Assuming this physical access claim is truthful (and i have doubts), I would feel at this point its budget letting him down. If your threat model includes "targeted attacks from people with physical access", it's time to run a vm on aws or azure and use the tooling they make available to secure it further. If you want tonnes of resourcing at a quite low budget, there's only a certain amount of "calling out" the group that supplied it that's reasonable.