Behind the Interview: What We Told Jeff Crilley About PRO-tect
We recently sat down with veteran broadcast journalist Jeff Crilley to talk about PRO-tect: how it started, what a typical case actually looks like, and the values that shape how we work.
We've told the story of how PRO-tect started a hundred times in a hundred different rooms, but there was something different about saying it out loud to Jeff Crilley with a camera rolling. Maybe it's that his show has a way of making you slow down and actually think about the why behind what you do, instead of rattling off the same three sentences you use at a networking event. Whatever it was, we walked out of that interview having said some things we don't usually put into words, and we wanted to put them here too, not as a press release, but as the story itself.
Why we built a one-stop shop
We built PRO-tect to be the kind of firm we wished existed when we were starting out: a one-stop shop, so an attorney doesn't have to juggle three different vendors for investigation, protection, and everything in between. That partnership with attorneys isn't a slogan we came up with later, it's genuinely the reason the company exists. Every decision since has been filtered through the question of what actually makes an attorney's life easier and their case stronger.
How we split the work
Between the two of us, we split this business right down the middle. One of us handles the part that requires being in the room, with clients, in the field, making the calls that only someone who's done this for years knows how to make. The other handles what happens after that: the case data, the tracking, the documentation that gets built so it's actually usable by the time it lands on an attorney's desk instead of a pile of raw notes they have to sort through themselves. Neither of us could do this alone, and honestly, we don't think either of us would want to. It works because we're each covering ground the other can't.
The range of cases we take on
One thing we tried to get across to Jeff is just how wide the range of cases really is. People hear "private investigator" and picture one thing, but we're in criminal matters, civil litigation, personal injury, HOA disputes, and plenty in between. What doesn't change from case to case is how deliberate we are about which ones we take. We say no more than people probably realize, and that's on purpose.
Ethics isn't a line item, it's the filter everything runs through first.
The stories that stuck with us
The two stories that stuck with us most from that conversation were a search that ended in finding a missing child, and a piece of our work in high-end private security. We're choosing to keep the details close for now, not because they're not worth telling, but because some of these cases involve people who deserve the choice in how their story gets shared, especially one involving a child. If that changes, we'll come back and tell it properly, the way it deserves to be told.
The team behind the two of us
We also made a point of naming Devin and Avery Morgan, because this company was never a two-person show, whatever the "co-founders" framing might suggest. The two of them bring something to how we handle clients that we simply can't on our own, and we don't think we say that enough out loud.
The part we keep thinking about
The part of the conversation we keep thinking about, though, is the last few minutes, when it stopped being about cases entirely. We talked about faith, and about a gratitude practice we try to hold onto every day, and how much that actually shapes the way we sit with clients who are usually going through one of the worst chapters of their lives. That's not something that shows up on an invoice or a case file. But it's probably the truest answer either of us gave that whole interview to the question of why we do this.
If you want to hear it in our own words, the full interview is linked below. We'd rather you hear it the way we said it than the way we've written it here.
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