Episode 22 with Rick Meekins

Narrator:

Welcome to Cyber 909, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and cyber aficionado, Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 909, episode 22 with Rick Meekins.

Den:

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Cyber 909, your podcast, which is really a bait and switch. We don't really talk about cyber very often, so every episode I have fantastic guess. And today's episode, I think actually I reached out to this guy on LinkedIn or he reached out to me, but I wanted to meet him because I was checking his profile out. I was watching some stuff he'd done before. This is a business strategy consultant extraordinaire. Rick Meekins, welcome to the show.

Rick:

Thank you, sir. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for the kind accolades as well. I appreciate it.

Den:

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny, and you and I have met a few times before this and you've been sharing with me, Hey, how can you help 909Cyber? And I'm like, oh shit. This is a guy who I believe can really help. So let's talk a little bit about your background. Now I know you're in Atlanta. Let's talk about young Rick, young Rick high school, you're finishing school. What was that life journey when you were growing up?

Rick:

Sometimes I think I was young Sheldon, just this guy that just didn't really connect with everybody, but was everywhere but reality. I grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, which is kind of across the river from Philadelphia, north of Camden. I was always one of those people that was really curious about stuff. We got the, I'm like gun date myself. So Converse 64, 1 28 came out. My dad was like, Hey, look at this cool new thing. We had the fastest internet in the world, 12.8 bits per, not kilobits, bits per second. We had bulletin boards. And so I launched into learning about technology. I really enjoyed that. Grew up, I started dabbling in solving people's problems when I was probably junior high school, high school, something like that. One of the things that I did that really stands out to me is I created a computer dating service. So this is manual database, collecting people's information on a piece of paper, plugging into the database and finding out who matched and I would sell them the results. So that was fun. Had friends that sold candy and it was like, well, you could sell this, sell like that, and they would increase their sales. So that was always my mentality. It was always like, how can we solve a problem or how can we take something that's existing and make it better? Got into the restaurant industry. Got into the restaurant industry.

I don't remember exactly when, but I was a trained chef for a long time, so I worked in the restaurant industry for about 17 years. That culminated with, I had a catering company. Catering company got big. And so I bought a restaurant, ran this restaurant for about three years and then did what I thought was the greatest catering gig in the world. I was just like, okay, I'm done with this business. I'm ready to get up and move to Atlanta, get back on track with where I started, which was I really wanted to get back into business. I really wanted to help entrepreneurs in particular. I saw a lot of people, same thinking. I saw a lot of people that would have an idea, they have a product, they have something that they could sell, they have a market they can sell to, but they didn't really understand really well how to build a business around it, build something that would allow them to step away and actually have a life. And I knew from having the restaurant and working 70, 80 hours a week, that was absolutely not what I wanted to do, and I couldn't kind of didn't want to leave anybody else behind. And so in 2005, I started this company and that's what we did. We just worked with companies and just help them design operational structures that would allow them to scale.

Den:

Wow. And as you were saying that, I was thinking it's almost like you've got the helpful hustler mentality, so you're trying to help people as a kid growing up, but also that hustler mentality because in the streets, and I grew up in Scotland, so for me it was similar where nothing was free. You didn't get anything handed to you. I grew up in a middle class family at best, and I was going around the door selling candies and doing newspaper runs and just all sorts of shit. I mean, I was just like, I got to try and make some pocket money here. So in the restaurant business, I mean, I'm one of those avid cooks. I wouldn't say I'm brilliant, but I do love to cook. What kind of learnings did you have as you were building those businesses that you think translated really well into helping entrepreneurs now?

Rick:

Wow. The thing about the restaurant businesses that people don't really think about is the restaurant industry is two businesses. You've got manufacturing in the back, so you're getting raw goods coming in, you're producing them, and then you're producing a product that you're selling in the front of the house. The front of the house is a service business, and so it's all about creating an experience. And so both of those really translated really well into what I do. I always think customer first because that's what we had to do in the business if you didn't, I mean, if you think about the idea, you go to a restaurant week after week after week, you have a great meal and then all of a sudden you have a terrible meal and terrible service regardless of all 10 15 experiences you had before. Now your expectation or your belief in that restaurant has deteriorated somewhat.

