Bodyguard Careers

Bodyguard Careers is an informational site with the purpose of providing bodyguards with all the information and tools necessary to succeed in the executive protection industry.

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No High Paycheck without Homework

Career Advice, Personal Protection Jobs

I am a fan of Lisa Irby’s blog 2 Create a Website, and frequently check her site to see what she’s got to say.

In her post Lazy People, she shares her thoughts on laziness and it really, really struck a chord for me.

I must tell you, I have a pet peeve; poorly written or form letters. Sending the wrong letter in haste can do more harm than good. Don’t be lazy.

Be sure to check the appropriateness of your letter to its recipient. It appears that many individuals wishing to obtain employment in the executive protection field are failing to conduct due diligence. “Due diligence” means conducting the advance work and investigation required to craft a suitable cover letter to a particular individual or firm. The cover letter is the very first impression that you are making on an individual who is doing the hiring. If you cannot provide an appropriate and suitable cover letter, you have already failed your first detail. You simply will not be contacted for an interview.

[Read more…] about No High Paycheck without Homework

Interview with John Sexton

A Professional Speaks

John Sexton has over 20 years of experience in law enforcement and security, both in the United States and abroad. He’s written numerous articles on security-related topics for international publications, and Sexton Executive Security provides services and training for government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. John recently traveled to China, the Middle East and India and he’s planning executive security training programs in Beijing, Shanghai, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.

BGC: How did you get started in the Executive Protection Field?

JS: Actually I can still vividly recall the first E.P. detail I ever worked. It was in the early 80’s in Ireland and I was assigned to protect a judge who was sitting on the bench trying a Terrorist (Offenses Against the State Act) case. At that time our terrorists thought nothing of assassinating a judge in order to have a case halted. It was their way of getting an adjournment.

I was a uniformed Police Officer and the job needed to be done by a plain clothes officer. That morning when I reported for duty, the Station House Sergeant told me to go home and change into “civvies” as I would be protecting the judge. I went down to the Judge’s home where we had a temporary trailer parked for the duration of the trial. The officer I was relieving handed me an old Webley revolver and a lozenge can which contained a handful of bullets.  Thankfully the terrorists didn’t show up during my shift as I am quite sure that my weapons (probably dating back 60 years to our civil war) wouldn’t have even slowed them down as they were typically equipped with Armalite Rifles and Semtex when they were activated for a mission.

BGC: Who are your typical clients? Celebrities, executives, political figures?

JS: We have celebrity, executive and political clients at times. The majority of the time though, our clients are executives.

BGC: What factors should new people who are interested in getting into this field consider? [Read more…] about Interview with John Sexton

Support Bodyguard Careers

Personal Protection Jobs

Hello Folks. It’s Jeff Again, the lesser known half of Bodyguard Careers. Generally you will only hear from me when it comes to updates to the site and other housekeeping issues. Unfortunately, it is time for me to clean house and make a request to our readers.

You see, while Hucky does a good job of playing the role of “Good Cop” on this site, I have the unenviable role as being the “Bad Cop” when it comes to keeping Bodyguard Careers running smoothly. I am the Yin to Hucky’s Yang. The Jackie Chan to Huck’s Chris Tucker. The Vanilla Ice to Hucky’s MC Hammer (ok, that is a stretch).

As you already know, Bodyguard Careers provides useful information and services to our readers that we feel are among the best in the Executive Protection Industry. From weekly feature articles to job postings to monthly emails to a robust resume submission system, we try to provide something for everyone who visits the site. All of these services are FREE to our visitors, and are funded by revenue that we receive through advertisements on the right and left hand sides of our blog.

Until now, these ads have provided sufficient revenue to cover our hosting charges, email delivery fees and development costs. Unfortunately, revenue has been on a steady decline, and the site is no longer carrying its own weight. Call it the economy or call it something else, but the bottom line is this; we need help in order to keep this site up and running.

This brings me to the reason why I write this post. I wanted to point out a new feature that you will see on the right hand sidebar of the site. This is a “donate” button from Paypal that allows you to donate money to help support our site. We are not asking for much, but if you could spare a few dollars, it will go a long way toward keeping this site alive and thriving.

If you want to keep Bodyguard Careers FREE, please DONATE today. $1,$5, $20, any little bit counts!

(Note: You can donate by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the screen)

Interview with Jacquieline Davis

A Professional Speaks

Jacquie Davis
Female Bodyguard

Jacquieline Davis

For more than twenty-five years British born Jacquieline Davis survived as one of the top operators in a male-dominated profession – the secretive, often dangerous world of covert operations. After leaving the police force she worked as a bodyguard, where her training – which included combat training – and a willingness to risk everything for “the client”, led her into increasingly dangerous operations, so much so that she became recognized as “The World’s Top Female Bodyguard”.

