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Would you like to work with better clients, make more money, and build a business that gives you true freedom?
Have you struggled with the loneliness that comes with working long hours and solving the dozens of complex problems you face as an entrepreneur?
Do you ever feel like the most valuable business secrets are shared behind closed doors—where only insiders have access?
Welcome to The Inside BS Show—your daily invitation to step behind the velvet rope and into the room where real business leaders talk strategy, success, and scale.
These are your people. They've been where you are, and they've gone where you want to go. But most importantly, they feel your pain and can help it go away.
If you're an entrepreneur, CEO of a private company, or leader of a professional firm, this show is your secret weapon.
On each show we break down the business growth strategies that insiders use to win—revenue generation, building influence, succession planning, hiring top talent, navigating legal minefields, and crafting an exit strategy that maximizes value.
But this isn’t just a podcast—it’s a community. We don’t just talk at you; we bring you into the conversation.
Your host, Dave Lorenzo (The Godfather of Growth), gives you an exclusive front-row seat to the insights, strategies, and behind-the-scenes conversations that drive business success.
A new episode drops each Wednesday at 6 AM.
Want to connect with Dave? Call (305) 692-5531.
What are you waiting for? Join us ON THE INSIDE.
What happens if you have a data breach? You know what happens? It's over. So the best thing for you to do is to secure your data the best way possible. And to do that, you need to know what we're gonna share with you on this edition of the Inside B.S. Show.
Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo, I'm the godfather of growth and I'm here with my partner, Nikki G. Nicola, how are you this afternoon? Hi Dave, I am doing great, how are you? I'm fantastic, thank you. So Nicola, you talk to a lot of clients and a lot of clients who have data in their business and I know this keeps them up at night. What happens if somebody has a data breach and they didn't do what they were supposed to do? What are the legal implications of that? Sure, so the legal risks can be significant when you have a data breach.
So I'm setting aside right now for purposes of this discussion, all the business risks because certainly there are costs to your business to correct it, there are reputational concerns you need to be thinking about when it happens. But aside from all of that, you also may have a massive liability exposure that you need to be thinking about and thinking about immediately. Oftentimes what we see when there is a massive data breach is a lawsuit that follows it in the civil space and oftentimes it's a class action.
So put simply, a class action is a lawsuit brought by one or more individuals as plaintiffs on behalf of a class or a group of similarly situated individuals who share a similar harm that occurred to them as a result of the defendant's conduct. So in these particular instances, what we will see is data was exposed for a massive group of consumers and so a lawsuit is brought on their behalf to recover those monies for what they were damaged. The lawsuit settlements that we have seen come out of some of these massive data breaches are immense.
We're talking anywhere from $150 million in settlement monies to upwards of 700 million. Some of the examples we've seen are with Uber, with T-Mobile and with Equifax. So there are significant liability risks associated with that from a civil standpoint that you absolutely need to be considering along with everything else that's going on with the business at the time.
So, Nicola, you are so impressive with your legal definitions. It's almost as if you're reading it out of a legal textbook. One of my clients who is in the managed service space said to me one time that a data breach is kind of like drunk driving these days.
It's like a rite of passage. Almost everybody you know has had that happen to them at some point. And I said, actually, no.
You know what a data breach is like? It's like if you're a school bus driver and you're drunk driving and you drive the school bus off the edge of a bridge and all the children are killed. That's what a data breach is like because it has a massive impact, not only on you legally, it has an impact on you financially. It has an impact on you reputationally from the standpoint of the fact that if you have competitors who have not had a breach, everyone's gonna flee to a competitor immediately because they're never going to trust you with their data or their money ever again.
So I don't wanna spend the rest of this show talking about how horrible it is to have a data breach, but I do want to sufficiently scare the crap out of people who are not taking the proper precautions to secure their data. And we can spend a couple of minutes at the end of the show talking about the proper way to handle a breach if you've had it. I mean, you gotta engage an attorney first and then have the attorney hire all the experts.
We can talk about all that at the end of the show. I'd much rather focus on what we can do upfront to make sure that everything is secure. And to do that, we have the perfect person as a guest on the show today.
So folks, if you're listening, if you're watching, we are gonna introduce you to Kathy Myron. We call her CyberKathy. She's the queen of the cloud.
She owns a company called eSilo, and they specialize in helping people just like you prevent all that nasty crap we just talked about from happening. But the depth of her knowledge is so much greater than that. I can't wait for you to meet her.
Kathy, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Dave and Nicola.
Oh, it's so great to have you here. So Kathy, let's start off. Why don't you give the folks your background? Because when I listen to a podcast, the first thing I think of is, all right, so I know who Dave and Nicola are.
Now they're putting somebody in front of me and they say she's sharp, but we can't do you justice as well as you can. So talk about your background. Talk about how you got to the place where you are today as an entrepreneur.