You know what I mean? So customer experience is great, and of course service product delivery is really always, it's got to be top shelf. I was in fine dining, so it's not like I was just hustling out hot dogs and potato chips or something like that. I was preparing food from scratch to people that were paying a decent amount of money for their food that expected and appreciated good food. And so that's always been my mantra. If I'm going to do something, if I'm going to work with a company, whatever it is, we're operating at a level of excellence.

Den:

And I think if it like a restaurant with average food, but amazing service is one that people will return to.

But a restaurant with great food and shit service, you don't go back. I mean, for me it is, I mean, want good food, but if I go to a place and the food's great and the service sucks, it's the experience. Like you say, the food is part of the experience, but so is the service. So is the ambience, so is the deck or so is the cleanliness. I always say a restaurant the way judge, how I think the kitchen will be clean, not is by their toilets. You got their restrooms. If their restrooms are dirty and not hygienic, then you're like, wait a minute. That's the thing. Their clients see how dirty is the shit we don't get to see. And all of my friends, we all have that same measure stick as you ventured into building your business. So you're an entrepreneur for the second time. When you were building the consultancy business, what was the biggest challenge you faced in your first year? Do you remember? It was 20 years ago now, right?

Rick:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the thing that I was afraid of because I was working with smaller companies is charging too much and just not getting the customers. And I think that a lot of people face that. I think my gift is really, my gifts are really in strategy and operations, just figuring out how to put things together. But I still went to mean just full transparency. I still went to market as a typical technical founder. I'm really, really good at what I do, but in terms of selling it, packaging it, it's just like I go into a company, it's just like I can show you how to make processes and systems and this and that and this and that and this and that. And companies are just like, so what? Is that going to help me pay my bills? Well, yeah, it'll help you pay your bills, it'll help you scale your company, but that's not the way that they're necessarily thinking when I'm describing what I do. And so those were the two biggest challenges I had.

Den:

Yeah, it's interesting when I think of, I mean I am in that position now. We launched about September, so it's brand new. And I look at it, I can stand in front of any audience on a stage and talk about cybersecurity strategy. I can give them great advice and talk about my pedigree and my history. That's the time where people are like, oh, we want to work with you. If I just knock on your door and have not done the whole walk on stage business, that's a whole different game. That's a whole different sell. Because when I'm on stage, I'm not selling. When I'm on stage, I'm talking about experiences, I'm talking about stories and journeys,

And I get the sense from our conversations that you're very attuned to, you have a methodology that's tried and tested. You have these processes. And the other thing though is I think that little secret sauce of your personality type, working with an entrepreneur, a founder, CEO, whatever, I think you have that gift where you can turn around and you can help them figure out how they can be their authentic self, selling their authentic product in a way that isn't undervalued or overvalued, but really helps them understand and see that success mean when you first reach out to someone. What is the process of you explaining to them why it's valuable for them to work with you guys? And then when you do start working with them, what are the kind of mistakes you see?

Rick:

The biggest challenge, and I really look for founders, technical founders, and the biggest challenge that I see in a lot of companies is they don't really have their marketing, their sales and their customer experience really well aligned, really functioning. And so you go in, it's just like, what is your sales department doing? He's like, well, this guy's doing this, this guy's doing that. What are your sales reports like? Well, we don't really have support reports. We meet once a week. We talk about what's hot and that sort of thing. But so what are your sales goals? Well, we have these goals here, and how do you know you're going to hit them or what do you need to do in order to hit those goals? Well, we're really trying to figure that out. What kind of leads is marketing sending you? Well, they're not really sending us leads. They're more doing social media and stuff like that. Every once in a while we get something from them, but it's not really. And then customer experience, it's like, so what is your customer journey?

