Personal Security for High Networth Individuals at Work

Personal security for high networth individuals at the places you go every day

Personal security for high networth individuals is usually planned around the big moments: the trip abroad, the gala, the board meeting in another city. Two attacks in two days this week are a reminder that danger tends to arrive somewhere much more ordinary. It arrives at the places a person is known to visit again and again, where anyone who wants to find them can simply wait.

On the afternoon of Monday, October 19, 2026, local time, Australian federal MP Helen Haines was struck by a white Toyota LandCruiser outside her electorate office on Murphy Street in Wangaratta, in regional Victoria. ABC News reported that emergency services were called at about 3:30 p.m., that the 65-year-old was critically injured and flown to The Alfred hospital in Melbourne, that a 43-year-old man from nearby Tarrawingee was arrested, and that police found a knife in the vehicle. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it a deliberate act, and a joint counterterrorism unit was activated. According to Reuters, as published by NBC News, he said it was too early to determine a motive.

The evening before, on Sunday, October 18, two men on a motorcycle opened fire at shipping businessman Rana Dilip Suryavanshi near Baramati airport in Pune district, India, and attacked him with a sharp weapon. The Indian Express reported that Pune rural police said he was visiting a location near the airport at about 7:30 p.m., that he was not hit by a bullet but was injured by a machete, and that he was out of danger. Police had not identified the suspects when the report was filed. Sources told the paper he was accompanied by security guards.

Two very different countries, two very different victims, and one thing in common: each attack happened at a fixed, findable place. An office with a street address. A location near an airport. Neither required the attacker to predict a route or crack a calendar. They needed to know where the person would be, and to be there.

This article supports the section on vehicles, arrivals and departures in our 2026 guide to high net worth security. In the guide I explain why so many attacks begin at the car door. Here I want to go one step further and look at the fixed places in a principal’s week: the office, the curb in front of it, the airport, the gym, the regular restaurant, the place of worship. These are the places where personal protection is often thinnest, because they feel familiar.

If you have read our piece on how family office schedules leak, you know how attackers learn when someone will move. This piece is about the other half of the problem: what happens at the destination, where the schedule no longer matters because the place itself gives the person away.

Key takeaways

• Fixed places are where a principal is easiest to find. An office address, a regular gym or a known airport routine can be watched without any inside information.
• The curb, the sidewalk and the walk from the car to the door are the exposed minutes of an ordinary day. In Wangaratta the attack happened in the street outside an office.
• Security guards on site do not settle the question by themselves. In Baramati the businessman reportedly had guards with him. What matters is where they stand, what they watch and how fast they can move the person.
• A vehicle is the simplest weapon available at a curb. Standoff, barriers and drop-off positions are part of personal security for high networth individuals, not just architecture.
• Map every fixed place in the principal’s week and rank them by exposure. Start with the places visited at the same time on the same days.
• Bystanders and staff are often first on scene. In Wangaratta, bystanders detained the suspect. Your own staff should know what to do in the first minutes, including first aid.
• Recommended HNW security teams treat fixed places as a standing assignment with its own plan, not as the boring part of the day.

Two attacks at known places in two days

Wangaratta: outside the electorate office

The details reported so far are limited, and I am going to stay with what has been published. According to ABC News, emergency services responded to calls for assistance on Murphy Street at about 3:30 p.m. after a white Toyota LandCruiser struck a 65-year-old woman outside Helen Haines’s office. Victoria Police said a 43-year-old Tarrawingee man had been arrested and would be interviewed. Police said a knife had been found in the vehicle.

Prime Minister Albanese confirmed that Ms Haines was attacked outside her electorate office and told the ABC: “This wasn’t an accident. This was a deliberate act.” The Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police and ASIO were understood to be working together on the investigation. Acting Superintendent Ashley Mason said bystanders had made a citizens’ arrest and thanked them. Ms Haines’s family thanked bystanders, health workers and police and asked for privacy.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke pointed to a rise in hostility toward people in public office. ABC News reported that the AFP received 951 reports of violent threats and harassment targeting public-facing roles, including federal politicians, in 2024-25, and 1,007 reports in the 2025-26 financial year.

