#35: Randy Steinle, Co-Founder & CEO | Cyber Trust Alliance, Inc.

In this episode of “In The Thick of It,” Scott welcomes Randy Steinle, CEO and co-founder of Cybertrust Alliance based in Austin, Texas. Randy shares his journey from growing up in New Jersey to studying business and economics at Wheaton College in Chicago, and how his early career experiences in sales and leadership roles at various technology companies prepared him for entrepreneurship.

Randy dives into the origins of Cyber Trust Alliance, which began as an idea while working at a managed service provider (MSP) to address the cybersecurity and compliance needs of small and mid-sized healthcare organizations. He discusses the challenges of educating the market, developing the right pricing model, and learning to delegate effectively as the company grew.

Throughout the conversation, Randy emphasizes the importance of mentorship, building a strong advisory board, and collaborating with partners to accelerate growth. He shares valuable insights on the mindset shifts required when transitioning from employee to founder and the critical role of self-reflection and accountability in leadership.

About Randy:
A 30-year technology veteran, Randy has led businesses in healthcare, higher education, manufacturing, and IT services.  He and his partners founded Cyber Trust Alliance to simplify compliance for healthcare organizations. Randy holds a BA in Business Economics from Wheaton College; has served in leadership of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners for 18 years; and was honored to be the Inaugural Man of WIT for the Global Women in Technology Association. He’s married to Beth, a Professor and Sr. Associate Dean at the University of Texas in Austin and the proud father of 4 grown children.

About Cybertrust Alliance:
Cybertrust Alliance helps organizations and their third party vendors assess, manage, and track compliance with regulatory initiatives, utilizing virtual Telassessment technology and Risk Management software. With their solution, compliance is a simple, easy to understand, and manageable process for everyone.

To learn more, visit cybertrustalliance.com

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Randy Steinle

CEO/Co-Founder, Cyber Trust Alliance

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

Hey, what's this about the advisory board?

I said, well, I just figured out really quickly that I

couldn't do this on my own or I wasn't going to do it well.

And I saw the model of some of these mentors in the past, and I just got bold about,

you know, hear somebody speak, go up and talk to them and ask them to come be on my board.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Randy Steinle, Co-founder and CEO of Cybertrust Alliance, joins the show today

to share his perspective on starting a compliance focused software business.

After studying business economics in college,

Randy launched himself into a software sales career.

Years later, Randy joined a Texas startup,

which gave him experience building relationships in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Since launching Cybertrust Alliance, Randy has learned the importance

of conducting security risk assessments, the value of a managed service provider model,

and the challenges of government spending and compliance.

Throughout the episode, Randy emphasizes the value of using new and old school methods in

business and the importance of seeking guidance from other experts in the technology space.

I am pleased to be on the road this week in Austin with Randy Steinle,

CEO and Co-founder of Cybertrust Alliance.

Randy, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks, Scott.

Great to be here.

Let's go way back.

I always like to start at the beginning.

Where'd you grow up?

Family's all from Ohio.

I was born in Ohio, but grown up years were New Jersey.

Fortunately, I've lost the accent and a little bit of the edge over the years.

But we did Ohio, Boston, Connecticut, New York,

New Jersey in the first five years of my life, and then 18 years in Jersey growing up.

Now, given the close proximity of those places, I'm guessing that you weren't a military brat.

This was corporate relos.

Yep.

It was all dead.

Corporate sales, jobs, moving, same organization, but just bouncing at different offices.

Okay, was he an IBM guy?

I've been moved general foods.

Okay.

So on the grocery side of the business and selling coffee

and actually coffee for years and then dog food for years.

So very similar.

Yeah.

Interesting mix for people who don't drink coffee.

They might think it does taste like dog food.

That's fair.

That's fair.

Yeah.

So where did you end up kind of settling at?

You said you made all those moves in the first five years of your life.

Yes, sir.

Where did you spend the bulk of your growing up then?

Jersey.

Yeah.

So New Jersey was five to kindergarten all the way through high school in New Jersey.

What was school like for you?

I mean, I loved the experience.

I'm very social, and so I kind of thrived in that experience.

I did fairly well with grades, so got into the college I wanted to.

I think my parents and my teachers would agree that I could have studied harder,

but I look at it as the full experience.

That was a blast.

Played sports, sat on some of the committees and so on, and just had a great time.

If I redid it, I wouldn't have changed anything.

Yeah.

Were you kind of like an ab student?

Yeah.

You know, for years I was, I'd say a minus when I got into college,

I pressed the lower end of that a little bit, but somewhere.

Yeah, b plus, a minus in that range.

Okay.

You mentioned sports.

What'd you play?

I was a goalie on the soccer team, and then I was third baseman on the baseball team.

Tried a few others and quickly discovered that those were where I needed to focus.

So basketball was not my thing and.

Yeah, but soccer was most of it.

Baseball fell off after the first couple of years,

but I lettered four years in soccer and high school and loved it.

Do you get out there at all as an adult?

I did for years.

I haven't recently, mainly because at my age, playing goalie,

it's good for a few minutes, but then the recovery is rough.

So just kicking around these days.

I played hockey in a recreational adult hockey league years and years and years ago.

And, man, there's something about goalies in hockey.

Like there's just something a little bit.

Little bit off.

Like if you are willing to stand in front of a puck coming at you that fast,

like there's just something a little bit off.

Soccer's not quite the same thing.

No, I'm with you.

I could not do that on the soccer field.

Big enough ball, big enough goal, different ballgame.

But, you know, I had a loud voice, I was aggressive.

I didn't mind getting kicked a few times,

and I figured out quickly that that was sort of my bent.

So it worked.

Yeah.

Outside of soccer, did you have other interests growing up?

Yeah, I was student council for years.

We traveled a lot as a family and we went to DC,

hit lots of historical spots along the way and down through Virginia and thought a lot

of the history of the United States, which was a blast.

But mostly for me, it was student council and sports.

So it was my balance there, singing, acting, those things weren't really my thing.

My daughters got that passed through me, not because of me.

Got it.

Where did you go to school?

You went to college?

I went to Wheaton College in Chicago, so then spent 18 years in Chicago was part

of that experience, and first job and kids were all born in Chicago.

So did big chunks.

After the first couple of years of bouncing around.

What was that like, going from the northeast to the midwest?

Well, I'll say, for starters, Chicago's my most favorite big city in the country.

I love the people, the pace of life, the diverse food and culture and all that.

And the way Chicago took advantage of the shoreline.

Just can't say enough good things about it other than between December and March,

when it's when I got to school, they said, well, last winter we had a week

straight where it was about 80 below Windchill, and we had to shut the dorms down.

And somehow I still decided to go there.

So I don't know if it was crazy or what, but it has its own vibe as compared to New York.

So I liked the pace of it, but just slowing it down a little bit was more my better fit

for me.

And I just liked the Midwest culture, and that was fantastic.

The Midwest cold and the northeast cold are both very cold,

but they're very different kinds of cold.

We lived in Minnesota for a few years when I was a kid, and probably a much more akin

to the Chicago area weather than what people have out on the east coast.

But, I mean, you get the nor'easters, and those will come

in and dump just a ton of snow and causes all kinds of damage.

And it's a big, heavy, wet snow, not a light, fluffy snow, but either way, it's cold.

And I'll second what you said about Chicago.

It may not be my absolute favorite big city, but it's definitely top two or three.

Such a vibrant place, great restaurants.

Being there in the springtime or in the fall, you just can't beat it.

Yep.

I mean, football in Chicago in the fall before it gets wicked cold.

One of the greatest things out there.

Funny enough, I recently it came out that the bears are looking

to build a $5 billion indoor domed stadium.

It'll be interesting to see how the Chicago people take to that.

I was going to say, I mean, I appreciate it,

but I don't know if the die hards will be up for that.

I imagine there will be some people up in arms.

Well, what did you study in school at Wheaton?

So, business, economics.

And then I was one class shy of a philosophy minor,

so I was thinking about going into law, kind of rounded out the education.

First couple of years of college, I enjoyed the social side of college.

Second half of college, I applied myself and pulled my grades up.

And that's when I met a professor who was a philosophy professor.

My initial was, I don't understand why this is a major.

What would I do with this?

But the more I got into the courses and it challenged you

to think differently about things and the strategy and so on.

Absolutely loved it.

Took everything I could take, and I got down to the end,

and it was like I'd have to go another semester to finish this.

I decided not to go the law route, so just didn't finish it.

But still look back.

That that was one of my most favorite things about college

was going through and studying like that.

So, business economics was a philosophy focus.

Having a professor like that, that really takes an interest and wants to guide you,

that makes all the difference in the world.

Oh, yeah.

You said that the first two years of school,

you kind of goofed off, and then you took it more seriously.

What was that turning point?

Was it that professor, or was it something else?

It was a mix.

I mean, he was definitely part of it.

