PAGE 12 - Weekend Bulletin PARADISE, August 9-10, 2008

When the going gets TOUGH

� Terri Cooper is a woman with two lives. By day she is a social butterfly and shrewd businessowner with a passion for helping others. By night she is a tough security supervisor mixing it withthe blokes and confidently controlling crises, safe guarding celebrities and directing drunks.They seem like polar opposites but in Terri these different worlds collide, as Katie Miller reports

Terri assists a paramedic in treating her security partner, suffering fromshock after a car accident outside the Crowne Plaza Royal Pines Resort

I t was a week before TerriCooper cried.With a dead body on the road,

her work partner in an ambulance and asporting event with thousands of spec-tators under her control, the securitysupervisor didn’t have time for tears at theaccident site outside the Crowne PlazaRoyal Pines Resort.

Instead there was strength and determi-nation in Terri’s eyes as she swallowed heremotions and did the job that had to bedone on a ‘difficult and traumatic’ eveningin January last year.

A 72-year-old woman had left the Aust-ralian Women’s Hardcourt tennis cham-pionships and was crossing Ross Streetwith her husband when she was hit by a carand dragged about 70m.

Terri and her security partner were firstat the scene.

‘‘It was just a really horrible, horribleset of circumstances,’’ she says. ‘‘Theywere Japanese, they came over every yearfor the tennis and were flying out the nextday and two minutes before crossing theroad he had a wife and then, he didn’t.

‘‘It was very difficult holding the hus-band back because she was lying therecovered and he was trying to crawl over toher and I was having to hold him back andtrying to calm him down.’’

At the same time Terri’s security part-ner collapsed with shock – although it wasinitially feared he was having a heart attack– and had to be taken to hospital.

Terri, who was in charge of eventsecurity, says she had no time to thinkabout what had happened betweenlooking after her partner, the accidentscene and the tennis still going on insidethe resort grounds.

‘‘I think it probably took me about aweek before I actually cried,’’ she says.

This is the tough, resilient Terri whohas handled whatever has been thrown ather – and on one occasion being throwninto a concrete pillar – during two decadesin the security world.

With consummate professionalism shehas watched over celebrities, talked downcountless drunks, copped attitude frommen as the only woman heading a GoldCoast Indy security sector and dealt withcrises such as the Royal Pines fatality,although it will surprise many to learn thisside of the single 48-year-old exists at all.

Security became an enduring part ofTerri’s life 20 years ago, when she wasasked to join the first leather-clad femalesecurity contingent on the door of Bris-bane’s Transformers nightclub, but it hasnever been her day job.

To those in business circles she is betterknown as a ‘networking queen’ thanks toher consultancy, through which sheteaches networking skills and runs meet-and-greet events in Brisbane and on theGold and Sunshine coasts.

Some may recognise the Auchenflowerlocal as a former swimwear model, pro-motions specialist, entertainment manageror private investigation business directorbut outside the hours of all these jobs andseveral others she has slipped on her secur-ity uniform and earpiece.

Terri says she does the mostly night andweekend work as an Asset Protection Sys-tems senior security supervisor becauseshe enjoys the polarity of her differentcareers, rather than just for the extra cash.

‘‘I love the yin and the yang of itbecause in my (networking) job I get to befeminine and then to do security caters tomy masculine side,’’ she says.

‘‘I do have a lot of male interests, likeV8 motorsports, and I just find it’s a reallynice balance and one stops me from takingthe other too seriously.’’

Those masculine pastimes hark back toTerri’s days growing up on four hectares atRochedale, where her parents still live,which she says was the ‘middle ofnowhere’ with no public transport and notown water when her family arrived.

Her passion for cars developed when asa youngster she began to follow her dadTom into his work shed, where he wouldgive her a carburettor to play with as hetinkered with his vehicles.

Today Terri drives a Holden Commo-dore V6 and dreams of owning a yellowMonaro but her first motoring experience,at age 11, took place alongside her fatherin the only manual set of wheels the familyowned – a Bedford tipper truck.

‘‘I didn’t have the same sort of drivinglessons other people have,’’ she laughs.

‘‘When I was older and had my licenceI taught my aunt (Pat Shipsey, who was 40)to drive in the same tip truck and I canremember Mum and Dad sitting in thedining room being terrified of this tip truck

approaching the house thinking it wasgoing to come through the front doors.’’

When Terri was about 15 her dad, aplumbing and drainage contractor, taughther to shoot tin cans with a .22 rifle andanother hobby was born.

Terri has had many sessions at theshooting range since perfecting her marks-manship but it has always remained a rec-reational interest rather than a work skill.

‘‘I did look at getting my pistol licencebut if you get a gun licence you are prettymuch going to be given jobs where you needto carry a gun and I’m not sure that I want tobe placed in that position,’’ she says.

