Cyber Security: Starting a Consulting Company After a Lay Off

When you're laid off, the job market is horrible, and everyone is hiring consultants. What do you do? You start your own consultancy.


In this episode, I spoke with Thomas Mccourt , a Cyber Security Consultant who started his own business after being laid off twice within a year. We talk about why he finally decided to start his business, how his layoffs have helped him figure out his path, and so much more.

Follow the podcast on Instagram: @rebootloadingpodcast

Interested in becoming a guest? Email me: rebootloading@gmail.com

Get in touch with Thomas here:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom--mccourt/
Blue Team Tom Consultancy: https://www.blueteamtom.com/

Transcript

00:04
Hi, welcome to the Reboot Loading Podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie. Hello everyone. On today's episode, I am here with Tom McCourt. He's originally from Maryland, now living in Pennsylvania. He has been in the cybersecurity field for over 10 years. He was also in a layoff round with me at a previous company, and I'm here to talk with him today about all of those things. So Tom, welcome to the Reboot Loading Podcast.

00:33
Thank you. It's great to be here. How's life treating you? Life, you know, life is, uh, life's pretty interesting. It's got its ups and downs, you know, coming from a layoff. There's more downs than up, but, uh, things, things are okay. Things are good. When you have a layoff, it's, you know, you focus on things like, Hey, um, how am I going to bring in money? How am I going to support my family? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? But no one's talking about the depositives of a layoff. I get to spend more time with my kids.

00:59
you know, I can go on my kids field trips. That part's been great, honestly. It's been kind of like a really good mental refresher. So from that aspect, things are really good. I'm glad you mentioned that because it is true. It's kind of like when you go and you want to do a review of a restaurant or somewhere, and usually you're not going out there to give the good reviews because you had some bad experience. So I like that you have a focus on the positive things because I do think that gets lost. Yeah.

01:29
It took me a while to get there. I mean, when the layoff first happens, it's the why is, why me? Why, why am I the target of this situation? And I have my good days and bad days as is, as does everybody, but I really am trying to stay on the positive side. Or a couple of months ago, that probably wouldn't have been the case. You know, I was better, you know, but for anyone else dealing with layoffs, it's, it's pretty important to, to find.

01:55
something to strive for, something to do, something to keep your mind occupied so you don't go into those low, low spots. What has that been for you? Has it been just the extra time you've been able to spend with your kids or have you taken up any other new hobbies? Spending a lot of time with the kids. One of my kids is doing potty training, so I'm a lot more involved with that. No, it's not. It's not fun at all, you know, dealing with that. And I got- Dipping diapers, so that's a positive. Diapers are so expensive. So,

02:24
Dealing with the Pawnee training, I'm a lot more involved now, but I've also been doing things, you know, some of the woodworking. I got my garage clean last weekend. It was great. You know, I've been just trying to tidy up the house. I've been cooking a lot more, trying to take care of like my health. I think I get into these situations or I guess when I'm really focused on doing a good job in a role, I have this mentality of put my eyes down and get, and grind things out no matter how long something takes. And it's something I feel like.

02:52
I personally need to work on. So when I can actually take time to myself and actually like eat better, work out, do things that are good for me and my body and my family, it makes me feel good, right? Because sometimes, you know, whether I'm working at one place or another, I can definitely put my head down, grind it out and forget about everything going on in the outside. Yeah, this kind of forces you to look in those different directions you might've been putting off. I like how you mentioned.

03:19
cleaning the garage, I need to do that. That's on my to-do list as well. But there's a lot to be said about some of the things that you can get done, put your mind to it. And likewise, you've been grinding at another opportunity for yourself as you've been laid off and you know that it's been a difficult road as far as finding permanent work. I mean, forget about finding something that you really enjoy and want to work.

03:49
for a lot of people are just taking whatever they're getting at this point, but you've pivoted that into a direction to make it a little bit more positive for you. Yeah, I there's a weird shift I think going on in IT, in cybersecurity, IT and just tech in general right now that people aren't really talking about. And maybe this is happening in other industries too. I just see how it affects me.

04:13
There is a lot of companies that don't seem to want to be hiring full-time people because they're worried about the economy and they're seeing all these companies do mass layoffs everywhere. No one wants to hire a full-time employee, right? Because health insurance is expensive for a full-time employee. Benefits are expensive. The employee is expensive. So a lot of companies right now are going to temps and contractors. In fact, that's 99% of the positions I get hit up for on LinkedIn or Indeed or Dice or...

