Security Market Watch
SMW #10 - Cybersecurity Customer Advocacy and Investment Strategies with Josh and Maggie
We're throwing back the curtains to give you a real sense of our day-to-day experiences as experts in cybersecurity customer advocacy. Josh and Maggie, your hosts, are on a mission to transform the face of customer service in this field; striving to provide a white glove service that we're proud to call our own.
What's more, we're not shy about sharing our own experiences in investment. If you've ever found yourself wondering what the investment landscape in cybersecurity looks like, we've got you covered. We discuss the importance of understanding the people who use the products we invest in and how this awareness can inform sound investment strategies. Lastly, we wrap up by tackling leadership and business values, delving into the importance of connecting with people on a personal level and standing by your values, even if it means turning down a promising opportunity.
As always, we value your feedback and look forward to continuing the conversation on other platforms. Check out the Security Market Watch Newsletter and follow my social media accounts for more updates. Thanks for tuning in!
We're throwing back the curtains to give you a real sense of our day-to-day experiences as experts in cybersecurity customer advocacy. Josh and Maggie, your hosts, are on a mission to transform the face of customer service in this field; striving to provide a white glove service that we're proud to call our own.
What's more, we're not shy about sharing our own experiences in investment. If you've ever found yourself wondering what the investment landscape in cybersecurity looks like, we've got you covered. We discuss the importance of understanding the people who use the products we invest in and how this awareness can inform sound investment strategies. Lastly, we wrap up by tackling leadership and business values, delving into the importance of connecting with people on a personal level and standing by your values, even if it means turning down a promising opportunity.
As always, we value your feedback and look forward to continuing the conversation on other platforms. Check out the Security Market Watch Newsletter and follow my social media accounts for more updates. Thanks for tuning in!
Welcome to this episode of Security Market Watch. I'm your host, josh Bruning, and I'm here with our other host, maggie Dillon, and today we don't have a guest. Today this is about Maggie and me and you, and we just wanted to explain and kind of explain ourselves why our existence, talk about what's important to us, what are we doing, what's important to us and sort of what we're all about, and we're just. I talk to Maggie quite a bit, we talk to each other quite a bit, but this is just going to be a conversation between two hosts on Security Market Watch, so feel free to eavesdrop.
Speaker 2:That's why we're doing that. The idea is that we forget where we're recording and we show a little bit more of our personalities, because I feel like, while our content is phenomenal and you should watch all of it if you haven't already we just need to show our personality a little bit more. We're more about like this is a dinner conversation, so we're going to we're going to talk a little bit about why we're here, how we got here, maybe some odds and ends.
Speaker 1:Right, I just clocked out. I'm guessing that your day has just ended, so it's like it's after hours. I'm pretty sure if you're listening to this and you just clocked out, you know you're feeling the, you're feeling the after effects, the aftershocks of the day. So a lot has happened today. You know, over at Trustmap we're so busy and you know this is a really good time to reflect on all of the happenings of the day. Really, you know we could sit here and talk about my client experiences.
Speaker 1:Actually, today we did a webinar with GRF and they're I guess they're a cyber, obviously they're a cybersecurity organization, but let me Google real quick and see what their tagline is. So cyber GRF or I think it's just GRF. So GRForg is their website. Global Resilience Federation. We just did a webinar where we talked about ransomware and so if you're interested in ransomware, what's going on around the world? They have a lot of good data that they talked about today. And then I got to talk about Trustmap a little bit and I did like a 10 minute rundown on. You know, trustmap is a maturity assessment management platform, so we have a ransomware assessment. So we just talked about the ransomware assessment and that was a really good webinar. So if you're listening to this, check out GRForg. You'll find that webinar on there and other musings about the day. Maggie. Well, how was your day? What did you accomplish today and what are you excited about?
Speaker 2:I did my inner geek writing down GRForg Is that what you said? It was GRForg. Okay, I'm going to check that out. So my day started off with coffee and a group of professionals out of Finland, switzerland and Sweden first thing in the morning, and I woke up a little later than I would have liked to. I'm not a morning person, I'm a night owl. So it was a scramble, but so good, because I prepped the night before. I always try to do that and it was a very interesting tech portfolio advisement type of call.
Speaker 2:These are international allies that have businesses here in the United States but want to spread out more in their own countries implementing correct compliance and cybersecurity as they do this. What was really cool is a lot of them are program managers, agile coaches, scrum masters, things of this nature, and in the group it's a pretty decent size group and people just kind of come and go. But I had been attending some of the coffee chats with them and I said, well, why aren't we doing a cybersecurity chat, Cybersecurity and coffee, and so that's what today was. It was the first kickoff and I got a chance to answer a lot of great questions, and I love those types of conversations because they're organic.
Speaker 2:You get real case studies as they're happening, and that's the bread and butter for me, because we can do trainings and get certifications and read books and everything. But when you hear about live, actual concerns, constraints, challenges, it really gets the wheels thinking on additional solutions that you can provide. So that's how my day started and then wrapped up. I've got some state and local governments that I'm trying to partner with on their framework after they've just gotten through your end fiscal budget. So really good, it was a good day. Busy Last strategy, which I really enjoy Good.