Speaking to reporters, Albanese also said, as quoted by Reuters, that it is a good thing politicians in Australia can go about their community and talk with people “at the supermarket, in the street, at street meetings, public forums.” I agree with him, and I think that sentence captures the dilemma for many of the people I protect. Their work and their lives require them to be reachable. The question is how to keep a person reachable without making them easy to ambush.

Baramati: near the airport, with guards present

The Indian Express report on the Baramati attack is short. Two men on a motorcycle came to the place near Baramati airport where Rana Dilip Suryavanshi was visiting, one of them opened fire, and they attacked him with a machete. He was not hit by a bullet. He was treated in hospital for the machete injury and police said he was out of danger. A case of attempted murder was being registered at Baramati taluka police station. The suspects had not been identified at the time of the report.

Sources told the paper that Suryavanshi was accompanied by security guards. I do not know how many guards there were, where they stood, whether they were armed or what they did in the seconds that mattered, and I am not going to guess. But the detail matters for anyone who assumes that having security present closes the question. It does not. Presence is the start of a protection plan, not the end of it.

What is known and what is not

In both cases, motives had not been established when these reports were published. Nobody has been convicted. I am not drawing conclusions about the people involved or about the politics of either country. What I am drawing on is the shape of the events, because that shape repeats in cases all over the world: a person who could be found at a known place, an attacker who came to that place, and a few seconds in which the outcome was decided.

Why fixed places carry more risk than the route

The route can vary; the door cannot

When families talk to me about travel security, they usually think about the drive. Which roads, what time, which car. Those things matter, and route variation is a real tool. But a route has a weakness that the destination does not: it can be changed. You can leave ten minutes earlier, take the freeway instead of the canyon road, switch cars. You cannot change where your office is. You cannot move the entrance to your children’s school. The gym is where the gym is.

That is why, in my experience, people who plan attacks spend so much time at destinations. A fixed place lets them watch without following anyone. They can sit in a café across the street, walk past at the same time each day, or park nearby and simply wait. Following a moving car is hard and gets noticed. Watching a front door is easy and usually does not.

Public-facing offices and open doors

Some fixed places are built to be open. An electorate office exists so that constituents can walk in. A family foundation may hold public events. A business owner may like to greet customers at the shop, or meet suppliers at a warehouse. Private client advisers, gallery owners, restaurateurs, doctors and many founders run places where the public is welcome and where their name is on the door.

I do not try to close those places. That would defeat their purpose and, often, the principal’s sense of who they are. What I try to do is separate the public part of the place from the person. The public comes in through a reception area that is staffed and visible. The principal’s own movement in and out uses a different door, a different time or a different route through the building. Appointments are confirmed, walk-ins are met by staff first, and the principal is not the person who opens the door to strangers.

A vehicle is the simplest weapon at a curb

We do not yet know exactly how the Wangaratta attack unfolded. I will say, as a general point from many years of planning arrivals and departures, that the curb in front of a building is where pedestrians and vehicles meet with almost nothing in between. A person standing on a sidewalk outside an office, talking to someone, loading a car or waiting for a ride is exposed to anything that can mount that curb.

This is one of the reasons I look at standoff when I assess an office or a residence. Where does the principal stand while waiting? Is there a barrier between the drop-off point and the traffic lane, such as bollards, planters, a raised curb or a wall? Can the car pull into a covered or enclosed area instead of stopping on the street? Can the principal wait inside until the car is in position, rather than standing on the sidewalk? These are simple, inexpensive decisions, and they change the geometry of an attack.

Mapping the fixed places in a principal’s week

The first thing I do with a new client is build a simple map of their week. Not the calendar of meetings, which the family office usually controls, but the list of places they go repeatedly. When I ask people to list them, they almost always forget half. The list usually looks something like this:

• The office, and often a second office or a co-working space.
• The children’s schools, sports fields and after-school activities.
• The gym, the trainer’s studio, the yoga class, the tennis club or the golf course.
• A place of worship, often at the same time each week.
• Two or three regular restaurants, a favourite coffee shop and a members’ club.
• The airport or private terminal, and the hotel used in a second city.
• Doctors, dentists, physical therapists and other appointments that recur.
• Family homes: parents, siblings, adult children and in-laws.
• Places linked to hobbies or causes: the stable, the marina, the gallery, the charity board.

For each place, I want to know four things. How often does the principal go there? Is it at the same time, on the same day? Is the visit public, either because the principal posts about it or because the place itself advertises it? And what does the arrival look like: where does the car stop, how far does the person walk, and who is around?

