The Hall exists to recognize, celebrate, and reward those in and around the retail loss prevention industry, honoring achievement and excellence across a variety of categories. It is intended to celebrate the lifetime achievements of industry leaders who have contributed so much to benefit the industry they have served.
They have cut the path for those who have followed. They are leaders of innovation, design, process, and policy. They have led an exemplary career, been a master of mentoring, and they have shared with others to help elevate professionals in loss prevention, enhancing the the industry, giving back, and paying it forward, to those who follow.
LP Rising Star of the Year
The LP Rising Star is an up-and-comer that has demonstrated through their words, actions, and behaviors that they are going places as a role model for others, a leader in their company, and as a positive, insightful, and exemplary representative of the loss prevention industry both now and moving forward. They are making a positive impact in the lives of others and leading by example, whether through successful times, times of change, or times of adversity.
Watch here to learn the 2021-2022 LP Rising Star of the Year:
This Year’s Finalists
The 2021-2022 Finalists for the LP Rising Star of the Year include:
Douglas Horsting, Lead Asset Protection Investigator, Rite Aid
Douglas Horsting joined Rite Aid as a Lead Asset Protection Investigator in June of 2021. The role was newly created to address the significant rise in external theft and ORC activity in NYC and the boroughs of NY. Prior to joining Rite Aid, Doug worked as a security supervisor in a hospital setting.
In today’s retail environment external theft in large cities has become an unprecedented challenge, couple that with Covid-19 and the problem would seem insurmountable. Despite all of the obstacles, Doug embraced the task and not only found a way to be successful but exceeded everyone’s expectations. He took the time to train the store level employees regarding our policies and the need to work safely when dealing with external theft. He stressed documenting all of the activity to understand the patterns of theft and identify the recidivists.
Then he took things a step further, becoming the champion Law Enforcement liaison. He contacted the individual precincts and scheduled meetings to educate the officers on the patterns of thefts from the individual stores and provided documents and video assisting law enforcement with identifying the recidivists. He scheduled covert operations with the officers to apprehend the suspects in the act of shoplifting. He follows up with the DAs office to ensure they understand the extent of loss the stores are experiencing as a result of these repeat offenders. He attends every precinct meeting Law Enforcement has with the community and speaks directly to the public regarding the efforts of the officers to provide a safe shopping experience. He is currently repeating these efforts in twenty precincts throughout the city and is working tirelessly to expand his reach. He is responsible for a record number of arrests and more importantly for providing a much safer working environment in our stores.
Doug does not take “no” for an answer, he is definitely a Rising Star.
Emma Gomez, Albertsons Companies
Emma Gomez is an exceptional employee, a tremendous asset to our department and she is deserving of this award and recognition.
COLLABORATION: Emma has developed numerous partnerships. She is a strong communicator and has taken initiative to support our asset protection field division teams along with corporate support functional areas in collaborative efforts.
COMMITMENT TO HIGH STANDARDS: With an immense amount of corporate, division and store level change, Emma has used data to consistently heighten expectations as it relates to quality, support, and customer-service.
LEADERSHIP in TEAMWORK: Emma has organized and lead team meetings, training/development initiatives. She has provided strong leadership and oversight in our case management system. Her understanding of retail store operations, corporate functional groups, ecommerce, and the complexity of supply chain has qualified her to move into a leadership role.
PASSION: Emma is a self-motivator, extremely organized, continually learning new ways to manage routine activities both efficiently and effectively. Her continuous attention to detail, development of best practices has earned the respect of her colleagues.
RESPONSIVENESS/SERVICE: Emma consistently goes above and beyond the job in pursuit of excellence. Her willingness to assist others and positive attitude to get the job done reflects in her team player approach.
Gary Schlotthauer, Executive Team Lead Loss Prevention (ETLAP) Target Corp
It is a great pleasure to nominate Gary Schlotthauer for consideration for the 2021 LP Rising Star. In addition to performing his job at an exemplary level, Gary demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to our country with twenty years of military service.