He was a mentor and a friend, and we did things with his family and helped babysit his kid

so that having somebody you were accountable to, even through a friendship, was a big thing.

Getting out of the dorm, moving into a house, growing up a little bit,

taking on more responsibilities, and my roommates and I kid around that.

In the early days, the three of us were the three amigos, and nobody was dating anybody.

We were all just having fun.

We got.

Everybody got a little more mature, got jobs, started focusing.

And so when the whole house is doing that, it makes a big difference.

So you are the average of your five closest friends, right.

And that accountability and sharpening of one another is really important.

Indeed.

So, you mentioned work.

What kind of work did you do in college?

Well, you know, I mean, I was security guard for a bit as a night watchman,

and then an intern for technology company that was building

educational products for college markets around physiology and biology.

So, you know, it's early on tech.

We used Macs, which now I'm completely a pc guy, so I don't know what that was all about.

But my boss's brother worked at the nuclear accelerator lab,

so we were getting to see tech that nobody else could play with yet.

I remember getting our first email addresses, like,

holy cow, we're talking to guys in Russia right now.

So that experience, that was an internship I did, and then I wound up going with that company

when I graduated and got to see all ends of the business because it was a small business.

So you wear lots of different hats, so I wasn't the entrepreneur, but I was working for one.

It's hard to quantify the value of that getting started as a young 18 year old.

Trey, it's interesting.

I was in an Uber recently, and I was talking with an Uber driver,

and he mentioned that he had had a car full of recruiters for some big tech company, and they

were lamenting that they couldn't get, they hadn't met their quota for college hires.

And he said, you want to know the number one reason

that they couldn't get people to sign their offers?

I said, I bet they wanted to work remote, and these companies wanted them in person.

And he said, yep, you're absolutely right.

And what you just talked about there, having that close proximity to other people,

you learn so much just through osmosis, and I get why people want to work remote,

and I've worked remote for a good chunk of my career, but you just lose so much.

You miss out on so much learning that happens just through that proximity.

Does that resonate?

Absolutely.

That's one of the things we've struggled with, because we're completely virtual.

So my partner, I started with him 17 years ago.

Everybody was in the office tech company.

We had 35, 40 people.

We had check ins every morning.

Everybody goes through their ten second update.

So the accountability every morning had to be there

at a certain time, and everybody fed off of that.

Fast forward.

He's virtual.

I'm virtual.

The new company is completely virtual.

My Ciso lives in Vermont.

My product manager lives in Portland, Oregon.

And with the right team, it works awesome.

But as we've hired young people coming out of college who are fantastic people,

super smart, amazing careers ahead of them.

But the mindset of working for a startup remote is really hard to.

If you hadn't done it before and you hadn't kind of built those rhythms,

you need that proximity based mentorship.

Absolutely.

Early in your career.

So, timeline wise, when did you get out of school?

89.

Finished college in Chicago.

And, man, you had one of the first email addresses.

That's just hard to believe.

A life without email, seriously.

I talked to my kids about getting the first cell phone when I was 30, something like that.

And they're like, how's that possible?

How could you survive, dad?

What'd you do?

It's amazing to think about the changes just in our short lifetime.

This was probably a few years after the first iPad had come out,

and it might have been time or some other big publication had written this article

about the impact that the iPhone had, and it had a picture of a very young kid.

And the caption was, to a two year old, a magazine is an iPad that is broken.

And this kid is literally trying to swipe to unlock the magazine,

thinking that it's going to be an iPad.

And, yeah, it's amazing what the current generation takes for granted.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thinking back through what my first computer was, laptop,

IBM thinkpad with 200 meg of ram and no, 200 meg hard drive, I think.

No, take it back.

80 meg hard drive.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just, my iPhone is like, could have taken us to the moon.

By comparison to my original laptop, that probably cost five grand.

And I bet that battery was really heavy on that thing.

Pass.

That was part of our exercise program, was just getting your laptop around.

All right, so that first company, was that intellitool?

Yes.

That was one right out of college.

So, intelligent tools for higher education.

The guy who founded it was a professor, taught physiology,

self taught coder, and then eventually hired a team to go build a company.

And you were in sales?

I was, yep.

Okay.

What was that like in the early days coming out of school,

did you have a hard time getting people to take appointments with you,

or were you able to lean on the credibility of the professor?

How did you get started?

It was more leaning on his credibility because he had done work in the industry.

They had started just as a family run business.

So his sister in law had been doing some of the marketing,

and we weren't as much outbound marketing.

We put a catalog together a couple times a year, sent that out to all the university

physiology departments, and then did some trade shows and so on.

So it was more coming to us and handling those and doing quotes,

and so I was more inside sales, I would say, technically, than outbound.

So helped me learn the process.

I didn't have to go cold call, which now I know is a blessing, having to do that.

But, yeah, his reputation and the company's reputation really helped out a ton.

Got the doors open.

Yep.

And how long were you there?

Five years.

Were you married at the time?

I got married while I was there.

Okay.

And did you and your wife meet in school?

Yeah, yeah.

She was actually from Minnesota, so got spent plenty of time up in Minnesota,

either freezing or almost getting carried off by the mosquitoes that are the size of.

It's the state bird of Minnesota.

Yeah.

So you were there for five years.

What did you go do after that?

So, took a.

I don't know if the right word is, but took a flyer

with the startup that was in the power in electric space.

Turned out Chicago wasn't a great place for that.

So it started in Minnesota, and they were doing lighting, retrofits,

and efficiency around power, because the Minnesota power company was looking at,

do we go build another $100 million plant or do we reduce usage?

So they were funding all these programs, and these guys took advantage of it.

Well, in Chicago, we had power coming out our ears.

It was a harder sell.

So I learned a lot, did a lot of cold calling, knocking on doors.

Fortunately, didn't have to do that for too long, and my next opportunity came along.

But it's a good, good learning experience.

Just a rough one.

Today.

We've got all kinds of things to help reduce power consumption.

You know, we've got leds, we've got smart thermostats,

we've got all kinds of things to help with that.

We didn't have those things back in the mid nineties.

What was the stuff that you were putting in to make these places more efficient?

I think we called it a two by four, two foot by four foot lighting fixture.

That was billions of them lining the Chicago skyline.

You take out the old magnetic ballast, you'd put in electronic ballast.

Those were brand new.

And actually it was the first led lamps or bulbs,

so you could swap out four of those big old school light bulbs, if you will,

and that old ballast for electronic and a couple of small ones.

And then you put a mirror in behind it that we'd custom make to fit that shape.

So you get the same light output or more, but you could go,

I think we were using 25% of the power that an old school light needed.

So when you compare that across a building, you can see ROI in a year and a half or less.

And then things like big manufacturing plants,

if you turn on all of your power consuming equipment at once,

you get billed based on that spike in power, whatever's your highest spike.

So they had ways to ramp all that equipment up slowly so

you never hit those spikes and multiplied across a month.

Companies could save tens of thousands of dollars just by doing it more efficiently.

So that was less efficiency and more figuring out how

to get around the billing that the power company did.

There's a mix of those kinds of things that for most places,

could save money on it, even if they weren't getting it paid for by the state.

It was just harder to get people's attention because

people weren't really thinking about it yet.

You said you took a flyer on this company.

How long were you there?

Less than a year.

We were building the market, trying to drum up business.

And like I said, the guys who were coming down from Minnesota, it was like for them,

they were getting handed deals by the electric company and the electric

company was funding it and the customers could pay it off gradually over time.

So they were seeing benefit immediately where we were dropped the place in

start hitting the ground, somebody's making phone calls, people are out knocking on doors.

So we closed a couple of decent sized deals that year, but it was commission only.

I got a little bit of a stipend to get started.

But with the growing family of kids and so on, it just was rough.

Yeah.

That's interesting how being just one state away

that the geography makes that much difference.

Yeah, I mean it's really nuclear power in Chicago that they had an abundance

of power that they didn't have to worry about ever going and having to lay out that capital,

that just totally different mindset.

We were almost working against them.

So it was one of those things you learned the hard way, but we figured it out quick.

Yeah.

Well, where did you go after that?

So that's where I went to Everett Charles,

which fortunately was a couple of my good friends and was in the same office complex.

But that was all circuit board manufacturing test equipment.

So think high speed circuit board manufacturing line.

At the end of that line is a piece of test equipment that one tests the board,

one tests the parts, one tests the finished product.

So we built these custom test fixtures.

Imagine that circuit board sitting on a silicon gasket.

And you suck that down with vacuum onto these spring probes that are touching places

on the board and running a circuit through it and testing to make sure it works properly.

I think it was 100 2150 million dollars business and we had eleven offices around the US.

So I started as a sales guy in Chicago, eventually became GM of the Midwest region

until we started shipping manufacturing over to China.

Our customers did, we had to retool things.

And so we started popping up plants internationally and shutting

ones down in the US where our costs were out of whack.