The weekly pattern review

Once the list exists, the pattern becomes visible. In one review, it was obvious that a principal arrived at the same gym at 6:15 every weekday morning, parked in the same open lot, and walked about forty meters to the entrance while looking at his phone. The rest of his security was good. That forty-meter walk was the weak point of his week, and anyone who spent two mornings in the lot would have known it.

The fix was not dramatic. We varied the time within a window, moved the car to a spot by the entrance, had the driver stay with the car, and asked him to keep his phone in his pocket for those forty meters. The goal was not to make his routine unrecognizable. It was to make it harder to plan around.

Which places deserve attention first

I rank fixed places by a combination of predictability, exposure and history. A place visited every day at the same time, with a long walk from the car and a public entrance, ranks high. A place visited occasionally, by appointment, with indoor parking, ranks low. A place where something has already happened, such as a confrontation, a stranger asking questions or an address appearing online, moves to the top of the list regardless.

The office usually ranks high because it combines all three: daily visits, a known address and, often, public access. The airport ranks high for frequent fliers because the timing can be predicted from flight schedules, and because the terminal curb is a place where everyone stops and unloads. Places of worship often rank high because the time is fixed and published, and because people understandably do not want security to change the character of the visit.

The office: building, curb and lobby

Standoff and the drop-off point

Every office I assess gets the same walk. I start where the car stops, not at the front door. I look at how close traffic comes to the drop-off point, whether anything stands between a moving vehicle and a person on the sidewalk, and how long the principal is exposed between the car door and the building door.

Where the building allows it, I prefer a drop-off inside a garage or a controlled courtyard. Where it does not, I look for the part of the curb with natural protection: a row of planters, a column, a raised step, a recessed entrance. I want the car to stop as close to the door as possible, the door to be open or unlocked before the principal steps out, and the waiting to happen inside. A principal who stands on the sidewalk while the car circles the block is a principal waiting in the open.

When a family is choosing a new office, I ask to see the building before the lease is signed. Many of the decisions that shape personal security for high networth individuals at an office are fixed the day the lease is signed: whether there is a garage, whether there is a second entrance, whether the lobby is staffed, whether the principal’s floor can be reached without passing reception.

Lobby and reception

In a multi-tenant building, the lobby is the first filter. I want to know whether the building has staffed reception, whether visitors are announced, whether the elevators require a credential and whether the building’s security team knows who our principal is. In my experience, a short, polite meeting with building management achieves more than any piece of equipment. They want to know who to call, which vehicles belong to the principal and what to do if someone asks for him by name.

On the principal’s own floor, reception should be a buffer. Staff should know that nobody walks straight back to the principal’s office, that deliveries go to reception, that unannounced visitors are met in a meeting room near the entrance, and that staff never confirm the principal’s presence to someone who calls or walks in. “Let me check whether he’s available” is a better answer than “Yes, he’s in his office, I’ll get him.”

Public-facing offices and open-door policies

For clients who run public-facing offices, such as a foundation, a showroom, a practice or a campaign office, I separate three things: who can walk in, who can see the principal, and how the principal comes and goes. Walk-ins are welcome at reception. Seeing the principal requires an appointment or a staff decision. And the principal’s own arrival and departure do not use the public entrance at the published opening time.

Staff in public-facing offices also need a short, clear procedure for difficult visitors: when to call the police, when to lock an internal door, how to get the principal out through another route, and who calls the security team. They should practice it. A procedure that lives in a binder is not a procedure.

The parking structure

Parking garages are often treated as safe because they are private. In practice they are frequently the least-watched part of a building. I look at where the principal parks, whether that spot is marked with a name or a title, how far it is from the elevator, whether the cameras cover it and whether anybody watches them. Reserved spaces with the principal’s name on them are an old habit that I ask clients to drop.

The walk from the car to the door

Positioning of the protector

When a close protection agent is present, the walk from the car to the door is where his positioning matters. The agent should be out of the vehicle first, should have looked at the area before the principal steps out, and should be between the principal and the direction from which a threat would come, which on a sidewalk usually means the street side. The agent’s attention belongs on the people and vehicles around the principal, not on the principal, the door or a phone.