Speaker 1:Good, and we're both. You're the strategic queen. I love it. You're always busy and I'm always busy. That's a good thing. It's a good problem to have when you're busy and you're so focused on solutions. I think we're both really very conscious of the value that we deliver the people around us. We're both good business consumers, but also our team members are higher ups. You know our at least for me, my higher ups. I know you're more of a. You've got your own business and you've got your, and I know you answer.
Speaker 2:We're both really good yin and yang to explain this, because I was thinking about this and we both have our own portfolios, work for various companies, but we're at enterprise ourselves and sometimes I forget that and when you get in that mind frame, you start operating completely different with your business partners, colleagues, mentors, asking for trainings, those types of things. And I want to dive into customer advocacy, because you're the king of customer advocacy and after I ask you, I'm going to give my comments as well, and I want people here just an outsider perspective, as someone who's been just looking from kind of the outer fishbowl versus your inner fishbowl. So tell me a little bit about where did that passion come from? Because the minute I met you I knew you had white glove service and you didn't even come off like that. So tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 1:Well, customer advocacy is something that really came out of my day job at Trustmap and I started out as a solutions engineer and before I got into more like heavily into the sales side and into account management. So I started in solutions delivery, really focused on tech and really focused on the product, and I found that you had to really, in order to sell the product and in order to deliver value and talk about your solution, you couldn't just focus on the product. Coming from an IT background, it was very easy for me to just focus on the tech. But there are two sides of the coin the customer and then there's the product. And if you can understand both of those things with equal depth and precision and proficiency, you really get a complete package right and you can deliver a complete package. So customer advocacy really came out of my desire to understand the customer and to put myself in the customer's shoes. So when you do that, you begin to not look at your product as this really cool gadget and here's a button over here and there's a feature over there, and I could talk about all my features and they're going to love it and I'm going to wow them with this demo and they're just going to buy lots of software. If you go about it that way, you're not going to sell a single license at all.
Speaker 1:So I started to talk to CISOs. I started to focus on individual verticals. So I started to focus on healthcare and financial services and I talked to people in those spaces and really just asked you know, instead of trying to set up a sales call where you go through discovery and, you know, go through the entire sales cycle and closing is the mission, the mission for me was what are your problems, what are your struggles, what are your pain points? And I took a lot of that feedback back to the dev team and I said well, here's what I'm hearing out in the open and out in the field. How can we make our product better to address these problems? I'll give you an example. So one of the things that we always talked about and trust map was the cross mapping feature. Right, we have this thing where if you're trying to assess against one framework let's say NIST, csf, and you know you have all these other requirements you can cross map and you can basically see the overlap between all of those. It's basically like a United Controls Framework type of deal. You can sort of see the overlap between all of the frameworks, and that was really cool.
Speaker 1:But when we really talked to the CISOs, it wasn't that they just wanted to see that they had a real desire to report on several frameworks and to reduce the number of resources that they're assigning to the operations of basically their cyber operations right? Specifically when it comes to maturity assessments and making your you know, your controls more mature. Stick with me, I know this is a long-winded way of doing this, but I promise it's worth it. So we took that back to the devs and I said well, you know, what they're trying to do at the end of the day is not have a maturity assessment platform where they can see the overlap with everything. They're accountable to someone. So putting yourself in your customer shoes leads you to also think that, to realize that your customer or your customer also has customers. They have an audience, they have someone that they need to satisfy. They're looking for budget, so they have to justify their budget to someone, right? So these are the times in enterprise sales. They're accountable to their stakeholders, their customers and to their shareholders, right?
Speaker 1:So we thought, well, let's, instead of having them just view the commonalities between frameworks. Let's have them be able to take one assessment, take that data from that assessment and put it into all the other frameworks that they're looking at, and so they don't have to allocate all of these resources to fill out every single assessment. And then you know, basically, like it's painstaking, it's really hard to, and it takes a lot of hours to be able to take 10 assessments. But we were able to reduce that time by like 70% and at the end of the day, what we got out of it was an enhanced reporting feature, right. So we didn't go into it thinking, well, how can we make this product better and more cool?
Speaker 1:What we did was we put ourselves, you know, by asking customers what it's important to them and for them I mean for lack of better words in cybersecurity we don't really like to talk about this as much, but the CISO has to justify his existence or her existence, right, they have to. They're real people with real emotions. They have families, they have kids, they have spouses, they've got mouths to feed, and if they cannot justify their existence to the business, then they're out, right. Anybody who can't justify their existence to the business, they're gone. And so I'm thinking how do I make their life easier. How do I give them what they want, at the same time not, you know, increasing our overhead. You know what can we do within a timely fashion, within two months or something, you know, two weeks? If we could, that would give them this much, you know, x amount, exponential value. So customer advocacy, in short, is really putting yourself in the customer's shoe.
Speaker 1:And that really led me to go beyond Trustmap and really think of the what I would call injustices, the injustices of the cybersecurity market. And one of those injustices check out any conference, go to Black Hat, go to RSA, go to Futurcon, go to Secure360, the second you walk in on the floor, there's tons of vendors, right, and everybody claims that they're different. But they're not right. What they'll do is like they'll change the color of their booth, right. Or, you know, this person can process data at, you know, 10 megabits per second, and we can do it at 15 megabits per second. You see we're different. And it's like, no, you're not different. You're just like you've just taken something that already exists and you've made it better, which is good, but that's very different than differentiation. And so I hear C-SOS. Now C-SOS are like they're just not going to those shows anymore. They're just like screw it. When I go there, it's just, you know piles of people trying to sell to me. They claim they're different but they're not.