How are you creating value for them at every checkpoint? How are you making sure that once they leave, that they're your biggest fans, they're referring other people to you? Are you getting the most money you can out of your customers? And so a lot of times companies just aren't thinking that way. They might think very siloed where they've got marketing over here, sales is over here, and maybe they're doing customer experience or they're just focused on sales and their sales is not really functioning at the level that it could. They're producing work, but they're not necessarily hitting. If you think about the idea of, I don't know if you saw the Salesforce report, most salespeople last year didn't hit their target, same with the year before. And a lot of times it's just because the systems and the processes and tools are not in place and they're not being coached in order to be successful in their work.

Den:

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, as you're saying that, I was thinking back to my time at Banyan Security. So I was their CSO and reported to the founder and CEO, but we would sit there in our leadership meeting every week, and it literally starts at marketing. So we've got product, then we've got marketing brand and product marketing. What are we doing there to generate the funnel part of the funnel? Then the funnel comes into the salespeople, how are the sales and marketing people working together? Where do the SDRs even sit if you have SDRs? And then it would be what customers are we converting the ones that we're not? Why not the ones that we are customer success team, we want to hear about your shit now. And it literally was a full circle because then customer success who are also responsible for retention,

Den:

They're

Den:

Going to come back to our product team and be like, these features and functions are being asked for by our customers. Now let's talk about how we rate and rank those. And then the product team talk to the technical marketing team about marketing. And then all of a sudden we're now back at product marketing in conjunction with brand marketing and creating the funnel or continuing to grow the funnel. And I think I was blessed because seeing that, but also participating in that at the executive level was my first ever time doing that. But I got two years of being embedded in that process. Which levers do we pull, which might improve the funnel? Which levers will we pull that improve the customer, the prospect buying the thing?

And then what are our levers and options to improve the product for retention? Because you only have a finite set of resources. The whole every step only has that finite resources. You only have so much money for marketing or people all the way through. So it was really eyeopening for me, which as part of this adventure that I got, now, I'm not even close to being near that. I mean, shit, there's a small group of us and as the founding and the CEO, I'm also the marketing guy and I'm also the sales guy, and I'm also the top of funnel and I'm also customer success. And the other people in the team, they're also many hats as well. So it is fascinating. What would you say is one of, in your life, I assume you've had some great mentors in your life, be it professional or personal, what was one piece of advice that a mentor gave you that just stuck with you that you still to this day call upon on?

Rick:

A lot of the advice that I've been given has really been around mentorship or around leadership. And one of the biggest lessons I learned was, and it's very, very simple. It's like inspect what you expect. I come from an athletic background or played sports most of my life. And so when you're on a team, everybody on the team is on the team for they do their job for playing soccer. Your goalies doing that, you're halfback, fullbacks, everybody's doing their job. And so that's the world I came from. So that's kind of the world that I expected when I went into business or that's at least my thinking. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs go, A lot of business leaders go into this. And so if I gave someone something to do, my expectation is that they would do it and they would do it kind of in the way that I recognize that not everybody's going to have the same standard or process or whatever, but the outcome is what was expected.

And so I was a sales manager, I had a commercial fitness company, and I would give the sales team what their responsibilities were. It's like, okay, I need you to put this in a CRM, all those things. And my expectation is that they would do it, and then we'd go and we would run the sales reports and the information wouldn't be there. The company comes to me is like, Rick, you've got to inspect what you expect. And he really, really drilled that into me. The other piece though that has really been, I guess front and center for me in the past few years is that John Wooden statement where he was, his expectation for his team members is that they always do their best. It wasn't that everybody went out and won every single game, even though he became winning his coaching, what basketball history, I believe, but he drilled into his team, always do your best. And it was started with the little things. Are your shoestrings tied correctly? Lemme show you how to tie your shoestrings so that they don't get untied mid game and you can't do your best. I mean, it's those things. And I absolutely love the little things that turned into big things.