04:43
every job recruiting site, I'm really only getting hits for temp jobs. And if it is a full-time role, I mean, it's just a disgusting pay cut. That's not, it's not worth taking. So I took a temp job doing some cloud security type of work in AWS and Azure. It's a temp job, but it pays the bills for now. So I don't have to stress, um, like other people have or are because they aren't working temp jobs. Now I took a massive pay cut, but it pays my bills and it's kind of stress free.

05:12
With that being said, I decided that since all these other companies are going towards hiring contractors and things like that, that I'm going to start my own business. So officially, like, I know three weeks ago, my business, it's called Blue Team Tom Consulting, has come online. The website is blueteamtom.com. And we offer cybersecurity consulting services, advisory services and things like that for small and medium sized businesses.

05:36
That's awesome. I'm real excited for you to see where this is going to take you. And it's something I've seen a lot of with these mass layoffs, a lot of people are having to think outside the box a little bit. And it's also been a push to maybe get you into a direction that you've been wanting to go into.

05:54
but you've just been, like you said earlier, you have more time to focus on your health and you have more time to focus on other things that's not just your job. Now you are able to sit back and maybe have some time to think about what's really important to you. And creating your own consulting business is, it's a big deal. I mean, you're really putting yourself out there and you've been in the cybersecurity space for a while now. What drove you to...

06:22
that particular field and what do you enjoy the most about it? I decided to start my own company because I'm tired of working for other companies that don't take security seriously. I've worked for many companies and I have some, I want to say damning stories. I have some interesting stories around companies doing just blatantly the wrong thing around cybersecurity and best practices and just I don't like the idea of companies providing

06:52
or something where they could spend the same amount of money between a band-aid fix and actually fixing the problem. Just fix the problem. I'd rather pick and choose the companies I work with so that I can work with people and companies that want to take things seriously, not just check a compliance box or pass, you know, an audit. You know, from that perspective, I want to make an impact and I've had jobs where I felt like I could make an impact and I've had, I've definitely had jobs where I couldn't, I had no say.

07:21
and I want to be able to steer companies in a good direction. You know, you take any startup right now, most startups are thinking about, how do I bring money in? How do I become a successful business? They're not looking at the fact that one cyber attack for a small startup could cripple that business indefinitely. I'm hopefully going to try and give startups and smaller companies and companies like that a chance to stand on their own two feet when it comes to that kind of stuff with keeping budget in mind, obviously.

07:51
startups don't have a lot of cashflow. And it's important to, especially in a startup environment where you may not have certain expertise. You have someone who has this brilliant idea, they have a team in place, but they may not have all of those puzzle pieces. And cybersecurity is a huge piece of that puzzle, especially with everything going cloud-based, all the digitization of things. It's just, it's a huge.

08:17
piece of it. And we did see back in, I want to say 2020 ish, there were a lot of cybersecurity hacks that happened. And companies that I worked for companies that we worked with were being impacted. And these were huge companies that were getting targeted. And if you take a startup company, like you said, I mean, it can bring them down immediately. That's the thing, right? So AT&T was just in the news, right? 70 million.

08:46
Current and old customers of AT&T, 70 million clients, essentially their data was leaked. That's massive. So how do you prevent that? Well, if you put the right building blocks and the right architecture in the beginning at that startup stage, you can actually fix a lot of problems and build from a good security foundation to have a more secure future for your business. A lot of companies,

09:13
build out their company, their architecture, without thinking about security at all. And then they get to a certain size and they're like, oh, hey, we should probably do this now, now that we have the budget or now that we can do this or now that we can do that. But it's, it's never too late, but it's definitely hard to retroactively go backwards in time and fix your architecture that is super broken. You brought cloud up. Cloud in general, the biggest issues in cloud is misconfiguration. People accidentally doing something in a cloud-based piece of software. And

09:42
doing something incorrectly, and that's often why data is leaked. I mean, that's 99% of it is people check the wrong box, did something stupid accidentally or, you know, intentionally, whatever, not understanding how something truly works, a service truly works in the cloud and they accidentally leaked data or they accidentally exposed private keys or whatever. And that's, and that's happening all over the place. I mean.

10:07
It's every day, it seems like there's a new, a report of a new company getting hit with something. It's definitely needed. And I really liked the fact that you, from what you've said so far, and correct me if I'm wrong, you really want to come into a space where somebody is brand new. The company is just getting started and really helping them build from the ground up so that they don't have multiple band-aids over their issues. They're actually building quality product, having a quality foundation prior to.

