September 2026
Welcome to the September 2026 issue of CEO Monthly. We are pleased to bring a selection of news, features, and success stories to our readers around the world. Covering inspirational journeys of a small yet mighty selection of CEOs across the corporate landscape, this month’s issue sheds light on improvements for the maritime, security, social housing, and automotive industries, and more. These accolade-worthy CEOs have their sights set on making the future better in business through providing superior client service, and elevating the working environment for their team members. The years to come are looking extremely bright and exciting not only for the CEOs in this issue, but also for the industries they influence and improve. We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed creating it, and we look forward to seeing you again in October. Sofi Parry, Senior Editor Website: www.ceo-review.com AI Global Media, Ltd. (AI) takes reasonable measures to ensure the quality of the information on this web site. However, AI will not assume any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, correctness or completeness of any information that is available through this web site. If errors are brought to our attention, we will try to correct them. The information available through the website and our partner publications is for your general information and use and is not intended to address any particular finance or investment requirements. In particular, the information does not constitute any form of advice or recommendation by us or any of our partner publications and is not intended to be relied upon by users in making or refraining from making any investment or financial decisions. Appropriate independent advice should be obtained before making any such decision. Any arrangement made between you and any third party named in the site is at your sole risk and responsibility.
4. News - Wildfire Appoints Mike Grillo as Senior Vice President of Data and Consumer Insights - Russell Reynolds Associates launches The Leadership Lab to Help Organizations Make Better Leadership Decisions 7. Every Business Now Needs an AI Strategy. Most Don’t Have One 8. The CEO Turning Information Into Insight 10. The Automotive AI Suite from the Automotive AI Company 11. Siobhan Sargeant: Charting a New Course for Blyth Tall Ship 12. Security That Makes a Difference Contents
NEWS Wildfire Appoints Mike Grillo as Senior Vice President of Data and Consumer Insights
New capability combines leadership science, proprietary data, advanced analytics, AI, and human expertise to strengthen decisions about leaders, teams, and organizational performance Russell Reynolds Associates (RRA), a global leadership advisory firm, announced the launch of The Leadership Lab, an integrated research and innovation capability designed to help organizations predict leadership performance and bring greater analytical rigor and clarity to their most complex leadership decisions. The Leadership Lab combines RRA’s experience advising boards, CEOs, and senior leaders with leadership science, advanced analytics, AI, applied research, and proprietary leadership data. It will turn research and data into practical insights, intellectual property, analytical models, diagnostics, and evidence-based solutions that can be applied directly to client challenges. The Leadership Lab will work alongside RRA consultants and client teams to strengthen executive and team assessment, benchmark leadership capabilities and performance, and deliver custom research and analytics projects tailored to complex leadership and organizational challenges. Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Chief Science Officer at RRA, said: “Organizations have access to more leadership data than ever before, but the real challenge is knowing how to interpret it and act on it. The Leadership Lab brings together science, data, technology, and deep leadership expertise to help clients move from complex questions to better-informed decisions and practical action.” The Leadership Lab brings together leadership advisors, researchers, behavioral scientists, data scientists, and analytics specialists, supported by an Academic Advisory Board comprising leading scholars and experts, including: - Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School - Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, Adecco Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School - Emma Harrington, Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia - Sunny Lee, Associate Professor, UCL School of Management - Paul McCarthy, Industry Fellow, School of Computer Science Data Science Institute, University of Technology Sydney “The Leadership Lab is designed to connect rigorous research with the decisions clients need to make in the real world,” said Gabrielle Lieberman, Director of The Leadership Lab at RRA. “By bringing together researchers, behavioral scientists, data specialists, leadership advisors, and external academics, we can look at complex challenges from multiple perspectives while staying focused on practical client impact.” To learn more about the Leadership Lab, visit: https://www. russellreynolds.com/en/capabilities/how-do-i-boost-theperformance-of-leaders-and-teams/predict-leadershipperformance Russell Reynolds Associates launches The Leadership Lab to Help Organizations Make Better Leadership Decisions Paymentsanddataveteran joins Wildfire to enhance the company’s consumer insights offerings for financial institutions and online retailers Wildfire Systems, a loyalty and consumer insights platform, announced the appointment of Mike Grillo as senior vice president of data and consumer insights, a strategic hire that will help Wildfire unlock greater value from consumer insights derived from the company’s platform. Working across Wildfire’s product, merchant and client teams, he will focus on