Den:

Yeah, I can't remember who it was. There was some army general talking about when you wake up in the morning, make your bed. And that was similar to his whole thing, which was start your day. The little things matter. And I look at that. I don't have a great attention to detail, but I'm pretty disciplined when it comes down to I'll be detail orientated when I need to be.

And then other times I'll surround myself as I build a team with people who are better than me at that. And when you build a team, it is vitally important to think about the diversity of background and thinking. And I look at that. There's way more power in that team, and it is kind of like a sports team, really, right? The reality is you're not all good at defending versus attacking. You're not all inspired the same. So go figure out how you build your team now as you speak with your clients. What's the biggest mistake you've seen them do? I guess I think of it, it's like, well, the biggest mistake you see quite often, and then what kind of advice or coaching do you give to ideally remediate that mistake or prevent them from falling down that trap?

Rick:

To me, it's always been kind of weird. I've met more entrepreneurs that either don't or under invest in marketing and have expectations that not investing, so say organic social media is going to build their company. Software company is just like, Hey, you know what? We're trying to get 10,000 users on the application, but we're just going to use organic social media. I don't think we're going to live that long.

Den:

Yeah, exactly.

Rick:

And it's tough to get people to really see that the investment that they're going to make and the progressive investments that they're going to make are going to turn around, are going to produce fruit for them. And entrepreneurs of course, I mean, especially early stage companies, I mean, they're looking at every dollar and it's just like, okay, do I eat lunch today or do I invest in my company? And so these decisions are very, very critical. So what I always try to do is I really try to lay out for them as plainly as I can, okay, here's the opportunity. Here's what's going to happen if you don't. So it's like we've got to be able to put them in a position where they have the power to make the decision, but they have enough information to at least consider what direction they're going to go in. I cannot tell you that every time I've had that conversation, companies have turned around and say, okay, I'm going to invest in marketing. So it's just like, okay, what is the other way around? How are we going to fix this? How are we going to get to a place where they're going to feel comfortable with marketing?

Den:

And I was thinking, would you get, when you get to a client, I was thinking, do they pull you in at the star or do they pull you in when shit's not going right?

Rick:

I don't think that they would say that things aren't going right. I think what they tend to say is, Hey, we want to do this little thing. It was like, Hey, can you set up the CRM system for us or can you blah, blah, blah? And then I'm in there. I'm just like, Hey, did you notice who's doing? And it tends to expand. I mean, nobody, very few companies have come in and said, Hey, I need to do strategy. Unless they were doing something that, unless they were completely blocked and at a loss and they're really looking for more of an assessment and direction. But very, very few people have said, Hey, you know what? I want my company to double revenue in the next five years or something like that. One lady came in and she said she wanted to grow massively, and I showed her how to do it, and she kind of was like, I don't want to do that.

Den:

Well, so that was one of the other things I was thinking was, so I can imagine, I'm going to draw a parallel here to Garden Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares, and literally the business is not achieving what it wants to achieve. They have a run rate of a year, they're calling upon you and they're saying, Hey, Rick, save us. And then you stroll in and you're like, you look at all their systems and processes and how they're doing it and what their strategies are, how they're marketing, and then you turn around and say, these are my recommendations. And the owner of the business, so back to the analogy of the kitchen nightmares, turns around and says, oh, you're full of shit, blah, blah, blah. But then at some point they've got this light bulb going off. It's like, alright, okay, what Rick says is true. I need to, is it like that? Do you encounter that kind of scenario?

Rick:

I do. I do. I think, well, people don't always call me back to have that conversation, but what has been interesting is that has happened. And then I'll bump into them years later and just like, oh, Rick, that was the greatest thing you ever did. You changed my, I'm like, what? I'll take it.