10:36
rolling out their business. Exactly. Right. You know, I worked at this one company years ago and they had a platform, very interesting tool, but the quality wasn't there, right? Every release that they pushed out caused issues on clients' computers, right? It would crash or it would do, it would accidentally wipe data or it would do something that's bad design, you know, quite honestly, you know, it's bad, it's bad design and then it's bad security on top of it, learning from that

11:06
know, did a couple of years ago, I'd really like to help companies move forward in the right direction. And it doesn't have to be super small, right? I can do small and medium sized businesses. It's just, I'd like to fix the problem as quickly as I can for companies, because once they get to a certain level of certain size, it becomes, do we have to stop product or whatever to fix major glaring issues? What is the impact on the business? You don't want to stop business impact. You don't

11:35
The goal is to fix the security issues as they come up as quickly as possible and make sure your architecture is sound. And likewise, having a larger company, one of the issues that you may come across is you have too many hands in the pot. So you might be having a lot of conflicting opinions on which way to go, which direction to do things, and that could slow things down ultimately. I mean, it could be good in the sense that you have more opinions, you have a bigger pool to choose from, but at the same time,

12:05
If you're dealing with something like cybersecurity and a potential threat there, you want to get to the bottom of the ASAP. You don't want to have to. And see, that's an interesting, that's an interesting, uh, statement, right? So you're absolutely right. But there's another side to that coin as security, you can scream and call out things all day. Hey, this is an issue. This is an issue. But at the end of the day, if the company wants to accept risk,

12:33
accept that this is going to be a problem, they accepted it. They're accepting that this is a faulty whatever, or this is a potential attack vector, and they're accepting the risk in case it does happen, and they don't have the budget or they don't have the means to fix it anytime soon. So the best security is understanding, like, how does this impact business to the dollar amount, right? Like, is this going to cost the business $2 billion? If so, what do we do to fix it?

13:02
What's the fixed costs? Is there a trade here, right? Is the fixed gonna cost more than the potential issue? Can it hold off six months, a year, two years? It's just understanding the business, the business needs and making sure that business revenue doesn't stop based on the security findings. Make sure you can still be successful. And going back a little bit, how long had you thought about this idea? Like, did it just come to you or was it something?

13:31
even prior to being laid off that you were thinking, there's a need out there and I'm going to do it one day, but just not today. And then one day came and here you are. I actually tried to start a company back up in 2011 doing IT recruiting. And then I realized I absolutely hate recruiting. I'm hands on. I like to touch things. That's my entire career. So interviewing other people.

13:59
or roles that I wasn't, I had no really stake in. It just wasn't for me. So I got out of it. But as far as Blue Team Tom, this company, I've been kind of mauling on it for a while, but it's always been a, well, maybe next year, I'll do it, right? Cause I like where I'm at or I'm okay now. And then the layoff happened and it was more like a enough's enough. You know, I'm coming from a layoff at the previous company. And then before that,

14:27
There was another, you know, layoff essentially. So it's pretty much back to back layoffs. No fault of my own. My reviews have been great. You know, just the companies had money issues or whatever, whatever the problem may be. It's a few layoffs within a year. Yeah, yeah. And I'm just kind of over it. I'm tired of companies making decisions based on company needs and things like that to invoke a layoff.

14:55
And the people that should be responsible for said layoff are still employed. The people that are making the bad choices for these companies are still at the helm, are still driving the ship while, you know, the people that work really hard are getting screwed, honestly. And I'm, I'm, I'm tired of being that, that person. When I was younger, I worked for this one company and we had a blizzard one year and I was stupid and young enough to not understand that they were taking advantage of me.

15:24
at the time and I slept at work three days during that blizzard in case something went down. I pulled a hundred hours that week. It was horrible. Wow. And after that job, and I was only there a couple of years, I realized, you know, why? Like I drove home in the blizzard and they actually paid a snowplow to come and pick me up at my parents' house at the time and drive me back into work. And then they left me there for three days. Oh my goodness. They didn't deliver food, nothing. It was

15:54
Were you living off of vending machines? They had a company fridge, so I was just eating people's lunches because no one was coming into the office. It was disgusting and horrible. There's no showers there. It was just the worst time in the entire world. And I've never forgotten how I felt at that moment. And I'm tired of companies taking advantage for people that want to work hard, that want to do a good job. I want to do a good job and I want to work hard. I don't mind putting in the time, but I actually want to feel accomplished and I want to feel like I'm...

