Bex Deadman
Hello and welcome to another episode of Talk’n TRM. My name is Bex Deadman, also known as Travel Risk Bex and today it’s my honour to welcome my guest, James Lawrence, owner and founder of Peregrine Risk Management, who will be referred to as Jim for the rest of this call. Jim, how are you? It’s lovely to see you.
James Lawerence
I’m very good and thank you very much for inviting me to this webinar today. I’m so excited to be talking about Travel Risk, as you can see.
Bex Deadman
I know, just for the viewers who didn’t see what happened off-screen, he danced his way into this today. So if there was ever any doubt, that Jim’s the person we need to be talking to, and he loves Travel Risk, in case you can see his name there for those of you looking on the video. So he’s the perfect person for us to join what we’re up to. So we had a session with me and Jess, which is the session that everyone should listen to before they start listening to these podcasts because it will kind of explain a little bit about what we’re doing. But in theory, it’s a quick, short, sharp session of about 15 minutes where I get to talk to some of the most incredible people that I’ve met within this industry as I’ve moved and done the transition from travel management into travel risk management. And what I’ve learned is that there is a passion that sort of sits within all these people that they don’t necessarily often get the chance to kind of talk about. And this is really important, it affects us all. So I’ve set up this podcast so people can share those stories with us.
So I met Jim back in 2020. We were just reminiscing about that. We did a panel together. I made him do a slightly different panel than we’d done before, but it was for TBTC and it was great. But it was the first conference, just after the Pandemic, so it was a bit weird from that perspective, wasn’t it?
James Lawerence
Yeah, people were still unsure whether they were able to travel, whether they could attend conferences, and we were still in that transition between, obviously, isolation or restriction on movement. And then all of a sudden we’re trying to promote Travel Risk and get the wheels turning and gain confidence back in the travel risk space by trying to adopt a more risk-based approach. Because obviously, throughout the Pandemic, the main thing the UK government especially, was harnessing was the fact that you need to risk assess, and that was from the Prime Minister all the way down across the health sector and across travel in itself as well. So it’s been really important that by attending these conferences, doing podcasts like this, is to portray the mechanisms, the methodology, the tools, the resources that you need in order to enable that confidence, but to enable travel overseas. So it was really important that we attended that conference to start off with Bex, to be honest, to get our message across. It’s got the wheels turning, it’s got the discussions happening and it’s got the movement that we wanted to see and the travel profile to increase.
Bex Deadman
And look where we are today. It seems like a million miles away. So, thank you, Jim. So your building looks great. I hear these are your new offices. So for those that can see, and we’re not on the podcast, he does look slightly like he’s in a prison, but it’s all really old grey stones. So these are your new offices, last year you moved in.
James Lawerence
Yeah. So as we’ve grown as a business, we needed to expand. We’ve now got an ops room, working space, training department, training wing, really nice environment to work in. We’re really keen to give a nice cultural feel to where we work. We have quite an open forum with regards to the way we do business and we have an open way of sharing information internally and externally as well, which I think really works moving forward. But the offices just lend themselves to a nice working environment.
Bex Deadman
Yeah, no, they look great. Well, we’ll be down to visit you as soon as we can. Okay, so we’ve done a little bit of kind of just chatting to begin with because I really want you to feel comfortable in this and I don’t need to feel like I’m firing questions at you, Jim. But now we’re going to start firing questions. So firstly, there are three questions. So just to remind you, the first one is who you are and a little bit about what you do. You can spend as much time talking about each answer. The second question is that you know that this is the bit I want to get to. It’s your why, what have you done and why have you got here? And what is it that drives you to do this and to have these crazy conversations with me and other people and do all the things that you do? And then finally, for anybody wanting to start getting into travel risk management, to begin to understand this, because it’s a complex subject, what’s your golden nugget of where they start? All right, so are you ready?
James Lawerence
Always.
Bex Deadman
So who are you, Jim, and what do you do?
James Lawerence
Yes, as Bex alluded to at the start. So, my name is James Lawrence. I’m co-founder and director of Peregrine Risk Management. I oversee the operational side of the business, so it’s split in two, as I’m sure other businesses are, but everything operational, from training to intelligence to operational delivery to all our technical services, all sort of sit within my remit. And we’ve also got a very large risk consultancy element as well, which specialises in travel risk management, which we’re talking about today, crisis management, business continuity, we build travel safety programmes for organisations and so on. So we established it in 2019. We knew straight away that we wanted to go into travel risk management because we live in a globalised world. Pre-pandemic, there was an array of risks and threats that you would face when you travel. And we knew that after the pandemic, they haven’t gone anywhere. There’s no furlough scheme for criminals. There is a platform for people to start travelling again, but it needs to be done in a safe and secure manner. So we really focused and harnessed our efforts on the travel safety elements of not only our business offerings but the way we interact with clients as well, to make sure they’re getting our methodology and the reasons and the rationale behind why travel risk management is so important.
