You want to be in close protection (CP)? Clients are going to get choosier, we’re told – because having a CP team isn’t cheap.
David Rubens of Meido has something to finish at his computer so he invites me to look at his book shelves. He has several hundred books, grouped, and they tell you the journey of his life. Some are about martial arts – a few are in Japanese. Others are about world affairs and terrorism. This former Israeli paratrooper– who like many young men after their military service went travelling – became a martial arts instructor in Tokyo. In north London, David founded the Meidokan Dojo in 1991; he’s still based in Kilburn. He still teaches Aikido and last year was awarded his 6th dan. (Suffice to say: that doesn’t just happen to someone!) He’s gone from door superviser trainer to SIA-badge close protection and terrorism awareness trainer and speaker, and CP provider and international security consultant. He gained a masters degree from Leicester University and has been invited to lecture there and at Cranfield University, the Wiltshire-based institution whose security and resilience department is aimed more at the UK and world’s armed forces. David speaks, does introductions and arranges business security in and for Russia and elsewhere in eastern Europe, besides Japan. You want to do business with the oil and gas sector in a former Soviet state? You’re a sponsor of the Champions League and want security at the 2009 final in Moscow? You want – in a word – your security for a corporate visit or event co-ordinated? Such is the business and life of an international security consultant. You don’t – so I reflect after David takes me from his office for brunch in a restaurant on Kilburn High Road – apply to an advert to become one. You don’t wake up one morning as one. Your career takes you there; what you learn, who you meet, the skills you pick up and keep sharp.
So it is with CP. From the outside it can seem a small and cliquey world. David – who provides CP purely on the executive and corporate side, not the diplomatic or showbiz sides – makes the point that a CP person has to feel comfortable in that world. If you don’t feel at home, having a coffee in a Hilton hotel, or in the Institute of Directors building, ‘then you don’t belong in that world’. David raises the word professionalism, which has more than one meaning here; not only does the security sector wish to be professional, but the clients – who expect professionals if they pay for PR or tax advisers or whoever – want CP people who look and act the part. But, like others, David asks why security management, unlike PR or tax advice, is bought on margin and price. He suggests it’s because security is seen as a cost, not something that brings economic gain; hence the value of security is something David seeks to demonstrate.
Developing your CP or indeed other security career (as opposed to a job) is about training; but not only about training; and it depends on the trainer. David gives the example of a woman who asked whether she ought to do a firearms course; for four days. David answered to the effect that if you’re a businessman, entrusting your family to a bodyguard with a gun who’s had four days training, how confident would you feel? In CP, as in life, once a client sees a CP person, within a moment the client will make a judgement; do I hand over my safety, or my wife and children’s, to you? David adds: “The beauty of that is, if you do want to build a career, then this industry [CP] is elitist, in the best sense of the world. You are judged on your skills, your qualities, your capabilities, and the better you are, the better you will be. It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female, black or white, have a degree or not; what’s important is, are you a good protector? and to be a good protector means, are you professional? Because if you are professional, everything else comes with it; I don’t need to know you are a kick-boxer, that you have done this or that.” David suggests you hang around with good people; make yourself valuable. ‘Don’t come to me asking for a job; bring something to the team.” (To myself I recall here meeting Kevin Horak of CP firm Clearwater late in 2007, and being struck by his interest in learning anything that could make him a better CP. Foreign languages for instance.) Talking of languages, David adds one thing useful to have: local knowledge. Do you know your way around a country. If you, a CP hopeful, tell David you speak German, David will speak it back to you and find out if you mean you can order two beers in German, or you can run an operation in a German-speaking country. And by local knowledge, that doesn’t mean you had a nice time there two years ago; David means, do you know the security manager at a hotel, who to hire cars and drivers from? In other words, don’t claim to have skills you don’t really have. The problems on a CP job, David suggests, are often not due to bad guys with machine guns, but the security team’s mishaps, whether self-inflicted or acts of God. Say your car has broken down; you ring David who’s 3000 miles away … can you, the man on the spot, not fix it better than David?!
If CP work sounds ‘very, very, very hard’ as David says, that’s in part because the hours can be long. Say the client gets up early and after business is out late; so are you, protecting him. You have to get up before him, to get ready, and you go to bed after him. Ask David when the lunch break is, and you’ve blown it! If and when the client stops for lunch, you do. At intervals in this conversation, the SIA crops up. Now David as a trainer was dealing with the regulator from the start, even before the start, if that makes sense, and his verdict is that (in CP) the SIA regime has deskilled the sector – ‘you just have to look at the questions on the exam paper, apart from anything else’. Yes, the CP training course at 150 hours is way more than the security guard or doorman’s 40, but as David set out, a CP badge alone does not qualify you, someone just out of the Army, to walk into an airport first-class lounge with a client. For David, like the CP sector in general, it’s very much about paying your dues, showing responsibility, and respect to your employers, so that it’s shown back to you – in the form of more, and more prestigious and well-paid, work.
To sum up: David, recently 51, reflects that he is doing things he could not have at 35, say. He speaks of his last 20 years as preparation, for where he is now; and he still feels 17. “It just shows; if you just offer a good service, and stick around long enough, you can actually do something; you can become who you wish to become. And I have become what I wish to become. I have become an international security consultant working at the top level of government and research institutions; and I am loving it.” We walk back up the street towards Kilburn Tube station. A man closing the back doors of a van says hello to David and they shake hands.
For more visit www.meidoconsultants.com and on the martial arts side, www.meidokan.org.