‘‘It’s just a different category of securityand I don’t think that’s what I want to do.’’

Terri has never been confronted with aweapon but her former partner had a gunpulled on him when in her early 30s theyran a private investigation and debt collec-tion business together.

She did fear for her partner when hewas out at night doing repossessionsbut says she was never afraid for herown safety because her dad brought her upto be streetwise – so much so an employeronce told her that was the reason shewas hired for a job over an otherwiseequal contender.

‘‘It’s probably the wrong thing to teachkids but in our household everyone wasguilty until they were proven innocent, sowhen you met someone for the first timeyou never just assumed they were an OKperson – they had to prove that,’’ she says.

‘‘So I never put myself in a situationwhere I felt uncomfortable, uneasy oranxious because they’re the times some-thing happens.

‘‘If I didn’t feel comfortable with some-thing I wouldn’t do it.’’

Being a woman often worked in Terri’sfavour when she was serving summonsesbecause people rarely expected the docu-ments to be delivered by a female, particu-larly not a young, attractive one.

At the same time she was in debt collec-tion she was expressing her feminine sideby running a fashion parade and pro-motions business in nightclubs and had todevelop methods to protect her swimweargirls from aggressive patrons and drunks.

It was in this environment Terribegan to cultivate the mediation skills thatwere to become essential armour in hersecurity work.

Weekend Bulletin PARADISE, August 9-10, 2008 - PAGE 13

‘‘She was lyingthere covered and(her husband) wastrying to crawl overto her and I washaving to holdhim back ’’

She believes this aptitude is one of theadvantages of having women in security,adding that the number of females in theranks has grown enormously in the pastfive years.

‘‘If you’ve got a big beefy guy tellingsomeone he can’t come into a nightclub,particularly if he’s in front of his mates, hewill very rarely say ‘oh OK’ and walk off,’’she says.

‘‘Whereas if you are female, pleasantand just have a different way abouty o u . . . h e d o e s n ’ t f e e l h e h a sto prove anything in front of his mates.So purely by the psychology of it, it justworks better.

‘‘Having said that, when push comes toshove and fists start flying it’s not an idealplace for a girl to be.’’

Terri can usually use her gift of the gabto avoid anyone resorting to force but shehas seen the level of violence on the streetsrising in recent years.

She recalls watching six police officerstrying to hold down a drug-affected personwho fought back with frightening amountsof strength and aggression.

‘‘When we were younger we probablyall had alcohol before we should have but Ihave certainly noticed an increase in thelevel of intoxication in younger people,’’she says.

‘‘There seems to be less of acare factor.

‘‘Drugs certainly bring outviolent behaviour in people andin a lot of instances they haveno recollection afterwardseither and I guess that’s thedisturbing thing about doingsecurity – you never reallyknow what substance some-one could have taken andhow they might react until you’reactually there.’’

It was only last year that one ofthose volatile situations went badly forTerri for the first time since she earned hersecurity licence – which includes the sametraining police receive in defensive tactics– and took on her first official securityposition at the Gold Coast’s IndyCarGrand Prix in 1992.

She was evicting a man from a Brisbanevenue when she was thrown back head-first into a concrete pillar and hospitalisedwith whiplash and neck and shoulderinjuries, although luckily there was nobleeding to her brain.

Terri needed a month off work torecover from the attack, which came asa shock.

‘‘I’ve been yelled at and threatened andall those sorts of things but this was thefirst time I’d actually been hurt,’’ she says.

‘‘It probably just made me that littlebit more aware of how quickly things cango wrong.’’

Terri says the incident didn’t affect herconfidence and she headed straight backinto security work without fear as soon asshe was back on her feet.

She scratches her head with manicured,siren-red nails and says if it happenedagain she could switch to different sorts ofevents, but if she was forced into a ‘sedate,conservative, safe, security job’, she wouldprobably give it away.

‘‘That’s why I do security . . . it’sbecause I love the challenge,’’ she says.

‘‘I love being busy and I love beingin the middle of everything thatis happening.’’

Terri never imagined where her lifepath would lead when, finding she was anA-grade student in English and hopeless atthe rest, she left the Loreto Convent atCoorparoo at the end of Year 10 – scrap-ing through to graduate junior school byjust one point.

She went to business college and scoredher first job at 16 with office-equipmentcompany Roneo Vickers, working her wayfrom the switchboard to become one of theyoungest female sales representatives onthe road at the time.

However, within 18 months Terri andher managers realised selling wassimply not her forte and a couple ofmonths before she was to be married

at 21, she moved on to working in thecarpet industry.

Terri met her husband-to-be, John, onthe school bus they used to share when shewas 13 and began dating him about twoyears later.

Their romance also sparked her loveaffair with the Gold Coast, where theyused to spend every weekend and whereJohn proposed – on bended knee in theSurfers Paradise Beer Garden – when Terriwas 17.