So it was a good ride.

I was there eight years and we had a good run, really successful company, learned a ton.

It was first spin into corporate culture

and they got acquired towards the end of my stay there.

And so became part of a multi billion dollar company.

So there's a really good experience and a lot of learning there.

And just as we started, we shut down the Chicago plant.

We went from eleven to one plant in the US, plus corporate.

So once they shut that down, I took a corporate job

for a little bit and then had an opportunity to come to Texas.

So that was kind of the quick out there.

What was it that drove you to take that next opportunity?

Just didnt like the new big corporate feel or you saw more opportunity with the next company?

I mean, mixture of things, right?

I mean, for starters, after 911, I became GM of the Midwest region

with a $6 million quota a month before 911 happened.

So we took an incredibly profitable, really successful region,

and my three biggest customers lost 90% in two months.

So we managed to more or less break even for the year, which was an accomplishment in itself.

But between that and then the move offshore,

the opportunities were getting tighter and tighter and tighter.

The business was changing, the model was changing.

I was more in a corporate position where I was calling

on a couple of strategic accounts around the world.

It was just a very different job.

The opportunity in Texas was, my brother's company was a startup.

They were going out to commercial space for the first time ever so we could get family

together, try my hand at a new opportunity, moved to new places in the country.

So it all sort of worked in favor of moving to Texas.

Yeah.

What were the types of companies that you were selling into there?

The Texas one or no, back at Everett Charles.

So it was a mix of, for instance, some of the label printers.

I cant think of the name of the company, but theres a famous label printer that

we made the test equipment for the circuit boards that went in all their printers.

Right.

Dymo or Zebra or.

There you go.

Zebra was one of my big customers, Lucent, huge customer.

Telabs, some moto manufacturers back then, huge.

But you saw things like us.

Robotics was one of our biggest customers in the world.

Then they sold out, and we moved with that sale and continued to do business with them.

And then 911 happened and other industry forces.

And you saw guys who were multimillionaires from their stock, couldn't afford to buy a car.

So the market, ups and downs there were crazy, but it was a lot

of equipment manufacturers who had circuit boards in there that we tested for them.

So my four biggest in Chicago were Tel Avs, three Lucent,

that was probably the oh, and Delco Electronics.

So that was kind of the opposite end of the spectrum,

where it's low tech, all these fancy circuit boards going in a computer.

Now you got these low tech boards that go in cars, but gazillions of them.

So they were buying these couple thousand dollar fixtures, but 100 of them,

where these guys would buy a $30,000 fixture once a year.

So it was really interesting mix.

And so you had folks flying down to the border towns

where all the manufacturing plants were getting the design specs.

It was really fascinating business.

Loved it.

Clay, you started out selling software, then went to a different type of technology

with the energy space, and then you went to hardware.

Youre also selling to very different types of buyers, selling to higher ed.

I assume youre selling to, like, commercial property owners.

Yeah, or individual owners.

Yeah.

And then selling hardware to a very different type of customer.

How are you able to adapt and learn the business that quickly?

I mean, to me, well, it's a mix, right?

I mean, part of it, my whole thing is relationships.

So I don't feel like I'm selling as much as building relationships with people,

and the product is sort of secondary to that.

And the Chicago deal, selling hardware,

I figured out after a bit that was really good for how I'm wired.

I'm very mechanical.

I like to figure things out.

So going from software, which I don't write, or couldn't, thank goodness, to something

I could hold my hands, and we build a physical fixture, and I'm talking to the client.

We're trying to hit a test pad on a circuit board that's 15 mm in diameter.

That just clicked in my head.

So it got to the point where the operations guys were like, hey, youre a sales guy.

You know too much about this.

Get off the floor.

I dont need you giving us trouble out here.

So that just, I loved that.

I mean, those eight years, job wise, were awesome, and I learned a ton.

And I had some great mentors.

I mean, the company was stacked with great leaders.

And so some of those guys ive stayed in touch with and good friends really helped a ton to me.

I mean, you just have to dive into it.

People are people.

People like to buy from people.

You go build those relationships, you figure the rest out.

So you moved to Austin Post 911, and you went to work with your brother.

You said, yes, sir, that's systems evolution.

No, that was before that.

That was duration.

Software systems evolution bought us.

So, I mean, literally, I got here nine months later, they sold the company.

So that was fairly short lived, but they were doing custom app dev for the state.

So my brother's an ex accenture guy.

One of the other guys had worked for the governor's office.

And so sort of a blend of smart people.

There's four partners.

They're all still great friends, and they were selling all to the state where it was,

let's take advantage of connections we have.

But also, if you build something for the state.

The state owns it.

So now you can reapply that code for a different division and as long as you spend

less than a certain dollar value, it doesn't have to go out to bid and so on.

So there were some great things where they were building all this

productivity software for the state that they made a great business with that.

And then we started looking at, could we take this out to the commercial space,

use the same concepts?

And that's why I was hired.

So we were bidding on like a management system,

pharmaceutical testing lab in New York and it was a huge project that we bid on.

We had an oil and gas company west of Dallas that was building a new system

that needed custom code because there wasn't so much off the shelf back then.

I mean it was fantastic experience.

That was harder for me because I moved to a new state and had

to build all new relationships to start from.

And the partners all had those relationships to begin with.

So I would say that one didn't go quite as smoothly for me to get started.

But it was a great experience and made

connections that now help a lot in what I'm doing today.

Working with family can be a challenge.

Would you recommend it to others?

I think you got to figure that out for yourself.

I mean, you know, my wife and I have said, hey, I love you and you're really good

at what you do, but I think it's best that we have separate jobs.

And I mean she's a professor and associate dean at UT.

She's amazing at it, but it's best that we can go home

and share our days and not have them intertwined all day long.

My brother and I, the hard things are,

is they're selling the company and if I'm not hitting my quota or whatever, that's hard.

But he and I have a great relationship and I would definitely do it again with him.

But I think you got to know yourself and your partner or your

sibling and I don't think there's a bad answer to that.

No universal truth for that.

I'd probably err on the side of.

Not for most people.

If I had.

If you push me for an answer,

it's probably more dangerous to try and do that and more unique when it works perfectly.

My opinion, I would agree with that.

When you were there, is that what set you on the path to what you're doing today?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, part of it was relationships again, so Microsoft partner in the software world.

I started building relationships in the Microsoft ecosystem.

I became part of the channel partner board.

I go to the big global conference I meet now my business partner.

It was that ecosystem that helped me take that next step for sure.

That was mostly those relationships.

You mentioned Microsoft and you mentioned VAR channels and things like that.

Microsoft is absolutely massive in the world that we're in.

We're starting to get into the Microsoft ecosystem through their mid market ERP products.

Im guessing you were more on the infrastructure side with Microsoft.

We were, yeah because we were running an MSP here in Austin.

Prior to that was more on the software side with my brothers company.

When I first dipped my toe in there we went to the hey were starting a new chapter in Austin.

Anybody want to volunteer to help us set it up?

And my boss said he does but it turned out to be and some of those folks

I've been friends with for 20 years and would go to the hill for them.

It was really mostly SMB companies that couldn't get access

to all the resources at Microsoft as a small business especially starting out.

But part of this international association gave all of us access to higher level resources,

more influence into product development.

We could see things sooner.

Microsoft really respected the relationship.

It's the only association that Microsoft gave the right to use their name.

So it's the International association of Microsoft Channel Partners and started.

I was there for the 25th anniversary so I can't remember the exact start date but started

in Europe and then expanded across.

So I did Austin chapter president then I became president of the US and then sat

on the global board managing the relationship with Microsoft between the partnership.

So we had about 5000 partners at the height of it and I mean it was fantastic.

Met more people, got exposed to multiple millions of dollars worth

of contract opportunities through those partnerships.

So it helped me professionally but also personally built some you know lifelong relationships.

Was that a pretty cooperative collaborative group?

Because imagine I mean these members are effectively

competing with one another for the business right?

Yep.

Were things pretty cohesive or did it get a little bit ugly at times?

There were times where it got feisty.

One of the tenants of the whole association was working together

was hey youre a small business you cant do it all by yourself.

You need partners to be successful.

Lets take that to the next level.

I had three or four MSP's that I competed within Austin that I could call

and say hey Scott my guys are stacked I got a client with a problem.

No problem Stanley.

Well take care of it.

I mean it fostered that and the people that couldnt operate like that

just left or didnt become a part of it.

To me it was unfortunate because I think people missed out on a lot of opportunity,

being a little more open minded and theres so much business

it was never about hey Scotts, going to steal all my business.

It was get over yourself, lets work together, lets partner.

Preston, its really interesting you say that in my firm im a member

of a similar group called the ITA Information Technology alliance and its made up of

both publishers as well as consultants and resellers for various software products.

And this is effectively a group of competitors and sometimes its people that are

competing selling the same product, sometimes its people that are competing selling

different products that go head to head and yet its incredibly collaborative.