I also feel that travel risk management is in the same space as health and safety was probably 20 years ago, where ‘there was blame and claim’ going around everywhere. Slips, trips and falls became a big issue for insurance. It’s now travel, it’s now security and safety in a different guise, but overseas. So that’s sort of who I am. I’m also a chartered security professional, one of a handful in the UK. I hold a master’s in Risk and Crisis and Disaster Management and in September, haven’t told anybody this, but you’re now going to know. I’m going to start my PhD in Security Risk Management. So that’s my sort of angle and that’s who I am.
Bex Deadman
Off the press here, everyone. You heard this here first. Wow. I don’t know how you’re going to possibly get that done. You’re more than capable, but I know how busy you are. But that’s really exciting. Congratulations, Jim. That’s very cool. So now let’s get on to your why. I know that there’ll be everyone with this, there’s always a reason to do it, but then there’s the passion behind it. So tell me your story and let’s see where we go.
James Lawerence
Yeah. So obviously, some of those who know me, know that I’m ex-military. I left in 2009, and when I first left, I jumped around the African continent, the Middle East, and the Far East, and I realised quite quickly that in all those areas, it’s not all about conflict. It’s not all about terrorism. It’s not all about all the dangerous, nasty things that people assume with certain countries around the world because they’re low probability, high impact events that very rarely occur. So I started taking a really keen interest in ways to minimise travellers’ risk exposure quite quickly and focusing on those things that you come across more often. The petty crime, the illness, the road, traffic accidents, the cultural issues and the confrontation you may have for lack of understanding around local cultural awareness. So these are the things that I started to become very interested in. And I knew that if we could do the high probability, low impact stuff really well and do the planning phase, so the risk assessment phase really well as well. We could significantly reduce the chance of anything happening to people travelling overseas. And this became really evident when we started to do gap analysis quite a few years ago.
Now we’ve done many, many, now we’ve probably done 30 or 40 on different organisations. But what those gap analysis allowed me to do was to identify the pain points of my clients, but also identify the vulnerabilities and ways and recommendations and ways to really get rid of those concerns and worries that keep people up at night. And that’s the first question I always ask my clients, what keeps you up at night? And usually, it’s around travel, not knowing where the people are, not being able to assess the risk properly, and not having the right level of experience, knowledge, training, and resources. And it became quite evident that there were massive gaps in travel safety. We then looked at how we could build a travel safety programme and how we could do a five-step approach to target the travel safety world. And then we came up with a methodology of governance, preparation, protection, reaction and recovery. And the idea is there that we target each element of the travel safety programme. So governance looks at policies, procedures, the external context of the organisation, and your legal operating framework. It protects the organisation and provides this umbrella of how that organisation wishes their people to be looked after and how they want their travel to be conducted.
But then we really focused on the planning phase and the preparation phase, which looks at the risk assessment and I’ll come on to that in a minute, the training, resource allocation and all the other things you need to do before you travel. The protection piece whilst you’re in the country, so journey management, hotel security, those types of things, but then the ability to react. So we always pride ourselves when we do the risk assessment, we layer in two types of controls. Protective controls reduce the likelihood, reactive controls reduce impact. So we look at really how we can layer those into that travel safety programme. And then once we get to the end, which is the recovery phase, then how do we learn from our travel safety programme, how do we learn from the trips that we’ve been on, but also things like how do we look after people once they come back from a trip if they do experience an incident? And I’ll give you an example. Several years ago, I had a client who had a problem with a traveller in South America and they had to repatriate. Unfortunately, what had happened to the traveller was that they’d done things that were outside the exclusions within their insurance policy.
