but we are still in the service line.”

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