But talk about where you were before that, because you, like me, had a background in corporate America. So explain to the folks where you came from. Sure, Dave.
So before I was the CEO of eSilo, and we're a data backup and cybersecurity company, as you can imagine, I spent 15 years at a Fortune 10 multinational organization. So I was at a company called GE. You might've heard of them.
They make aircraft engines, healthcare machines. We recycled $12 billion of commercial paper every single day. We had a lot of different businesses.
And I spent nine of my years at GE in the corporate audit function. So really looking at these different standalone businesses and evaluating their cybersecurity health, their business resiliency, their IT systems and the quality of the data that came out of those systems and was used for everything from financial reporting to handling of client information and so on and so forth. So that's really where I came from and where I learned that when you think about technology and cybersecurity specifically, you might be governed or regulated by a number of different three-letter agencies.
And depending on what country you're talking about, there's a whole bunch of different regulations. But if you strip all of that back, what makes good technology a good, high-functioning technology system or organization is really the same. The requirements are by and large the same.
And that is, are you protecting information in the way that it's accessed? Are you protecting the network that all of those systems run on? Are you protecting the systems that are housing all of that information and how you interact with third parties and so on and so forth? So that's really where my background comes from. After I spent nine years in audit, I actually moved on to a CTO role. So I was one of the chief technology officers up at GE headquarters.
And at the time, my team was responsible for all of the productivity tools, mobile and collaboration tools for a global 350,000 person workforce. So again, you think about the variety of technology and the kind of problems that organizations like that have, staying safe and staying compliant. I take that knowledge and I bring that to my small and mid-sized clients and help them understand and distill down.
These are the most essential things that you need to be putting in place to protect yourself, to protect your employees, to protect your clients. And we help do that in a way where they're able to leverage tools that maybe they've never heard of before or have never been exposed to and also implement the right procedures that are gonna keep them out of trouble in the longterm. So how did you get into tech in the first place? Were you like a little baby crawling around on the living room floor with your parents' TRS-80 RadioShack computer and like tooling around with it and that's how you got into tech? How did you become somebody who was interested in technology? No, but that's what you're describing is my son.
Growing up with all the devices. I always was a really avid user of technology. So I was always the first to go out and buy the MP3 player when it came out or the tiny pocket camera.
So I loved using technology and I was always excited by the power that it could bring. But then it wasn't until I went to college, I studied finance, information systems and operations, partly because I frankly didn't know what I wanted to do and partly because I knew that I wanted to be in business, whatever that meant. And I knew that technology and numbers were gonna be a huge part of it.
So that's really how I got my start. And I was fortunate that when I was in college, they were doing recruiting for a bunch of different leadership programs. And so I was lucky enough to get into GE's Information Management Leadership Program and that just put me on the track for the rest of my career.
Gave me a lot of opportunity to see different areas within technology. So I understood what it meant to be on the infrastructure side versus creating applications versus sitting with a business owner and understanding their problems and translating that into new technology that we could create and deliver for them. And that's really what got me started.
Hey Nikki G, did you know you can also get our show as an audio podcast? Of course I know you can get the show as an audio podcast. I'm on it. But does our audience? I don't know.
So those of you who are watching on YouTube, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Just search up the Inside BS Show with The Godfather and Nikki G and you'll find us right there. Click the follow button so that you never miss a show.
Now there's a couple of reasons why you're gonna wanna do that. Nikki G, tell them what the first reason is. You get to ask us questions that is exclusive to our podcast listeners.
Yeah, we only answer listener questions on the audio version of the podcast. We don't do it on video. So if you wanna hear what everyone's thinking or if you wanna ask us a question, you gotta download the audio podcast.
The second reason and my favorite reason is because you can take us with you. You can have a little Nikki G in your pocket while you're working out in the gym, washing the dishes or walking the dog. I love me some Nikki G in my pocket when I'm walking the dogs.
I don't know about you, Nicola, but that's one of my favorite things to do. Absolutely, take us with you. After you watch this episode here on YouTube, go to wherever you get your podcast, click the follow button so we can go with you on your journey and you can ask us questions.
We will see you or more like hear you there. Okay, so when you're at GE and let's say you're in your first or your second year at GE and things are going great and you're doing well because GE pays, they pay their employees well. Do you have one eye on always doing your own thing and being an entrepreneur or was it something that was foisted upon you? It happened by accident.
I could have just as easily stayed for 40 years and retired. As you said, they treat you too well to make you want to leave. But I had other factors in my life that kind of happened.
I had met my husband at work, so that was fantastic, but also that meant that we brought it home every day. You know, we would always talk about the same people. Our teams worked together, which I think made our teams uncomfortable.
