Risk | Vulnerability

Can’t Afford Risk Assessments for All Your Buildings? Think Again!

April 30, 2019 | 4 min read
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Recently I was talking with a gentleman from an enterprise business, who had over 900 buildings. I asked, “How many assessments do you perform in a year?” 50. “Do you think it’s possible to do all 900?” No way! “What if I told you that it’s possible, and for less than you expect it to cost?”

For most companies, assessing 900 locations could easily cost millions of dollars. But what if it could cost substantially less?

Most organizations think it’s impossible to conduct a risk analysis on all their facilities, because it’s too costly. Yes, it’s important to do physical security assessments, but the cost of the engagement is simply too prohibitive. Or is it?

There are several ways to lower the costs of doing risk assessments at all of your buildings—and they’re simpler than you think. Here’s how to make it happen.

Handpicked related content: Do Security Assessments on Multiple Buildings Without Killing Yourself

Costs of Opportunity

If you’re cutting back on risk assessments due to the cost, you’ve probably forgotten about the costs you’re still incurring by not assessing every facility. Most organizations don’t calculate the financial losses they incur when issues arise that a risk assessment could have prevented.

The goal of an assessment is to reduce occurrences (or the cost of the occurrences), which means reducing overall costs. If you have 900 locations and only conduct 50 assessments, you’ll have financial losses at 850 of your facilities that could have been avoided. But if you were to do assessments at all 900 locations, you could prevent (or reduce) incidents throughout your entire organization before they happen.

To justify the financial impact of assessing all of your buildings, compare the historic data of your overall costs for each facility annually, compared to the overall costs annually while performing assessments. Then subtract the yearly average cost by the cost of a risk assessment, and that’s your true cost of assessing each building.

This is just the first step in reducing your risk assessment costs.

Reduce Reporting Time

By far, the most expensive part of a risk assessment is the report writing. For every hour spent investigating your building, there’s another four to six hours spent writing the report. If a security consultant spends two days on-site, they could be working close to 100 additional hours on the report! If the billing rate is $200 per hour, your total costs for one building could be close to $20,000. That’s the traditional model.

But what if you could eliminate 70 to 80 percent of that time? Security professionals who use Circadian Risk software to conduct risk assessments can generate reports in a fraction of the time. Instead of two or more weeks, the same job could be done in about four days. Suddenly, you can conduct risk assessments on three or four facilities for the same cost.

Factor in the cost prevention you’re getting at each of those additional facilities, and your security assessments become even more affordable.

Pay Your Own People

You can cut expenses even more by using your own people to conduct the on-site inspection, rather than hire a security consulting firm. Why pay top dollar for something you can do yourself, with internal resources?

If you go to a doctor’s office, the first thing they do is collect patient information from you—symptoms, blood pressure, height, weight, smoking history and current medications. The nurse does all that before the doctor sees you.

Instead of having security professionals collecting basic information about your facility, you can use less expensive resources who are already on hand. It doesn’t take a security professional to count your damaged door locks or missing video cameras. Assign a lower-paid individual, such as a security guard or maintenance person, to collect the information for the security assessment. Then hire a trained professional to review the data in Circadian Risk (to keep time and costs down) and develop a remediation strategy.

With this approach, you’re only paying for the risk assessment software and the staff training. Half of the assessment activities are spent on a lower pay grade, saving you thousands of dollars across all your facilities.

Read more: Hit or Miss? A Security Consultant Tries Circadian Risk

You Can Afford to Assess All of Your Buildings

How much could you end up saving with these techniques? Every company is different, but on average, we expect organizations to see anywhere from 50 to 80 percent cost reductions. With that kind of savings, it becomes possible to assess all of your facilities.

You know that security risk assessments are important for the safety of your employees, your customers and your brand reputation. Let Circadian Risk help you make that possible. Contact us today to find out what we can do for you.

Yes, I want to assess all of my buildings.

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