You get these competitors in a room and they're willing to share their good stuff

with one another for the sake of making the overall industry better.

And you said it, the people that are willing to collaborate,

they're the ones that stick around and that really make it great.

And the people that don't want to collaborate, that want to hoard and keep it all

to themselves, they don't make it, they don't last in that kind of a world.

And based on what I've seen, the people that are willing to accept exactly what you said,

there is so much out here, theres no way one of us can sell it and support it all.

Lets work together.

Those are the ones that tend to be far more successful than

the people that just want to keep it all to themselves.

100%.

We saw that time and time again.

Before I joined, Microsoft had commissioned a study looking at

partners who are part of an association like that, working together collaboratively.

I cant remember the exact numbers but it was like 40% more revenue

running through those partners than the partners who are standalone.

I'm going to do it on my own and it's not enough just to join something like that.

You have to have the mentality.

That's right.

Absolutely.

You've used an acronym, MSP managed service provider.

What does that mean for people who may not know?

It's funny you asked that because right now I would say

my electrician thinks he's a managed service provider because I'm on a recurring contract

with him and I pay a monthly fee to have access to him when I need something.

And it includes XYZ.

So I think the term has been overused a bit.

But when I joined my partners company back in the day, we were on contracts where your

computers break, its break, fix your computer breaks, you call us, we come fix it, you pay us

by the hour, the problem with that is you and I are incentivized by two different things.

The longer it takes, the more money I make, so on and so forth.

The managed service model was more you pay me a fixed fee, now its my problem.

The faster I get it fixed and the more uptime you have and the more efficient we are,

I make more money, youre happier, you keep running your business.

Now were all pulling for the same things.

So people love the idea of fixed fee, love the idea of we could do things remotely,

thats when the age of all the monitoring tools.

So we set up all you can eat packages remotely for companies

that their folks could call in 24/7 get help, but I dont have to roll a truck with a person.

If you want that, then you pay extra.

It was a great transition for our customers, for our business.

It helps us balance cash flow and run.

The numbers are easier to predict, but same for the customer,

they know what theyre going to pay every month for the most part, and theres less surprises.

So that shift in the IT space was, I think one of the best things that ever happened.

And this is mid to late, two thousands.

Yeah, I joined them in zero seven.

I actually worked for a company

in that time period that also had a managed service component to it.

And man, I feel like that was the heyday.

That was a really, really good space to be in at that time.

The market was hungry for it.

And to your point, it brought predictable costs to the end customer, it brought

predictable revenue to the provider, and going back to the competing incentives

in the time and materials world, this actually incentivized the MSP to

proactively ensure things are going well so that they don't have to put people

on a problem.

Yeah, that's a good point.

To me, that's driven a lot of the technology that we see today, because the more

I can figure out how to predict what's going to happen with your computer before it happens,

solve that problem without putting a body on it, so on and so forth.

I think that, yeah, absolutely changed the whole game.

And how long were you there?

Well, I mean that's my partner who, we started Cybertrust together.

So that started in zero seven.

We started the Cyber trust idea in 2012 when the healthcare space was going through,

the high tech act came out, which was basically, hey,

we're going to move all the paper medical records to electronic.

We need some new rules around how we're going to protect that, because HIPAA is a privacy

rule, HIPAA security rules, specifically, how do we enforce that and maintain it.

So we signed a contract with the Texas Rural Hospital association in 2012

to help their hospitals go through this meaningful use process.

So we weren't doing the conversion, but the federal government needed them to have

a security risk analysis and see how prepared they were for this migration ahead of time.

And if they passed and had all the criteria in place,

then the feds would help fund that transition.

So that was my move away from our traditional MSP model into looking at this new space.

But we kept it as just a division and sort of dipped our toe in for a few years,

mostly worked in the rural hospital market.

It wasnt until 2018 that we decided, hey, were going to go write our own software.

This is a standalone business.

This is something worthy of spinning out.

It was 2018 that we formed cyber Trust, got the paperwork together, started writing software.

We launched to market 2020.

Super awesome timing, by the way, about two months before the whole world shut down.

So we got really good at paying our own paychecks for 18 months and those kinds of things.

There's lots of those stories out there.

All right, when you left, was that an amicable parting when you left the other company,

or was that a difficult thing to separate from,

or do you guys still have an ongoing relationship today?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, so Chris, who ran that company, still runs that company.

Hes my partner and co founder here, so I still consult for them.

I mean, I was just on a call yesterday on a big sales opportunity, helping them close a deal,

Clay.

So it was a seamless transition and things are pretty intertwined then.

Yeah.

It just made sense though, too, because in the cyber world, I sell through MSP's and that was

a big part of the decision was, hey, we shouldn't be an MSP and compete with our channel.

So it really made sense to delineate that and separate out.

But behind the scenes, we're still pretty close and work closely

together and we can borrow resources if we need and contract

people back and forth so we don't have to duplicate certain tasks.

Theres a common thread here that I picked up on, and youve really

figured out how to navigate government spending, whether its state or the federal.

Whats the trick to that?

Well, I appreciate you saying that, but im not sure that weve figured it out.

Weve done okay with it.

Part of it is some of the partners we have,

ive got a partner in DC whos a healthcare attorney who has been in the space for 25 years.

He worked with some of my other employees in the past.

That guy is in the thick of it, right.

No pun intended.

And so he's sitting on working groups in DC and seeing what's coming down the pipe.

And so I invite him in and pay him to come speak at conferences with me

to help our customers understand what could be impacting them.

Well, that's, it goes both ways, right?

We learn from the customers, the customers learn from us.

We help keep them abreast of what's going to impact them.

But we know that's an opportunity for us as well.

And that's a big part of it is having people.

That's their world, and they keep us ahead of that.

Trey, and the origins you said you were selling to the state of Texas.

What you're doing today is taking advantage of federal dollars.

Is it very different going from state to federal, or is there a lot of overlap?

Trey theres a good amount of overlap, but to me,

states put a lot of emphasis on built here, designed here.

Im in Texas.

Why am I going to hire a company from Florida to come do this?

I want a Texas based company.

I want to put money into my economy.

So that was one of the bigger differences, even to the point of the fact that

I moved here from Chicago and back then had only been here for a few years.

My partners, who had grown up in Texas and were fifth generation,

you chose carefully who went to those meetings, depending on who you were talking to.

And so there were some big things like that that

at the federal level it levels some of that playing field.

It still depends who you know, but it's not the same.

There's bigger challenges, but the trade offs.

I feel like it's easier selling to the feds and maybe that's just

because I understand the program better and there's more opportunity.

But just in my experience, that's been an easier process for us.

Okay, let's go back and dig a little bit deeper into the origins of cyber trust.

So you saw a need in this space.

You had customers that had a need for this.

What was that aha moment that made you guys say, hey, we're going to spin up a dev team

and invest resources in building this tool out so it's really practical out in the field.

We're helping the rural hospitals go through this process.

One of the things about HIPAA that we learned quickly is they claim

that it was built flexible so that it could scale to big and small organizations.

The positive side of that is great for an enterprise organization

where you can take that and figure out what applies to you.

Smaller organization.

You dont have the resources to go determine all that.

Youre not going to pay attorneys to go through all that and so on.

So there's a lot of guessing.

It's a real hindrance to a smaller organization.

Absolutely.

The idea is good, but the implementation, I tell people all the time,

HIPAA says, protect your data, and they say, could you get a little more granular than that?

Yeah, do it really well.

I mean, that's just slightly exaggerated.

So as we met with these hospitals, it was like we're shooting for a moving target,

if there's a target that we can see at all.

We like working through associations, so we can do one to many,

and we can work with more people that have similar needs.

So being part of the Texas Rural Hospital association was fantastic.

Right.

Because there's now 162 hospitals.

Right.

And they trust that organization.

So we didn't have to start from scratch.

But as we went out in the field, I mean, we were, I was selling deals, working with corporate.

Chris was out in the field doing risk assessments.

Everybody waits till fourth quarter to do their assessment every year.

So we'd have a third quarter where we do ten or 15, and fourth quarter,

Chris would not go home, sleeping bag in the back of the truck,

out in rural Texas doing three or four audits a week and just nonstop.

It's like a CPA.

Absolutely.

From February to mid April, exactly the same.

What we saw was the fact that we created a protocol.

Back then it was Microsoft Word and Excel and going out

in the field and doing it face to face and being in the place.

And some of those back then it was, here's a hundred page report.

And that report goes on the shelf because the hospital is so busy

and doesn't have a lot of money or extra resources that if

they could address a couple of those things, it was a big deal.

So no fault of their own.

A lot of times that reports out on the shelf and gathers

dust until we came back next year to reassess.

Right.

So we just said, hey, hey, we need something affordable for these folks, right?

They can't write a big capex check for this process every year,

and they're required by law to go through this assessment.