But anyways, he had an amazing opportunity to come down here to Florida. So he left the company, came down here. I stayed remote for another year, but I realized, and this was back in 2016, that I spent all of my days in my home office on a video camera talking to people in other parts of the world.
Now we all do that, right, post-COVID, but at the time I just didn't feel like I was creating the connections here where we were gonna live and put down roots. So that was really the beginning of me starting to look around and ultimately shift to be more entrepreneurial because where I live, I'm about two hours north of Miami, there weren't a whole lot of GEs in this neck of the woods. And having a young family, and we had just had my daughter and we were about to have my son, I knew that being in the car four hours a day wasn't gonna cut it.
Yeah, yeah. All right, so you decide that you're going to exit GE and you're going to become an entrepreneur. What was your process like? Because, you know, I know you now for a year and you seem like a very thoughtful, logical person.
So I'm assuming that you had some sort of a plan. What was your plan? Of course I had a plan. I don't know if anyone knows this, but Harvard Business School would teach a course and they also put out a book about how to buy a business.
And I stumbled upon that while I was still at GE and it kind of put on the light bulb. And I said, well, I never considered myself entrepreneurial. I don't think I have the stomach of what it takes to start something fresh, but I can absolutely go and buy something and make it better.
And I had felt like my time at GE was very much a real world MBA. And so, you know, all the management training and leadership skills, I said, I can go find something that I can be really passionate about and put my own mark in it. And hopefully, you know, I'm gonna find something that's already successful and I can just make it better.
So I went out, I devoured the book, I hired a business broker and I went shopping. And I didn't know that there was a business MLS just like there is for home sales. But so, you know, you sign a couple NDAs and you start looking at all these businesses.
And I wanted to think differently and think more broadly than I had before. So I entertained a lot of different business models and companies. I wasn't dead set on tech.
And to be honest, most of the technology businesses for sale, either I couldn't, you know, buy on my own or they were websites. And I wanted a real business that had a real impact. But ultimately, I got very lucky in the sense that eSilos founders were looking to exit.
They had built a very successful enterprise over the course of 15, 16 years, but the founders were a bit tired of the same thing. At the time we were exclusively an offsite backup company and we didn't have any of the consulting work or any of the real cyber focus. And so I saw that as a chance for me to pick up a key component of a good cyber hygiene plan, right, is offsite backups and disaster recovery.
And what do you do when something bad happens and really add to it all of my consulting experience. So that's ultimately how I found eSilo and acquired the company back in 2018. Gosh, I just want to hear some more about this journey.
So you purchased eSilo and tell us, you know, what were the immediate challenges? So you went right from working with GE, being in the corporate world, being thrust into entrepreneurship voluntarily, of course, but what were some of those early challenges that you faced in taking that company and shifting it to expand what they were offering to the market? Some of the best advice I got in the very beginning was from my broker and he said, don't break what you just bought. So I had all of these ideas of the things that I wanted to do, but I also knew that it was really important to stop and listen, listen to the team, listen to the customers, right, interview our partners and understand what was working well and what wasn't. And I had to train myself to be really patient, which is not a natural trait for me.
So that was a little bit challenging. And the other thing I think is it was extremely humbling because coming from a large enterprise, right, I had a level of confidence over, oh, this will be so easy. And as all of us know, now that we're here in the real world, entrepreneurship, owning a business, running a business is not easy.
There are so many things that you have to do or find the right person to do or figure out how to do, you know, learn it. Whereas when you come from corporate, there's a team and there's a department or a person that you can always call on to do those things. So I think I'm a person who loves to learn.
I'm constantly trying to better myself and better my skills. So I think that was a good match, but it also just took me a long time to learn how to do things that I'd never done before. I did a lot of influencing within corporate, you know, we call that sort of selling, getting other people to do things, but I never had to get someone to open up their wallet.
And that for me was definitely a big change. And so just one example of many as I first got started. Sure, what would you say helped you? I mean, you've identified kind of, you're struggling with these challenges and you're finding your way through it, but is there something that really stands out to you that really helped you get through that difficult time period? So I made my own little board of advisors, right? So people that I knew and trusted and had expertise in the domains where I was weak.
So that certainly helped. I had listened to more business podcasts and started reading business books. I never did any of that in corporate.
I was, you know, heads down, this is all I need to do. And I realized there's a whole world out there of consultants and coaches and people who have helped hundreds, if not thousands of people that were in my shoes, get over some of those initial humps. So realizing that and finally kind of raising my hand and asking for help and hiring some good people to help me was really key.
So yeah, let me ask Kath real quick. How did you decide which advice to take and which advice to not take? Because there's so much out there and there are so many people who are giving out so much advice that's bad advice. How did you, what was your process to sort through it? I will admit at the time, I don't think I had much of a process.
