Olivia Ribali

I attribute my success to an incredibly tough work ethic. Anything that's worth doing is worth doing right - there's no point in doing it multiple times. Comfort fosters complacency, for sure, and you have to be uncomfortable to grow. I mean, that's why they call it, you know, between a rock and a hard place, the snake shedding - they better get between the rock and the hard place, you know?

The best career advice I've ever received is that people are not going to like you, and their opinion doesn't matter. Don't take criticism from people that you wouldn't ask advice from. Looking out at the thousand-foot view, I'd take criticism from someone who I want to be.

People are waiting for you to fail and never give them what they want. But also, know when enough is enough. There are going to be people that do not like you and that will not give you the opportunities that you are looking for. They will never see you beyond what you are, being a young woman. That's when you learn to not quit, but you need to learn how to exit gracefully and go a different direction. Maybe go around that person, maybe find a different path. There are going to be people that will never give you the time of day - don't waste your time trying to please them. They do it for the pettiest reasons, too.

Some of the biggest challenges in our field today are hiring and retention. Not to be too crass, but in the security industry itself, you have to be really careful with who you hire - you want to make the right hire. Because it's more than just signing people in and out of buildings. This could be anywhere between executive protection, close protection, surveillance. Something I've noticed in this industry is that it definitely attracts people with the wrong mindset - for lack of a better term, like psychos. People that want to feel like they have power over others, and that's not the person that you want to put in positions, especially getting into leadership. Those are some of the bigger challenges that I think we face in our industry.

If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients. Kill them with kindness. Another value I definitely push on my guards and on some of my higher-level clients is that ego kills. Always be open to learning, because the second that you think you know it all is the second that you know nothing. I'm very much driven in education, as I work a lot with educators in the education field and a lot of team leaders. The day you stop learning is the day that you die - that's what I mean when I say ego kills, and I'm a firm believer in it. I've seen it time and time again.