Speaker 1:So customer advocacy is number one, pointing out those kinds of injustices and saying look, if you're different, if you're saying that your product is different, make that differentiation known and make it an actual differentiation, like actually be different. And that comes with risks, right, if you're different, there might not be, you know, a roadmap or a template for you to follow. So you have to really think outside the box. That's the other injustice. They don't think outside the box. Like salespeople are doing the same things that they've done forever. You know cold calling, reaching out on LinkedIn, trying to get everybody everybody's trying to get your attention and they forget that you're a person and so you know.
Speaker 1:It's calling out the people in our own industry who commoditize security leaders and businesses and really think of them as a product.
Speaker 1:They think of them as the product you know and they think of them as objects and leads to be cultivated, when actually their people and their businesses who are providing value to their customers, and you have to understand their customers and their stakeholders as much as you understand your own product and as much as you understand them, and only then do you start to like, put your finger on the pulse and get into the zeitgeist of cybersecurity to really understand what it is that we're doing.
Speaker 1:So, in short, if I were to use, you know, sum it up in one sentence customer advocacy is the practice of calling out the injustices of your own industry such that your customers and the people that you cater to and you care about, come out on top. Not, you know, not the other way around. If I'm coming out on top and my customers are, you know, left with the egg on their face if they make a bad decision and they can't, and you know they get fired because they bought the wrong product and they made a bad decision. We should be ashamed of that. As salespeople Like we should be embarrassed that we sold a product or a bill of goods that does not provide as much value as it possibly could. That's my story and I'm sticking to it and I'm dying on that hill.
Speaker 2:So for Christmas I'm getting you a diamond encrusted customer advocacy gavel and I want you to create a council or something type of committee where you can just bang it all the time if people are being in the wrong and you need justification. And I want to point something out. Thank you for answering that. That was a very long answer and you went completely down the rabbit hole, like I knew you would, and you did 20 other things that I didn't even think of bringing up, but you did it perfectly. So thank you.
Speaker 2:One thing I've noticed about you from the very first time I met you you're natural with customer advocacy and the way you just described it was almost like you learned that, and I don't think that's something that is all the case. I think you in particular and I would suggest this for any company that's looking to have a real SME as a salesperson or business development person on their spread you came from IT. You understand the technical meanings from the ground up, from the internals out, so the way that you sell and approach a product is gonna be very much as if you were the customer versus somewhere on my end where I'm coming from the outside in, and that pairing when you're able to build a sales team that has those two different types of mentalities and someone from outside of IT. I didn't grow up in IT, in sales or recruiting. I grew up in a very different realm, which was government contracting. But now you see the correlation between government contracting and those contracts where it starts from the top down and you're already in the internals building out, and so I personally think customer advocacy obviously follows in line with everything that you said. I didn't learn about true advocacy until my mom got sick with leukemia, and so what I would say to that customer advocacy is very much an empathic process.
Speaker 2:A lot of people that are in sales are not necessarily empathic or intuitive, and if you can tell right away that someone's just not in agreeance with what you're saying or maybe they're having a bad day and you're sitting over here trying to talk about your product all day, there's gonna be a disconnect the whole time. And watching a very sick human that was in stage four of their life with cancer, I cannot tell you how many times her medical team dropped the ball. Because you're working with various different facilities, different doctor teams, different diagnostic teams, getting results, getting data from this source, this source, this source. Meanwhile, she can't even stay awake because she's getting pumped with so much medicines. Same thing with an IT team or a CISO they're getting pumped with so many different vendors and so many projects.
Speaker 2:I mean, I just we talked to a deputy IT director that had 168 products on his belt with a team. Only one person did cybersecurity. And I'm thinking, can we set someone up for failure even more? Because and I don't know this, please, I'm not speaking out of term, but it ties back into the customer advocacy. If I talk to a leader like that and then I go back to their boss, who I originally had the relationship with, hey, I can help you with this project, this project, this project. I just wanna tell you, as someone who has former executive headhunting experience, you really need to be paying attention to that top right hand person Because if I were them, they're the exact candidate I'm plucking off to get out of this situation, because they're miserable and they don't have mental health clarity.
Speaker 2:They're not sleeping at night, they're so overwhelmed. Then you're not giving them budget to hire additional people, yet you're expecting them to somehow get the same type of white glove service that we're talking about here. They're gonna go with the lower budget people that don't care about customer advocacy, they're just doing transactional sales. So there's my rabbit hole to say you have the factor. That's why you're good at it, and you even do it in your podcast. This is not the only podcast that you have, but you have a way with genuinely caring about people and it comes across in how you operate.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Maggie. Coming from you, that's high praise.
Speaker 2:Absolutely that is getting true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you so much, and I like your opinion. Like is not a strong enough word. I love your opinion and your perspective and your world is a world that I'm not entirely familiar with. So government contracts, and when I think of government contracts, I think of, like Lockheed Martin, dod contracts, so I learn a lot from you.