The industry as a whole has.

I mean, what the law says is you have to do an assessment anytime there's a significant

change to your infrastructure, to your business, but on a regular basis.

The industry norm is once a year at least.

Doesn't say that specifically in the law, but if you sit with an auditor,

you'd have a hard time convincing them that's not appropriate.

So, I mean, thats the thing.

HIPAA has been out for two decades, more than two decades.

And if you talk to the federal government today, I just read a report a couple weeks ago,

80 85% of healthcare fails to meet the minimum standard.

Preston, youre kidding me.

Where are the gaps?

The biggest one over the years, the office of Civil Rights is in charge of this,

keeps beating the drum.

The biggest one that shows up the most often is people.

I cant tell the exact number.

There are millions of businesses in the healthcare space who'd never had a risk assessment.

That's step one, right?

You can't build a risk program and a security program and a privacy

program if you don't understand where your risks are, right?

So that's number one.

The key components, right, is doing assessment.

Build a plan to remediate the deficiencies, track progress against the plan, train your staff,

have documented paper policies and procedures, not paper,

but documented written policies and procedures for all these areas.

So those are kind of the five key components.

Back in the day, they had talked like, this was when we got started.

65 70% of healthcare had never done a risk assessment.

They were like, folks, just, let's start with that.

But the problem was, most of the time it was a very manual process.

It wasn't well documented what the protocol was.

So then the office of Civil Rights came out with a protocol, fairly complicated.

I got guys with phds who are like,

you know, are we going to do all of that in a small practice with one doc and five people?

So we looked at it as I'm going to quote a friend, let's crawl, walk, run.

We don't need to fix all these things instantly.

Government's not even asking for that, right?

We just need to educate people, need to take a look at where our risks are.

We need to put a plan together and get working on it.

That's it.

So initially, the whole idea of the tool was, I want something where I can interact

with people and help them walk down this path instead of just handing them something.

I want something where they can see it color coded.

So I glance at a dashboard and I see red, green, yellow.

I know where I need to focus my time, and I need something that

documents all their due diligence because everybody's doing something

moving that direction, but if it's not written down, it doesn't exist.

So, I mean, that was sort of the start for us, was simple, inexpensive.

Let's walk this journey together and take one bite at a time

as we go forward and that's been our mantra since day one.

And just trying to get a better understanding of what all this assessment entails is that,

hey, we're checking to make sure that your firewall is protected.

We're looking at user access permissions, and who can get

into what systems and at what level they can get into them.

Can you print documents from this system and not like,

is that the kind of stuff that you're getting into?

Not all the way that deep initially.

And that's part of the thing.

I kid all my cybersecurity friends that cybersecurity people come in and talk to you and say,

hey, there's this crack in the foundation airhouse in the back corner

behind that bush that sometime in the next 50 years might be a problem.

So we got to put this solution in to prevent that from happening.

Meanwhile, the front door is unlocked and the house is on fire.

So most of these people, doors unlocked, windows are open, houses on fire.

So we're looking at the big things.

It's like we're going to run a scan of your facility,

internal and external, that looks for vulnerabilities.

People talk about pen testing.

That's a more advanced thing.

That's way more expensive.

That's down the road.

But we're starting simple.

That hits a government database, an industry database,

that has all these known vulnerabilities.

So now I've got a roadmap that I can look at and say, hey, firewall's misconfigured.

If we close that down, that takes a lot of risk off, hey, that laptop.

If someone gets in through the firewall,

that laptop could be configured a little better to reduce your risk further.

So we prioritize all that.

So everything's rated pants on fire extreme.

Deal with this right this second to high risk, to medium risk, to low risk, to,

hey, this is something to watch, but we don't have to do anything about it now.

And then we validate that, right?

So we walk through a facility.

We do that virtually now, thank goodness, which helps us scale, which is a.

We're taking advantage of the earlier thing we talked about.

So we want to look at things like physical security.

Like, I'm walking through a doctor's office, and I'm standing, talking with someone,

and there's patient data on that screen, and there's no one sitting at that desk.

That's a problem.

Gotta have auto log off or log off when you walk away from.

We're looking at all those different layers to give them kind of an overall.

Here's where the main pain points are for you that we need to address.

We do things like, we test their team on phishing.

We send them a phishing email, see how people respond to that.

We work with them to get around their defenses because we want

to test the social aspect of that, not the technology.

We test that separately so we look at the humans.

Do you have a training program in place?

I need to see documentation of it.

Do you have contracts that meet the federal requirement

with all your vendors who have access to your medical records?

Because that's a whole nother.

You're responsible for all those people as well.

So we look at all of those things and then present all that in a,

here's your infrastructure, here's your problems, here's your people,

here's your problems, here's your policies and procedures, if you have any,

which is a whole, we could have a whole conversation about that.

We give them templates for all of those because, you know, it's,

here's where you are, here's where you need to get to.

Let's help you take those next steps.

You mentioned the phishing tests.

Do your customers ever get pushback from their people on those phishing tests?

All the time.

I asked that because three, four years ago,

I decided to use one of these services to test my people and see how well they would respond.

And thankfully, people were smart.

But I worked with a bunch of techies and several of them figured out very,

very quickly that this was intentional revolt is too strong of a word.

But it really got people upset that we were doing this, that you dont trust us,

and its not that we dont trust you, we just need to make sure that everybody really knows.

And the only way to really know if you know, is to test you.

And is that something that your buyer ends up pushing back

on you and saying, no, we dont want to do this.

Or in some cases, yeah, I mean, we've had.

My favorite of all was funny.

We impersonated the IR's.

And so I wind up on a phone call with the IR's, with the CIO of a hospital, with the head

of an association, me and my security engineer answering for, because one of the hospital

employees pulled this up and was like, hey, that looks legit, but something's wrong about it.

So she called into the IR's hotline, reported you.

Reported us.

The IR's hotline then went and opened a ticket and investigated it,

tracked the IP addresses back.

You've got the feds showing up at your door.

Totally, I mean, literally it was like hey we understand what you're trying to do,

it's a good concept, you can't impersonate the IR's.

My thing was with all due respect the hackers don't follow the same rules

and what we're trying to do is educate people on how to not be the next victim.

I totally understand that Mister Steinle, but technically

you cannot impersonate the IR's, you cant use any of that stuff.

I need you to promise me that youre never going to do this again,

that youre going to get rid of all of this yada yada yada.

Well then im calling my customers and saying hey sorry,

were going to pull back that last test and several of them its interesting,

some were like oh yeah that wasnt fair at all, that was totally too close to home.

Other ones were like dont pull that back, you already sent it out.

All my people have already responded to it.

No.

So it was interesting to see the reactions and I had one guy whos

one of my toughest customers, hes always challenging us and pushing us and so on.

I wrote to him, he wrote back and was feisty.

Dude I dont have time to send out three more things to my people.

We did the test, leave it alone.

So I told him what happened and he called me and he was like that's the best thing I've heard

in a long time.

He's like if you guys are getting in trouble with the IR's,

you're doing your job, you did it right.

And he was like I'm impressed.

I mean that's like the first time I got a attaboy from him.

I was like all right, we got to go get in trouble more often,

you know, so it's, it's funny what sets people off, right?

Cause some, it's like okay, I did the test, could you leave me alone and not send me anymore?

Other people are like hey that's not fair, you set us up, you're gonna get us in trouble.

And it's like we're not, this is education guys, we're not trying to get you in trouble.

So it's interesting the mindset and so many different ones that we get feedback on.

Yeah you got a slap on the wrist from the IR's.

I can only imagine if you had been bank of America or chase or somebody like that,

that would have probably really struck some Ireland.

Yeah and we've had our data center shut us down a couple of times because somebody complained

to them because the IP address of where it was coming from was inside the data center.

When we were developing the product, one of the pages we created,

the fake pages we created, was from, I think it was Amex.

And Amex was scanning the web, saw something about that, reached out to the authorities.

Then I got all these blacklisting, crazy legal emails from the data center.

They shut down our whole thing.

Like our entire production environment, they were shutting down.

Unfortunately, we caught it in time.

So there's people out there looking freaking out about it.

And one of the biggest challenges for us today is Microsoft and Google

and all the email providers are working so hard to not let those through.

It's hard for us to test the social aspect of it because we have to just jump through

hoops every month to be able to get the emails through, just see how people respond.

I'm actually encouraged when you talked about Amex and how they flagged it, I know that's

frustrating for you because you need to test that social aspect for your customer.

But as a consumer, knowing that they're actively proactively finding those things,

that's a good thing for the rest of us.

Yeah, I have to take off my business owner hat and put on my consumer hat

every once in a while and appreciate and respect those kinds of things.

So, yeah, that was a good one.

Yeah.

All right.

Carving the company off and spinning it out into its own entity, that was a big decision.

Talk to me about the conversations that led up to that.

I think you kind of alluded to some of it earlier.

