The Security Consultant's Handbook

Richard Bingley

• Publisher: ITGP
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9781849287500
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

A compendium of essential information for the modern security entrepreneur and practitioner

The modern security practitioner has shifted from a predominantly protective site and assets manager to a leading contributor to overall organisational resilience. Accordingly, The Security Consultant's Handbook sets out a holistic overview of the essential core knowledge, emerging opportunities and approaches to corporate thinking that are increasingly demanded by employers and buyers in the security market.

This book provides essential direction for those who want to succeed in security, either individually or as part of a team. It also aims to stimulate some fresh ideas and provide new market routes for security professionals who may feel that they are underappreciated and overexerted in traditional business domains.

Product overview

Distilling the author's fifteen years' experience as a security practitioner, and incorporating the results of some fifty interviews with leading security practitioners and a review of a wide range of supporting business literature, The Security Consultant's Handbook provides a wealth of knowledge for the modern security practitioner, covering:

• Entrepreneurial practice (including business intelligence, intellectual property rights, emerging markets, business funding and business networking)
• Management practice (including the security function's move from basement to boardroom, fitting security into the wider context of organisational resilience, security management leadership, adding value and professional proficiency)
• Legislation and regulation (including relevant UK and international laws such as the Human Rights Act 1998, the Data Protection Act 1998 and the Geneva Conventions)
• Private investigations (including surveillance techniques, tracing missing people, witness statements and evidence, and surveillance and the law)
• Information and cyber security (including why information needs protection, intelligence and espionage, cyber security threats, and mitigation approaches such as the ISO 27001 standard for information security management)
• Protective security (including risk assessment methods, person-focused threat assessments, protective security roles, piracy and firearms)
• Safer business travel (including government assistance, safety tips, responding to crime, kidnapping, protective approaches to travel security and corporate liability)
• Personal and organisational resilience (including workplace initiatives, crisis management, and international standards such as ISO 22320, ISO 22301 and PAS 200)

Featuring case studies, checklists and helpful chapter summaries, The Security Consultant's Handbook aims to be a practical and enabling guide for security officers and contractors. Its purpose is to plug information gaps or provoke new ideas, and provide a real-world support tool for those who want to offer their clients safe, proportionate and value-driven security services.

About the author

Richard Bingley is a senior lecturer in security and organisational resilience at Buckinghamshire New University, and co-founder of CSARN, the popular business security advisory network. He has more than fifteen years' experience in a range of high-profile security and communications roles, including as a close protection operative at London's 2012 Olympics and in Russia for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. He is a licensed close protection operative in the UK, and holds a postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning in higher education. Richard is the author of two previous books: Arms Trade: Just the Facts(2003) and Terrorism: Just the Facts (2004).

CHAPTER 1: BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEUR IN THE SECURITY BUSINESS

1.1 Context

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky, NHL Hall of Fame.

Whether as an employee, senior manager, or self-employed consultant, we are all expected to be entrepreneurs. Growing a successful business, your own enterprise or somebody else’s, is one of the most satisfying experiences during anybody’s working life. Winning new contracts is a thrilling endorsement of conceptual plans, existing skills, prior investment and experiences. On paper, becoming a successful entrepreneur within the security sector can be viewed as relatively straightforward by those on the outside of our profession. There is a popular perception that the private security market is awash with money. Especially around high-value assets where niche specialisms and uber-exciting professional backgrounds may well be required by clients. Two recent conversations that I’ve had spring to mind. The first, with a young law undergraduate at my boxing gym. After sparring me out of the ring, my pal wanted to chat about how he could ‘diversify’ into security. (Doesn’t being a barrister pay enough?) Secondly, a talk with Jason Towse, a managing director at one of the UK’s biggest security operators. He told me that margins from manned-guarding had all but evaporated. Success was hard-earned and cumulatively accrued, he said, “from building long-standing strategic relationships”. Longer-term relationships enabled the client and vendor to develop a trusted synergy based upon an intuitive understanding of one another. There had to be a ‘cross-cultural fit’ between both organisations, Towse reflected (1).

The truth is, of course, that security markets are, in essence, volatile. Furthermore they remain vulnerable to changing commercial market conditions, like any other private enterprise. Security markets mirror wider global market conditions, unless specific local incidents or security cultures emerge. That is, if they are lucky! Some three or four years after the noughties banking crisis, major financial institutions in London were still laying-off dozens of security staff, despite the international terrorism threat level either being designated ‘severe’ or ‘substantial’ (2). Yet elsewhere, often in fragile spheres of instability and conflict, the private security market has boomed beyond the wildest imagination of most practitioners. For example, after almost a decade of military intervention in Afghanistan, by 2010, the US Department of Defense employed around 20,000 private contractors and licensed 37 companies in Afghanistan. Circumstances again changed rapidly that year. Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, issued a decree prohibiting private security companies and established an Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF). The APPF was tasked to replace all non-diplomatic private security management functions (3). Yet four years later, following significant security lapses, and consideration for wider national security concerns, the outgoing President revoked his 2010 force nationalisation decree. Thus, market continuity planning, to militate against inconsistent customers and uncertain markets, will be a recurring theme for entrepreneurs as we travel through this book.

