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Hi-Lites from the PSC

The room was filled with the attendees as Mike Nossaman opened the 2012 PSC conference and went over how and what the conference is about. He touched on minor changes and then allowed for the introduction of the first session “from a one man company to a worldwide partner” by Christian West. Christian owns AS Solutions in Seattle, Washington. Prior to his session I introduced myself to Christian where he immediately said, “Chad Duke told me to tell you hello.” Chad is one of the specialists that I mentor and one that I featured on the BPI security blog. As we spoke I realized that I had referred business to AS Solutions this year and had spoken to Christian’s partner Brandon Voller. NETWORKING through social media between me and Chad initiated that connection.

Christian spoke of how he turned his one man shop into a global provider with fortune 1 and 5 companies. His presentation was good and enlightening. In fact Christian’s story in many ways mirrors BPI.

After lunch we had a panel discussion on security solutions moderated by Robert Oatman. Questions had been passed to the moderator but somehow mine didn’t make it to his hands. Go figure. In my view the discussion took off in different directions and fell off message. To the point that we discussed the Colombia incident with USSS.

After lunch I sat in on the session- “Challenging Perspectives, adapting
To the change in the EP framework” by Charles Randolph – head of security of Microsoft. His session really got into the weeds on how MS has a full EP/ERT and support element. The things that private sector company owners dream of having.

The evening closed out with Frank Gallagher’s no bull session on “The care and feeding of CEO’s and CSO’s. If you don’t know Frank by now you need to start following him and reading his articles on security driver. Frank hit all the points that we discuss everyday and posed some rhetorical questions where you could see some perplexed faces. I know that Frank used diplomacy in his approach because of the conference, but I’d venture to say he was parsing his words constantly in order to quell that Marine in him that was screaming to come out.

So far I give the conference a “B”. I would hope that we would look at changing the name of the conference to what it really is. The Executive Protection Security Council. I think that having a legitimate council looking
into the craft and then and maybe then the clients can see that we are solidified and moving in some direction.

3 comments

  1. Doug Smith

    Nice one Eric. Are there any further details available of this Microsoft support element?

  2. Leon Adams

    Thanks for the update, Eric. Keep the good info coming, bro.

    1. Eric Konohia

      Thanks Leon. Make sure you catch Mondays blog

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