Den:

They didn't even send you a thanks at a bottle of wine or something. Hey, you saved my business, but I didn't say thanks. The other thing, so one of my business friends said this to me last August as we were IDing on building 9 0 9, which was your first run of clients you're most likely to get via your network,

But the second run, where do you get that second run of clients from? So it's either referrals or it's you market. So for me, that's why I jumped in very early on. The first thing I done and people said, oh, you don't need a website. I'm like, of course I fucking need a website. How will people know where we are? What is your shop front door? You must have a shop front door. Absolutely. Something that says what you do and why there's value in them coming to you. Yeah, I mean, the marketing thing that you said totally rings true. Now, you were about to say something there. So did you have a little thought in your head there about I did. You jumped straight in there with my magical wisdom. The Gordon Ramsay analogy I think is brilliant because I do look at it like you could be the business wizard. You can stroll in there, you can see what's going wrong, you can see what their desires are, their strategy, and really help bring them back on track. When you reach out with clients, you get them through the process. Now you have a methodology, right? I do. So do you want to explain a little bit about the methodology?

Rick:

Yeah, yeah. And it's cool because it really goes back to the sports analogy that we were talking about, and I believe very strongly in this, and this is, I've really seen this over and over again. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're really going to get an understanding of the company's readiness for change. Because if the company's not ready, if the people on the team aren't ready for change, then change isn't going to happen or change is going to happen very, very slowly. At the same time, we need to understand what our capacity for change is. So I can go into a company and say, okay, I want to do these X, Y, Z things over the next year, but if they don't have the capacity to do that, to manage that, then it's not going to work. And so the first thing I'm doing, in other words, and the first thing I'm doing is really evaluating the risk profile, if you will, of the team's abilities to be able to execute whatever we decide to work on.

And so with that risk profile, basically having a change management framework that we're going to use when we're developing the actual strategy. Now, when we're actually ready to get into the brass tacks, if you will, we go through a process of discovery. We want to understand, as you said before, we want to understand what's going on in the business, but then we want to understand why things are happening. We want to understand what other players in the marketplace are doing, what other players in the marketplace might be missing, what opportunities projecting into the future, what opportunities are on the horizon that we might want to steer the company towards. Once we've done that, we're going to bring that back. We're going to go with the company, we're going to have a sort of brainstorming session. It's like, okay, this is what we learned about your company.

These are our recommendations. These are some initiatives that you could work through. At that point though, what we want to do is we don't want to, the important thing here is not to own, for us anyways, is not to own what that strategy is going to look like. What I need to happen is I need for the leadership to step in and say, okay, this is what I want to do. This is the direction. These are ideas, et cetera, et cetera. At that point, we can prioritize what initiatives we actually want to go for, and then we model that out. Then we develop a plan to implement that. We're educating our client throughout this process because what exists now today may change in three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, a year, et cetera, et cetera. So what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to say, okay, this is the direction that we're going in.

We need to be able to pivot. We need to understand what key performance indicators, if you will, we're going to watch, it's going to say, Hey, we need to change this. We need to go a different direction, or what technologies or whatever's on the horizon. What we need to do is, excuse me. We need to be able to know what sorts of things we need to be able to adjust incrementally in order to produce that strategic advantage. It doesn't make sense in my mind to just say, okay, we're just going to scale this company, or we're just going to make this company scale. What we want to do is we want to say, okay, where can we find the blue oceans to quote Blue Ocean strategy? Where can we find those so that the company can actually become somewhat stable, become sustainable, and then at the same time, scalable.

Den:

Scalable. So when you go through the process, one of the things I was picking up on is you lead them through. So you also do a guided strategy session with the leadership team? I do. And then I think it is good sometimes to have a third party person take your team through guided strategy creation or guided brand or guided whatever. I mean, my teams at Adobe and Cisco, we would build our own strategies, but quite often we'd bring in a third party person to facilitate the thing so that me the boss, I'm not the boss, I'm a participant in the session.