helping partners better understand their customers, optimize their programs and develop new products and services. Grillo has held executive leadership roles at Visa, American Express, and Argus, as well as leading fintech companies. At Wildfire, he will combine his deep expertise in data and experience with both issuer and merchant relationships to build offerings for partners which productize data, provide shopping insights, enrich consumer profiles and improve program performance. Grillo’s mandate will also include identifying optimization and growth opportunities across Wildfire’s rewards platform and the Wildfire Commerce Network (WCN). “Wildfire sits at the unique intersection of loyalty, consumer insights, agentic commerce, and retail media, giving us valuable visibility into how people shop and engage with our clients’ loyalty and rewards programs,” said Jordan Glazier, CEO of Wildfire Systems. “Bringing Mike onto the team is an important step in putting those consumer insights to work. His experience across payments, fintech and data-driven businesses will help us turn that intelligence into smarter products and new growth opportunities for both our clients and our merchant partners.” The appointment comes as Wildfire continues to broaden its business beyond rewards and loyalty to provide shopping behavior insights and develop new datadriven offerings and commerce media opportunities. “There is tremendous opportunity in the intelligence created when you connect SKU-level consumer shopping behavior, merchant and product purchase attribution with trusted financial services brands,” said Grillo. “Wildfire has built an impressive foundation through its loyalty platform. My focus will be on turning that intelligence into greater value for our partners and helping them better understand their customers, optimize their programs and identify new opportunities.”
Feature AI is moving beyond the experimentation phase and becoming embedded in how business is done. Even companies without an explicit strategy are using it, whether they’re investing in systems and tools, or employees are using them independently without any top-down initiatives in place. With many organisations now building AI into customer service activities and operations, businesses without a defined strategy run the risk of falling behind their competitors. Not just from a technological perspective, but from the negative impact of fragmented decision making, caused by the lack of defined business framework. AI is now a critical strategic concern AI deployment has passed the stage of being a technology initiative – it’s migrated into a critical strategic concern for every type of business. For many observers, it’s gone beyond IT and become a question of leadership, with boardrooms needing to understand AI implications even if they aren’t technical experts. A PWC report found that only 35% of boards have incorporated AI and GenAI into their oversight roles, meaning the majority are still overlooking something that’s becoming as fundamental as cloud, cybersecurity and digital transformation strategies. The importance of organisational fit As with any decision, technology can become expensive when adopted without a clear, rational understanding as to where it fits into the wider architecture of the organisational model. Businesses mistake AI activity for AI strategy. They launch isolated pilots, encourage experimentation without effective governance in place and chase trends driven by what they’ve heard their competitors are doing, or what’s currently occupying media headlines. And the outcome of this unstructured activity? Disconnected investments, potential security and compliance risks, and little or no value for money. This fragmented approach makes it difficult to scale AI initiatives that have shown promise. While these unstructured implementations aren’t necessarily failures, they can limit future options and seed the ground for unwanted organisational complexity further down the line, according to Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise study. An effective AI strategy requires a more coherent approach, one that’s fundamentally grounded in overriding business objectives, not technology selection. Creating an AI framework focused on identified business outcomes and high-value use cases is critical. For instance, deployments targeted at growing revenue, improving operational efficiency, enhancing the customer experience and reducing compliance risk can deliver tangible business benefits. But for them to do so, the organisation must have the correct structures in place. Effective governance is key Establishing robust governance is a vital first step. Defining who owns data and specifying responsible policies for use will help to improve ongoing security, and assist with compliance obligations in the long term. That’s why the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has described governance as ‘a continual and intrinsic requirement for effective AI risk management over a system’s lifespan and organisational hierarchies’. Working to improve data quality and ensuring the right skills and infrastructure are in place are the foundations on which good governance is built. Accenture’s AI ROI Report, describes how resilient structural discipline facilitates effective knowledge management, which is essential for accurate forecasting, implementing process automation and improving customer support. Taking the time to define success metrics is also important. It’s advisable to distil tangible criteria to help teams focus on identifying where value such as productivity gains can be found, and where cost savings can be achieved, or time-tomarket improvements gained. Laying the foundations to support AI implementations Of course, the value of AI is dependent upon how it interacts with existing business systems and workflows. AI implementations tend to