This sounds obvious. In practice, I see protectors who walk ahead to open a door, who chat with the principal, who look at the building instead of the street, or who stay with the car while the principal walks in alone. Each of those habits leaves a few seconds where nobody is watching, and a few seconds is all an attack needs.

Timing the arrival

Exposure is measured in seconds. A good arrival is short: the car pulls up, the agent checks, the door opens, the principal moves inside. A bad arrival is long: the principal finishes a call in the car with the door open, stops to look for keys, greets a colleague on the sidewalk and stands chatting at the entrance. I ask principals to finish calls before arrival and to have conversations inside. It is a small courtesy to the people protecting them, and it makes a real difference.

What the driver watches

The driver sees the destination before anyone else in the car does. In the final approach, a driver should be looking for anything that does not fit: a vehicle parked where nobody parks, a motorcycle with two riders waiting near the entrance, a person who appears to be filming, a group that has gathered at a time when the street is normally empty. In Baramati, the police account describes two men on a motorcycle. A driver who sees two riders idling near an arrival point has a reason to drive past and come back, and should have the authority to do so without asking. We wrote about this in more detail in our article on security drivers for UHNW families.

The driver’s decision to abort an arrival should never need a discussion. If something looks wrong, the car keeps moving, and the protector and the principal can talk about it afterwards. Families sometimes find this inconvenient. It is the kind of inconvenience that should happen a few times a year and cost a few minutes each time.

Airports and the private terminal

Commercial terminals

Commercial airports are hard to protect in because they are public, crowded and predictable. Flight times are published. Check-in and security lines force people to stand still. The curb in front of departures is a long line of stopped cars with open trunks and people unloading bags while looking at their phones.

For principals who fly commercially, I try to reduce the time spent at the curb and in public areas. Bags can be handled by someone else. Check-in can be done in advance. The car can pull up at a less busy door. The principal can wait in a lounge rather than at the gate. Arrivals are planned so that the car is waiting when the principal comes out, not circling while the principal stands at the curb with luggage.

Private terminals

Private terminals, which in the United States are usually called FBOs, offer much more control. The car can often drive close to the aircraft, the terminal is small and staffed, and the passenger list is short. But they are not invisible. Tail numbers can be tracked, staff talk, and people who follow a principal know which terminal they use. We covered the local picture in our post on Van Nuys FBO executive protection, and the same logic applies wherever a family flies privately.

Meetings near the airport

The Baramati report describes a businessman visiting a location near the airport, not a terminal. That pattern is common: a quick meeting on the way to or from a flight, at a hotel by the airport, a warehouse, a logistics office or a site visit. Those meetings are often arranged at short notice, with people the principal barely knows, at places the protection team has never seen. For an attacker, a meeting near the airport has another advantage: the principal is likely to be on a tight timeline and distracted.

When a principal wants to add a stop near an airport, I want the address in advance, someone to look at it, a plan for where the car will wait and a clear time to leave. If the meeting is with a counterpart in a dispute, a new business partner or someone who asked for the meeting at the last minute, that should be flagged to the protection team before it goes into the calendar.

Regular venues: gyms, clubs, places of worship and restaurants

The gym and the trainer

Fitness routines are among the predictable parts of anyone’s week. They happen early or late, often alone, often at the same time, in clothing that makes it obvious nobody is carrying much. Principals who train with a personal coach also share their schedule with that coach, the studio’s front desk and sometimes the other clients. I ask clients to vary the time within a window, to use studios that have controlled entry, and to make sure the trainer understands that the schedule is private.

Outdoor exercise, such as running, cycling or hiking, deserves its own thought. A principal who runs the same trail at the same hour every morning is giving away more about their pattern than almost anything else they do. I am not going to tell anyone to stop running. I will suggest varying the route, running with someone, carrying a phone and letting the household know the planned route and return time.

Members’ clubs and regular restaurants

Clubs and favourite restaurants feel safe because the staff know the principal. That familiarity is useful: staff who know the principal can also notice someone who is asking about them. I like to have a quiet word with the managers of places a principal uses regularly. Not a security briefing, just a request: please do not confirm reservations to anyone who calls, please let us know if someone asks when he usually comes in, and please seat him away from the window when possible. Our article on personal security for high networth individuals in public covers restaurant exits and evening movements in more depth.