Den:

Because

Den:

Sometimes some leaders, some leaders are great at it and they can do it very successfully, and I've done that too. But I really feel that in order for the team to all commit and contribute to that strategy, having the boss not be the boss, not wear the boss hat for this, is usually more productive. Is that your experience?

Rick:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I actually have run my companies like that, and I explain to people, it's like, look, my job is, again, using the sports analogy. My job is like the team captain. I mean, that just happens to be my job. You're responsible for this, you're responsible for that. I brought you in because you're an expert at what you do. I didn't bring you in to tell you what to do. If I'm telling you what to do, I don't need you.

Den:

You

Rick:

Know what I'm saying? I can find somebody that is less expensive or whatever it is. I'm not looking for any robots. So yeah, absolutely. When you're in that strategy session, we really need a level playing field and we really need to get everyone's expertise. The CEO is great at being a CEO or whatever his or her role is, but he may not be great at marketing or sales or some other category, and we really, really need that information. We really, really need that perspective. We really need to hear from the people that are talking to the customers. If we don't have that information, we're flying blind.

Den:

Do you think a lot of CEOs know that they're not meant to be the marketing person, the salesperson, because some CEOs or some executives, they just want to get in amongst their team shit, and from a maturity perspective, regardless of their actual age, from a business maturity perspective, some of them just don't know how to get out the way.

Rick:

They're two sides to that really. So yes, short answer, there are some that just don't know how to get away and they control everything and et cetera, et cetera. But there are the other CEOs that really shouldn't be CEOs. They're founders and they're great at whatever their skill is. And sometimes another person that's more experienced as A CEO needs to come in if that company is going to grow the way it needs to. And again, that's why we do, that's one of the assessments that we do when we start with the company, we look at their team and then we say, okay, where are the gaps? Who don't we have on this team? Who's the wrong person? Who's not in the right seat? Whatever it is. And sometimes it's that founder and that's, that's really funny. I was just going to say, it doesn't mean that the founder doesn't own the company. It doesn't mean that they don't, but they're just not the CEO. They're just not in that seat because it's not the best seat for them.

Den:

Yeah, so it's funny, you totally made me think about a post I literally just put on LinkedIn two days ago, which was a picture of a bus crashed into the side of a house, and then I was saying, we all have a seat on the bus, but not basically the right person in the wrong seat can be negative for the company, but the wrong person in the driver's seat can be disastrous. And I really feel, and actually an old mentor of mine told me that years ago, years and years, years ago, and I had a guy lead a project, an engineer, seasoned engineer, really gifted technically, but the project was an epic fail. He was the one leading it. We didn't have project managers and the team back in those days.

My boss turned around to me and he said, was it his fault that it was a failure or was it your fault? He said, because you're the one that put him on that seat and he had no business being on the seat. It's just not his thing. And I was like, first of all, as the leader of the team, my fault. Either way, I'm the boss. It is my responsibility for it to be successful or own it if it's not. But I learned a lot growing up. I mean, I just looked at it as a leader when I was the worst leader growing up. I mean, I look back and I'm like, oh fuck, what a nightmare. I'd never have wanted to work for me growing up. I was a dick. So it took me a long time, Rick, to learn that one. I like to think, and I even think of it now, I'm still in a journey. I think we all, anyone who is, whatever their career is, if they think that they've done it and they're there and everything's all great, I think they're blind. I look at it, my leadership journey has now translated over to an entrepreneur, CEO founder journey,

And I don't necessarily plan to be the CEO of the company forever. There's going to be a point in time where I'd rather just be on the board and have someone who can take it even further than I got it

Den:

And

Den:

Just realize that my gift is only going to get us so far. But yeah, I don't know. I do know some CEOs that are totally blind and ignore all that stuff, and they'll just literally, they'll keep thinking they're CEO extraordinaire and really it not their place. When you work with companies, I want to talk about you got the process, so what kind of business or results do they see contrasting from when you walked into them when you walk out? What's their change in success?