You know, that's the first thing I can say. But I've always had this philosophy and I used to tell this to the folks that I would mentor. You go ask three people the same question, they're all gonna give you a different answer from their unique perspective.
And your job is to triangulate between those responses, what resonates and feels true for you. And that's essentially, I guess, the process, even though I wouldn't have consciously realized that that's what I was doing at the time. So the stuff that I would, you know, someone would give me a piece of advice on messaging.
Oh, you need to be more emotive in your messaging. I'm a very rational matter of fact, analytical person. And they're like, you sell based on emotions.
Like, well, I don't know how to do that. All right, let me go read some books. Let me go talk to some people.
Let me hire her to write stuff for me so that I can learn how to do it. So those are things where, you know, I think almost instantly sometimes you realize, yeah, that makes sense. Let me go and try that.
Whereas sometimes I got advice from folks. And a lot of times one of the filters I apply is, well, do I want to be them? Do I look up to them for something that they've accomplished or achieved in their personal or professional life? And I really try to make sure that I'm taking advice from people I consider to be role models and who have a lot to offer. Cause you get a lot of free advice sometimes, but it's not always good, as you said.
Well, yeah, Nicola can tell you about unsolicited advice. What's the mantra we have about unsolicited advice, Nicola? The advice is for you, not the person on the receiving end of it. Yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Go ahead, Nicola, you got the next question. Sure, so let me back up a moment. When you step into this role, did you already decide from the outset, these are the key objectives that I really like to achieve.
And if you did, how and if did that, how and did that change from the time you got through all the self-education and then you're really getting your footing moving forward? I wish I could say that I was much more strategic and intentional when I started, but the reality is, is I didn't know what I didn't know. So part of this was me jumping in feet first and figuring it out. Had you asked me in 2018, if I ever thought growing a consulting sort of arm of our service would be a big priority, I probably wouldn't have said so, or if I did, it would have been much further on.
So I think things kind of evolved differently. I will tell you that one of the first things that I had intended to do was a lot of work around analytics. So in organizations and AI is becoming so popular at this point or so mainstream, I should say, but I was thinking if we've got data from 300 different companies, about their internal operations, wouldn't there be some way to anonymize that and derive analytics from it so that we could show you, here's how your operations or transactions compare to two dozen other peers in your same industry all across the country.
And then of course, you quickly realize that some things that sound good are not very easy to practically implement in a safe and secure and in a way that aligns with your core values. And so I ultimately abandoned that idea and we moved on to different things. But I'll tell you that my goal for the business wasn't very specific in terms of products or services or whatever.
It was, I just wanna help small businesses. Like I just wanna help people who don't have access to the information and the resources that I had when I was in corporate. And I'll give you a perfect example.
When you're in a fortune 10, the big vendors, everybody comes to you. Microsoft would come to me, Salesforce would come to me. I went and had lunch with Steve Ballmer when he was the CEO of Microsoft.
I mean, you never get an invitation like that, except for when you're in those large enterprises. Small and midsize organizations are trying to get support when something's broken and they can't even get to someone in this country. Or you open a ticket and it gets routed to 15 different places and then five days later, someone gets back to you.
And I said, that's horrible. And I wanted my clients to feel that white glove concierge level of service, that level of we actually care about how your business is doing. And so that's really where I was focused on is making an impact and doing the things that I knew I was really good at.
But for a community that really needed it, frankly, it would be a lot more appreciative than some of the larger corporations where you're just a cog in the wheel. Give us the kind of overview of your eSilo as a company and your team. You're virtual, I see you're working from an office in your home, right? Those of you who are listening, Kathy has a very nice office in her home and I've been in there virtually many times.
So is all of your team virtual and how many folks do you have? And do you have separate consulting people from the product or service offerings that you have? Explain how it works. Yeah, sure. So we're 100% remote.
Mostly the team is in South Florida, although we have somebody who's up in New Jersey. And in three days, I have a team member who's moving from Miami to the Czech Republic. So we truly embody being able to work and live anywhere.
And I think that's a huge attraction to what we do. The team itself, we're fairly small. So we're about five people core to the organization.
Most of my team is very technical. So they run the day-to-day of the backup service, they're handling client issues, they're doing all of that. Most of the client facing components are gonna be me.
So you think about like high technologists, they're very, very introverted and they're much happier with their numbers and their screens than they are interacting with the clients every day. So I love to take that on. I love to be in that role of the problem solver.
I've always sort of been in that translation of what are you trying to accomplish in terms of business? What's the problem? How do we make things better with technology? And then directing the team behind the scenes to be able to do that. So that's essentially how we work. When it comes to cybersecurity assessments, where we might be dealing with regulations in different areas or with different jurisdictions, I do have a broad network of resources that I can also call upon if we need somebody who's a specialist in that field and that's all they do all day long.