16:23
contributing. And as soon as you take that away, I'm going to stop trying. I'm going to stop working hard because what's the point? Basically, what you're saying is something that I've heard from many people that I've spoken with that have gotten out of the corporate world. They had similar sentiments as you as either they were in very toxic workplaces. They've had a long enough career to where they said, you know what, this is not worth it. A lot of times it's they have family now, they've grown.

16:52
We have, when we're young, we're more willing to do things, work ourselves to burn out or whatnot. But when you start getting into adulthood, into your career for many years, you have all of those, that tenure under your belt, you're a little bit more willing to take a chance, I guess. And in some ways, you're just willing to be a little bit more adventurous, looking outside the box. And you've also had a lot of time to think about like, what do I really wanna do?

17:21
what's really important to me. Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, if I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, that job's gonna be up at any company to fill my shoes. And that's the truth. So I want to be there for my family. I wanna be there for my kids. I want to be there and take care of my house and everything else going on. And a company's not gonna do that. Like a company, you know, you're a drone at the end of the day. And I'm tired of being that drone, you know. Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense. If you think about it,

17:50
I would say pre-COVID, we were always looking for a work-life balance, especially if you're a parent, you're always looking for that work-life balance. You wanna have a company that's very important to you to have that, that they're offering, maybe they were hybrid, maybe they did offer, if you did absolutely have to work from home, you could do that if your job was something that was able to be done from home. But I feel like after...

18:17
in this post-COVID time now, we are with all of these return to office mandates and I get it. People have leases on buildings and there's a bunch of empty buildings out there. They have to fill them up. We get it. But at the same time, that whole concept of what is work-life balance has changed. I fully agree. But I will say a caveat. I've been pretty much remote probably since 2011 with the sprinkle of attending on site.

18:47
For one year I did on-site at one company and then I realized that, God, I hate it. I'm going back to remote work, I'm done. But COVID really ramped that up. And I think people realized work-life balance is a lot more important than they thought. I can do my job at home. And now all these companies want all these people to come back and why? I understand if you're not performing, but show me the numbers. If you can truly work from home, then why does it matter?

19:14
I don't care that they have leases and things like that. You know, quite honestly, companies aren't really looking out for their employees anymore. And so any company that's doing this mandate to return to office, now I understand for certain positions, I understand that, but not all positions deserve to have to be forced to come in. One, you're limiting your employees, right? On what kind of employees you're going to get. They have to, or you got to pay for relocation or whatever. I would never relocate for a job.

19:43
Why would I relocate for a job when all these companies are doing layoffs? There's all these stories about people relocated for Amazon and Google and Microsoft, and then three months later, they got laid off in the last year. I don't wanna be in a weird state, relocated for a job and then immediately get laid off. You will never see a more angry Tom than if that were to happen. I would just be the angriest human being. I think work-life balance is super important.

20:11
And I think COVID really, really drove that home about how important it really is. I mean, people can work. I am a lot more productive at home than I am in the office, because in the office, there's a lot of things for me to do. Like I, people watch sometimes, I'm like, what is this person? Or the water cooler, or, you know, I need to get up and get 15 cups of coffee because I'm bored. It's harder in the office. One, I have to drive there and traffic is just the absolute worst. But two,

20:40
even outside of traffic, even if it was 30 minute drive in, no traffic, or I could ride a bike in, if I could still do the job at home, why does it matter? And it's the same thing with like, oh, there's in office perks, there's sleep pods, and there's, we have a chef, I don't care about any of that. I'd rather be home. I hear you. Plus I don't have to worry about what I'm wearing every day. I can wear a t-shirt and shorts or jeans. I worked this one job and they forced me, because I have tattoos.

21:09
Um, they forced me and they're not offensive. They're nothing crazy. And they forced me to wear long sleeves all year round. And my, um, office was like not air conditioned and it was just disgustingly hot in the summer. And so like, I had to bring in a change of clothes because I would sweat through my shirt because it's like 99 degrees. I would hit like a hundred degrees in my office and there's like no AC and I, and

21:38
required to wear long sleeves because tattoos were at the time not allowed in the workplace or not acceptable in the workplace. It's just ugh. I'm tired of all that. Like just I just want to work at home. I want to when people say or picture IT people that you know or hackers or whatever they want to work in the dark and they want to be around no people. That is my complete definition of me. I I'm completely locked me in a closet. Don't care turn the light off. I'll get so much work done. But as soon as

22:08
I've hit a point in my career where I have to have all these meetings and I have to be a lot more public facing. And not that it's bad, it's just different. So again, as I said, work from home is fantastic and I will never return to an office. Now I'll do on-site travel every once in a while. I've done some really cool travel trips. I've had a couple of horrible travel trips. What about flying out for your own clients?

