Pro-Concepts featured in Hampton Roads Business Journal
“Everybody faces risks every day,” said Shawn O’Rourke, president of Pro-Concepts LLC.
O’Rourke started his Virginia Beach risk management consulting firm that supports government and commercial clients in a variety of industries, in 2011.
He said he first got involved with risk management in the early days of the computer age.
The Navy commander served 21 years before retiring in 1996. That’s when he went to work for a small business in Northern Virginia that did business with the Department of Defense.
The company supported a software management network as it dealt with the issue of tracking risk. It began with a program called Risk Radar, a database on a floppy disk, in 1996.
“A risk – if you don’t keep visibility of it – becomes an issue,” O’Rourke said. “When it becomes an issue, you have to refocus yourself, spend more money and change your resources around so you can actually solve the problem.”
O’Rourke explained the idea behind risk management is to be proactive to make sure issues don’t occur in the first place.
“Risk management, to me, is helping those companies who are looking to expand or bring a new product online or build a new system to be able to sit down with them and say OK, have you thought about all the different facets of going from A to B to C?” he said.
Pro-Concepts inherited the data rights to the Risk Radar software and developed the product, Risk Radar Enterprise, a web-based application that aims to help mitigate risks within a company.
The real-time program is designed to help managers determine the best way to identify, analyze, track, mitigate and control a company’s program or project’s return on investment.
“The tool is designed to help them track risks, issues and opportunities,” O’Rourke said.
The company offers training – a risk management 101 course – on the application because he said a lot of people don’t truly understand the principles behind it. The application starts at $7,800.
Pro-Concepts also provides risk assessments, training and proposal reviews.
Johnny Walker, president of Thor Solutions LLC in Arlington, has used O’Rourke’s methods, concepts and processes to help with his engineering services business.
“This notion of risk identification, risk analysis, risk evaluation and risk treatment or mitigation … I still do all this stuff that Shawn taught me how to do many years ago,” Walker said.
Original Article Posted: Pro-Concepts featured in Hampton Roads Business Journal by Sandra J. Pennecke staff writer for Inside Business.
757-222-5356, sandra.pennecke@insidebiz.com
