Overview
#047 – Today I’m joined by Michael Silva. He’s a veteran of the security consulting industry and the founder of Silva Consultants, who got his start installing alarm systems as a teenager in Seattle before opening his own security consulting practice in 1985. Following 9/11, he spent several years running the Seattle office of Kroll’s security consulting practice before returning to independent practice. Michael has authored multiple books on security consulting, including “Becoming an Independent Security Consultant“, now in its second edition, and is a longtime member of the International Association of Professional Security Consultants (IAPSC). His work today spans technical security design and security management across sectors ranging from multifamily housing to high-net-worth estates.
If there’s one thing I took away from this conversation, it’s that longevity in this business comes from listening to the market instead of your own assumptions about it. Michael’s career is a study in reinvention: alarm technician, technical designer, security management consultant, and independent consultant again, and every shift came from paying attention to what clients actually needed rather than what he expected to sell them.
You an learn more about Michael’s work and connect with him here:
- Silva Consultants, https://www.silvaconsultants.com
- Becoming a Security Consultant, https://www.becomingasecurityconsultant.com, a free resource with videos covering much of the same ground as the consulting book
- Contact: MikeS@silvaconsultants.com, offered on air for anyone seeking mentorship
Highlights from This Episode
- Let the client’s real problem redefine the service you sell. The practice opened as a security systems design shop and grew into roughly half assessment work once it became clear that clients could not specify the systems they needed because nobody had ever assessed their risks or defined their program goals.
- Treat a stint at a large firm as tuition. Kroll brought global reach, brand authority, and engagements an independent could not win on his own, and it also revealed that the rates he had charged for years were about half of what those same clients would pay without blinking.
- Stay in learning mode permanently. The people who struggle in the transition are the ones who arrive with decades of experience and no appetite for hearing anything new, and the ones who succeed accept that consulting is a different profession from the one they just left.
- Assume your network resets the day you go independent, and build a proactive marketing program to replace it. The vendors and peers who returned every call when you were a buyer often go quiet, and two calls a week is not business development. He was making 20 to 30 calls a day starting out, and he still markets today after 40 years.
- Do as much preparation as you can while someone else is still paying you, and open with six months to a year of runway. Research, conference relationships, health insurance, credit, and any financing you will need are all easier to secure as an employee, and self-employment quietly turns a 40 hour week into a nine hour one if the schedule is not structured. Just never run a side practice on your employer’s time.
- Hire for attitude and train from scratch. His strongest employees arrived with no security background at all, while experienced hires often brought bad habits and 15 years that turned out to be one year repeated 15 times. The same logic applies to the profession’s aging demographics: senior practitioners should be asking younger people what they want and how to help, and newcomers should take any job that puts them inside the industry.
- Pick a narrow service and client target when you start, then broaden once you are established, and listen to what the market will actually buy. The retired postal inspector who planned to sell mail room assessments learned the hard way that his former agency provided the same service for free.
- Watch how the market shifts under you. Large corporations that once hired outside designers now staff that expertise in house, engineering firms have absorbed security into their low voltage divisions, and multifamily housing went from indifferent to a major growth segment on the strength of negligent security litigation.
- Never let one client become most of your revenue. A university that paid like clockwork for years froze for three months over an internal accounting failure, and with payroll to meet, that concentration nearly took the business down.
- Guard the small ethical decisions, because the line moves gradually. Padded hours under a not to exceed cap, referrals steered to friends instead of tested against the marketplace, and accepted golf trips and cruises all erode judgment long before anything obviously wrong happens.
Memorable Quotes:
- “Even though they might have 15 years of experience, it’s really that one year of experience that they’ve repeated 15 times.”
- “You don’t immediately go from being perfectly ethical to being a felon overnight, but the line is gradually moving.”
- “They give up just short of takeoff.”
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Book: Becoming an Independent Security Consultant: A Practical Guide to Starting and Running a Successful Security Consulting Practice by Michael A. Silva (first edition 2016, second edition 2024)
- Book: The Consultant’s Guide to Physical Security Assessments: Practical, Field-Proven Techniques That Work by Michael A. Silva
- Book: Protecting Apartments, Condominiums, and Gated Communities: A Guide to Security for Homeowner’s Associations and Property Managers by Michael A. Silva
- Book: The Security Consultant’s Guide to Home Security: 101 Tips to Make Your Home Safer and More Secure by Michael A. Silva
- Organization: International Association of Professional Security Consultants (IAPSC), which enforces strict independence requirements for membership
- Organization: ASIS International, including the successful security consulting seminar where the host first met the guest in 2017
- Concept: negligent security litigation as the driver behind demand for multifamily housing assessments
- Concept: not to exceed contracts and the billing ethics they invite
- Concept: the observation from Silva’s book that roughly 70 percent of potential clients will never think to call an independent security consultant
- Tool mentioned by host: Claude, used to build spreadsheets, planning materials, and graphics from the financial sections of Silva’s consulting book
Related Episodes
- Big Ideas in Corporate Security
- How to Be a Remarkable Student of Security
- Security Leadership: Integrity & Serving
- Mastering Security Excellence