22:34
I don't mind that, but most of the time with any of my clients, I can easily jump on Zoom or Teams or whatever. And I don't mind the travel. It's just the act of traveling sucks. You know, I flew to California for one business trip and my rental car broke down three times. And then I got robbed at gunpoint at one incident of travel, which was neat. You just had to say robbed at gunpoint. I wouldn't want to travel either. So yeah.

23:01
Yeah, that did, that did happen. That was not fun. Um, it was quite the experience. You know, I was with a group of people, uh, coworkers and things like that. I had to figure out how to get on a plane with no identification. Also not fun. Before I got into computers, I was a welder. Uh, I used to weld up concrete bases that get put in the ground and, and for roads and ships and things like that, you know, we used to build mattress machines. So what it does is it's essentially a conveyor belt that glues mattresses together and I would weld up this gigantic thing.

23:31
I hated, you know, I eventually was like, if I keep this up, my body's going to be broken. I don't want to do this anymore. So I got back into computers and built my career from there. So I mean, I've dabbled in other other avenues for career and realized what at least what I don't want to do, at least long term, I know what I don't really want to do. Things were to happen and you know, I could easily go back to welding if I had to. If things were ever that bad.

23:57
I could easily go back to going back to construction. I would be miserable, but I could do it. And I think that's important that other people need to find other avenues, whether they, you don't have to like something, but you have to, if you have a family, you need to find a way to support them. And sometimes that is doing something you absolutely hate. And for me, that's going back to construction. I just, it's not fun for me. I did some really cool things.

24:23
really cool things. I built some really cool things. You know, we had sensors and lasers to make sure like if you fell into the the mattress machine, it wouldn't like squish you. And so that that was neat. If I could do everything all over again, I think it'd be a farmer, which is also a very hard profession. But one, I also don't have to really deal with people, which sounds amazing. And I get to drive a big tractor, which is also fun. And cows are pretty cool.

24:46
So that was my next question for you is if you could pick anything to do. And for me, it changes on a day to day basis. Not too long ago, I wanted to have like a cat sanctuary slash cafe type thing and just chill out with cats all day. Today it's different. I just recently took my oldest on a college tour and I was telling the, the sophomore that was doing the college tour there, like, I don't even know what I want to be when I grow up. So it's okay if you don't have your major set in stone right now. It's okay.

25:14
You know, my grandfather owned a farm and I remember when I was five or six, I'd go over his house every Sunday after church and run around with the goats and I'd run around with the sheep. He had chickens and cows and sheep and goats and we'd run around and play. I remember loving that. He showed me how to take the blades off a gigantic tractor at the time, mainly because I was small enough to get under it.

25:42
safely, you know, and he showed me how to do a lot of cool stuff. And I would love to own a farm though it's disgustingly expensive land is disgusting. But I, but you know, there's a caveat. I want the land for other reasons. One, I want to be a hermit. Two, I've always wanted a lot of land that had a stream that runs through it, where I can see the deer and I can see the wildlife and everything like that. That's partly why I moved out of Maryland. You know, I was living in a little Amish town.

26:12
a while in that little Amish town we had I mean 3 a.m. every every day hear this donkey e-hauling you know it's what you woke up to a donkey and he was at the farm next door it was great we did sell that house uh after we restored it it was built in 1902 we restored a good part of it ourselves and then we sold it and we moved to this house uh which is a little closer to civilization for the kids so they can actually have like friends uh you know

26:41
But um, these can be friends. Donkey, you know, the donkey was pretty cool. There was, there was a couple of cows. There was a donkey. There was, um, uh, was it Rebecca? The chicken would come to visit our house. Um, she poop on our front porch a lot. Does that mean she liked you guys? I don't know. Uh, I guess she always, she always wandered over across the street. She braved the street crossing and poop on our porch. Oh, that's kind of why the chicken crossed the road. Why did she cross the road?