But our core team is really the five of us. Is there something that triggered that passion for working with smaller mid-sized businesses aside from kind of developing some of that wallet GE? Is there something further back in your background that made you wanna do that? I guess I'll say that the closest peak I had into entrepreneurship was my mother was in real estate and my father was an electrical engineer, but on a contract basis. So he was very much sort of running his own business, but on his own.
So he would work for different companies as projects would arise. And I saw how hard they worked for what they were able to provide me and my family. And being a first-generation American, so my parents were both from Hong Kong, they came over to the US for school for the idyllic American dream.
I wanted to, I guess, pay thanks to that and really respect everything that I had watched them accomplish. I mean, when you were in college and they would ask you to write the essay of like, who's your hero? I literally would write about my dad. And when he came to the US, he didn't speak a whole lot of English, right? He got very basic education.
He put himself through school in three years. He worked. He also has polio.
So ever since he was one, he's walked with a limp. And I think people will sometimes discount you for things like that. And I just watched him build the most resilient spirit and he has the most can-do attitude, but he does it in a very kind way where he takes care of other people.
He's never up for one-upping or any of that type of BS. And so, when I think about the average small business owner, like they're building a legacy for their family. They're working their butts off to provide for their children and their grandchildren.
And a lot of them are also immigrants. And so they don't have always the best backgrounds or come from all of these opportunities and means, but they're able to make an incredibly amazing life for themselves, but also impact on their community. And so it's playing a very small part in helping those businesses thrive because whatever 85% of businesses in America are considered small.
I think that's a huge part of what we do. Cathy, when you were growing up, how much influence did your parents' journey to the US have on you? And what was that influence? You said your dad was your hero. Was it the work ethic? Was it, I mean, coming here with nothing, that's almost like the entrepreneurial journey, only high stakes for the whole family.
Did that have an impact on you? And were you able to, did you reflect on that before you left GE to go out on your own? It wasn't incredibly conscious, but it's always been a component of my personality and something that I valued. What I got from my parents was absolutely work ethic. It was also courage to do something unknown and to put yourself in unfamiliar situations if you think that there's tremendous upside on the other side of it.
I think about what their parents must have felt sticking their kid on a plane. And if I use my dad as an example, his whole family scraped up enough money to send him here. My grandfather was a fisherman, so they didn't really have a lot.
There were seven kids. He's the only one that they sent to America. And he didn't have enough money to get back home for something like 10 years.
So when his mother passed away, he didn't have enough money to come back to the funeral. And so, but I watched him work hard and save and create something. And so that level of work ethic definitely kind of permeates into my personality.
And also just for a little while, I had a chip on my shoulder when I was younger. And I don't know if it's because I'm Asian, because I'm a woman, because I'm smaller. I always look young.
So I would find that people would often underestimate me. So I wanted to show that I was just as good as, if not better than the other men in the room or the other students in the classroom or whatever it is. And it took a while for that fire to kind of wake up inside.
Like, yeah, I didn't have that through school. I was kind of, whatever, school. But as I got into the working world, I realized that that was gonna be something that set me apart.
And if I didn't stand up and speak up and have my voice be heard, I was gonna regret that later. And it was probably one of the best things that I did in a culture and in a company where that was really rewarded and diversity was valued. And so I was very fortunate to be in the GE ecosystem because I think I got a lot of opportunities early in my career when I was younger that in most other organizations, you wouldn't have a shot at a job like that until you were 40, 50, even sometimes.
So that was pretty amazing. Yeah, I really wanna pick up on this. So, and we share this, Kathy, I remember growing up and being a woman who wanted to be in business and there weren't many.
And you always feel like you kind of have to overcompensate for, you should try harder. You have to be smarter. You have to be more driven to be able to break through a lot of the barriers that existed.
And I really wanna ask you because tech is such a male-dominated field. I mean, it's something like less than 30% of women are in technology. The percentage of women who are leaders in technology are even less than that.
So I wanna hear just, first of all, your initial impression when you hear that, if it's something that you consciously think about or if you did, as you were coming up through the ranks and owning your own company. Yeah, it's definitely in the back of my mind. It's why a lot of the nonprofit work and volunteerism that I do within the technology space is focused on girls in STEM and women in technology, women leaders, because there's never enough of us.
And I think the generation needs to turn around and pull out those that are coming behind them. And I was lucky enough to have a lot of women role models, women mentors who helped me kind of make that transition. So that's definitely huge.
But I will say that in the last couple of years, I think it's gotten better. More women in tech and women in cyber. We're still one out of maybe every seven or eight in a room, but it is getting better.