Her book, The Circuit is a fascinating account of one woman’s amazing experiences involving the dangerous job of rescuing children and adults around the world to the more glittering world of guarding well-known celebrities such as Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli and J.K. Rowling. Available from amazon.com or www. jacquiedavis.com

BGC: How did you get started in the Executive Protection Field?

Jacquieline Davis: Back in the 1970s, police pay was very poor and everybody moonlighted to earn more money. Working as a bodyguard was one of those jobs we were asked to do. Our Pay as a bodyguard was £30 per day for 12 hours. It was a fortune to us as police take-home pay was about £120 per month ($240 dollars at today’s rate). I was then asked by an agency if I would like to train as a Bodyguard, I said yes and the rest is history.

BGC: Who are your typical clients? Celebrities? Executives?

Jacquieline Davis: Most of my clients are Executives, I shy away from the pop bands and singers, they have minders, not Bodyguards.

BGC: What is a “minder?” [Read more…] about Interview with Jacquieline Davis

Interview with Leonard Holifield

A Professional Speaks

Prof. Leonard C. Holifield, CPS, is President and CEO of the International Academy of Executive Protection Agents, LLC. Known as the Harvard of Bodyguard Schools, he is an honor graduate of ESI – Executive Security International and former chief security officer and personal bodyguard to the former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roy S. Moore, aka the Ten Commandments Judge. With over 20 years in the security business, Prof. Holifield is one of the most sought after instructors in the United States.

He is the author of SOLO – Security Operations for the Lone Officer (Outskirts Press) and Close Quarter Combat “A Soldiers Guide to Hand-to-Hand Combat” (Paladin Press). He is a frequent lecturer on executive protection, national hate groups and gangs, unarmed self defense and one-man solo security operations. He has been recognized by several national and international organizations; to include Marquis Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who Among Executives and Professionals, WOMA’s Who’s Who in the Martial Arts and Combative Masters of the 20th Century (Lulu Press). As former Chief Combatives Instructor to the United States Army his work in the field of hand-to-hand combat has been featured in major military publications to include Army Trainer, Soldiers, KORUS and Military Police magazines. A former military police officer and highly decorated veteran of the Gulf War, he was credited with capturing the first Iraqi POW during Operation Desert Storm. He is the president and founder of the International Sikaron Karate Federation and holds 3rd, 6th, and 10th degree black belts in Judo, Hapkido and Sikaron Karate respectively.

BGC: How did you get started in the Executive Protection Field?  What  was your very first assignment?

[Read more…] about Interview with Leonard Holifield

Book of the Month

Book of the Month

BLINK: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

Published by Alan Lane, 2005

288 Pages

This book is a good read because it talks about things that you don’t necessarily “learn” in training programs–but rather is something that you need to develop for yourself. This book is about making important decisions based on experience, intuition and intelligence–all within the “blink” of an eye!Gladwell calls this process “Rapid Cognition,” and as he says on his website, he doesn’t ever actually use the word “intuition’ because that suggests something on an emotional or gut level–something almost “not rational.” He believes those first few seconds are actually perfectly rational–just thinking at a faster rate. This idea is something that is a core characteristic to achieving success in Executive Protection, and makes for a fascinating read!

Here is an excerpt from the book:

Imagine that I asked you to a play a very simple gambling game. In front of you, are four decks of cards–two red and two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don’t know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. The rewards are high, but when you lose on red, you lose a lot. You can really only win by taking cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice, steady diet of $50 and $100 payoffs. The question is: how long will it take you to figure this out?

A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and what they found is that after we’ve turned over about fifty cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what’s going on. We don’t know why we prefer the blue decks. But we’re pretty sure, at that point, that they are a better bet. After turning over about eighty cards, most of us have figured the game out, and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. This much is straightforward. We have some experiences. We think them through. We develop a theory, and then finally we put two and two together. That’s the way learning works. But the Iowa scientists did something else, and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins. They hooked each gambler up to a polygraph–a lie detector machine–that measured the activity of the sweat glands that all of us have below the skin in the palms of our hands. Most sweat glands respond to temperature. But those in our palms open up in response to stress–which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous. What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More importantly, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the good decks, and taking fewer and fewer cards from A and B. In other words, the gamblers figured the game out before they figured the game out: they began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making.

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