Rick:

I mean, we can measure it in a few ways. I mean, if we just look at the improved performance of their, we'll just look at their sales, marketing, customer experience. We look just from that perspective. I mean, you can almost guarantee 10%. Typically we can get 20%, and this is assuming that people are doing the things that they're supposed to do. Strategy happens on two levels. So we have strategy. It's like, okay, we implemented the CRM system, all the processes and that sort of thing. We also have adoption. If people are slow to adopt, change is a lot harder. Change gets sometimes pushed backwards. So 20% is pretty standard, but we've gotten more. There was one company we took from, I think about 6 million to about, I think it was about 20, 20 something million in about three years just by doing, implementing and managing their sales, marketing, and customer experience.

Den:

Wow, that's phenomenal. So I'm hoping you get a good percentage of that. I remember once my team at Adobe, we'd done this automation stuff and at one point this little platform we built that was all self-service.

Den:

It

Den:

Saved, I can't remember how many hundred thousand dollars of it time.

And I just remember seeing my boss once, I was like, shit, if I got $5 for every it hour we saved. And that time, maybe the cost of an IT hour could have been a couple of hundred bucks or whatever the number was. But I'm like, man, if I just got the tiniest percent of that, I'd probably retire. So yeah. So hey Rick, I know we're blasting through the minutes here. If you could give a founder one piece of parting advice, you mentioned marketing. Is there any one thing that you'd say other than marketing that a founder should never forget to do?

Rick:

It's really, I mean, we've talked about it a couple of times. It's really making sure you've got the right people on the bus. Now I'm going to add to that though, because the other piece of that is we have to know our blind spots. We have to understand as founders, I'm going to include myself in it. We have to understand where we're weak, where we need support, because if we don't, this is damaging to the company. If we're the wrong person, as you said, if we're the wrong person in the driver's seat, we end up crashing the company. It's horrible. Think about the idea that if you're a founder and you've got the wrong people on the bus, that means that you're probably going to have to compensate for someone else, which means that you're not doing some of the things that perhaps you're supposed to do or other people aren't doing. Some of the things that they're supposed to do, they have to compensate for somebody else, or your organization is just not functioning the way that it needs to. It doesn't make sense. They need to take the time, put the effort into getting the right people on the bus and getting the best support for themselves.

Den:

And I think that's huge. I mean, as you build your business, you're not just thinking of making some money, you're also building culture.

Den:

You're

Den:

Responsible for people's lives and their careers. There's a huge responsibility on a founder as they build that organization and culture. For me, culture is huge. I think culture is led from the top, and if you model the behaviors and you model the cultures or the culture you want to create, then I think that's so important to your business. Because also when you hire people, you're hiring people, and if you've got a nasty culture, then all you're going to do is screw yourself over because the good people are not going to stay. The bad people will stay and your business will still go to shit. Anyway. Yeah, Rick, I appreciate your time. I was just thinking, so we'll definitely link to you and the business and the show notes, and then any other little links or little things or tidbits that you've got for the audience, we'll put that in there.

Den:

Cool.

Den:

Great having you on, man. I think you're one of the people that businesses need. When you think of the tools in your toolkit, for you to build your business and be successful, I look at this tool and the toolkit is vitally important to your business and your strategy. So yeah, I'll be staying in touch with you as well for sure. So I'll be expecting some of my founder friends. I'll probably want to figure out how Rick can help them. So thank you, sir. Really appreciate it, and we'll keep in touch for sure. And then I think at some point we'll probably have you back on the podcast as well just to get some updates and see where things are going and shit like that. You got some of these good stories. You didn't reveal all the dodgy ones just yet, but I'm sure there's a few more in there. I got 'em. Thanks, man. We will get them revealed soon.

Rick:

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much, Den. I really enjoyed it.

Den:

Thanks, man.

Narrator:

Thanks for listening to Cyber 909. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and don't miss an episode of your source for Wit and Wisdom in cybersecurity.

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