They had a small family wedding in alog-cabin church, which Terri musesburned down after their divorce. But evenon the way there, she confesses, she wasunsure of the match.

‘‘I remember sitting in the back of thelimousine, with my dad looking out thewindow, thinking ‘I’m not sure I’m doingthe right thing here’, and my dad looked atme and he squeezed my hand and said‘you’re having second thoughts aren’tyou?’,’’ she says.

‘‘I looked out the window so hewouldn’t see my eyes fill up with tears andsaid ‘no Dad, I’m fine’.

‘‘I knew itp r o b a b l y

w a s n ’ t t h eright thing to do

but in those daysthere was just so

much expectationon you.’’

Terri and John, aconstruction worker,

parted ways when Terriwas 25 and it was then

she began to forge herindependence.

She started going out with‘the girls’ for the first time in her

life, hitting Surfers Paradisenightclubs including The Pent-

house, The Avenue and Twains,where she was a door girl for about

six months.A few years later the blue-eyed

beauty was given the security gig on thedoor of Transformers, one of the first

Brisbane nightclubs to use female security,and through that role she heard about jobsgoing at Indy.

She started by monitoring the GoldenGate building at the second Gold Coastevent and has worked every Indy since,climbing to second-in-command and thensupervisor of one of the seven sectorsseven years ago.

‘‘I love Indy,’’ she says with a grin.‘‘I love the V8s, the F111s, the

helicopters, the overseas visitors, therace drivers, the cars . . . I just love thewhole experience.

‘‘After four or five days of 12, 14, 16hours I always come home and say I’mnot doing it again and every year as soon asIndy comes around I’ve got my hand upto go.’’

Terri’s role includes attending briefingson possible terrorist threats, dealing withfights, searching bags, keeping an eye ontomfoolery on the balconies and protect-ing the Indy cars when they crash, wardingoff the opportunists trying to pilfer expens-ive souvenirs to sell on eBay.

She’s tight-lipped about securityincidents that have happened over theyears out of respect for her employer butdoes reveal there has been one death in hersector, when one of the marshals had aheart attack.

‘‘Every year his wife and kids comeback and they bring some flowers to placewhere he passed away and have kind of alittle memorial, so I make sure whoever thestaff member is at that place knows they’recoming,’’ she says.

‘‘We just make sure they don’t have toargue their way in and give them the timethey need.’’

Terri oversees about 20 securitypersonnel in Delta sector and is treated bymost colleagues like a sister, but she hascome across some men who don’t take wellto having a female as their boss.

She handles them with the same diplo-macy she employs with the patrons, askingif she’s done anything to cause offence andexplaining that she’s been doing the job foryears and her instructions are only to maketheir lives easier.

It’s strange to think someone with sucha verbal talent in the security arena wouldbe afraid of speaking in public, but thatwas the case with Terri even after shestarted Terri Cooper Networking in 2001.

She used to have someone else emceeher events but one day he turned aroundand challenged her to be the face of herown consultancy and with discipline andher characteristic strength she workedthrough her fears.

PAGE 14 - Weekend Bulletin PARADISE, August 9-10, 2008

Minding their business . . . Terri Cooper has ensured the safety of tennis ace Martina Hingis (left) and JohnFarnham, and (right) with Austin Powers as an organiser of the Racecourse Road Festival, Ascot

‘‘I would be physically sick before Ispoke, I would shake so much I couldn’thold the piece of paper because you’d seeit shaking. I went through all of that buteach time it got a little bit easier and nowyou’ve really got to stop me from talking,’’she says.

‘‘I still get nervous before I speak but Ithink that’s a good thing.

‘‘I once asked John Farnham if he gotnervous still before he went on stage and hesaid ‘the day I stop getting nervous, I quit’.’’

‘The Voice’ is among a host ofcelebrities Terri has watched over throughher security work in Brisbane and on theGold Coast, but although she is a greatadmirer of Farnham’s boundless energyshe’s not one to get starry-eyed.

Whether she is body-guarding tennisplayer Martina Hingis or ensuringthings run smoothly for the RedHot Chilli Peppers, Dalai Lama, IanThorpe or Queensland Premier AnnaBligh, Terri says her focus is the job, notthe person.

‘‘They’re human . . . and sometimes Ithink I wouldn’t want to be them just ob-serving how people react when they walkinto a room, particularly with RichardBranson,’’ she says.

‘‘I’ve seen people shove others out ofthe way to get to him and he literallycannot have five minutes to himself whenhe’s in public. That sort of a life must bevery difficult.’’

Ever the networker, Terri has coaxedsome of her high-profile charges to speakat her breakfast events, including racingcar champion Craig Lowndes – who shesays is so generous with his time she has topull him away from signing autographs.

She gets a buzz out of putting peopletogether and seeing business come out ofthe meeting, especially when the resulthelps charity.