James Lawerence
It wasn’t covered. So my client had to charter a private jet and a mental health practitioner to this country to then repatriate this person because they couldn’t get them on a commercial line. What happened was then within the insurance process, this person got lost and it was a student. And when they came back to the UK, they were lost in the system. There was no occupational health, there was no mental health and wellbeing support, so they didn’t really close the programme off. So we’re very big on, look, you finished your trip, but it’s not over yet, let’s learn, let’s look for opportunities for improvement, let’s look for near misses and so on. But also let’s remember that if anybody does travel, they may need some support when they get back to the UK. This was quite evident, especially in the university sector where people have been on placements or working overseas for quite a long time. So we built a travel safety programme. I then became really passionate about travel, I’ve got a great understanding of everything that’s happening around the world, especially geopolitically. I’m a big believer in understanding what we call the ground truth, because you can’t make risk-based decisions without having situational awareness, of what’s happening on the ground.
So a real passion for the area of travel safety really came to the fore. When the ISO 31030 came out in 2019. I was actually quite refreshed that everything that I’d been doing for years before, from sort of 2009 up until that point, for ten years, was bang on point with regards to ISO 31030.
Bex Deadman
It was, you might as well have written it, Jim, and you hadn’t had you? But you might as well have done.
James Lawerence
But when that came out, it was really refreshing to see now, unfortunately, Peregrine was in its infancy, we weren’t really involved, but it’s really refreshing to see that people are now actually taking travel risk management to a different level. There are obviously spin-offs that are happening downstream with regard to the travel industry and stuff like that, but I think it’s been really refreshing to see organisations take this seriously. Not knowing where your people are, not knowing how to respond to an incident, is a big thing for an organisation because what we ultimately try to do, and the main output of what we do, is to protect the reputation of the organisation that we’re looking after, but also protect the people that travel. So, double-edged sword. And when we layer in legislation like the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, there’s two pillars to that that we kind of focus on. One is it provides the overarching management of safety. So an organisation has a legal obligation to provide a safe and secure environment for those working or travelling on behalf of the organisation, but also the traveller has the same responsibility to act in a safe and secure manner.
And what we found when we were doing these gap analysis, especially, was there was a massive gap in the risk assessment. And what would happen is a traveller would do a risk assessment, and submit it to somebody who had no training, no understanding, and they were then approving that trip. I’ll tell you my golden nugget later, I won’t let you onto it now. But the biggest problem we had was the lack of knowledge to complete the risk assessment in the first place by the traveller. And then the lack of knowledge of an approver to approve that trip with no real clear escalation process within the organisation. The escalation process helps protect that organisation and then it frames everything that moves forward. So what training do you need? What mitigation? What protective and reactive controls do you need? What do you need to do in the country? How do you work with third parties? How do you respond to an instance? So that frames everything and it’s really important that the risk assessment piece comes before budget. The risk assessment comes before you allocate a budget, because if it’s too risky, why waste your time putting a budget against it?
James Lawerence
But also the risk assessment piece allows you to travel risk manage. How can you risk manage something that you’ve not assessed? And that’s one of the biggest issues that we found and the biggest gaps. The risk assessment process for travel isn’t different, but what we always try and tell our clients is focus on three things your people, the destination you’re going to and the activity they’re going to carry out at the other end. Because each one will have different variables and different ways of interacting with each other and can increase or lower your risk profile. So that’s kind of why I got into it. I love the subject, as you can tell.
Bex Deadman
After we’d first met, Jim, and then I introduced you to what I’ve been doing with the ISO 31030 work, and I joined that group a lot later. I remember you just jumping up and down and just being like, it’s exactly what we do and just being so delighted with that. And I think that’s the key with ISO 31030. It shouldn’t be anything different than what people are doing. It’s there to actually just give you some guidelines and a framework like we talk about to then see what you are doing against it and then to do other things. But you do now have an opportunity with the next standards that are coming from this to have more involvement. So you’re actively involved in the new BSI group that we’re looking at as a standard for travel vendors in travel risk management, because really, if a company is going to try and align to ISO 31030, they need to know what their vendor supply chain looks like. And that is possibly one of the biggest gaps right alongside this communication piece, Jim, which you’ve just nailed beautifully in the conversations that you’ve just had.
It’s so common for companies to maybe have policies and certainly, what I’m finding is they’ve definitely got a T&E policy so a travel and expense policy. They possibly even now have some sort of risk management policy or crisis management policy, but they just don’t seem to be linked in any way. And often the travel team doesn’t really talk to the risk crisis team and it’s all sort of done in silos and really this kind of needs to be lifted out of that and everyone’s talking and communicating with each other in order for it to work as efficiently as possible. Thank you for your why. You really went there and that’s what I wanted you to do, so I’m grateful. And this is what it takes for change, people. These are people who are passionate and driving change forward. We fully think that travel risk management will evolve. It’s not going anywhere. And over the sort of next ten years, we expect it to take the sort of same journey that disaster recovery did as it merged and moved into business continuity. So those people that are thinking about risk management, and specifically travel risk management, now, you’re ahead of the curve and this is a good place to be, but ultimately you’re keeping your people safe, your people, your assets and your reputation and what could be or should be more important than that.
