Interview between Mark W. Gabel, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Salus Secure Environments, and Kris Coleman, Founder, President, and CEO, Red Five.
Mr. Gabel: Hi, I’m Mark Gabel with Salus Secure Environments, I’m here with Kris Coleman with Red Five and we’re going to talk about security. Kris thanks for being here with us today and why don’t you tell us about Red Five, who you guys are and what you guys do.
Mr. Coleman: Thanks Mark. Red Five is a security company that focuses on high net worth families and corporations. We’ve been in business about 15 years, our approach really came out of my time at CIA and at FBI where I worked both investigations and intelligence operations. We took care of directors; we took care of individuals operating in dangerous environments. And, all those experiences lead me into the private sector eventually to take care of private families and corporations. We take care of individuals’ privacy, we take care of individuals’ security and then we help them rebound from adversity by teaching them how to be more resilient.
Mr. Gabel: Some of the things we’ve worked on with you guys before has been risk assessments for our clients. Walk us through, for the people who don’t know, what a typical risk assessment looks like for what you guys do.
Mr. Coleman: We follow the Sandia methodology that came out of the national laboratories. When we built our risk assessment methodology, we figured we would follow something that actually had been proven over the last four years. Sandia’s methodology, we approach it from – understand what the assets are that we’re trying to protect, whether people, information, equipment, whatever it may be. Reputation is another thing we try to protect.
Then we take time and we take a look at what the threats are to those assets. Specifically, what kinds of things or people would occur that would have an adverse effect on those assets. That’s our threat assessment piece. Once we’ve understood the threat assessment then we will get into the vulnerabilities. Sometimes there are existing counter measures that’ll protect that asset. You might have an alarm in your house, you might have a strong door, you might even have a dog. All those things are good mitigation against threats, but we’ll do a vulnerability assessment to see what else needs to be added so that we can actually defend against those threats.
We’ll do the vulnerability assessment and then that leads us into risks. We’re talking about likelihoods of how and when these things might happen, if they might happen, but then more specifically, what are the consequences if they do happen. The risk assessment piece is really important because then you can make good decisions about what you’re going to spend to actually mitigate those risks. And, some of them you’ll accept, you’ll transfer the risk. You’ll say, “You know what we have insurance for that. I’m not going to worry about protecting that piece of art, we’ve got a big insurance policy.” But family is hard to insure, you want to protect the family. And reputation is also hard to insure. We really spend our time on the asset register, understanding what it is, understanding the threats, checking the vulnerabilities, and then making sure we have actually reduced your risk. We allow our people to manage their own risk that way.
Mr. Gabel: Sounds very thorough, what you guys do.
Mr. Coleman: It’s very thorough, it’s very comprehensive.
Mr. Gabel: And it also sounds holistic, like from every approach.
Mr. Coleman: No doubt, so I appreciate you saying that. The threat side is not just about man made threats, it’s also about natural hazards. We are down here in Florida, so it could be hurricanes. We’re talking about the West, it could be earthquakes, we get into flooding in some instances and it could be a whole variety of different hazards. Health is another issue, health issues, especially when you travel other parts of the world.
Mr. Gabel: Sure.