I just think that when you don't have enough women in the boardroom, period, it's really hard to get women in leadership in other places. So the more that we can be visible, and I think it's podcasts like yours, it's speaking events, it's conferences. And I'm looking forward to in September, I'm gonna be moderating a panel on cybersecurity and disaster recovery at the Disaster Recovery Journals Conference in Phoenix.
And I was really vocal about the panel and wanting to make sure that we had diversity on the panel and really happy that it's an even 50-50 split, men and women. And so those are the types of things where I think if we push for that more, the women leaders in the field get recognized and are visible. Yeah, absolutely.
Is there something that for you, when you think about this and helping to advance more women into technology, is there something else that stands out to me? Obviously, you're giving back, you're active in these programs where they're focused on STEM. And I think that's really been significant in the last few years in showcasing opportunities for careers in technology and those other areas to women, especially, and other students. Is there something else that from your standpoint would help advance careers in technology or other ways that companies can think about helping to promote careers in technology, especially for women? Yeah, I think when it comes to companies promoting, I would say make sure that there's equal opportunity for training.
A lot of times in a group setting, our unconscious bias kind of creeps in and even find it with myself where you'll see a group of professionals and then there's a woman in the room and sometimes you might assume that the woman is the marketing person or the HR person or the intern there to get everybody coffee as opposed to the technologist or the cybersecurity person. And so I think opportunities for one, catching that unconscious bias and kind of educating people on it, but then sending women to training, giving them opportunity to be the tech super user of the systems that you have, or to be the liaison with the managed IT partner that does your firm's technology. I think those all help through exposure to get them into and interested in technology.
That's really how I fell into it. I thought I was gonna be in finance. I did an internship at Morgan Stanley and they happened to just luck of the draw, I got assigned to a team that was automating a lot of business processes.
And I was like, whoa, this is really cool. Like we could do the spreadsheet thing and all of that, but the power of technology in an enterprise like this, that's what I wanna go do. And so that kind of changed the course of where I was looking in terms of career prospects after I graduated.
So I think it's that kind of exposure that just helps women see that there's other opportunities. And hopefully there's another woman on the other side of the table who is already in the field and can kind of show them the ropes. Cause I think there's also comfort in a community of your peers.
And I'll say the same thing for my financial advisor. He's a man, but he has a woman on his team. I will call the woman 10 times more than I will call the man just because I feel more comfortable with her.
And that's just, that's the way that it is. So Kathy, let's dig into eSilo now. So give us your business model, okay? Tell us what, cause we have a lot of hardcore business folks who listen to the show.
So give us, what is the eSilo business model? How does a brand new client come to eSilo and what's kind of the client path along the client lifetime journey? Sure, so majority of our new clients come to us through cybersecurity assessment. And that's usually because they either just had a breach or maybe they had a close call, right? So we almost got hit, but then the bank was able to, you know, recollect some of the funds that we had wired to the wrong person or something else. Or sometimes it's just that they are either in a regulated industry.
So there's an annual requirement for self-assessment or an external third-party assessment. Or in the case of John, who's a partner at a management consulting firm, and they've been a client of ours for a couple of years now, they were courting much bigger clients. They were courting Fortune 500 companies.
And those companies have a lot more strict supplier security reviews than, you know, your average, you know, midsize customer. And they knew that they needed to up their game in order to pass those reviews and land those deals. So usually they'll come to us through the course of an assessment.
We'll determine with them what's the standard we should be assessing them against. So what are the applicable regulations? Or if there isn't, you know, a direct regulation, we'll often do a NIST cybersecurity framework assessment, NIST CSF, National Institute of Standards and Technology. And that's kind of the gold standard for our industry.
Over the course of several weeks, we'll get really deep into their business. We'll interview a bunch of folks on their team. And at the end of it, they get a very detailed report from us that says, here are the places where you meet those expectations.
Here's where you're doing well. And here's all the places where maybe you're not. And here's a roadmap for the next three months, six months, 12 months of the things that you need to do in priority order to close those gaps and reduce your risk of a cyber attack or a data breach.
And I think a lot of folks, when they think about cybersecurity, they think about tools, right? Oh, you know, I just go buy this tool and I install it and everything's fine. And I think the marketing for those companies that make those tools, they don't do anybody any favors because they oversimplify the problem. They oversimplify the solution.
They just buy this one thing. When in reality, just like many other things, cyber is a people, process and tools conversation. And we pride ourselves in not shying away from the conversation around people and process.
It's very easy to buy and resell tools. We will do that in some cases, but to be honest, that is not core to our business model at all. It is really partnering with our clients from a strategic point of view.
How are you setting your technology budget? Are you investing enough in cybersecurity compared to your peers? Here's what the benchmark is. Here's how you should be thinking about investments in hardware and software and cloud services and, and, and. And in a lot of cases, they're stuck with some older technology that's been around for many, many years.