Speaker 2:That's where it started, though. I started working for Lockheed Martin DOD contracts, specifically with the VA, and then it spread into at least 20 other governmental contracts where we were doing worker compensation exams, recruiting doctors to do those types of exams for everything from NASA employees, all three letter agencies you can imagine. We were doing their worker comp exams and having these security clearances and everything, and I was 22 years old, living in Los Angeles. After just moving out of a cornfield, what did I know? I got thrown to the sharks. So a lot of what I have to say. I can't compare my experience because I don't really have anyone to look at or mimic other than other people who have traveled a lot and tried different industries, and I think that there's pros and cons to that.
Speaker 1:Let me challenge you a little bit. When you're your time as a recruiter, who were your customers? Was it the? Was your customer the person that you're looking you're basically searching for jobs on behalf of? Or is your customer the company that you're hiring for?
Speaker 2:All of the above. So I did full desk recruiting, executive head hunting. I was in charge of building my own book of business with parameters based off of whatever firm I was working for, and so I was definitely contacting anyone from CEO, founder, c-suite executives or even board directors or people that I knew were getting ready to do startups, and so it kind of started there. I loved it because it gave me even more reason to fill their positions, because I've got a relationship with them first and I've really heard their pain points and then knowing the exact candidate or professional that would fit that Bob Ross painting I'm somehow designed in my head and then going finding a needle in a haystack. So there were two totally different challenges with that and I always felt like it was a Hail Mary situation in the playoff football game for the championship game. I know there's a huge number saying I probably won't be able to pull this off in the timeframe under the parameters. They're looking under the budget. But there's always a chance and I, like you One of my most proud things I can say I always had one of the, if not the top, customer service rating. After every single experience, even if I wasn't able to deliver. I would find another solution, whether it was someone was trying to find a full-time employee and I said look, I have a CIO for you, but they can only do projects right now because they're currently in school for their PhD. Could we work at? Could they work 20 hours free with this time, at least for the first quarter, see what they can get done, and then, if it still makes sense to hire a full-time, we bring in that at another time, and then you save a little bit more on budget that way, just coming up with solutions like that.
Speaker 2:So it was full desk recruiting. I learned all aspects of business from that. I moved into executive headhunting after working in HR for retail of all places Target and I started out in Target, only ending up in the HR department because, case in point, I'm a little clotsy. I get hurt from time to time and while I was in college I'm like why am I taking this third shift job in the warehouse at this brand new Target store? I fell off a ladder, broke my knee. They put me in HR because I felt sorry for me and it. Had that injury not happen, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, josh.
Speaker 1:Wow, look at that. I know it's crazy how life works. That's crazy, and I'm sure that you've felt the pain of all of your customers over the years.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:And this is why customer advocacy is so important. We talk about people in cyber all the time, but America runs on trust, like America. The America is as great as it is, and I don't care who's out there says America's not great or whatever. Blah, blah, blah. America's the greatest country in the world, and I moved here from Guyana and I didn't move here because it wasn't, I moved here because it was and it is. And so what makes America great really is the trust that people have among each other, that when I shake your hand and I make a deal with you, you know that I'm not trying to screw you over, right, and I know you're not trying to screw me over. I scratch your back, you scratch mine, and that's how America works.
Speaker 1:And the second that breaks down trust in an industry breaks down. That's what gives salespeople a bad reputation. So I've got a personal stake in the game. Is that if you're looking at all salespeople as rotten and untrustworthy, then you're looking at me as rotten and untrustworthy. I don't want that.
Speaker 1:I try to have as much integrity as I possibly can and I try to be as honest as I possibly can with my clients, because I know that that's the American way and that's what makes us great and I wanna contribute that and feel like I'm a part of it. You know what I mean. So it's about being a part of something bigger. You know it's about not being self-centered.
Speaker 1:So, all right, enough about me and what I think, and I wanna hear more about what's going on in your world, specifically your strategic operations and the hill that you have sort of the hill that you're gonna die on is the mantra of never give up. You always talk about persistence. You know goes back to our first episode of Security Market Watch. If you're watching this or you're listening to this, check it out episode one and we're gonna talk to Tim Scanlon about persistence in sales. So could you give us a little bit of why that became your mantra and how does it serve you today and how do you intend to take that attitude of persistence and never giving up into the future?
Speaker 2:Oh man, that was a big question. I'll give an example. So I love helping communities that are underserved. I love diversity, I love bringing people together of all walks of life. Things I do that kind of help me stay in that passion and in the weeds so I can still see kind of what's going on.
Speaker 2:I live on currently in my hometown. I live on the south side of town and that's where there's no money and people are struggling and I did it on purpose. I have plenty of opportunities to move out where all the economic growth is going on, but they already have success going on. How can I reboot and help my community here? So I have a very gritty background. It's kind of blue collar mixed with street smarts, mixed with just taking a leap of faith when I was 21, packing my car up, putting my blower and the backseat and literally moving to California from Indiana without really a plan other than I'm not gonna lose and I've always taken really calculated risks, some, I mean I thought my parents were gonna kill me when I decided to do that, but I'm so glad that I did, because I can't grow as a professional if I'm not failing. I'm always open to failing forward, no matter repercussions, to a sense, because to me, in my opinion, most of the people that I've studied or mentored under whether they were celebrities that I'd ever met, whether they were actual leaders that were my bosses you know people in my community that I partnered with I always gravitate to the ones that come from nothing and stand for everything, or the people that were set up completely to fail, and they overcome it.