Places of worship

Places of worship are among the hardest places to protect, and among the places where I am especially careful about the principal’s wishes. Services happen at published times. People arrive and leave at the same moment. The whole point is to be open and welcoming. I do not want a protection team that changes the atmosphere of a service or makes other worshippers feel watched.

In practice, that means a discreet approach. A protector who blends in and sits where he can see the entrance. A car that waits close by rather than in the main lot. An arrival a few minutes earlier or later than the crowd. And, where the congregation has its own security volunteers or a relationship with local police, a quiet coordination so that everyone knows who is who.

When security guards are already there

The Baramati report says the businessman was accompanied by security guards. I want to use that detail carefully, because I do not know what happened in those seconds. But it raises a question I am asked often: if a principal already has guards, what more is there to do?

Quite a lot. Presence deters some people, but a determined attacker plans around presence. The things that make security effective at a fixed place are not visible in a photograph of a man in a suit standing near a car. They are:

• Advance knowledge of the place. Has someone looked at the location, the entrances, the parking, the sightlines and the approach routes before the principal arrives?
• Positioning. Are the protectors between the principal and the likely approach, or behind him, or at the car?
• Attention. Are they watching people and vehicles, or are they watching the principal, their phones or the building?
• Distance and time. How quickly can they move the principal to cover, into a vehicle or into a building? Has the route to that cover been chosen in advance?
• Vehicle readiness. Is the car close, running and pointed in the direction of departure, with the driver at the wheel?
• Communication. Can they call for help and give the exact location within seconds?
• Medical capability. Can they stop serious bleeding until paramedics arrive?

Guards who stand where they are told and have no plan for the first ten seconds of an attack offer limited protection. Protectors who know the place, stand in the right spot, watch the right things and have already decided where they will move the principal can change the outcome. That difference is what separates recommended HNW security teams from people who are simply present.

Do not pursue

In fixed-place attacks, the instinct of untrained guards and brave bystanders is often to chase the attacker. From a protection standpoint, the priority is the principal: cover, evacuation and medical care. Pursuit leaves the principal alone at the moment they are in real danger, and it can lead the protector into a second attacker. Arrests are the job of the police, with the evidence that the security team preserves.

Bystanders, staff and the first minutes

In Wangaratta, bystanders detained the suspect, and police thanked them publicly. A witness told the ABC that a number of residents stepped in to help, and the Haines family thanked bystanders and health workers for their swift assistance. That reflects something I have seen many times: in the first minutes of an attack at a fixed place, the people who matter are often the people who happen to be there.

For a principal’s own fixed places, those people are staff. Office staff, reception, building security, the regular driver, the trainer at the gym. They will not replace a protection team, and they should not be asked to confront an attacker. But they can be prepared for the first minutes:

• Who calls emergency services, and what exact address and entrance do they give?
• Where is the trauma kit, and who has been trained to use a tourniquet and pressure dressing?
• Which internal door can be locked, and who locks it?
• Who calls the security team and the family office, and in what order?
• Who meets the police and paramedics at the door, and who keeps the scene and any footage intact?

Medical readiness is a part of protection that families tend to underestimate. When I worked as a Security Operations Director and Senior Team Leader at Gavin de Becker & Associates, every detail I led carried medical equipment and people trained to use it, because the time between an injury and professional care is where lives are often decided. We wrote about the estate side of this in our post on estate medical readiness for UHNW households, and the same thinking applies at the office.

Noticing the watcher at fixed places

Attacks at fixed places are rarely improvised. Someone has usually been there before, sometimes several times, to see when the principal arrives, where the car stops, how many people are with him and how long the walk takes. That preparation is the window in which an attack can still be prevented, and it is where protective intelligence and good observation pay off.

The signs are usually ordinary. The same car parked across from the office on several mornings. A person who appears at the gym at the principal’s time, then at the coffee shop he uses afterwards. Someone photographing the entrance of a building that is not a tourist attraction. A delivery rider who waits without delivering. A caller who asks reception what time the principal normally arrives. Taken one at a time, these things mean little. Recorded and compared over days and across places, they can show a pattern.

I train drivers, residential officers and office staff to write these things down, with the time, place and a description, and to pass them to one person who looks at the whole picture. The point is not to turn staff into investigators or to treat every stranger as a threat. It is to make sure that when the same face or car turns up at two of the principal’s fixed places, somebody notices. We described how online signals connect to this physical watching in our article on protective intelligence from online to physical.