Taking on the role of business planner, when the sands of politics and economics are permanently shifting, can absorb and expend a lot of energy and enthusiasm. It may even sap individual and team morale after a while. Chronic uncertainty causes fatigue. Yet, there is a positive side for security practitioners because surrounding instability, even adversity, should really play to our strengths. Uncertainty and adversity are the very reasons why our clients look for our services. After all, if a security consultant does not survive and thrive on instability, then why on earth should an external client ever need to have confidence in you?

As we will see in this chapter, and subsequent sections of the Handbook, information is a critical success factor to any enterprise. Knowledge is, de facto, commercial power – a mix of leverage, authority and trust in us to do the right thing, at the right time. Those who take time to properly research, analyse and make sense of surrounding business environments, will reap longer-term dividends. Not least, because a greater sense of authority and resilience will emerge about your enterprise in the eyes of your putative clients and market peers. By positively embracing uncertainty, and shining a torch of leadership in difficult and unpredictable environments, the modern day security practitioner is ideally equipped to add real value to most organisations, including their own. Security practitioners and successful entrepreneurs have many shared characteristics: adaptability, a preference for back-up plans, and, above all, psychological resilience and stamina. “There’s no such thing as a setback”, said self-help guru business mogul, Tony Robins, who declared this enjoyable truism after his latest TV series was cancelled by producers (4). Just a nudge in another direction, perhaps.

1.2 Competitive intelligence

“Competitive Intelligence is not an invention of the 20^th Century.” – (Leonard Fuld, 2013)

Enterprises thrive due to many factors; desirable products, effective marketing, blindly optimistic and wealthy investors, dynamic working cultures and, of course, good leadership and motivated employees. Nevertheless, in all likelihood, a business can only survive and prosper in the longer-term by remaining actively aware and adaptive to its operating environment. Such alertness includes keeping a careful and most respectful eye upon similar organisations fishing in the same waters.

Security sector job roles are more fragile than others. Services and consultancies are in many cases contracted out, licensed and regulated by government departments and public authorities. This extra political dimension – sometimes influenced by a swift change in public opinion, or a new ministerial appointment – means that projects or administrative regimes can be uprooted or radically changed with very little notice. Commercial security and risk services are often tasked around delivery into higher-risk domains, where the approach by government agencies could be more volatile and uncertain. The only consistent feature of many higher risk environments is their inherent inconsistency. Governments will often seek to take direct control of a crisis situation or contagion of negative events. Authorities may wish to extend their reach over a perceived, troublesome sector, such as security, by issuing a raft of measures that may be impracticable and toxic to continued business. Security risk management thus attracts a high degree of interest from media and NGOs which makes public authorities even more susceptible to intervening within this sector. Sudden alterations to the operating environment imposed by governments and public authorities, can lead to damaging losses if the new conditions are not quickly anticipated. On the positive side, riskier security or operating environments provide fantastic opportunities for security enterprises to shine and excel. Companies that know their operating environments well, and also uphold professional practices around individual and organisational resilience (those that we delve into across this book’s eight chapters), will gain competitive advantage over their commercial peers.

Case studies: Four overnight game-changers to a private security operating environment

1. The introduction of British troops into Northern Ireland in 1969 to separate warring factions, and provide protection for civilians. This UK Government move followed the escalation of widespread sectarian and terrorist violence in Northern Ireland, and concerns in relation to the neutrality of some public services including domestic police functions.

2. The shooting and killing of several citizens in Baghdad by a small handful of employees working for the US security company, Blackwater, during 2007. The company was immediately ejected from Iraq by the domestic government. A national and international clamp-down on overseas-based private security contractors followed. This tragic event contributed, somewhat, as a catalyst for ‘Montreux Document’: also known as the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), a Swiss Government initiative. ICoC was codified into sector guidance by security trade association, ASIS, who later published the widely practiced Management System for the Quality of Private Security Company Operations (ANSI/ASIS PSC 2012).

3. Establishment of the Afghan Public Protection Force (APPF) by President Hamid Karzai’s administration, following his declaration in 2010 that all Private Security Contractors (PSCs) will be disbanded and services provided direct by the APPF. Karzai repealed his decision four years later.

4. A last-minute decision by UK Government ministers and officials to deploy several thousand Armed Forces personnel to guard the London 2012 Olympics sites, following an admission by the central security contractor, G4S, that there was a significant service delivery shortfall in required security guards. The British Security Industry Authority had warned about significant potential shortfalls more than two years beforehand. Those well-mobilised private companies that anticipated the shortfall were able to pick up the slack and win last-minute contracts, including for specialised services, such as close protection.

What is competitive intel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Becoming an Entrepreneur in the Security Business
• Chapter 2: Becoming a Developed Security Manager
• Chapter 3: Security Legislation and Regulation
• Chapter 4: Private Investigations
• Chapter 5: Information Security
• Chapter 6: Protective Security
• Chapter 7: Safe Business Travel
• Chapter 8: Personal and Organisational Resilience
• ITG Resources