The Mind4Survival Podcast

84: Risk Assessment Principles and Threat Mitigation

09.16.2019 - By Brian DuffPlay

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There are some very basic risk assessment principles that will help you to identify potential problems, manage your risk profile, and mitigate your most significant threats.

Now many of you may be asking, well, what’s a risk profile? Your risk profile is all the stuff that identifies the threats to which you and your family, your home, your car, your dog, whatever are exposed to.

You determine your risk profile by analyzing what your personal assets are, what you have to protect your personal assets from, and what you have to protect them with.

Meet Ed Clark

But before we get too far down the road on this, I want to bring in a special guest for this interview.

My special guest is Ed Clark. Ed is a retired US Army Special Forces Officer and a global expert in security and vulnerability assessments. And today, he’s going to discuss risk management principles and give us some ideas on how to develop and manage our risk profiles and better protect our homes, our family, and our loved ones from the everyday trials of life.

And again, it’s worth remembering that we can take these philosophies and concepts and apply them down the road to our overall prepping mindset and strategy. So without further delay, let’s go ahead speak with Ed.

Brian: How are you doing, Ed?

Ed Clark: Good, excellent Brian. How are you today?

Brian: I'm doing well. It’s good to have you on the show. I appreciate you taking the time to come in here and talk with me and, hopefully, everybody that listens to us. Will you mind telling people a little bit about your background so people understand where you’re coming from and your level of expertise when they listen to this?

Ed: Sure, sure. So I’m a retired Army, US Army Special Forces officer. I spent four years as an infantryman, about a year in a ranger battalion, and my last 24 years as a Special Forces officer. I had a break in service and came back into active duty after 9/11, thinking I was going back to 5th Special Forces Group. Instead, I got pulled into this homeland security project?

So I was at Fort Leavenworth doing homeland security right after 9/11, and that’s when I started looking at managing risk and physical security and cybersecurity and things like that. I did some work for the White House, Homeland Security Council. We did vulnerability assessments for agriculture, fo, and agriculture industries. And from there, I left active duty again, and I went to help the coast guard establish their port security program.

After that, I opened my own business doing security consulting, and since then, I’ve helped PSA with their pipeline security program. I’ve helped DHS establish its chemical facility security program. And of course, consulting for various types of critical infrastructure, port facilities, schools, we have a school security program that we do.

Most recently, we’ve been doing a lot of active shooter seminars and consulting.

Brian: That’s awesome. Those port security projects, those are pretty big, aren’t they?

Ed: Yeah, it is. And that is my specialty. I tell people I can do one school or the entire school district. We offer a service that the US Coast Guard looks for called a Strategic Risk Management Program, the whole port facility, and all the different functions that it provides. It’s designed to identify the relative risks within the port to help that captain from the coast guard allocate resources. Where is the most significant risk? How much risk can I bite down?

Foundation of Risk Assessment Principles

Brian: Can we go over what the average person needs to do, one, to manage their risk profile and two, really to look at their home? People are concerned about how they protect their homes or come up with a proper home emergency preparedness plan for them and their families.

I know you usually talk about risk on a  big macroscale.

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