You didn't want to compete with your partners, but I guess.

Walk me through.

Was that something you guys decided pretty quickly to do or was that a.

We've been talking about this for years, and I think now's time.

Yeah, it was more of the latter that we've been looking at.

Do we focus on this?

Where do we go going forward?

What's the right way to do it?

So been lots of conversations, Chris.

It's funny, Chris has been an entrepreneur for years

and built and bought and sold multiple companies.

And he was president of EO entrepreneurs organization.

So it's in his blood.

I was more corporate guy, smaller businesses, but never the guy running it.

And he said, I mean, literally, he said,

I think it's time for you to have what he calls an entrepreneurial seizure.

And he said, you need to go run this one.

It'll be a good challenge for you.

So he helps put the money in to get it started.

And he's a unique unicorn to me where he's a really amazing businessman,

but he's also a tech guy, so he could build your data center and sell it to you.

And most people could do one or the other.

So having him mentor me and give me the freedom to, like, there was one year where

economy was rough, and we geared up too fast because COVID stuff, we started hiring.

We were trying to raise money.

The money didn't come in as fast as the employees did.

Had to reset after a bit, which was never fun.

You know, I went to him and said, dude, you've done this for years.

I'm pretty sure you saw that coming.

And he said, yeah, it sucks to be in that position, doesn't it?

And I said, yeah, so why didn't you tell me?

He's like, because now you'll do it differently going forward, you know?

So as frustrated as I was with him, I knew that was,

you know, like, every time I do hiring and make decisions about finances and so on,

now I remember that, and it's helped immensely as we go forward.

So it's been a process.

And being part of the other company,

we didn't have to jump off the cliff instantly either, which was nice.

So we could go halftime into this to start bring up a website

and gradually work our way into it, which was unbelievably helpful.

And part of the way we survived COVID as a startup at the beginning

of that was being part of a bigger organization with more resources

and being able to work both sides of that line for a little bit.

Before that conversation with your.

Your co founder about, hey, I think it's time.

Entrepreneurial seizure.

Is that what he called it?

Yeah.

Before he encouraged you down that path,

was this something that you had considered previously, or was this kind of out of left field?

And, I mean, I imagined.

Cause he and I talked about for years that we were gonna build some things together,

but I was fairly comfortable him being the front man because it was in his blood.

And he and I balance each other pretty well.

Significantly more mellow, and he's more type a, maybe double or aaa, depending on the day.

And he's the guy that I can take a Saturday and relax a little bit, and he gets

bored and goes and welds a new fence in his yard or learns how to do some new skill.

And he plays professional tennis, you know, as a coach.

And so, you know, over the years, it's like, hey,

should I go get this other skill or should I take this training class or so on?

No, you do.

You're really good at this.

I'm really good at this, we've balanced each other well, kind of figured out the rhythms of

that, and to me, that is really unique, and it's been really amazingly helpful because I, I

didn't ever imagined having to go start this company and be an entrepreneur wasn't, I don't

think, was in my DNA, but watching him do it and being given the opportunity sort of in this

somewhat protected environment with a guy who's been down that path a bunch of times was an

amazing, is still, you know, an amazing opportunity that made it significantly more

possible.

And now I, now I get it, you know, and I was at Baylor recently.

I helped coach in the new venture competition.

The guy did a presentation, and he said, here's how most people sleep,

you know, and there's sheep going over the guy's head, and here's how entrepreneurs sleep.

And the list is cranking through your head,

and your eyes are bloodshot and you're staring at the ceiling.

And, I mean, I used to sleep like a baby, and now a couple of nights a week, I wake up

at two in the morning thinking of stuff that I didn't get done, that has to get done.

And if I don't get out of bed and write it down and set alarms

for the next day, I can't go back to sleep.

Something you just said there totally, totally hits home for me.

I have a hard time shutting things down mentally.

And what you just talked about, how entrepreneurs sleep, the number of nights that

it doesn't happen so much in the middle of the night, although from time to time, it does.

When I'm trying to go to sleep, I'm thinking about a million different things.

I'm replaying my day.

I'm thinking about what's, you know, tomorrow, what's next week,

what's next month, juggling all these different things.

But if I will pause and write it down and get it out of my head, I can move on.

There's something that happens in my brain.

Once I've got it out of my head, I can move on.

And I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one.

Yeah.

I mean, I figured it out the hard way after a couple of sleepless nights,

but once I did that, it was so freeing, right?

Because I, I'd write down one thing or type it in my phone or whatever,

lay back down, think of another thing.

So finally, one night, out of frustration, just got up out of bed,

sat down with a notebook and just started doing it.

Got it all out.

Sat there for a half hour or so.

And went back and fell right to sleep.

Done.

It was so free, and it was unbelievable.

But until, you know, until kind of went through that process.

Yeah, it's interesting.

One of the things I found, I'll sit down and I'm.

I'm in a pretty good rhythm right now where if I'm not traveling,

I take half a day a week out of the office.

I've got this coffee shop.

That's my secret layer, although everybody in the office seems to know where it is.

And I'll go for half a day.

And I start off each of those sessions just writing line after line

after line after line in my notebook about all these things I have to do,

whether it's something massive or whether it's something tiny.

And I get to the end of that list, I'm like, oh, my gosh, how am I going to get this done?

Well, then I go and I review the prior week stuff,

and I scratch that off, scratch that off, scratch that off.

And I'm amazed at how much of it just kind of gets taken care of along the way and.

Or, hey, a week later, two weeks later, a month later, like, well, I haven't got that done,

and nothing's falling apart yet, so I guess it really wasn't that big of a deal.

But the freedom you get just from putting it on paper, putting in your computer,

and gives you the ability to move on and be productive.

Yeah.

I mean, no matter how technology advances,

there's still something about writing in a notebook.

So I have, like, ten of these black notebooks at my house,

and when I finish one, it goes on the bottom, and then I pull out a fresh one,

and I've gotten to the point where there's so many things stuck up here.

I do the one overall list with everything, and I run three columns down the page,

and these are the urgent immediates on the left side.

The center is next here, the right is longer term.

But then I figured out that I start taking notes over that page as I'm doing

things and adding more things so that I can't read it, and I have to rewrite it.

So I started doing a write that out.

Then each day I take kind of my top ten off of that and write those on a separate list.

Like, I got to get these done in these next 8 hours, 10 hours, 12 hours,

and then I'll go back and cross them off the list and maybe rewrite it down to where?

Then I'm setting alarms in my phone for the two or three things

that if they don't happen at a certain time on this day.

Otherwise, it's just, you know, I can't keep track of it all.

So I'm using tech to do that, but at the same time, I can't get completely off the old school.

There's something to me freeing about just actually writing it all down.

Is that a system you developed on your own or is that something you read about in the book?

This one specifically, I've just sort of been doing.

I don't know when, I couldn't tell you when I exactly started it,

but I've just gotten in a rhythm over the last year that I may have read it.

That's what inspired me.

I don't remember specifically, but just kind of finding what works for you.

Like, my wife is the most organized person I ever met

in my life and way busier than I am and juggles all of that.

I mean, she's amazing, but she has her own system.

And at times I've said, hey, why don't you do such and such?

And she's like, nope, back off.

Works for me.

It's my thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think you kind of have to just figure out what works and theres no right or wrong answer.

For a long time, I really tried to avoid paper as much as possible.

And several years back, totally with you, there was something

about physically writing pen to paper, pen scratching on the paper.

Theres just something about it.

And you talked about, when you finish one notebook, get another one, throw it on the stack.

Im in the awkward spot right now where I just finished a notebook and I started a new one.

But I have to keep carrying my old one with me for a little bit to be able to refer back.

And yeah, I'm usually carrying two because you got to keep like a rolling 30 days or whatever.

Right.

First world problems.

But having, having something extra in the bag is not always fun.

All right.

You got that push from your co founder.

Were you nervous?

Were you apprehensive?

What did your wife have to say about this then versus now?

Yeah, yeah.

At the moment, I mean, she's more conservative than I am.

She's our CFO.

And so the idea of taking that on was it was exciting.

More exciting to me, more nervous to her.

It's, I mean, you're living it.

It's ask me six months from now and I may give you a completely,

well, ask me next week and I'll give you a different answer.

She's been unbelievably gracious and forgiving and,

you know, and stuck with me through all this.

And having a tenured professor who you're married to is nice when you run into a startup.

But for me, it was a bit of nervousness.

But knowing that Chris was, had been through this so many times and knew what he was doing

and teaches people to do that took a lot of that anxiety away.

But still, at the end of the day, hes trusting me to go take this and run with it.

Hes going and doing something different.

And so there was a lot there of just accountability and wanting to do well.

So part of what I did and have continued to do is I remember there

was a woman whos attorney in Dallas in healthcare,

and she worked for the Office of Civil Rights and did have a breach investigation.

Couldn't be anybody more perfect for our space.