Speaker 2:I actually just posted a video. Wow, I would love to put the video into the comments whenever we post these, but there's a motivational video of Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali is one of my favorite of all time mentors. His whole story is just phenomenal. I mean, the man was so core, valued and moral in his belief systems he refused to go to war and served five years in prison, gets out and then goes and reclaims his title against George Foreman in Africa, in the Congo, in the roots of where he came from, and he did not balk the entire time. And what was he known for? Talking a lot of smack. Was it smack or was it truth? Was it self-belief? And so how do I tie that in?
Speaker 2:Professionally, I'm in an industry where there's zero trust. Okay, well, first way to show you I'm a trustworthy person is I can't be bought. I can't be bought to go to the north side of my home down. I can't be bought to sign a contract if it doesn't fall in alignment with my moral or core values. I can't be bought for ransomware. I can't be bought for any of that. That, right there, in and of itself, shows I don't give up with finding other solutions that do match good, solid, integrity, filled core values of myself, of my clients, of my colleagues, of anyone that I work with, kids that I'm teaching to. I actually just got asked to learn to help teach classes on AI, blockchain and data science, and I'm really excited about it.
Speaker 2:So it's constantly about going back to what you said with lack of trust, and I think part of not letting that get in the way is not fearing it and just never giving up on who you are and if you fall out of alignment as a person. Because, let's be real, here we are in the most stressful times ever. I mean, we're hearing about aliens from the government and the government's gonna shut down and we're in a recession and all these things are just going on around us and we're supposed to act like everything's just hunky dory, normal every day. Well, I could let that get to me. Or I could just literally say I'm not giving up personally or professionally and I'm gonna funnel that all into my professional mission because my work is my mission, because I love what I do. It doesn't feel like work. That was a really roundabout answer.
Speaker 1:No, I love it. That's such a. I wouldn't expect anything less and there's. It's such an honest and I can tell it's such an honest response and I can tell that it comes from deep inside, deep inside and there's a lot of history to that response and I can wait. So, time out, the North side is that the good side of town, in your part of town.
Speaker 2:Oh, so we say South side, strong side is what the saying is down here, but the North side is where there's a little bit more money, a little bit more resources our top hospital systems. Up North they've got a huge highway freeway convergence all the actions on the North side. That being said, all the cool stuff is on the South side.
Speaker 1:That's funny. Our North side is where that's the hood. So when I heard North side, I was like. I was like, did she mean South side?
Speaker 2:I thought it was like a a a a a Shisee South corner of their town or something. Or even if it's not really a town, you got one stop sign like don't go by that house, and you know it's always over the city.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm right and I'm right between I'm I'm in uptown Minneapolis, but I'm on the part of uptown that's closer to downtown, so a little bit closer North, and I totally get that. I understand it is more interesting over here than if we were to go to. There's this, there's this spot called West End in Minneapolis and that's that's. That's kind of where you know, you get a lot of more of the bougie stuff. So that sounds like your North North side. Yeah, all right, I was. I just thought that interesting. You know, we always this is such a tangent, but we always think of, at least for me. I think that, like my, what would I? You know? So if you say that North Minneapolis is not like as affluent or whatever, I just think that every city in the US, their North side, is the same as North Minneapolis, which is a dumb thing to think. Well, okay, I just called, I just called myself out.
Speaker 2:I was going to say wait a minute. I'm going to go to the University of Minnesota grad and you've stated Minneapolis.
Speaker 1:That don't mean nothing. Trust me, A degree does not make you smart, and it didn't make me smart. I'll tell you that. All right, when do we? Where do we want to go next? I had there was something before I took myself out.
Speaker 2:I have something I want to ask you about because I think something that differentiates this podcast in particular and some of the content we're putting together. A lot of people don't realize. We're both investors, we're both young investors in the products and services that we believe in. So, just on your take, if you were to talk to anyone that's you know, maybe in our oh, I'm not even going to go age range or get discriminatory because I can already see that on follows coming for anyone that would like to make investments and they I can't say young people, because I don't know if I'm exactly young- I'm like an elder millennial and I don't even like saying that term because there's so many judgments that come around with it, but regardless.
Speaker 1:We're both millennials, so let's stick with millennials. That's a big, a pretty wide range.
Speaker 2:The next boomer generation, the millennials here coming in after that. So what advice would you give to anyone wanting to invest for the first time in cybersecurity?
Speaker 1:Learn, learn and talk to people. Don't go on YouTube and try to research everything about investing. Investing has nothing to do with investing. Like most truths, it's not about the thing that it's about. Investing is not about investing. It's about value and it's about understanding where the value is. And I mean you could also just the old adage follow the money. You know, in cybersecurity or any any industry, there's going to be a flood of money, but in my experience that stuff is so temporary. But if you understand the fundamentals of how your industry works, for me it's really important to just focus on one industry. I can't be an expert on every industry, so I find an industry that works and that I understand and there's money flowing through it, but I would say it just always comes back to just learning. Talk to the people who consume the products that you're investing in Comes back to customer advocacy.
