Join America Back to Work, a weekly podcast, video, and blog series that covers timely and relevant topics affecting the labor market and workforce with industry experts. The series includes recruiting, hiring, retention, employee satisfaction, customer service, background screenings, and more.
From the Experts: How to Protect Your Business Like a Secret Service Agent
This week’s episode of America Back to Work looked a little different than usual. S2Verify co-founder, chief strategy officer, and former Secret Service agent, Arnette Heintze, was interviewed by Gini Dietrich, who leads the S2Verify digital marketing efforts, to discuss Heintze’s road to S2Verify and his impressive resume in the security strategy industry.
Before co-founding S2Verify, Heintze spent more than three decades working at the highest federal, state, and local law enforcement levels. He served more than 20 years in the United States Secret Service as a special agent and senior executive, where he planned, designed, and implemented security strategies to protect U.S. Presidents, world leaders, events of national significance, and our nation’s most sensitive assets, including financial infrastructure.
After retiring from the Secret Service, Arnette focused on building the growth and performance of innovative start-ups and SMBs. In 2004, he established Hillard Heintze, a globally recognized strategic security risk management and investigations firm.
In 2009, along with Bill Whitford and Jim Zimbardi, Arnette established S2Verify with an approach and methodology that delivers fast, accurate, compliant, and affordable background screening insights crucial to better managing insider risks, threats, and vulnerabilities.
Heintze remembers the exact moment when he realized he had an interest in risk management and security. It was June 6, 1968, a little after 5:00 pm. He had spent a long afternoon in the South Louisiana sun mowing the lawn around his family’s mobile home, and, when he came back inside, Walter Cronkite was on the TV announcing the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
“I remember Walter Cronkite saying, ‘…and the president has dispatched the Secret Service to protect the remaining presidential candidates,’” says Heintze. ‘
He then opened the World Book Encyclopedia and looked up Secret Service—and the rest is history. He was hooked.
Heintze is an expert when it comes to managing risk, threats, and vulnerabilities for his clients, bringing the “non-fail mission” mentality from his time protecting presidents to S2Verify. His top tip for prevention-oriented risk management? Conduct ongoing background screening to protect your business from employee threats.
Listen to the episode to get Heintze’s secret to building a low-cost, periodic, continuous background screening program that safeguards your business now and in the future–and hear more expert tips on protecting your brand, people, and assets.