Category - Blog

We all have biases. We demonstrate this whenever we show an implicit, often unspoken tendency for or against someone or something. For better and for worse, biases are baked into our social, psychological, and cognitive evolution as human beings. Our pattern-seeking brains are hardwired to make predictions, and biases make life quicker and easier to predict. Of course, even protective intelligence analysts are prone to biases; it can’t be helped. But we can help ourselves – and those who consume the intelligence that we produce – by recognizing our biases and doing our best to mitigate them.

When people think about the risks that executive protection helps mitigate, they quickly conjure up images of threats they have seen in the media. Home invasions, pushy paparazzi, kidnappings, and public attacks all come to mind. And of course, these are all threats that executive protection professionals and their clients must take seriously.

With this blog we examine some lesser-known threats and vulnerabilities, so EP clients and practitioners can consider them as they plan and implement comprehensive protection programs. Even if you’re not in the executive protection industry, awareness of these threats and vulnerabilities is the first step towards mitigating them.

The importance of sustainment training in executive protection programs is often neglected. In this blog, we take a closer look at which EP skills need to be maintained through sustainment training – and why sustainment training is too often ignored or underprioritized in executive protection programs.

It’s important for executive protection agents to know when to blend in and when to stand out. If standing out becomes necessary to protect the client, we’re fine with standing up and getting noticed. In most cases, however, we’re happy to blend into the background. We never want to stick out because we didn’t engage in a little forward thinking concerning our wardrobe and style choices. 

In this blog, we’d like to get more tactical than we usually do and provide some practical tips that will let you dress for the part no matter what role you’re playing and wherever your EP job takes you.

Like any other business, most executive protection companies are vendors as well as purchasers. We sell protective services to our clients, and we sometimes buy services from other suppliers to make this happen. Ergo, we need to be good at providing the services we sell, and we need to be good at buying the services we outsource. In this blog, we ask executive protection companies and their clients to consider the differences between simple vendor and strategic partner relationships.

Technical surveillance counter-measures, or TSCM, as the term is almost always abbreviated, is still a rather misunderstood outlier in the worlds of executive protection and enterprise risk management. In this blog, we’d like to resolve some misconceptions about TSCM that we often run into, and, perhaps more importantly, call attention to why we think TSCM should play a bigger role in enterprise security risk management in general and executive protection in particular.

Some people are natural networkers. For others, networking is like flossing your teeth: You know you’re supposed to do it regularly, but for some reason, you never get around to it. In this blog, Christian West and guest blogger Craig McKim share 10 networking tips that any executive protection professional can put to use immediately.

Is the executive protection industry doing enough to prepare its next generation of leaders? We don’t think so. In order to keep up with the growing demands for EP – in terms of quantity and quality – we all need to do more to develop more and better leaders.

Christian West reflects on some of the things he learned as a bouncer that have come in handy working in executive protection, drawing on his own experience and that of some colleagues who also have the honor of writing “bouncer” on their resumés.

We’ve been watching the dumb things people do to pull down the EP industry rather than move it forward for way too long. And yes, this list is based on looking at ourselves over the years as well as at others. So, we started thinking about writing this blog and collecting ideas. It wasn’t easy, but we finally narrowed the list down to the 10 dumbest things we wish people would stop doing in the EP industry.

In this blog, Christian West underscores the importance of staying up to date with what is happening in the executive protection industry. Proactive networking is key to breaking down the barriers that lead to siloed thinking.

In this blog, guest blogger Mike Ellenbogen of Evolv Technology and Christian West zoom in on the executive protection industry’s perspective on security screening for events. The goal is effective security for the principal and others – without compromising the guest experience.

In this blog, Sean Schuhriemen and Christian West bring together two practical perspectives on protective intelligence. One is shaped by years of governmental service in operational intelligence, the other by decades of protecting corporate officers and high net worth principals. Together, they present a shared view on the importance of protective intelligence in executive protection – and call for even better integration between their two practices so we can learn from each other and improve outcomes.

Operational readiness is the most fundamental prerequisite for any protective effort and has consequences for practically everything we do as an executive protection company.

In this blog, we’d like to discuss how our understanding of this all-important concept is evolving towards operational optimization – and encourage everyone in the executive protection industry – colleagues, competitors, and customers – to join us in this continuing discussion.

As corporations continue to expand internationally, they are sending more staff to more places than ever before – including destinations associated with elevated travel risk. And as we can tell from the kinds of inquiries we increasingly receive, those responsible for handling corporate travel and security issues often find it difficult to know when what kind of travel risk mitigation is appropriate for where, for whom, and for when.

In this blog, we take a close look at the five questions we get from clients when they consider using secure travel services for employees besides the C-suite.