Where the threat picture justifies it, a protection team can also run deliberate checks: a second person who arrives before the principal and watches the approach, a quick look at the parking area for vehicles that were there the day before, a varied arrival that makes it obvious if someone adjusts to it. These are modest measures. They are also the kind of thing that rarely happens when security is defined as a guard at the door.

Adjusting the plan when the threat picture changes

The right level of protection at a fixed place is not set once. It should move with the threat picture. A principal who has just announced a controversial decision, closed a large deal, been named in the press, received a threatening message or entered a bitter dispute should expect the fixed places in his week to be reviewed that same day.

In practice, an adjustment might mean using a different entrance for a few weeks, moving meetings from a public-facing office to a private room, adding a protector for arrivals and departures, asking building security to watch for a specific vehicle or person, or pausing a regular public routine until things settle. These adjustments are usually temporary. What matters is that someone decides to make them, rather than waiting until the change in risk shows up at the front door.

Public figures in many countries are going through this kind of review this week. Families do not need to wait for an attack on someone else to do the same.

Close protection for UHNW families at the household’s fixed places

The principal is not the one with a predictable week. Spouses have their own offices, studios and appointments. Children have schools, practices and lessons that happen at the same time every week, with schedules that are often shared with dozens of other families. Elderly parents have doctors and regular outings. When I build a fixed-place map, I build one for each member of the household who might be targeted, not just the person whose name is on the company.

Close protection for UHNW families does not mean a protector at every one of those places. It means knowing which places are exposed and deciding, place by place, what is appropriate. A school run may need a security driver who knows the pickup procedures, as we discussed in our post on school run security. A spouse’s studio may need a better door and a reception procedure. A parent’s weekly lunch may need nothing more than a varied time and a phone check-in.

Private security for high net worth family members works when it fits their lives. The aim is to remove the obvious opportunities, not to put everyone in a bubble.

Security for UHNW family offices: owning the fixed-place review

Someone has to own the map. In a household with a family office, that is usually the family office, working with the security team. The family office knows the calendar, the addresses, the bookings and the vendors. Security for UHNW family offices includes making sure that knowledge is used to protect the family, and not leaked by it.

Practically, I ask the family office to do three things. First, keep a current list of fixed places for each family member, updated when routines change. Second, tell the security team when a new regular place is added: a new gym, a new school, a new office, a new board seat with monthly meetings. Third, be careful with what is shared. Every vendor, assistant and booking service that knows the principal’s regular places is a potential leak. Family office high net worth individuals security is as much about controlling that information as it is about guards and cameras.

High net worth security services for fixed places: what to ask

If you are evaluating high net worth security services, ask how the provider handles the ordinary week, not just the big trip. Good questions include:

• Will you visit and assess the office, the curb and the parking before you start, and again when something changes?
• How do you decide where the car stops, where the principal waits and where the protector stands?
• What does the driver do if something looks wrong on the final approach?
• What medical equipment do your people carry, and what training do they have?
• How do you coordinate with building security, club managers and places of worship?
• How do you protect the fixed places of other family members?

Home security for high net worth individuals is often the part of a program that gets the lion’s share of attention, because the home is where the family sleeps. The office and the regular venues deserve the same discipline. At MSB Protection, our in-house research and development team works on tools and methods to counter threats to UHNW clients, including how we map and review the fixed places in a family’s week. Our executive protection and security assessment services both start from that map.

A fixed-place checklist for the coming month

If the events of this week have prompted you to look at your own routines, here is the order in which I would work. None of it requires a large budget, and much of it can be done by the family office with a few hours of the security team’s time.

• Week one: build the map. List every place each family member visits more than twice a month, with the usual day and time. Mark the ones that are published, posted about or shared with vendors.
• Week two: walk the top five. Visit the five highest-ranked places at the time the principal usually arrives. Look at where the car stops, how long the walk is, what stands between the sidewalk and the traffic, and who is around.
• Week three: shorten the exposure. Move drop-off points, change waiting habits, vary times within a window, arrange indoor parking where possible and remove name-marked parking spaces.
• Week four: prepare the people. Brief reception, building security, drivers and the managers of regular venues. Place trauma kits where staff can reach them and arrange basic bleeding-control training.
• Every month after that: review the map, record anything unusual that staff noticed, and adjust when the threat picture changes.