Maybe it used to meet their needs, but it doesn't any longer, but they don't know how to get into something better. They don't know how to modernize. So no matter what it is that their problem is, we'll advise them on how to solve that through better technology.
Some of that's going to be a cyber conversation, but some of it's just going to be, let's introduce you to partners who develop custom software, or let's introduce you to platforms that out of the box, do what you're looking for. And maybe it's an opportunity for you to move and save some money and save some hassle in the process. So that's kind of how they get in.
Once they are in, as part of that action plan, we're usually sitting down and helping them write information security policies, business continuity policies, incident response plans, helping them put in place the right capabilities so that if and when an attack does happen, they know how to properly respond. And that's where the backup side of our business comes in. So as I mentioned, when I bought eSilo, we were exclusively offsite backup.
So for a law firm or an accounting firm or a medical practice, we would be their offsite backup storage. So if they had an issue, whether that was a tornado or a hurricane or a cyber attack, they would call us and we would be the ones to help restore their data, working in concert with their IT people. We still do that, but we don't often lead with that as the first part of the conversation.
That's a component in our toolkit for how we help them be prepared for those types of events. So after, or as a part of that action plan, we'll often work with them on an ongoing basis as their fractional CIO. So chief information officer, that's your C-suite level person who is overseeing your technology, not doing the hands-on work, but overseeing your vendor or your team that's doing it and providing that strategic level guidance to the board and management on what needs to be happening.
So that's kind of the third leg of our stool as far as the things that we do for our clients. That's great. If somebody's buying a company, would you do a technology assessment like upfront as a way to kind of assess the vulnerabilities that may be there? So if you're buying a company and a lot of what you're buying is the database of their clients and the goodwill, is there a way that they can connect with you to look over what they have and get an estimate for how much it would cost to shore up whatever data they may have? Yeah.
So I'm glad you asked that because I think it's something that gets overlooked in M&A transactions is the potential cybersecurity risk of what you're acquiring. And we've seen that happen time and time again. So somebody gets acquired and then they discover that, six months before the acquisition, there was a leak, but nobody knew it until post-close.
So that's absolutely something that people can come and ask us to do an assessment. So they get an idea of how well was the company operating? How buttoned up are their systems? And I think that'll give you a really good indication of the rest of their operations too. It's a good leading indicator.
The one thing I will say that we're not specialists at, because I like to be very transparent about what we're good at and what we're not, is valuing the technology. So if it's a company that has its own proprietary technology, we're not experts in that valuation, but we also work with and have a lot of companies that we could refer them to for that component of it. But really what we focus on is the technology that supports their internal operations and how they run their day-to-day.
So how early should a company come to you if they do want you to take a look at that in an M&A transaction? As early as they've got a potential target in mind. And the reason I say that is because my business experience, there's a whole bunch of other things besides just looking at the technology that I'm gonna ask them questions about, like third parties and suppliers, how are they thinking about, how are they managing that risk? One of the big things that we talk about a lot with the companies that we work with is supplier-related risk. Almost, I don't wanna quote the wrong number, so I'm gonna say a significant number of breaches are as a result of third parties that are compromised.
You look at Target, that was a huge, very popular breach many years ago, but they were compromised through their HVAC provider. So you think about how large companies are very well-protected and very well-resourced, but their suppliers tend to be smaller and tend to not be, those are the ones that are a target. So a lot of times we'll have people say, but I'm not big enough to be a target of a cyber attack, I have no valuable data, we're not on anybody's radar.
And it's not that you specifically are targeted, it's who your clients are. And frankly, sometimes it's just that no one's targeted, it's just easy pickings. If you leave your car unlocked in the mall parking lot, someone one day will eventually pull the handle and take everything that's inside.
So sometimes it's also just a matter of opportunity that you have to be aware of. I tell the story all the time, Kathy, of how when I switched to a business fiber internet connection, I went from a variable IP to a static IP, and they didn't tell me that they were moving me to a static IP, and they didn't tell me the risk of having an IP that didn't change all the time, every time we logged in. So my phone vendor happened to say to me, hey, listen, now that you're on fiber, you have a static IP, so you absolutely need a firewall.
And I ordered one, and it took two days for the firewall to get there. During that two day period, I woke up one morning, the second day that I had this, turned on my computer, there was a text file on the desktop. And the text file, when I opened it, had like a digitally drawn smiley face with like zeros and ones.
And it said, your data is exposed. You need a firewall. You're lucky you have nothing of value, or it would be mine.
And I freaked out. I unplugged everything, turned everything off, and I got in the car and drove and bought the firewall and installed it like that day. So, I mean, you think it can't happen to you? I'm a guy operating a business out of my house with a dozen contractors that work for me.
