Service
Executive Protection
Close personal protection and secure movement for principals and their families.
Protective operations for principals and their families: advance work, secure movement, residential and event coverage.
This is the operation itself. The assessment that decides what protection is warranted, and the crisis planning around it, is a separate engagement.
Advance work is the part of protection that is invisible when it is done well: routes and their alternates, the venue and its exits, medical facilities and their travel time, the local reporting picture, and the arrangements with the people already responsible for the location.
Coverage is built around how the principal actually lives rather than around a shift pattern. Residential arrangements, movement, events, family members with their own routines and a household that has to keep functioning are all part of the same plan, and the plan is written down and briefed.
Operators are licensed for the jurisdiction they work in and verified before assignment on every engagement, not once at onboarding. Empire contracts with you as principal and holds the engagement throughout: the same entity you signed with is the one accountable on the ground.
Underneath all of it sits an executive protection strategy: a written document that says what is being protected, against what, to what standard, and who decides. Most organisations buy operators without one, which is why they cannot answer the two questions that matter: is this proportionate, and how would we know if it stopped being proportionate.
A strategy reduces risk before anyone is deployed, because most of what goes wrong is decided in advance. It fixes the threshold at which protection increases or stands down, so the decision is not made under pressure by whoever is awake. It names who can authorise a change of plan, so a driver at a gate is not improvising policy. It states what the principal has agreed to, so protection is not quietly negotiated away one exception at a time. And it defines what gets recorded, which is what turns an incident into something the next plan learns from rather than an argument about what happened.
It is also what makes the cost defensible. A board asked to fund protection can approve a proportionate response to an assessed threat; it cannot approve an open ended number of people. The organisations that scale protection well are the ones that wrote the strategy first and let it decide the headcount, rather than hiring a detail and reverse engineering a justification.
Empire writes that strategy as a separate engagement from delivering it, on purpose. The firm assessing what protection is warranted should not be the firm whose revenue rises with the answer, and where Empire does both, the assessment is documented so you can hold it against what is actually deployed.
Common questions
Is this the same as hiring a bodyguard?
"Bodyguard" is the common word for it. The industry term is close personal protection, and the difference in practice is what surrounds the operator: advance work on the locations and routes, a plan for what happens if something goes wrong, and coordination of movement, not simply a person standing nearby.
What licence do close protection operators hold in New South Wales?
Close personal protection in NSW requires a Class 1E licence, issued through the Security Licensing and Enforcement Directorate, which involves approved close personal protection training and criminal record vetting. Empire verifies licences before an operator is assigned, on every engagement.
Can protection be discreet rather than visible?
Yes, and for most corporate and private clients that is the point. The level of visibility is a decision made against the threat picture and the setting: a deliberately visible presence deters, and a discreet one avoids drawing the attention that creates the problem.
Do you cover travel and events as well as day to day movement?
Yes: secure movement, residential coverage, event coverage, and advance work on the locations and routes involved. Where travel is to a higher risk destination, the assessment and planning behind it is the crisis and security risk consulting engagement.
How quickly can protection be arranged?
That depends on the scope and on where the principal is. Meaningful protection includes advance work, so the honest answer is that more notice buys a better job, but Empire will say plainly what can and cannot be done to a short timeline rather than accepting work it cannot do properly.
Check this against the source
Everything on this page describes a regulated activity. These are the bodies that set the rules, so you can read them rather than take Empire’s word for it.
- Verify a NSW security licence NSW Government
- Australian Security Industry Association ASIAL
The comprehensive protection program
One principal. One protective envelope.
Nine coordinated capabilities, built around the person at the centre of it. Mitigating risk, threat and vulnerability to safety, security and reputation comes down to owning the environment. If you are using personal protection services and you are not getting expert advice across all nine, you are paying for an immature product.
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Mobile close protection
The detail that travels with the principal, and the advance work that makes each movement something other than an improvisation.
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Corporate protection
The workplace: access control, reception and lobby posture, visitor handling, and the staff who will meet a problem before any operator does.
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Residential protection
The home as it is actually lived in: the household, the routines, the deliveries, and the family members with schedules of their own.
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Digital executive protection
What can be learned about the principal without leaving a desk: exposed addresses, data brokers, family accounts, and the footprint that makes a physical approach possible.
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Secure communications
How the team talks to each other and to you, on channels that do not become the weakest part of the plan.
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Open source intelligence
The public record, read properly and continuously, rather than a search done once when the engagement was scoped.
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Technical surveillance countermeasures
Whether anything is listening in the rooms, vehicles and residences where the principal speaks freely, and what would let someone install it.
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Risk management and threat intelligence
What the exposure actually is, in writing, before anyone deploys, and a threat picture that stays current and reaches the people on the ground.
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Ground, air and sea transport
Vehicles, drivers and the logistics of moving a principal between them, held by the same provider that is protecting them.
Empire holds all nine. That is the difference between a detail and a protection programme.
Not sure yet what level of protection is warranted, or need the crisis plan behind it rather than operators on the ground?
Insights
Empire Executive Protection Pty Ltd · ABN 30 622 627 034 · trading as Empire Protection