A Daughter Rescues the Family Security Business

How Nakia Stith turned around her failing father's Philadelphia private guard operations

By Amy Barrett

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Nakia has upgraded the quality of workers, both in the office and on site Bill Cramer

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Bill Cramer

In the fall of 2002, 24-year-old Nakia Stith had a conversation no one wants to have. Nakia sat down with her parents, Gregory and Vernetta, at a Houlihan's outside their hometown of Philadelphia. Gregory had been battling kidney disease since 2000. For the past year and a half, Nakia had spent hours each day with her father, either in the office or at home when he was too exhausted to make it in, peppering him with questions about Top of the Clock, his security company. But now Gregory needed a kidney, and both his daughter and wife were a match. Nakia's parents told her that Vernetta would be the donor.

Nakia was disappointed. "Even though my mother was a match, I felt this was something I was supposed to do," she says, her soft voice belying the steeliness underneath. "I had just made up my mind that this was how it was going to be."

Turns out she was right. Over the next few months Vernetta ran into her own health problems, making it nearly impossible for her to donate. At 6 a.m. on Mar. 31, 2004, Nakia checked into the University of Pennsylvania Hospital with her father. A biology major, she was both excited and fascinated by the idea of going into surgery and even asked the nurses to take pictures of the procedure. Six hours later, Nakia and her father each had one working kidney.

Gregory had started Top of the Clock in West Philadelphia in 1991. But as his illness progressed and he began dialysis treatments, he became too fatigued to manage the company effectively. In 2001, Nakia quit her job as a program associate with 4H, a national youth organization, to come home and help. But the definition of "help" quickly ballooned. Nakia describes battling theft, insurance fraud, and the perception that a soft-spoken twentysomething woman couldn't possibly compete with the military and law enforcement veterans who dominate the security industry. She fired or saw the departures of every member of the company's seven-person office staff. But within two years she was well on her way to turning the company around. Nakia has nearly doubled Top of the Clock's revenues since 2005. The 160-person company has about 20 clients on contract, up from just 6 in 2003. "I wouldn't have believed I could do this. I could never have imagined it," she says. "One thing I do know—my dad was so hard on me when I was young, he was so intense and he would always say, 'This is preparation.' And I would say, 'What are you talking about?' But I look back, and it all makes sense now."

KEY TENET: SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Gregory Stith and Vernetta Groves grew up in the same southwest Philadelphia neighborhood in the '70s and started dating in high school. They married in 1977, and their daughter was born the following year.

Nakia's father had big expectations of her. When she was in grade school he gave her reading assignments—books about ancient civilizations were a mainstay—and expected her to file book reports. He engaged her in spirited debates on everything from the Winter Olympics to Jesse Jackson's 1988 run for the Presidency. The Stiths even kept a dictionary on the back dash of their Ford Granada to help settle disputes on the go. But Nakia's parents and grandparents, all of whom were in long, solid marriages, couldn't insulate her completely from life in inner-city Philadelphia: By the age of 16 she had lost three cousins to gun violence.

By 1991, Gregory had left his day job at the local naval shipyard to make a full-time business out of a sideline providing security to visiting hip-hop celebrities. As an active member of the Nation of Islam, "the tradition of self-sufficiency was important to him, and creating your own business was big in the teachings," says Nakia, who is not a member of the group. She started to learn about her dad's company during her sophomore year in high school, when she worked in the office a few hours a week. But her grades fell, so her dad fired her.

By the time Nakia returned to Top of the Clock, she had graduated from Morgan State University in Baltimore, but hadn't taken any business courses.