27:11
to poop on my porch. Yeah. So yeah. Now we know the answer to that question. Exactly. Well, in that instance, yes. And you know, at the time I had three dogs and they would love the land to run and get in a mischief. Sadly, one passed away, so now I'm down to two. But you know, I still have the land, some land, not a ton, but I have land for the dogs. And you know, but it'd be awesome to get chickens and do all that again, because it's fun.

27:37
And if not that, voice acting sounds cool. Probably can't do it, but I think it would be so cool to just voice act on just anything, just one thing, just so I can point out when we're watching it to my kids, hey, that's your dad. That's a good way to, since you've classified yourself as like a hermit, that's a good way to not put yourself so much in the limelight, but just enough to where people

28:05
will know your name, but they don't know your face. They don't really necessarily know all the things about you, but they know your character. That's interesting. I've only become a hermit more recently. When I was younger, I really wanted to be in a successful band and I wanted to travel and I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to, up until I got 26, I was playing in rock bands and bars every weekend and I was on stage singing and traveling. I haven't played in...

28:34
some years now, but yeah, I used to. What instrument did you play? Drums. And I sang. Nice. Will we ever get to hear you sing? I haven't done it in a while, so I don't think it would be any good anymore, but who knows, anything's possible. I actually inherited some guitars recently, a lot of them, so I'm going to clean them up and see what happens probably in the near future. Maybe I'll record a song, see what happens. I don't know. You should. You should create like a whole... You can do a YouTube channel, but without...

29:03
You don't have to put yourself out there. You can just record your music. Yeah. And that's true. I want to hear it now. So I'm going to be, one day. I mean, I got my breath. Sure. If you Google, um, hard enough, you can find old demos. I've done a lot of different genres of music, but mostly I was, I was younger, younger, I was very into metal. So a lot of metal, metal music, screamo music and stuff like that, though my tastes have mellowed over the years. So kids will do that to you.

29:33
Yeah, now it's all wheels on the bus and uh, Coco melon songs. So goodness. So you'll be a singing farmer. I like it. Yeah, exactly. It works. It does. Old McDonald. What would be your best advice to give to someone who is out there right now looking for a job has been laid off. Maybe even if they're not laid off, they're just really looking for a change. What would be the best advice that you can give to offer some hope?

30:00
Take time for yourself, get angry as it's part of processing. And then once you have a couple of days of anger and pissed offness and bitterness, uh, pull yourself up, put your, your head on straight and figure out what you enjoy doing. You know, do you want to stay in the same field? Do you want to branch out and try something else? You know, take a chance, you know, you never know what's going to happen. So the worst, worst case scenario, you fail and failing sucks. It does, but it's, it's part of growing.

30:30
So the job market is horrendous. Don't get discouraged when you get a bunch of rejection emails or you don't hear back or anything of that sort because it's not you, it's not. Just remember those companies rejected you and become something amazing and then show them that you're awesome and they screwed up by not hiring you. You said as fuel to the fire. Yeah, exactly. When my first child was younger, I missed some stuff because I was working. There was times where I was working two jobs, two full-time jobs.

30:59
and things like that because we were trying to pay the bills. And I guess I realize now that I missed out on a lot of things. I don't want to do that again. Time is short. I want to spend the best amount of time with the things that actually are important because at the end of the day, the job doesn't care about you. Find something that makes you happy. And if you can't find something that truly makes you happy work wise, find something that you can tolerate enough to pay your bills and then do something fun. Well, Tom, I just want to say it's been an absolute pleasure to talk.

31:28
with you today about cybersecurity, about being laid off and talk about your farming adventure. I do hope that you get the opportunity to do that because honestly, I actually think that's pretty cool. I would love to have a hobby farm just as a side note. I will have all of your contact information, email your website to your consulting company in the show notes as well as your LinkedIn.

31:53
So if anyone is interested in getting in touch with Tom, you can do so, it would be amazing. If you need any cybersecurity work, you will definitely do the right thing by your company. Just tell that you're very passionate about what you do. It's a big deal for you. And I think there are many companies out there that would be very appreciative of that. And I also wanted to ask you if you would be interested in just doing a follow-up with me in a few months.

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talking about what's happened between now and then and just seeing how far you've come with your business. Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much. If you're interested in becoming a guest on my show, all the information on how to contact me is available in the show notes. Also, if you're enjoying the content and would like a shout out in an upcoming episode, a link in how you can support this podcast is available in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening and until next time.

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you