Okay, so finally, Jim, thank you for everything you’ve done so far. I just want to give our listeners your golden nugget. So let’s take this from the perspective of coming into travel risk management for the first time. It can feel a little bit overwhelming. Be your supplier side, be your corporate side, how do you start?
James Lawerence
So the first thing is, like I said, our five-step approach. The first thing we always look at is the governance. So you need a strong policy and a strong risk assessment process. If something does go wrong, the first thing a judge will ask for in a court of law is your risk assessment and your policy. I’ve got two nuggets if that’s okay, not just one I like to share. The first nugget is the amount of organisations I’ve seen without a risk appetite set. Without a risk appetite set within your safety programme, you have nothing to benchmark your risk assessment against, so it doesn’t allow for a swift or streamlined escalation process within the organisation. The risk appetite allows the approver to assess and benchmark against the appetite of the organisation, not the individual, not that person approving the trip, it’s the organisation’s risk appetite. And what that then does is it takes away individual risk perception and understanding because you may have one person one day who has no experience and the next day, and I’ve seen this before, a professor from a high-level Russell Group university approving. So there’s going to be disparities between the risk appetite takes that away because it’s based on the organisation’s appetite for risk.
My second nugget, which is my favourite one, is the test. You can build a travel safety programme, you can put all the policies and procedures in place that you want. You can have all the technology, you can have everything you need, but if you don’t test it, you’ll never know if it works. You’ve got to provide reassurance to make sure your policies and your procedures work. And then you need to go back and review those policies and procedures and processes to ensure they’re fit for purpose and get everybody to feedback once they come back from their trips and learn from experience and adjust and test again to make sure it’s fit for purpose. The amount of organisations that I spoke to during the COVID pandemic hadn’t adjusted their crisis management plan for about five years and when they opened it up, Joe Bloggs had moved on three years ago. It’s inefficient. So test, test, test. That’s all I would say to make sure it’s fit for purpose.
Bex Deadman
You literally have just taken me straight back to how I got into this, like you, I went years and years and years ago, way before, when I was looking back on my career, to think, why am I interested in this? I worked for an adventure travel company and they were incredible. Every year, we would do a crisis test. The reason we did it is because, unfortunately, years before that, something horrendous had happened to one of their tour groups and they weren’t ready, they didn’t know what to do. They had media outside. It was a terrible thing. And since then, of course, they learn. And they put this crisis team in every year and I was part of that crisis team. It’s where this passion came from and they made it really real. Until you’re doing it, they’re just words on a piece of paper from a policy perspective, aren’t they? And you’ve got to know what it feels like to be in that situation as much as you can be, to then know actually what you would do and react. Because you’ll find maybe you didn’t consider that piece or this bit’s come up or actually, that bit went really well.
And actually, those bits can kind of make it fun, though, those practices bring it all together. I know that sounds lame.
James Lawerence
I do a really good thing. Bex when we do crisis management training, I’ll give the scenario, and before I allow the CEO to give their strategic, or whoever the lead is, their strategic intent of what they want to happen, I take them out of the game. I say, ‘Oh, you’re on holiday, off you go’. And you can just see everybody else go, now, what do we do? But that’s how you build a team, that’s how you build the blocks that you need and the resilience into your travel safety programme. And the other thing as well is you just need to train on it as well. But the amount of people that are either approving trips or doing crisis management or acting as a lead in an organisation without any training, and that’s not good enough. So I think we’re in a world now to impart knowledge, but once you’ve imparted that knowledge, it’s really important to test that knowledge to make sure that you’re happy that it’s going to work.
Bex Deadman
I couldn’t agree more, Jim, thank you. We’re coming probably a little bit over our time today, but I just think it’s been well worth it and so grateful for you sharing what you’ve shared with us. I will definitely invite you to another session in the future. For now, this has been Bex Deadman on Talk’n TRM with James Lawrence from Peregrine Risk Management, and we look forward to seeing you in the new episode. Thank you so much.