And I heard her speak at an event, and I was like, man, I need to pick her brain.

So I went up afterwards and I said, what would it take to, for you to be on my advisory board?

And she said, well, I can't right now.

I've got a conflict of interest, but call me on this day when that ends.

So I did.

We had coffee, and she agreed.

And so I have right now eight people on my advisory board who are former chief marketing

officer Lucent, who's retired, and, as he says, figured out he wasn't a scratch golfer.

So he went back to work consulting with people like me.

And this woman, who's a brilliant attorney, knows everything that's going on in our space.

Some big health system executives who said, hey, I like what you're doing.

I'd like to help you do that.

So those folks we meet every month and talk through the numbers and new

business we're pursuing and companies we're looking at acquiring.

My chair always says that he's my adult supervision and make sure I'm running the course.

But there are people who are honest with me, call me out on stuff, challenge me.

They've all built successful businesses, so they know what it takes.

And so that's been huge, and I think it applies more pressure on me to do well,

but at the same time, kind of takes the gas out of the anxiety because

I know I can go to any of them and they'll be honest with me and help me make big decisions.

So what were the things that you were nervous about, worried about?

Like, were there, were there any specific things,

or was it just this general, like, hey, I recognize this is a risk.

I mean, because we had started doing a lot of this earlier as part of the original company.

I can't think of any specific thing that stands out.

I mean, it was more just in general.

We're taking some of the safety net off.

We're going spinning out.

We're going to go hire some people.

We got to go make this thing fly and pay our salaries and so on.

So, yeah, I think I'd say more general.

The level of responsibility changed a lot.

Yep.

All right.

You mentioned part of the driver was to not compete with the partners that you had.

How has your go to market changed since you guys carved off?

Is it dramatically different or does it look pretty similar to how it did before?

Similar.

I would say weve changed our definition of partner where originally to me,

partner was, hey, were going to go find msps that are in the healthcare space

that dont do compliance, that would just add on and they can resell our product.

We have some of those, some of our best partners, but we also said,

hey, the Texas Rural Hospital association, and that's not really their name.

It's Texas organization of rural and community hospitals.

To be fair, they are a partner and they white label our solution.

And it's, you know, they sell it to their hospitals.

That's a partner.

Just different models.

So they're almost like a consortium.

Yep.

You know, and then we've got a group in Baltimore that works with senior living

homes, and they have 400 operators, and they sought and invited us to be part

of their kind of GPO group purchasing that they built because they saw the need

for the members and wanted to negotiate some economies of scale for the

members.

So we're co selling inside that network together.

Those are ones that are exciting for me.

I'm flying next week into another state to sit down with their hospital association because

I met the CEO at one of these other groups, and he said, can we do this in our state?

So we've done more of that, which was our original found.

Where the idea came from was our original work in Texas.

So we've kind of expanded out, worked with other groups,

but now we're really more focused back where we started.

And that's where I think is the sweet spot because

to keep the price point where it is, we really need to sell one to many.

And I can't go start from scratch building a trusted relationship

and every one of those unless I do it together with them.

So this way, most of these are nonprofits, so they get some investment dollars from us

by being our partner and working together in this.

So it helps drive their programs,

it helps rural hospitals and healthcare organizations that are struggling to make ends meet,

do it more economically and pour some resources back into them.

So I love the synergy of those relationships you touched on.

COVID the call from the IR's.

What are some other surprises that you had?

There's so many just picking a particular thing.

One of the big ones for me was how I feel like I'm fairly

empathetic with people and can read people fairly well.

And we touched on this earlier, but people who I watch in industry who are amazing talents,

and then you put them in a different environment

that's outside their comfort zone, if you will, or whatever the right word is.

And I figured out how working in a startup and wearing six or seven different

hats and being able to mind shift a little bit and live lean and some of

those things, it's been surprising to me how you really have to be wired a

certain way to work in this environment and that's not good or bad or

anything.

I mean, some of these folks are killing it where they are,

but it just wasn't the right fit for them.

And that's been an interesting learning experience for me as a leader,

kind of figuring that out the hard way and, you know, trying to like, you know,

at first you get frustrated like, what's wrong with this person?

Right?

And then it's like, well, wait a minute, I'm the leader.

What's wrong with me?

And then you start digging into it.

Its like, well, this isnt a good fit for both of us.

Trey, what you said there, whats wrong with me?

I think that is such an important question that not just business owners,

not just entrepreneurs like everybody should be asking themselves that same question.

Im part of a group called convene and its similar to vistage.

Its a business owner peer group for faith based business owners.

And once a month, at least one person in our group has

to present something they call an opportunity challenge.

And they come to the group with this either opportunity they're trying to figure out how

to maximize or a challenge they're trying to figure out how to navigate their way through.

And there's a format to how you're supposed to present this to the group.

And man, the most convicting question in the format is what role have I played in this?

And man, it hits hard.

Like, that's my least favorite part.

When it's my turn to go talk.

That's my least favorite part of having to think through that and then to verbalize it to,

to my team, your peers and your team.

And, yeah, but it's, it's such an important,

it's such an important thing, and it keeps you on your toes.

And if you're proactively asking yourself that more often,

I think you'll be better off as a result.

Yeah.

I honestly think, as we go forward on this, if you're not willing to go there,

because, I mean, I had some people,

I respect the heck out of that in the early days held that mirror up for me.

And it's like anytime now that I'm like, what the, what's wrong with this client?

What's wrong with this partner?

What's wrong with this employee?

Now, I'm trained my brain to stop and say, hold on a second.

Let's start here first, and then we'll look externally.

And it's so counter to society and to industry

and to everything going on in the world right now.

But I think, I don't know how you can be successful if you're

not willing to be transparent and go through that process.

Because why would people keep working for you and people want to continue

doing business together with you if you're not willing to look there first?

Because it's easy to go figure out what everybody else is doing wrong.

Everybody's good at that.

People don't want to be held accountable by people that won't hold themselves accountable.

That's so true.

Yeah.

What's something that hasn't worked out quite like you hoped or

what's been the biggest frustration, biggest challenge in this journey?

Again, I may come back and rethink my answer later, but to me,

when we saw the opportunity and the problem, if you will, it's a no brainer.

It's required by law, this assessment, and going through the due diligence,

we've simplified the process.

We're doing it efficiently, lower cost, all those things.

You're an entrepreneur in your head, it's like, why would everybody not buy for me?

And going through industry, I mean, as you learn the challenges that healthcare

organizations are facing and all the competing priorities, for a long time, it was

like I spent every day educating people on why this matters and why it matters,

doing it with us and how we can help and so on, that's been sort of mind blowing

for me, that it wasn't just simple to go talk to people and they wanted to buy

something.

So we've had to really take a step back and say, we need to do more education.

We need to help people understand why this is important,

how we can help them do this and so on.

And that's taken longer than I expected.

But we're building deeper relationships with people who stick around.

So our churn is pretty low.

People like our team, like our approach to it.

But for a long time it was just like, what are we doing?

You know, what are we doing wrong?

We're missing something here.

And it's just, you kind of had to get out there

and do it and get in the weeds and figure it out.

And I'd say that's one of the bigger ones that I didn't expect.

When we got started, I got to ask a techie question here.

You started writing the software, I think you said 2012.

No, we were doing it manually back then.

We really started the software in 18.

1718.

Got it.

I assume that today this is a cloud app.

It runs in a browser.

You guys didn't have to go through a transition

of taking a desktop application and moving it to the cloud.

No.

Yeah, we started straight cloud native.

It's interesting, we were doing all the manual process

and writing our own protocol because it didn't really exist.

And we got introduced to a company that was, they were approaching it more like, there's

a free app on the federal government website that you can go through your own process.

Now, to be fair, I have guys with all kinds of certifications who've tried

to go through that process and are like, that's a lot.

So this team we met, they were taking that tool and putting a new UI on it,

making it a little easier to interact with.

We were taking the questions and just breaking them down into human terms

and trying to simply met up with those guys, figured out, hey, you're good with software,

you're good with UI, you're good with interacting with users.

And they said, yeah, and you guys have figured out

the protocol and did all the field work and so on.

And so that really helped accelerate there.

I mean, we bought the company, we wound up shelving their software and starting from scratch,

but using what we learned in the field, what his experience had been over years

of being a programmer and doing Ui for all different environments.

And I feel like we've got the perfect fit now.

This was an acqui hire.

Yes, exactly.

You got it.

All right.

How much different does your day to day look today than it did when you first started?

Or is it pretty much the same?

I think the biggest busyness is similar,

but the focus and the use of that time is very different.

Like, early on it was.

It felt like my hair was on fire.

And I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing,

continuing to do some of the things that we had been doing,

but with an eye towards the future, like, how do we take this to the next level and so on.

Now we have.

I feel like I have a better handle on what's our plan for the future

and the individual pieces that have to get done to get us there.