Terri has run events for the LeukaemiaFoundation and Make-A-Wish and evengone to jail – for the benefit of the SpinalInjuries Association, of course. She was

locked up with TV host and formerAFL player Richard Champion plus acluster of others at the old Boggo RoadGaol and had to draw on her contacts toraise money to ‘break out’.

The cause perhaps closest to Terri’sheart, however, is abuse prevention andeducation charity Bravehearts, havingjoined its board last year at the invitationof founder Hetty Johnston.

Terri has no children of her ownbecause ‘the circumstances have neverbeen right’ but she says her philosophy isto look after the ones here already whoaren’t being cared for.

At times all of her roles have cometogether to achieve this, such as whenshe made friends with a TaskforceArgus detective through Braveheartsand was able to organise police briefingsabout how to spot pedophiles for staffa t a Br i sbane venue ahead o f achildren’s concert.

She’s not sure where her compassioncomes from and puts it down to something

learned from mum Carol but when itcomes to strength in a crisis and businesssense there’s no doubt it was her fatherwho led the way.

Terri and younger brother Peter, asoftware company marketer living inSouth Carolina, used to pay out Tom forhaving ‘moths in his wallet’ but lookingback she reckons it was his level-headedadvice that put her in good stead for whatwas to come.

‘‘Dad always had this saying, wheneverwe said ‘can we go here or have thator do this’ he’d always say ‘there’s arecession you know’,’’ says Terri witha smile.

‘‘Dad’s been saying there’s a recessioncoming for the last 30 years and it’s a bit ofa joke in our family, but one thing he didteach me was you buy something when youhave the money.’’

Terri says her father is the ‘life and soul’of her close-knit clan and concedes thethought of losing family or friends is onething she does find frightening.

Spending time with those close to her isone of the ways Terri likes to relax butwhen she returns to her apartment after along day, or night, at work she is perfectlycontent to enjoy only her own company –and that of her two goldfish.

She loves to curl up with a gooddetective novel to escape and delvesinto business books to give her ‘akick up the bum’ every morning tokeep motivated.

When she’s not reading Terri is work-ing on her own two books – one, a net-working advice volume, the other a workentitled Stop Acting Your Age inspired bythe words ‘don’t you think you are too oldto be . . .’ that she has heard so often in thepast 20 years.

You might also catch her unwindingbetween meetings with a coffee or glass ofwine by the water at Marina Mirage, whichis one of her favourite places, somewhereshe’ll be visiting a lot more often as sheseeks to grow her consultancy’s GoldCoast profile.

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Weekend Bulletin PARADISE, August 9-10, 2008 - PAGE 15

In a premier position . . . Terriand elected Queensland boss

Anna Bligh ‘‘I’ve seenpeople shove othersout of the wayto get to him(Branson) and heliterally cannot havefive minutes tohimself whenhe’s in public

It has not always been smooth sailingfor Terri in the networking business. Infact for the first 18 months she struggled topay the rent from week to week and had touse her security job for support.

She says that period taught her thedifference between ‘want’ and ‘need’ butcreating the business was worth it becauseshe found her true calling.

‘‘I have realised I was put here to helppeople,’’ she says.

‘‘It’s what my passion is and I finallyrealised that and got myself into abusiness and a position where peoplewanted to be helped, and that makes mylife a whole lot easier and a whole lot morewarm and fuzzy.’’

Terri wants to expand her activities onthe Gold and Sunshine coasts and reckonswhile business or social networkingwebsites like Facebook certainly have aplace, there will always be value in meetingpeople face to face.

She is also itching to finish the counsell-

ing diploma she started eight years ago andwould love to find the time to do traumacounselling for the emergency services.

‘‘It’s something I’ve always beeninterested in and just having been at thataccident scene (at Royal Pines) that nightand knowing that these guys see that andworse on a regular basis and some of themresign from their work because of whatthey have seen . . . maybe there is an open-ing for it,’’ she says.

‘‘I think what I saw was fairly mildcompared to what these guys wouldsee but it probably took me abouta week to get over that and for mymentality to come back to who I was

before, because you do get a lot offlashbacks and wonder if you should havedone anything differently.

‘‘You can just imagine what it must belike if you are there saving lives and youlose one.’’

Terri would ideally like to fit in thecounselling alongside her other work,but with such a busy schedule sheknows she won’t be able to keep up thesame pace indefinitely.

She says she might eventually reduceher security work to only major events ifthe two jobs become too much, but you getthe feeling it will take a lot of pressure forher to give it up entirely.

‘‘I would keep doing it providing I canphysically handle it and can combine mybusiness and my security,’’ she says.

‘‘Obviously my business has to be thepriority but for the time being I’m copingand enjoying it so when I stop enjoying it,that’s when I’ll stop doing it.

‘‘I’m extremely happy with my life.’’ �

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