Speaker 1:You know, when you see injustices, call it out, because even if there's a lot of money that's flowing into a product or into a sector, it's not going to stick around for long if the people consuming that product aren't seeing value out of it. If eventually, you know, the value starts to leave, the money's going to leave just as quickly. Coca-cola has been around forever because everybody likes Coca-Cola, you know, and I don't care how good a product or how, yeah, if you've got a bad product, I don't care how good your marketing is and how good your sales are. You know, those things might be temporary, there might be a lot of money coming to it, but if it's a bad product, it's a bad product. I like to go back and watch old commercials to see the products that still exist and the ones that are still existing. You notice that the commercials are very stripped down and very simple right. The McDonald's commercials are very simple right, because the product was something that everybody wanted. So you can't really go wrong.
Speaker 1:And this is not financial advice like this is not investment advice at all. I'm still learning, you know, and I'm not a great, I'm not as skilled an investor as you are, maggie, and I'm just starting. You know I'm very, I'm an amateur at best, right, but what I've seen works is just understanding those fundamentals, understand your product, understand the people that that product serves. Does it solve a real issue? Does it solve a real problem or is it a made up problem? There are companies that make up problems and then try to solve the solution. And going back to Warren Buffett, warren Buffett wrote a book or he didn't write a book. So it was his mentor that wrote a book, benjamin Graham that wrote a book called the Intelligent Investor and the fundamentals of being an investor. They don't change right. So one of those tenets of investment is I don't wanna this is at least Warren Buffett's and Benjamin Graham's philosophy I don't wanna hold something for 10 minutes that I don't wanna hold for 10 years, and so I don't invest in products that I don't think are gonna be around for a long time. If I think it's a fad, like zero trust products, I stay away from ransomware. It's kind of ironic because I just gave a little presentation on ransomware assessments, but there are these buzzwords that come up in cybersecurity all the time ransomware, zero trust, mfa.
Speaker 1:The biggest thing now is risk, and we're finding that risk. Being able to understand the risk of your company is taking more resources to understand the risk than the potential loss of those risks being realized. You have to dedicate so much to just understand your risk and to put it into a proper framework. So it doesn't work for every company. It works for risk, works for industries. I'm gonna get off on a tangent on risk, but risk works for industries like insurance industries where you've got tons of historical data and it doesn't really change right. Car insurance, life insurance we know the things that kill people and we know the things that damage cars. There's lots of data Security. You've got threats that are changing every day. So risk is changing every day and the second you have a risk register, your risks change. The second you've done your threat modeling, your threats change. There are some things in risk that don't change or that change slowly. So, like asset valuation, those are very valuable. So knowing your assets, having an inventory of your assets, understanding the risks around your assets that are specific to your business, that really helps.
Speaker 1:So don't follow every trend and start investing based on the trend. Ask yourself does this trend really make sense? Cloud computing people invested tons of money in the cloud computing. We're learning that cloud is starting to become inflated in price. Because in the promise of the cloud when I was in IT was you can run your machines around the, not around the clock. You can run your machines when you need them and the times that you don't need them you shut them off and you just pay for what you use, but now we're finding that, well, you need to run them around the clock to do updates, or else your machines aren't secure, and so endpoint security is becoming a larger cost center because so many companies move to the cloud. So don't follow the trends, like you know, and follow the money. That's not terrible advice, but make sure that that money is resting on actual value, or else you'll find yourself investing tons of money into a bubble, and when that bubble pops, you're not gonna have any.
Speaker 1:Personally, I like to invest in companies and work alongside those companies. I like to work alongside the startups that I'm invested in, and sometimes being invested is not just putting money into something. Sometimes it's getting to know the CEO, offering your advice, offering your expertise or just being a sound board, someone who they can bounce ideas off of, and you get to grow with those people. You get to grow with those companies. So you're investing your time, so don't limit your. My advice would be don't limit your investment, only financial investment. Also, invest your time and also don't follow the trends. Really, make sure that the fundamentals are there. What about you? I should be asking you that question, maggie. What would you say?
Speaker 2:I'm an amateur investor as well. I have a totally different approach. Obviously, numbers and everything you just said is exactly on the money where we need to be. I think one of the biggest things that I've learned over the last few years here would be people lie and they will talk their product up way bigger than it actually is and they only give you bits and pieces of the information. So something and this isn't just with investment this is whether you're hiring a new employee, the amount of project work you have, how much your product is worth.
Speaker 2:On investment, there's a lot of different areas where CEOs and board of directors will lie, because it's a business strategy and in their eyes and I'm not saying what they're doing is necessarily wrong if it makes sense to their overall business, overall business plan or goals. What I'm saying is the approach is wrong, and so what I tell people at least the ones that I really wanna partner with is it's like this If we're working in a zero trust type of industry, think of it as everyone's always holding their cards close to their chest and they only wanna show you one or two cards at a time. Well, I'm the card dealer at the casino and I'm here to make sure everybody gets paid, everybody wins, everyone has fair share of cards, that the rules are followed. Problem is, if you're hiding your cards from the dealer and you're not following rules, you're gonna get kicked out of the casino and people talk. So that would be my biggest thing that I think I've learned as an investor is if someone is lying to you, what questions are you looking from a third party view of? Well, they would probably tell me this, but not tell me this, and then numbers and data will just show for itself.