We've got a good team and we meet regularly and we've got some good rhythms going.

We're still figuring out funding and some of the structure and those things,

but I felt more freedom to let go of some things that back then I got distracted by.

So there's things on my list, to your point, that they sit there for a couple of days,

world didn't burn down,

and I'm okay either handing that off to somebody or realizing it wasn't that important.

So there's some.

I don't know what you'd call that, but just kind of some inherent

understanding of what's really important and what really drives

us towards the mission versus what is shiny and bright and.

Sounds interesting that I'm getting sucked into less of those things now.

If you ask my leadership team, they might not agree with you, but I can see the difference.

You mentioned learning to let go and hand things off to people.

Is that something that's hard for you?

I didn't think so, but I'm realizing, yes.

I mean, especially working for a company where somebody else is.

The buck stops here versus with this, it's like if I don't do it, it's not getting done.

Now, some of my team will say we'll take care of it,

but everybody's strapped and working lots of hours and so on.

So it's not that I don't trust them, but some of it's like,

I can't ask so and so to do one more thing.

I'll just take care of it, you know, or, hey,

man, this is going to be killer and take forever and over the weekend and all that stuff and.

But I'll, you know, I'll just do it so I don't have to ask somebody else to do it.

So.

Yeah, I mean, five years ago, I would not have said yes to that,

but I'm learning that it's harder than I thought.

It's interesting, and I never actually considered this before.

I have a really hard time letting go, and I've talked on a lot of episodes about that.

And like you, it was a transition over time.

And I won't even go into all the stories about not wanting to let go of things.

But you talked about the difference in the mentality when you work

for someone else versus when you are the one ultimately responsible.

I had never put that together before, but yeah, that's a total,

total mind shift that I think exacerbates the problem.

If you are the kind of person that doesn't want to delegate and let you know,

trust somebody else or entrust somebody else to help you accomplish this thing.

Yeah, and I figured that out really slowly, the hard way,

gradually over time, and just finally starting to recognize some of these things.

What are the parts of the job that you enjoy the most that you get so much satisfaction out of

hopping on plane, in the car and going and meeting with clients and partners.

To me, paperwork, contracts, the day to day running of the business is a necessary evil.

You know, like next week, hopping on a plane Tuesday,

flying to Philly, meeting with a potential acquisition, startup company, pre revenue.

Unbelievable idea that I met at the new venture competition.

I would do that 365 days a year because young people, brilliant, inspired by them.

Thank God they didn't ask to look at my resume before they agreed to let me coach them.

But I mean, it's things like that that is exciting because I see

what that could become and I want to be part of it.

We're driving to meet with the hospital association and talk about a joint venture.

Do that all day long.

Those are the things that I love strategically, putting things together,

meeting new partners, meeting new clients,

putting big deals together, figuring out how to help them and grow our business.

It's the relationships that I said before.

What are the one or two things that you wish you just didn't have to do?

I love our attorney, but I could deal with that legal and I still have way too much of me

in the accounting and accounting and I are not friends and I mean, I have had to become.

That's been one of the challenges that I might

replace my answer on some other things you asked me about.

And we've got a great bookkeeper who manages a lot of that for me.

But there's so many tentacles to accounting and legal that make the things

that I love to do harder that those are the things that like, I want

somebody really good at that that just handles it and tells me where to not

step as opposed to right now I'm still way too much in the middle of both

of those.

And that feels like, you know, somebody just locked one

of my feet to the floor trying to go run and do the cool things.

So, man, I think im going to agree with you on both of those things.

Weve spent way too much time and way too much money on attorneys over the last two years.

And, man, I wish I could get all that back.

In fact, yesterday I actually had a call with the CFO of prospective customer

buyers, and the call was because weve had to go back and forth with their legal so

many times, I reached out and just said, hey, can you and I have a conversation

without the lawyers and let's see if reasonable people can work through some of

this stuff.

And, man, he was the greatest guy.

He's the kind of customer that I want to have.

I told him, man, I wish we could go back to the good old days when it was

a handshake and trust based on a good reputation that you did these deals.

And unfortunately, that's not the world we live in today.

We have to go through this process.

And he said, man, I'm right there with you.

And anyway, the attorneys and accountants messed things up.

They're very helpful, don't get me wrong.

But, I mean, Chris will say, my partner, he said, I bought tons of companies

over the years, and more often than not, the ones where it was on the back

of a napkin, over a meal or a drink went super well because we trusted each

other and we connected and made it happen, versus the ones that started out

with attorneys across the table, and we were in the background and they

were.

He said, there's so many opportunities to disconnect culture wise between

that versus just sitting down face to face and getting it worked out.

Yeah, I'd much rather hammer out a deal

over drinks and a meal than hashing it out with the attorneys.

Yep.

All right.

What would you go back and do different, knowing what you know today?

This is my first time raising capital, and Chris as well, which is interesting,

I think he borrowed $400 from his dad when he started his first company,

and so he's always bootstrapped things.

I've been in organizations that were funded, and I've learned a ton about that,

probably more what not to do than what to do.

So if I did that over again, right now we're working with some family offices,

and I love the strategic nature of that.

That follows different rules than VC's and angels and so on.

And I wish I had discovered that sooner and I would have put more time into that

type of relationship, because what we're looking to do now through those partnerships

is what gets me up in the morning versus the drudgery of the typical fundraising process.

So if I had to pick one thing, that would be it, for sure,

because it's just different set of rules and more people and less formulas, if you will.

Yeah, it's been game changing for us.

Yeah.

All right.

You've touched on mentorship a couple of different times.

Your co founder, your business partner, sounds like he's been

very important part of your entrepreneurial journey.

You talked about in some of your early jobs, early in your career that there were

people you're still friends with today and that kind of helped bring you up.

But you also mentioned that you're now mentoring other entrepreneurs.

Is there any counsel, any advice that you find yourself consistently giving

to all of the different people that you're working with?

One that jumps to mind is that advisory board, because I talked to tons of

entrepreneurs who were like, hey, what's this about the advisory board?

I said, well, I just figured out really quickly that I

couldn't do this on my own or I wasn't going to do it well.

And I saw the model of some of these mentors in the past, and I just got bold about,

I hear somebody speak, go up and talk to them and ask them to come be on my board.

And I met a woman at Microsoft conference.

It was like her first ever Microsoft conference, my 13th.

She'd been to all the healthcare conferences.

I hadn't been to any yet.

And we sat down and got talking and I was like, man,

we need to do business together, you know?

And she was like, oh, my gosh, I'd love to be part of your board and do that.

You know?

And it was total, it was exciting for her, it was exciting for me.

We'd learn from each other.

And it was one of those where I think I was assigned to be her,

you know, first time attendee mentor in the Microsoft ecosystem.

And so when I talk to entrepreneurs, I'm like,

do you see people out there doing the kind of things that you want to do

or acting the way that you want to act or leading the way you want to lead?

Go talk to them.

And it's amazing how these good leaders who've decided to go launch a business

and take that leap where that's like, huh, I never really thought about that.

And so I probably talk about that more than anything else because,

I mean, I have access to unbelievable brainpower that everybody

on my board is way smarter than I am and way more experienced than I am.

And so surrounding myself with those people is the only way that we've gotten to where we are.

I love that.

What's next?

We are putting some lighter fluid on this.

We love the model.

We've got people that love the model and love what we're doing and where we're going with it.

We're taking some investment, doing some joint venture partnerships to do more of this,

but make it more integrated into the healthcare system.

So, like, instead of, what do you do?

Styling by cell, HIPAA compliance.

It's more, hey, everything in a hospital needs to be grounded in security and privacy.

So how do we fit that into the ecosystem without making it a standalone decision that you have

to make?

So we're looking at things like, hey, register for your doctor's office

appointment or your hospital at the hospital, and it gives you a barcode.

When you get to the hospital, you scan it, they know who you are,

and I can track you through the hospital and help you find your appointment.

But I'm also watching what you're doing and making

sure you don't go places you're not supposed to.

And that's giving me identity and access management real time

that I'm monitoring through the facility that plays into my security and privacy.

So it's more building an ecosystem of solutions that help the patient

have a good experience without realizing that we're protecting them.

At the same time, helping the hospital have a good experience that's protecting their revenue,

their patients, their integrity,

their bottom line, and fit all that into something that is a no brainer.

We're working with cyber insurance companies to partner, to package that.

So it's really building an ecosystem that we're a part

of as opposed to coming in with just a point solution.

Is there anything we haven't talked about that you wanted to share?

Nothing I can think of.

This has been great.

Yeah.

But I don't have any other burning ideas on my, on my mind.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much for being a guest and sharing your story.

My pleasure.

Enjoyed it.

That was Randy Steinle, co founder and CEO of Cybertrust alliance.

To learn more, visit cybertrustalliance.com.

If you or a founder you know would like to be a guest

on in the thick of it, email us at introstory us.