Category - Blog

The holidays are coming up, and you know what that means. It’s time for Christian West’s list of gadgets that every executive protection agent wants for Christmas in 2019!

Standardization has a lot of advantages for providers and purchasers of all kinds of goods and services. So, why does the executive protection industry not yet have any agreed standards? Although more standardization would present challenges, these would be far outweighed by the benefits. The time has come to start talking about standardization and the executive protection industry – and to act.

Families are different than corporations, so it’s no wonder that high net worth families – and the family offices that represent their interests – approach protective security differently than corporate organizations. As you’ll see in this blog by Christian West and Brian Jantzen, however, we believe there are many good reasons for family offices to take a page from the best corporate threat assessment and risk management practices.

There is a lot of talk in the security industry about Enterprise Security Risk Management (ESRM), but the executive protection industry has been pretty anonymous in the debate. As far as we can tell, many (most?) folks in our industry have not even heard about ESRM. Certainly, very few have embraced ESRM as part of their executive protection practices. We hope this blog will change that. It’s time for executive protection professionals to understand what ESRM is all about, separate the hype from the helpful, and start integrating the ESRM approach into our protective practices and client relationships.

In this blog, we’d like to raise our ice-filled glass to all the road warriors out there – and take a closer look at what executive protection and secure travel teams can learn from the humble Diet Coke.

In this blog, Christian West and Martin Nielsen examine the growing risks associated with mail-borne chemical and explosive attacks – and how executive protection programs can now mitigate these risks for organizations and family residences with the help of new screening technology.

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.