Families with a full program already in place should still run this exercise. In my experience, personal security for high networth individuals tends to be strong at the home and on trips, and weaker in the ordinary places in between. Family office high net worth individuals security improves noticeably once someone owns that list. And private security for high net worth family members becomes more practical when it is matched to real routines rather than to a generic plan.

The same applies at home. Home security for high net worth individuals covers the gate and the front door; the checklist above covers the doors the family walks through every other day of the week.

Frequently asked questions

What does personal security for high networth individuals include at the office?

It includes the drop-off point and the curb, the walk from the car to the door, the lobby and reception, parking, procedures for visitors and deliveries, and a plan for the first minutes if something happens. It is less about guards at the door and more about reducing the time and distance a principal spends exposed.

Why are fixed places riskier than routes?

A route can be varied. A fixed place cannot. Offices, schools, gyms and places of worship can be watched without following anyone, and visits often happen at predictable times. That makes them convenient for someone planning an attack.

Is having a security guard present enough?

Not by itself. Effective protection depends on advance knowledge of the place, positioning, attention, a ready vehicle, communication and medical capability. Presence without a plan for the first seconds of an incident offers limited protection.

How do recommended HNW security teams handle airport arrivals?

They reduce time at the curb and in public areas, plan where the car waits, handle luggage separately and treat meetings near the airport as stops that need advance work. For private terminals, they also manage the information that can reveal which terminal and aircraft a family uses.

Should close protection for UHNW families cover every family member’s routine?

Every family member’s fixed places should be reviewed. The response at each place should be proportionate: sometimes a protector or a security driver, sometimes a changed time or a better door, sometimes nothing more than awareness.

Bringing fixed places into the security plan

The attacks in Wangaratta and Baramati are still under investigation, and I expect we will learn more about both. What we already know is that each happened at a place where the victim could be found: outside an office and near an airport. Neither needed a leaked itinerary or a hacked calendar.

That is why I treat the fixed places in a principal’s week as a standing assignment. Map them, rank them, walk them, shorten the exposure at each one, prepare the people who are there every day and review the map whenever routines change. Personal security for high networth individuals is built in those ordinary minutes as much as in the big moments.

For how this fits into the wider program, including home security, travel, family office procedures and close protection, read our 2026 guide to high net worth security. If you would like us to review the fixed places in your family’s week, starting with the office and the curb in front of it, our security assessment team can help, and you can contact us directly.

Sources

• ABC News (Australia), Independent MP Helen Haines injured outside Wangaratta office, October 19, 2026
• NBC News (Reuters), Australian lawmaker in critical condition after vehicle attack, October 19, 2026
• The Indian Express, Gunmen open fire, attack Pune businessman with machete near airport, October 19, 2026

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About Michael Braun

Michael Braun is a former Special Unit Operator, former Manager at Gavin de Becker & Associates, and Founder & CEO of MSB Protection, an executive protection and residential security firm serving high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients.

Braun has built his career at the intersection of specialized protective operations, executive protection, residential security, protective intelligence, and security risk management. His experience spans special-unit operations, leadership within Gavin de Becker & Associates, and the development and oversight of private protection programs within demanding UHNW environments.

He has been recognized by The Top 100 Magazine as a leading CEO in the private security field and is the subject of an upcoming Marquis Who’s Who feature highlighting his leadership and contributions to the profession.

Today, Braun is recognized for his work in executive protection, UHNW estate security, residential protection, protective intelligence, adversarial security assessments, and security auditing throughout Beverly Hills and Southern California.

His work focuses on moving private security beyond simply “providing a body” and toward intelligence-led, risk-based protection programs designed to identify vulnerabilities before an adversary can exploit them.

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Looking for Executive Protection or Residential Security Services?

If you are a high-net-worth or ultra-high-net-worth individual, family office, estate manager, chief of staff, or executive in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, Malibu or Southern California, MSB Protection provides executive protection, residential security, 24/7 protection, protective intelligence, medical-readiness planning, and security risk management.

We evaluate the complete security environment, from threat exposure and residential vulnerabilities to personnel, technology, procedures, protective intelligence, and emergency response, and build a program around the risks that actually exist.

Contact us for a confidential consultation or message us at +1 (805) 285-2807.