Arnette Heintze is a serial entrepreneur and company builder with a 20-year track record of founding, leading and guiding the growth and performance of innovative start-ups and small-to- medium (SMB) sized businesses.
After first establishing a national reputation as one of the most strategic and accomplished leaders in protective, security and investigative services in the U.S., Arnette focused his entrepreneurial passion on building six more professional services firms, generating hundreds of jobs and $100+ million in sales.
Today, he focuses on (1) identifying exceptional market opportunities across industries, (2) working with their leaders to cultivate powerful, principle-based cultures and teams, and (3) aligning operations to drive performance improvements and accelerated growth.
Over the years, he has advised and mentored senior executives at Fortune-ranked corporations such as American Express, AT&T, Bain Capital, Blackstone, Cisco, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Google, Lockheed Martin, MLB, Mars, Microsoft, NYSE, Trellix, PepsiCo and Walmart. He has also coached leaders of many small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB) such as Fastmore Logistics, Fulton May, and NuWave Technology.
Since 2004, he has managed AllSecure Strategies as a holding company for a variety of businesses operating in the United States and around the globe. Beginning in January 2004, AllSecure Strategies served as the parent corporation for Hillard Heintze, LLC until it was acquired by Jensen Hughes in April 2019. Since March 2009, AllSecure Strategies has been one of three holding companies which founded and hold ownership interests in S2Verify, LLC, a pre-employment and background verification services firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Over the 15 years that Arnette led Hillard Heintze, he assembled a small high- performing cadre of senior experts and transformed them into a globally recognized strategic security risk management and investigations firm. Under his leadership, Hillard Heintze emerged as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. For three years in a row, it was ranked on the annual Inc. 500/5000 list. In 2010, the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City’s extended the firm its annual award for the fastest-growing inner city firm in the U.S., naming Hillard Heintze #6 in the nation and #1 in Chicago.
Hillard Heintze systematically set new best practices in security risk management and investigations across the board – a track record that quickly and dramatically expanded the firm’s client list to include a “Who’s Who” of Fortune-ranked corporations with leading positions in their industries – across the country and, in many cases, the world. After years of pursuit by private equity and 20+ purchase offers, Arnette sold the firm in 2019 to Gryphon Investors and Jensen Hughes, an engineering firm with market leadership positions in safety, security and fire protection.
Before joining the private sector, Arnette amassed three decades of experience working at the highest levels of federal, state and local law enforcement. As a U.S. Secret Service Special Agent and a senior agency executive, Arnette planned, designed and implemented successful security strategies for U.S. Presidents, world leaders, events of national significance and the protection of the nation’s most critically sensitive assets. In 1990, Arnette was part of the Presidential Protective Division, where he served more than four years on the permanent detail protecting President and Mrs. Bush and President and Mrs. Clinton. In Washington, D.C., Arnette also coordinated the city’s 160 foreign embassies and served as the Secret Service’s chief spokesperson and agent in charge of the Public Affairs Office, where he also led the agency’s crisis communication team during some of the nation’s most trying times.
Among the highlights of his career, Arnette credits the honor of being selected in 1998 as the Treasury Department’s representative to attend the National War College, an elite program for select military officers and ranking federal civilians, where he earned a Master of Science degree in National Security Strategy. The National War College provides its graduates with the superior training, decision-making skills and strategic capabilities necessary for leadership in national security policy, foreign policy, defense policy, military strategy, force employment and joint operations. This experience sharpened Arnette’s perspective on planning, designing and building highly successful businesses and the crucial importance of aligning the most important elements: vision, mission, purpose, core values and beliefs as well as the enterprise’s organizational culture and value proposition.
Arnette has received numerous awards and recognition for superior performance, dedicated service and heroic actions, including the U.S. Secret Service Valor Award — the agency’s highest. This was bestowed on Arnette for courageous action and heroism he exhibited in a 1983 shooting and hostage incident in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Arnette has served as a Director and Chairman on multiple non-profit boards which include Cases for a Cause, Gilda’s Club Chicago, Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, and Drawing Children Into Reading (DCIR). In 2020, Arnette established a family foundation to further advance and support his family’s philanthropic interests.