create new data and messaging flows that existing processes aren’t equipped to interpret or leverage for operational improvements. This requires businesses to Every Business Now Needs an AI Strategy. Most Don’t Have One think beyond existing tools and operational models which can quickly erode any value gained. Significant work is required to ensure infrastructure and processes are modified to fully support AI implementations. Without a concerted effort to orchestrate information architecture capable of underpinning AI-driven transformation, all the cost, time and effort that’s gone into the project will be wasted. Poorly connected solutions implemented without this essential background work will simply create new operational silos that hamper business efficiencies. Successful AI adoption doesn’t really have much to do with technology selection, according to Harvard Business Review’s Stop Trying to Pick the Best Technology. It’s much more about engineering a model that facilitates reliable information flows between systems, processes and teams and – above anything else – adds value to what the business does. And that’s exactly why a robust and comprehensive strategy is essential for every company, regardless of business size or industry sector. By John Samuel, Founder and Director of Seventh State
The CEO Turning Information Into Insight
CEO MONTHLY / SEPTEMBER 2026 9 Jul23542 Some businesses are created to capture a market, while others are crafted to reshape it entirely. Technology provider TCW delivers unrivalled insight for over 3.3 million social housing properties through unique proprietary software engineered to recognise and extract data beyond human capability. Below, we delve into the journey of Ryan Dempsey, a celebrated winner in the Most Influential CEO Awards 2026 and the visionary mind behind the platform currently redefining PropTech. As the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of TCW, Ryan Dempsey has spent more than a decade building one of the UK’s most respected PropTech platforms from a single idea into a multi-million pound software business. This is a feat he has achieved without venture capital, private equity, or external institutional funding; every achievement and each milestone overcome has been driven by relentless effort, the trust of customers, and a commitment to technical brilliance. Ryan first conceived the idea of TCW when working as the Head of Assets and Compliance for one of the most prominent local authorities in the country. Responsible for managing a diverse portfolio of assets, thousands across multiple disciplines, Ryan desired to achieve a better understanding of his portfolio. With this desire, he developed a more informed process for decision-making that would facilitate better investments. Envisioning a more evidence-based approach to decision-making, Ryan set out to build a tool that could support asset and compliance professionals by efficiently turning unstructured data into detailed meaningful insights. He was joined by Co-Founders Ben and Ian and, together, they leveraged software development expertise and operations leadership to transform what was once an inefficient approach into a fully automated solution for monitoring compliance and managing risk. Vision quickly became reality with the creation of TCW technology, bringing to life the ability to read every piece of information from any digital document with complete assurance. Now, the TCW team supports more than 150 companies and analyses over 10 million documents, successfully cementing its position across multiple sectors as the number one leading platform in social housing. Statistically speaking, businesses such as TCW should not exist; independent research shows that most software startups are destined to stumble and fall, often due to poor product-market fit, premature scaling, or unsustainable commercial models cited as the most common causes. Many companies spend their early years floundering in search of a market. TCW, however, flipped the script entirely by starting with a profound understanding of a specific niche. Ryan recognised early on in his career that compliance has never been about mere documentation. Instead, it revolves around people, decisions, and, at its core, safety. Rather than simply digitising paperwork, he opted to delve deep into the workings of engineers and property professionals to better understand how they operated. His research mirrored realworld processes, letting the technology follow the operational reality instead of the other way around. This philosophy has enabled TCW to evolve into a platform responsible for helping manage millions of properties while accumulating one of the sector’s most valuable collections of realworld compliance intelligence. Yet, Ryan often reflects on a paradox: even as organisations gather more data than ever, truly grasping it remains the industry’s greatest challenge. “The availability of data has improved dramatically,” he noted, “but much of what exists is still misunderstood. Better decisions stem from understanding what the data is really saying, not just having more of it.” This distinction has become increasingly important as artificial intelligence permeates thebusiness landscape. Ryan envisions a future where the loudest AI narrative does not dictate success; rather, he asserts that it is the organisations that blend reliable data, domain expertise, and responsible practices that will thrive. In his view, AI should enhance professional judgement instead of replacing it. Without context, provenance, and technical understanding, technology risks creating confidence without certainty, a dangerous proposition when people’s safety depends upon the decisions being made. The CEO shared, “The challenge for modern software companies is no longer simply building exceptional products. It is building confidence in the decisions those products