Threat Assessment & Security Risk Assessment Services

A threat assessment is not a compliance document. It's a decision-making tool. When we hand a client a completed assessment, the test isn't length or formatting — it's whether the client and their team can pick it up, read it once, and know exactly what to change about how they live, work, and travel. If it needs a follow-up meeting to explain what it means, we wrote it wrong.

The Secret Service model of threat assessment — which came out of decades of studying actual attacks on public figures — starts from a specific premise: people who attack public figures rarely 'snap.' They plan, they signal, they research, they rehearse, and they leave a trail. The private-sector version of this discipline applies the same rigor to the threats UHNW principals actually face: fixated individuals, terminated employees, contested-litigation counterparties, and opportunistic actors who identified the family from a public data source. The methodology transfers cleanly; only the operating environment changes.

The single most common failure I see in commercial threat assessments is the substitution of a residential audit for an actual threat assessment. Someone walks a property, notes the fence height and the camera coverage, and writes it up. That's a physical vulnerability assessment. It has nothing to do with who might come after the family or why. A real threat assessment starts with a person or a category — who is the principal, what is their public exposure, what does the last twelve months of contact and mention data show, what does the digital surface reveal, who has a grievance and where are they now — and works outward from there.

For a UHNW family, we typically run the assessment in three passes: principals and immediate family (public exposure, litigation history, prior threats, digital footprint, travel patterns), household and family-office staff (vetting posture, access rights, offboarding hygiene, insider-risk indicators), and physical infrastructure (residences, vehicles, aircraft, vessels, offices). Each pass produces specific recommendations that are prioritized by likelihood and consequence, not by what's easiest to sell. If our top recommendations are always 'add more guards,' we're doing the assessment wrong.

One habit from federal work that we carry over: threat assessments are living products. A twelve-month-old assessment for a public family is not accurate anymore. Kids grow up, principals take new board seats, spouses file for divorce, businesses go public, a lawsuit gets filed, an ex-employee starts a Substack. Any of those events changes the picture materially. Our standing assessments get refreshed on a set cadence, plus event-triggered updates whenever a material change hits.

For clients evaluating a threat assessment engagement, three signals matter more than the deliverable itself. First: does the assessor interview the people who actually see the principal every day — the assistant, the household lead, the family office staff — or only the principal? Second: does the assessor's team include someone with intelligence-analysis training, not just physical security experience? Third: does the final product include a prioritized action list with owners and timelines, or does it end at 'considerations'? Assessments that answer those three questions well tend to produce real security improvements. The others tend to sit in a drawer.