Speaker 2:Eventually, people can only wear a mask for so long, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't continue investing in them. Now it's time for a conversation, especially if you've been an investor for a while. You're not seeing development of the product or you're not seeing progression of the network in the right direction or marketing or additional money being pumped into areas it should be. And I think that I love the idea of working side by side with someone you've invested with, because that's true partnership, but also it's a dance, and especially if they're a business owner and you're an investor and you also have your own business or you're trying to get up your own investments and everything.
Speaker 2:It's a dance and for anyone who hasn't watched it, you need to go watch our most recent episode with Tina Williams-Carroma. She does such a good job with the way she talks about her investors and how she's done what she's done. She owns three cybersecurity companies and I mean she's fairly young has everything else going on. I mean like the woman's phenomenal. Well, how did she do it? She learned the dance with investors and got investment early. She's gotten the right partnerships in place and there's a lot of people that know how to do that. The ones that don't are the ones that lose big on their investments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we should do a whole show with her on just investments. I think that'd be really cool. Yeah, I mean, I personally do not like to do business with CEOs that I don't like. Why are you so clueless? I mean, I might like them as a person, but I have to like their style of doing business. I have to know that the way that One of the CEO that I really respect is actually my old boss's boss his name is Greg Werthen and just very low key, very quiet you come in very soft-spoken, like you know, doesn't really raise his voice above this.
Speaker 1:He'll shake your hand and he'll look you in the eye. When he's angry, you can tell. But he's a leader through and through and he's always got his hands on the reins through tough times. I mean, if it's a tough time, I mean, come audit season, you don't want to be around his office, right, because he's just palpable, he's just upset, but in a way that's constructive. He's in the zone, he's focused on his business. There's some CEOs who are not focused on their business, they're not focused on growing their company, they're not focused on their employees, they're not focused on their shareholders, they're not focused on their customers, they're focused on the bottom line and you know if they're coming and you can step further.
Speaker 2:Their ego, their pockets and all about them and the fame and the fortune that goes along with it. Let's be honest.
Speaker 1:Here's how many leaders do?
Speaker 2:we all know that? Just fit that bill and it's really good.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly, yeah, and I might like you outside of business, but I'm not going to do business with you and I'm not going to invest in your company. I won't invest my time, I won't give you my ideas, I wouldn't discuss business with you, period. You know we'll go on the golf course, we'll hit a few balls. You know we'll play basketball, we'll get a drink, we'll hang out. Won't do business with you, won't invest, want nothing to do with those people.
Speaker 2:Well, in that I think what I'll say to anyone coming into business development or sales that takes time to get confident enough to walk away from business, because, especially when you're building your network or you're building your portfolio, you want to take on every opportunity you can, you want to work with everybody, but would you become friends with everybody? Would you accept everybody into your family, those types of things? And when you're finally able to walk away from business, that doesn't fall into alignment with just how you operate. It's going to be really difficult and I just think it's a lot of trial and error and just direct communication. You can tell right away if you're meeting someone's representative or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and if you're investing for the long term, like you said, it's they're like family. Yep, they're like family. So, yes, well said, well said. Ok, we've got about 10 minutes or six minutes left. Is there anything that you want to get across that you want people to know about you? What makes you tick? And if people can take one thing away from this conversation, what is it?
Speaker 2:Man should have given me time to prep. I would have had a really good answer, but this is going to be the authentic.
Speaker 1:Sorry, it was just off the top of my head.
Speaker 2:Is this is off the record, josh, or is this going public? Just kidding.
Speaker 1:So this is on the record.
Speaker 2:I would say the biggest thing to know about me is I'm OK with being fearless in all aspects. I'm not afraid to ruffle feathers, I'm not afraid to have uncomfortable conversations, because every time I've done that it has gone beautifully in the end. Maybe not right up front, but any business relationship I've had issues with or account that I've had issues with sale, investment, anything. I've always taken those issues head on where other professionals won't and I'm talking about business owners, the people making decisions, cutting checks. They refuse to handle conflict appropriately.
Speaker 2:And especially in our industry, we're going up against head to head with our own industry colleagues like CISOs and CIOs who can't take on what they want to take on. They want to work with us but they can't. How do I have that really direct conversation? Hey, mr CIO, can I be really direct with you? Based off everything you've told me about, your portfolio Sounds like you're probably going to be selling in about a year. If you can't do business with me, would you maybe be looking for a new opportunity confidentially? Those are the type of conversations I have to have and guess what? I've gotten some of the best professionals' new jobs because I've had the guts to have that conversation.
Speaker 2:Or hey, mr CIO, don't look like your company's doing too well. Have you thought about what next steps will be for your exit plan? Do you have an exit strategy? Well, quite honestly, I haven't brought myself to terms to talk to my team about that yet, because it's going to affect a lot of people. Hey, completely understand, that's a really uncomfortable topic. Wouldn't it be a little bit more comfortable if you had a plan in place and, bit by bit, you could release pieces of information to secure that process going a little bit smoother?