support. The delicate balance between innovation and trust has never been more significant or crucial.” This credibility did not materialise overnight; Ryan often finds himself called upon to lend his independent technical engineering expertise following significant incidents in the marketplace. His reputation is not built on software innovation alone, but in combination with deep engineering knowledge and a profound understanding of safetycritical environments. For customers, partners, and industry peers alike, this underscores a vital truth: technology’s worth is only as valuable as the expertise behind it. Ryan’s leadership philosophy mirrors the principles upon which TCW was founded. Research into high-performing organisations consistently identifies trust, psychological safety, authenticity, and purpose as defining characteristics of enduring leadership. Rather than leading through hierarchy or personality, Ryan has cultivated a culture where integrity, accountability, and technical excellence drive decision-making. As a result, TCW has grown differently from many of its peers. While others have chased investment-led expansion, the TCW team concentrated on building resilient foundations, long-term customer relationships, and technology capable of standing the test of time. Sustainable profitability enabled continued investment into research, engineering, and product development, while preserving the independence to make decisions based upon longterm customer outcomes rather than shortterm investor expectations. Today, TCW sits at an intriguing point in its evolution that combines years of proprietary sector knowledge, millions of real-world property records, trusted customer relationships, and an ethical approach to emerging technologies. These characteristics are difficult to manufacture and almost impossible to accelerate through investment alone, instead earned over time and through unwavering dedication. Therefore, Ryan’s story is not one of simple entrepreneurial success. It stands as an illustration that enduring software companies are rarely built by following prevailing trends, rather flourishing by understanding industries at a level others often overlook, solving problems others accept as inevitable, and maintaining the discipline necessary to stay true to a clear purpose long after easier paths present themselves. In an era increasingly captivated by artificial intelligence, automation, and rapid scale, Ryan continues to champion something far less fashionable, yet arguably far more valuable: the belief that technology achieves its greatest impact when it earns trust first. CEO Monthly Magazine is proud to announce Ryan Dempsey as the UK’s Most Influential CEO 2026 in PropTech Innovation, as his company is named the UK’s Leading Compliance Technology Providers 2026. Contact: [email protected] Company: TCW Web Address: www.tcwin.co.uk
CEO MONTHLY / SEPTEMBER 2026 10 LLA Digital was recently awarded the title of Automotive AI Solutions Provider, for 2026 in the UK, and it’s CEO Monthly’s honour to delve deeper into the company’s dedication to elevating the automotive industry with transformative AI solutions. 80% of customers need contacting five times before they commit to a purchase, yet 44% of sales executives drop the lead after just one attempt. ELLA Digital helps put an end to this, working with automotive businesses to help them turn AI into a competitive edge. Its intelligent, scalable, agentic AI agents offer real-world results across written, chat, and voice, accelerating customer engagement, generating higherquality leads, and driving measurable sales impact with effortless deployment. Working across both inbound and outbound lead engagement for sales, parts, and services, ELLA Digital fixes legacy issues in the automotive lead management process and significantly enhances the customer experience. The company is practical and puts people first, and is set apart by the fact that it is automotive through and through. Its team come from across the industry, highlighting that ELLA Digital is not a generic AI vendor targeting the automotive sector, but rather an expert solving a problem identified through its own experiences. This insight is seen through optimAIze®, its AI agent suite, which it designed from the ground up to cover real workflows, compliance requirements, and customer expectations in the unique world of 21st century automotive retail. Barny explained: “In an AI market crowded with horizontal platforms trying to be everything to everyone, that specialism is what lets us deliver results fast – and it is what keeps our clients loyal. Our retention and repeat-business numbers speak for themselves.” As the CEO of ELLA Digital, Barny is an integral part of its success. His role is to deliver the commercial and strategic oversight of its agentic AI SaaS, from product direction and go-to-market strategy to the legal, fiscal, and operational foundations. Day to day, this puts him with ELLA Digital’s commercial, technical, and customer teams. Barny’s leadership philosophy aligns with the wider company’s core values: integrity, honesty, trust, and a people-first approach. For Barny, these things are never at odds with commercial ambition. The Automotive AI Suite from the Automotive AI Company Award-winning ELLA Digital is the automotive AI company. It exists to help OEMs and both franchised and independent dealers harness the power of AI to sell more – be it vehicles, parts, or services – simply, securely, and effectively. Spearheading its mission to transform how the industry connects with customers is Barny Francis, recognised here as the Most Influential CEO 2026: Digital Transformation Leadership – UK. We caught up with him for more following the dual recognition as he and ELLA Digital are awarded for their excellence. Building a career within some of the biggest names in the industry, from Hyundai and