4 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 21 Jun 2023
Share by emailRecent articles have focused on business design. Another aspect to consider when designing your business as an independent security professional is your availability. Specifically, how responsive do you want to be to client requirements? As you progress through the process of business design, your desired level of availability will add shape and form to your products and services.
In this article, I’ll explore the concept of availability and the decisions you may need to make as you design your business to define your availability.
In the context of a security business, availability is your capacity to respond to short-notice client requirements. As you’re designing your business as an independent security professional, you’ll need to consider how available do you want yourself to be.
At a simple level, availability can be boiled down to the following:
Your answer to both of these questions may be “Hell Yes!”. However, let’s consider that for a moment. How will you plan dinners, movies and holidays knowing that you need to be available to receive a call or deploy on a project? What if you’re on a flight (for work or leisure) and a client is trying to get in contact with you? What about your partner’s birthday? Your kid’s school activities?
Many of us have a range of priorities in life that we’ll need to balance with the commitments demanded by our work.
Here’s one example of how challenging this can be in practice:
In March 2020, one day after returning from Syria, a client asked me to be in their office in Seoul first thing Monday morning. It was Sunday. I quickly repacked my bag and went straight to the airport. Although I had originally planned for a two-week stay in Seoul, I ended up spending six weeks there supporting the client. I’m sure many of you reading this have had similar experiences. Overall, the project was very worthwhile (and well paid), so I have no regrets in accepting it. However, this experience demonstrates some of the demands inherent in this profession.
Let’s delve deeper into the different approaches you can take to manage your availability.
From the outset, I recommend avoiding any type of service that requires you to be on call for your clients. Providing an on-call service means being by the phone all the time, ready to answer it within three rings. Is that sustainable for a single-person operation? Not really. It can be uncomfortable during dinners or cinema outings and even make traveling difficult. If your clients need to reach you, it’s going to be challenging to be offline for half a day on a flight. The impact of being available can be even more challenging when operating across time zones.
If you were part of a larger security company, on call responsibilities would typically be shared between a group of consultants. Some larger security companies may even have dedicated 24/7 operations centres to handle client calls. As an independent security professional, it’s just you. Even if you paid a service to act as an operations centre to receive calls 24/7, that operations centre would still need to call you.
So, your capacity to provide ‘on call’ support is probably very limited. You might want to avoid designing products or services that commit to providing on call support, because you won’t be able to honour all the commitments.
An alternative to on-call support is to offer support on a “best effort basis”. Capacity is often tied up in ongoing projects, even for large security companies. No company wants to have paid staff sitting around waiting for work. Therefore, the reality is that even large security companies can only offer support on a best effort basis. To claim otherwise would be disingenuous.
Instead, make it clear that your availability is limited and that you are not available 24/7. There are many capable companies that offer 24/7 service, so realistically anyone needing immediate assistance will likely use those larger companies. You do not need to compete in that space.
When possible and appropriate to the services you provide, it’s important to demonstrate to your clients that you can be responsive when needed. Responding promptly to emails is a basic requirement. If there’s a major incident, you should make an effort to be responsive and ensure your availability to your clients. You may even choose to deploy proactively to the incident location. Your clients will remember your availability during critical moments and will be more forgiving of the fact that you may not be available at other times.
Retainer agreements, where clients pay a monthly fee for ongoing support, present another availability problem. Retainers typically assume a certain level of support. Again, if you want to take a holiday, you may not be able to provide your client with the level of support they are paying for. That doesn’t mean you should avoid retainers altogether. Rather, you need to be careful to shape the retainer agreement to avoid having to be be at the beck and call of your client. I’ll cover options to shape retainer agreements in a later article. For now, it’s important to consider the lifestyle implications of retainers and whether they are something you think you can reasonably offer.
Knowing you can’t be available all the time, you’ll need to manage your clients’ expectations regarding your availability. As you build a relationship with your clients, let them know that you may not be available all the time. Balance this message with the fact that you will be as responsive as possible to their needs. If your products and services don’t demand availability, it’s unlikely your clients will respond negatively to your message.
The challenge is that this may contradict your instincts to appear as a large and professional company. However, it’s not worth worrying about. Be authentic and open about your limitations. Your clients will likely appreciate your honesty.
Availability may be good in theory, but in practice it will almost certainly have a negative impact on your personal and professional life.
From my own experience, being too available can almost certainly result in burnout. The problem is that as an independent operator, your options are binary: you’re either available or you’re not. My recommendation is to avoid being available all the time and instead be selective about when you respond to different incidents. I don’t believe this approach will hinder your business success. In fact, it will give you the headspace you need to act more strategically and take advantage of opportunities when you see them.