In ensuring your safety and security, finding a good Executive Protection Agent is the all-important nudge you have to weigh up. Learn the relevant mechanisms by which you get to make sure you’re getting the best hands to manage your Executive Protection needs.
Executive Protection is an art, and Executive Protection agents are the artists. If you’re a high net-worth individual (celebrity, public figure, dignitary, or plain moneyed fellow), you must have heard of Executive Protection and why it could be vital to your welfare.
Since life is our most precious asset, we are responsible for managing it wisely, the same way we do other assets using time and effort. When your life is secured, you get value for the effort put in to ensure that security — you’re more productive, relaxed, light-hearted, and out of harm’s way. Who wouldn’t want these?
Executive Protection is a famous concept nowadays because it’s the means through which you get to ensure that security and enjoy the value that comes with it. Executive Protection is also known as Close protection. It refers to security and risk mitigation measures taken to ensure the safety of Very Important Persons or other high net-worth individuals who may be exposed to elevated personal risk because of their employment, high-profile status, net worth, affiliations, or geographical location.
Executive Protection is forked out by trained agents who specialize in providing you with the necessary physical and digital security you need to stay risk-free at all times. These agents offer protective services to protect high-profile clients from potential danger at their homes, places of work, and other locations their clients may visit. They also identify possible hostile situations they can divert from their clients’ surroundings.
So, Executive Protection agents are the means through which you get to realize the goodies connected to Executive Protection.
This is why it’s essential to ensure that whoever you’re hiring as your Executive Protection agent has the requisite capabilities to handle your security needs and offer you the best Executive Protection. These capabilities are also known as hard or soft skills and traits that are particularly significant for the unique demands of the protective industry. These capabilities, skills, and traits will be surveyed in due course.
But in a nutshell, here’s the scenario: You’re a high net-worth individual with bumped-up security concerns, convinced that Executive Protection is the answer to your headache. You want to hire an excellent Executive Protection agent but are unsure how to do it.
Not to worry — we’re here to help you address that. Here are some salient steps you can take to ease the complex process of finding a good Executive Protection agent capable of handling your unique security needs:
Keep an eye out for specific skills and traits
Efficient Executive Protection agents usually have a mix of proven skills and traits that set them apart from the less efficient. While running through your list of potential hirees, be sure to pick out agents that display most or all of these skills and traits strongly because those agents will be more successful than others at handling your needs, no matter how special they may be.
An Executive Protection agent’s goal is to keep you safe, happy, and productive no matter where your job and other interests take you, so they must continuously come up with solutions to new challenges while spending so much time with you as professionals and not your friends. It takes a certain kind of person to thrive in such a context.
Some of these skills and traits you should look out for include resourcefulness, resilience, professionalism, discretion, self-awareness, service-mindedness, self-regulation, excellent communication, empathy, work-life balance, and self-motivation, among others.
Many of these skills and traits are interrelated; all are important, and an Executive Protection agent who possesses them will undoubtedly be good enough for your security needs, no matter the requirements you have in mind to dispose of those needs.
Apart from these, you must ensure the Executive Protection agent you’re considering can handle the typical duties of Executive Protection agents. These duties include:
Regularly assessing risks, vulnerabilities, and threats
Learning and memorizing emergency exit plans at various locations
Keeping confidential information safe
Accompanying and protecting clients during travel
Regularly evaluating and troubleshooting security system errors
Undertaking regular surveillance of the client’s well-being
Protecting the client from counter-surveillance by other entities
Confirm the qualifications of the Executive Protection agent
How good an Executive Protection agent is at their job can be proved in two ways: on paper and in practice.
You get to see how good an Executive Protection agent is in practice when they’re in the field, but you don’t want to have to hire an agent before you clock any indications of just how good they are; which is why these indications are accessible on paper — we’re talking degrees, certificates, and licenses reflected in the agent’s resume.
Many Executive Protection agencies and organizations require their agents to hold a high school diploma or equivalent, such as a GED certificate. Still and all, some agents go beyond to get further education, like a master’s or a bachelor’s degree, to enhance their expertise in Executive Protection.
An excellent Executive protection agent recognizes that they need several skills and knowledge of specific protective trends and techniques in the industry to provide their clients with the best services. So, you can expect to see reports of courses, classes, and training programs related to Executive Protection in the resumes of those agents you’re considering. Some of the topics these courses and programs are based on include cybersecurity, security site assessment, hand-to-hand combat, threat monitoring and analysis, and risk assessment, among others.
So, a good Executive Protection agent who stands above the rest will have a couple of courses, training programs, and licenses under their belt to show you on a surface level that they have the requisite knowledge and capabilities needed to handle your security needs efficiently.
Seek professional assistance
Getting a good Executive Protection agent can be a dicey process, especially if you aren’t someone with knowledge of the workings of the security industry. You could be misled in your approach to examining if an agent would be the best fit for your security needs, or you may find yourself overwhelmed by the process of sieving through as many considerations as possible to get to a bunch of options you’re satisfied are good enough for what you want.
That process can be eased by seeking professional assistance. You could receive consultation from security-inclined organizations that directly or indirectly provide such services, like us here at Security Pro (slowly raising our hands). These organizations will provide guidelines and directives that can make the process seamless for you from start to finish; you’ll know factors to consider before hiring an agent, what to expect from the agent you employ, and the process you will go through to hire that agent.
If you’re looking to take this burden off your shoulders ultimately, there’s a chance for that too. Allow us a couple of lines to plug our utility at this point.
At Security Pro, we research, identify, and connect you with the best professionals across various security fields, including Executive Protection. What we do is work with credible organizations and agents who have been examined and who hold proven track records of guaranteed customer satisfaction above and beyond client expectations — and we connect you with these professionals easily.
How do we get to do that?
It starts with you — you schedule a brief (also free) consultation with us or contact us anytime you’re ready for a meet-up, following which we’ll have a sit-down, discussing your protective needs and whether or not, in our estimation, you do need Executive Protection.
If we do determine that you need Executive Protection, we’ll handle the rough work of sieving through as many available agents within our network as possible while you lay back and go on with your daily business without any worries.
When the work is done, you’ll have a number of excellent options to choose from — we’re talking the cream of the crop in the field of Executive Protection.
These are some of the relevant techniques you can always employ at any time to ease the process of hiring a good Executive Protection agent. As we’ve said, your life is your most precious asset, and as far as we know, no one ordinarily places the security of their most precious asset in incapable hands. So, it’s necessary to ensure that when you hire an Executive Protection agent, you’re also sure that the agent has the requisite capacity to handle your needs efficiently and effectively. You can acquire this certainty seamlessly once these relevant mechanisms are taken on board.