Citroën to SEAT, Škoda, and Volkswagen, Barny picked up all of the leadership and management experience he needed, all whilst noticing that the digital sphere and AI were reshaping the industry faster than manufacturers and retailers could keep up. Roles at Carwow and Keyloop followed, before Barny accepted the role as CEO of ELLA Digital. In what has been one of the best decisions of his career, Barny has supported the company in a variety of crucial ways, from doubling down on its people-first culture to helping it overcome the challenge of getting the value of its AI solutions for car dealerships understood in a sea of AI noise. His goal is supported by his team who all contribute to helping the industry move from AI as a bolt-on tool to AI as genuinely embedded infrastructure across sales and service. As this shift accelerates significantly, ELLA Digital is already there waiting, having been expertly built for it. With optimAIze® covering more of the customer journey and ELLA Digital itself deepening its footprint with OEMs and larger UK dealer groups, Barny remains wholly focused on building the company and its AI suite, positioning it as the definitive AI partner for the automotive industry. Backed by a team of experienced specialists, ELLA Digital is set to make further improvements and impact on new and returning partners. The company is also exploring expansion across the globe, with the backing of its investment partners, and is expecting to accelerate both its product development and its team’s size. More on this automotive AI company and its agentic AI software can be found below. E Contact: Barny Francis Company: ELLA Digital Web Address: https://elladigital.com/
CEO MONTHLY / SEPTEMBER 2026 11 Siobhan Sargeant: Charting a New Course for Blyth Tall Ship Blyth Tall Ship first began as a project developed to honour Captain William Smith, a lesser-known Blyth hero who discovered the Antarctic landmass in 1819. In the years since its launch, this ambitious project has evolved to reconnect the town of Blyth with its shipbuilding and seafaring heritage through training, education, and community engagement. Steered by CEO Siobhan Sargeant, the charity is now on a mission to create a thriving, inclusive community inspired and empowered by maritime heritage. We caught up with Siobhan to learn more about this mission, as she and her team are recognised in the Most Influential CEO Awards 2026. “Exploring our future, inspired by our past.” Siobhan Sargeant has stood at the helm of Blyth Tall Ship since February 2025, following the departure of Founder and CEO Clive Gray after 15 years of leadership. Bringing to the role a deep understanding of the power of community-driven organisations, Siobhan has joined Blyth Tall Ship with a drive to build on Clive’s legacy whilst guiding the charity through its next phase of growth. If someone had told Siobhan twenty years ago that she would one day become the CEO of a maritime heritage charity, she would almost certainly have laughed. Before taking on the role, the CEO had never sailed on a tall ship, or even a wooden boat. But Siobhan has upheld an unwavering passion for people throughout the course of her career, always pursuing and creating opportunities to make a meaningful difference. Siobhan has spent more than two decades working across the charity sector, both regionally and nationally, developing partnerships and creating strategies that have enabled organisations to grow their impact. She has been fortunate to work within hospices, healthcare, and national charities, delivering everything from major fundraising campaigns and commercial partnerships through to service development and organisational change. Each of these roles have taught Siobhan something different, shaping her into she leader she is today. She has discovered a passion for joining organisations during periods of growth and change, and developed a love for building things, whether that is creating new income generation models, developing innovative programmes, or bringing people together around a shared vision. Through this work, Siobhan has learned that there is something incredibly rewarding about seeing an idea develop into something that creates tangible impact for communities. This passion eventually led Siobhan to Blyth Tall Ship. “Joining Blyth Tall Ship almost two years ago felt, in many ways, like an unexpected chapter,” she shared. “Whilst I had extensive experience within the charity sector, heritage was entirely new territory for me. What I discovered very quickly was that our work isn’t simply about preserving a ship or safeguarding archives; it’s about people. It’s about creating opportunities, building confidence, improving wellbeing, and ensuring that our heritage remains accessible and relevant for future generations.” Over the next 12 months and beyond, Siobhan and her team will focus on building a sustainable future for Blyth Tall Ship while continuing to grow the organisation’s impact within its community. Foundations put in place over the past two years have allowed the charity to develop a more diverse range of income streams, and the next phase centres on strengthening those opportunities to ensure that Blyth Tall Ship remains resilient and able to continue delivering the meaningful programmes that have earned it recognition as North East England’s Leading Maritime Heritage Charity 2026. From earning her stripes in grassroots fundraising to developing and delivering million-pound partnerships, every step of Siobhan’s journey has shaped the leader into who she is today. Throughout it all, the CEO has always strived to keep people at the heart of her work, staying true to her identity and remaining accountable as she continues on her mission to create meaningful impact across communities. For her passion, drive, and unwavering dedication, Siobhan Sargeant has been named North East England’s Most Influential CEO 2026 in the field of Community Impact Leadership. “I feel incredibly privileged that my career has brought me to Blyth Tall Ship at such an exciting point in its journey,” Siobhan reflected. “We have ambitious plans for the future, and I’m continually inspired by the passion of our staff, volunteers, trustees, and supports, who make our work possible.” She continued, “Twenty years ago, I couldn’t have predicted that I’d be standing on the deck of a 112-year-old Tall Ship talking about heritage and social impact. Looking back, however, I can see that every step of my journey has brought me here. Perhaps it wasn’t the plan after all, but it was exactly where I was meant to be.” Contact: Siobhan Sargeant Company: Blyth Tall Ship Web Address: www.blythtallship.co.uk AIM-Jul26301