Gary is a result driven Loss Prevention Expert. His expertise and shared knowledge allowed him to be the example and top Loss Prevention Manager when compared amongst his peers. Gary has been a constant leader in his local community recognized through partnerships by local law enforcement and neighboring retail partners such as Lowe’s, Kohl’s, The Home Depot and Walmart.
Gary is considered the “Go To” trainer for Loss Prevention in his district. In addition, over the course of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Gary was able to manage crowd control resulting in 0 incidents when his store was limiting customers in the store. Gary also partnered with the store to help maintain local, state, and federal COVID-19 Guidelines through training and development.
Gary developed a strategy that empowered his team to place 1st in his district in both recovered merchandise cases and dollars recovered, thus dubbing him as a “Rising Star.’
Gary’s theft identification and mitigation outpaced his predecessor. During the three plus years in role as an Executive Team Leader – Asset Protection Manager his team’s production increased in the following amounts
• Total Theft Proven 142% better than the three years before he took over
• Recoveries 312% better than the three years before he took over
• Recovery dollars 183% better than the three years before he took over
• Theft identification 148% better than the three years before he took over
• Theft identification dollars 177% better than the three years before he took over
Gary is a “Rising Star” and top leader in the Loss Prevention field. His content on LinkedIn is followed by Loss Prevention professionals worldwide.
Tori Connelly, MOD Pizza
During 2021, Tori started a career in the Asset Protection field as Loss Prevention Investigator. She had no experience with anything to do with Loss Prevention and tackled the challenge head on. Her keen attention to detail and heightened level of organization were strong contributors to success. And she was successful. Tori generated the highest number of investigations that lead to terminations that our team has seen (a twofold increase from previous years). This was done by learning and utilizing technology (both new and old) to identify theft, operational issues, training gaps and loopholes in our point of sale and exception reporting systems.
Tori quickly established herself as a trusted and valuable business partner to the field, providing help and allowing the field to come to her with potential investigations. Tori is always available, seeks to provide solutions, and sources solutions when she does not have them herself.
In addition to her work as an investigator, she put a significant amount of work into building relationships with a new vendor and managed a large part of the project roll out for a new video management system, DVRs, and alarm panels in all locations. This was no easy task, especially when faced with considerable setback in supply chain and installation labor shortages. Once complete, she continued to strengthen those relationships and work to ensure the project is working at its most efficient capacity for our squad and customers. She has mastered the new tools and as a result has provided a tremendous service to our DM and RD team while taking a significant amount of work off of their plate.
Tori is a true asset to our company and the Asset Protection Team. We are grateful to have her and excited to see how she grows in the future.
Tyler St. John, Meijer
Tyler since day one has been dedicated to his work. He has over the last few years learned so many new skills and information about Meijer. He is driven to succeed taking on harder stores each year and helping them become a success. His recent success was at a store that has historically been a Shrink focus store. During Tyler’s role at that store, he managed to work with the team and was able help the store graduate from the shrink focus list based on his partnerships and wealth of knowledge. Tyler is now onto his new task at another hard store that has also been consecutively on the shrink focus store list. Tyler has already started to build those relationships and teaching the store how they can improve those numbers.
Will Waddell, LPM, Dick’s Sporting Goods
Will was a leader in apprehensions for the Walmart chain in 2018 and trained countless new APAs who when on to lead their markets. In 2021 Will was still hard charging and improving his skillset as he transitioned to DSG. Despite having less technology due to being at a smaller company, Will remained a productive leader for the entire Dicks Sporting Goods chain closing external cases and post prosecutions at 6 different DSG locations in 5 different counties, which is a testament to his developed partnership with various Police Departments. Will also lowered shrink in his store enough for the store to be lowered from the red “fix store” category. Will is always there. His 2021 success led to him being promoted to Loss Prevention manager in 2022. Will is always willing to help out police and LP peers on identifying their cases and has done so many times. Will is a perfect candidate for rising star.