Speaker 2:I cannot tell you how many high-level professionals I've had break down in tears with me. Maybe I just have something on my forehead that says get soft with me. I've got Kleenexes, I don't know, but I'm able to tap into the heartstrings, and I think that's something that a lot of business development professionals' leaders don't take into consideration. They're so concerned with numbers and bottom lines and revenues. If you are not connecting with people on a very personal level to some capacity, you're going to get beat by your competition. That can, and so if I were to get something really across, it's be fearless in your approach but still be sensitive, be strategic, be open and honest and be very morally and integrity filled, because, no matter what anyone comes to say about you, if you do mess up what you will, we're all going to fail. We again fail forward.
Speaker 2:People can't say something about your reputation if you've always been consistent with your honesty and just how you represent yourself and if you haven't represented yourself well, you better take accountability and speak about it and handle that as it comes, whether it's someone made a bad business deal, someone made a bad hire, someone's got some personal issues going on with their life that affect their career, whatever it is, I think fearlessness and good decision making, as long as it's an honest take on it, is something I want to be remembered for. I hope I have a legacy built on that and I want to be the top female and cybersecurity sales on a global scale. I want to put me in front of the president, put me in front of whoever I need to. Let's go big or go home. I'm not guaranteed tomorrow. So there's there's a little soapbox spiel on that. You caught me off guard, but hopefully I got my point across.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I'm glad we got that on tape. I think that explains you to a T. And I was trying to realize that we both have this sort of grit. You know, maybe this is why we work so well together. I'm from a third world country, you know I'm from. Where I'm from is probably way worse than I am. And then the south side of Indianapolis, right.
Speaker 2:Indiana. No, fort Wayne Fort, fort Wayne, fort Wayne. I try not to tell my exact location, which is stupid because it's pretty easy to find, apparently, when you're in this industry.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:No, I think it's a lot worse. And I came to this country with 20 bucks in my pocket, the proverbial $20 in my pocket. I don't really know if it was exactly $20, but we'll just say it's the proverbial $20 in my pocket and I moved to New York and I slept on the floor of, you know, this guy's basement and that's kind of where I started to learn sales. I did real estate in 2008, 2008, 2009, right, when everything went down the toilet. So I had to learn how to sell. I mean, I had to be creative. That's the thing, and one of the best things you can do for yourself as a salesperson is just invest in your own creativity. So I had to be really creative. But we both come from nothing was handed to us and we had to persist and we had to kind of break every barrier that we came up across or came against or came up to. Dang. It is late in the afternoon. I'm so tired, it's okay, I can't even talk.
Speaker 2:I want to point something real quick before we end here, for everyone that's watching or listening. You've got two people from very different backgrounds that both kind of come from nothing and created something. Josh has a bachelor's degree from a very reputable university. I went to a tech school to get a degree in occupational therapy, to be in healthcare. That didn't happen. So I'm technically I don't have a degree, and we're both considered business development gurus in cybersecurity. And you know why? Because we're fearless and we didn't give up and it's a suburb, that is, you're far too kind.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't call myself a guru by any stretch of the word. I am just persistent, I am just honestly. That's what it comes down to. Like you said, it comes down to I am just very persistent, I don't give up. So all right. Well, if you could take anything away from this, this was a really good episode. I feel like I got to know you a lot more, maggie, and the audience got to know you a lot more and hopefully understand they understand a little bit more about our philosophies and kind of where we're coming from. I never give up.
Speaker 2:I wish we could have pop up events where we just traveled the United States and someone sponsored it, so we could go build appropriately and have conversations like this, actually like on a rooftop of a hotel or something like that. So we've actually been thinking of getting creative. Josh and I have talked a little bit about what was it? A rumble in the octagon in Vegas and having compliance and cybersecurity vendors. Come duke it out with their products and their roles. I think that'd be fantastic.
Speaker 2:So yeah anything that would be interested in sponsoring us or doing creative things like that. I'm going to put it out there. Get at us, we're both open to ideas rooftop, rooftop, workshop. Yes, oh, there we go yeah rooftop workshop. We can have like people in black suits, like men in black, on the rooftop, so it looks like you know we're extra protected, and maybe drop in on a helicopter or something. I don't know, we can figure something out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, let's make it happen, All right. Well, Maggie, it was lovely talking to you. We always talk in spurts. You know, when we call, when we have our calls, we talk for like 10 minutes or so. So this was good. It was really good. It was really good to talk to you and everybody who is watching this. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, hit that like button, share with your friends If you find that these conversations are valuable and they help. Please share as much as you can. Drop us a comment, send me an email, hit me up on LinkedIn, LinkedIncom slash Josh Bruning. You can also find me on Instagram and we put out a lot of clips, so we'll have this long form conversation on YouTube, but you're probably seeing a clip right now on one of the other social media platforms. Maggie, how can people find you?
Speaker 2:A few additions to that. Check out the security market watch newsletter. The link is actually on my LinkedIn profile right at the top underneath my profile picture. If you don't have time to watch or listen, it's a great way to get weekly updates of just an overview of who we're talking to and the subjects that we're discussing. Also, I'm on Instagram under God, what's my handle? Championship underscore energy. And then also we have our security market watch Instagram, which is actually security underscore, market underscore watch.
Speaker 1:Thanks everybody.
Speaker 2:Thank you, bye, bye.