CEO MONTHLY / SEPTEMBER 2026 12 Looking simply to make a meaningful difference in the lives of its clients and their communities, Condor Security Inc. provides integrated security solutions in Toronto and across the Greater Toronto Area. These include everything from remote video monitoring and security technology to the provision of security guards and For 25 years, the Greater Toronto Area has felt safer thanks to Condor Security Inc., a private security company providing security solutions, services, and training across the region. Following these notable achievements, we sat down with Benjamin Tabesh, CEO of Condor Security, who was named the Most Influential CEO 2026: Security Services Leadership – Canada, while Condor Security was recognized as the Leading Security Services Company 2026 – Canada, to explore his leadership journey and the evolving security services landscape in Toronto. expert training programmes. Condor Security also offers a concierge service, allowing it to integrate professional security services, luxury concierge, and advanced technology into one coordinated model. Having served as its CEO for more than 25 years, Benjamin Tabesh has been an integral part of its journey from day one. In the early days, he was involved in almost every aspect of the operation, but as the organisation has grown, his role has become much more strategic. Today, he explained, his focus is on developing leadership, strengthening service, maintaining client relationships, advancing training, making sure its three divisions work in sync, and deciding where to take Condor Security next. Although he today sits at the head of one of the leading providers of luxury security and concierge services in Canada, Benjamin’s journey to this point was far from simple. Born in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution, Benjamin lived there for part of his childhood before his family moved to Canada. Starting again in a new country instils resilience, adaptability, and appreciation for opportunity, all things Benjamin uses as a CEO. Founded in 2001, Condor Security did not initially have the scale of larger security companies, so Benjamin, focused on finding other ways to differentiate the organization. He settled on quality, training, responsiveness, and a personal service. Benjamin told us: “That is where what I have called our ‘underdog strategy’ originated. If we couldn’t outspend or out scale the largest companies, we could out-train, out-service, and out-respond them.” Guided by this attitude and well-placed self-belief, Condor Security has evolved from a traditional security company into a much broader organisation encompassing physical security, concierge, consulting, training, and technology services. Training is a particularly important part of the organisation’s offerings, and it is something that Benjamin feels especially connected to. This can be seen through training serving as one Condor Security’s core values, principles which continue to shape its growth and influence its decisions. Discussing the importance of training to him and the organisation, Benjamin commented on his pride in Condor Security being the first company of its kind in Canada with the ability to instruct and certify in the Verbal Judo system. This approach, which is designed to de-escalate conflict, today forms an integral part of the organisation’s security training provision, alongside fire safety training, first aid/CPR training, tactical awareness training, emergency response training, and more. As this shows, the team cover as many bases as they can. Behind this is the recognition that many of its clients do the same. The condominium sector is a good example, as Condor Security recognised that the person at the front desk does much more than access control. They are, at once, a security professional, emergency response, an ambassador, and often the first and last interaction a person has when they arrive and leave. This led first to the creation of its concierge model, followed by its concierge service. Taking advantage of hidden opportunities like this, is something that Benjamin has built a career out of at the helm of Condor Security, and whether he is blending physical and electronic security to streamline both, scaling the organisation without losing personal attention and quality of service, or continuing to invest in new training areas to upskill his team and his clients, this CEO is changing the game by redefining security in the Greater Toronto Area. As he begins to turn his attention to legacy, not in terms of personal recognition but in building something that goes beyond him, recognition in the Most Influential CEO Awards 2026 is something Benjamin cherishes. He hopes his influence can help develop the next generation of industry leaders and the future of security services, and keep Condor Security Inc. as Toronto’s security partner of choice for years to come. Contact: Benjamin Tabesh Company: Condor Security Inc. Web Address: https://www. condorsecurity.ca/ Security That Makes a Difference
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