I got nothing of value, yet within like 24 hours of having a static IP, somebody found my vulnerable system and was in it. Incredible, absolutely incredible. So it's just, it's amazing to me.
For the people who don't know, right? There's an entrepreneur here who is, he owns a railroad in Pennsylvania. I know, we actually have one guy who listens to the show who actually owns a railroad in Pennsylvania. I met him through Vistage.
So he may not know what backing up stuff to the cloud means, and he may not know how to select the right vendor to do that. So what is the difference for that guy for hiring you to back up all his data to the cloud versus dragging and dropping a file into Dropbox? Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of differences. The first thing I'll say is if you're running a real business, you need a real business backup solution.
You don't wanna use a consumer tool to do it. You don't wanna use a Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Drive, right? Those are actually cloud sync tools. They're not cloud backup tools.
It's a common misperception. When you think about it like this, if your computer gets compromised, you click on a bad link that came through an email of somebody that looked familiar, and all of a sudden your computer's infected with a virus, and your files all get corrupted. So they get jumbled up.
They're all there, but you try to open them. You can't actually make heads or tails of it. You can't see it.
You can't use any of the data. If you're using Dropbox sync or OneDrive sync, then the copy of that file that lives in your cloud that you think is your backup is now also corrupted too, right? So the changes are kind of indiscriminate. If you delete a file from your computer, then the copy in the cloud can be deleted also.
So what we always tell folks is that you don't want a constant synchronization of your data. A real backup is going to be as of a point in time where say eight o'clock every night, you're gonna take a backup of your files. If something happens after that backup at eight o'clock, you can roll back everything on your system back to a single point in time.
So there's consistency there. The other thing is that a tool like Dropbox won't allow you to control when new versions get made and how many versions get saved, right? You buy a plan. The plan includes however many versions.
They often don't tell you because they wanna be able to change that behind the scenes. It's not part of what you pay for, and you don't get to control that version history. Whereas again, if you have business grade backup, you can decide that the backup happens once a night at eight o'clock.
It happens every six hours. It happens every two hours, right? So you control frequency and you also control retention. I need that backup to be saved for 30 days, 60 days, seven years because of my regulatory requirements.
And so you now have a lot more control. So that's really one of the first things. The second thing is you wanna make sure your backups are encrypted because if something ever happens to that provider, if something ever happens to that storage, you wanna make sure that even if it falls into the wrong hands, nobody can actually view the files and take them and use them.
And if you were to have a leak of private information, if it's encrypted, that's gonna help you quite a bit as far as your breach responsibilities and what the implications might be. And then the other thing is that you want those backups to be completely automatic. There's a lot of organizations I talk to where the backup is so-and-so's job.
When so-and-so gets sick or is on vacation or just gets really busy and forgets, your backups don't happen. And too often we find companies that think they have a set of backups and a set of routines, but nobody's checking on them. So you don't realize that, oh, well, that was a task of somebody that we fired six months ago.
And so they haven't been happening. And then they go to restore from a cyber attack or a ransomware incident. And lo and behold, there are no backups or the backups that they have are two months old because no one's been watching the store.
So when you have a business grade backup service and business backup software, that's happening for you automatically. It's run by outside people. So that's like my team, that's all they do.
They run the backups, they check them every morning. We call clients proactively when something happens. I'll never forget in the beginning of COVID, people started traveling a lot.
And so we saw one organization, they're a clinical psychologist. And we noticed that the backups hadn't happened for a while. So one of our team members called her up and said, oh, I'm working for my beach house in Delaware.
I got a new computer. Oh, well, you kind of got to let us know that. So we can get you set up for your new equipment.
So that's an example of the level of personalized service that when you have a good system, someone's watching for you. Think about it like an outsourced IT department dedicated just to managing your backups. Whereas you can swipe your credit card on a website and get access to some software, but there's nobody who's monitoring that for you.
Trust me, the call center in the Philippines is not paying attention to your backups and gonna give you a call when something's in, something that they spot as unusual. Wow, that's great. This reminds me of, it's almost like being in the medical field.
Someone's monitoring where your heart rate is at a regular basis. There's doctors behind the scenes doing it. If you're someone who has had the device implanted or you have the monitor on, and then they're watching it in real time calling you.
I mean, this is really like first level service what we're talking about here is someone is out there watching out for you, calling you when it's happening so that they can work with you immediately to I'm sure catch this a lot sooner and prevent a major issue than when they start to notice it, which for those of us who are unsophisticated handling data or cybersecurity issues, that could be well down the road, I'd imagine. No, absolutely. And I'll tell you a quick story.
One of the things that people tell me often is that, well, I don't need backups from a third party. Like my team's already got that covered. We pay this vendor to manage all of our IT and backups are included as a part of it.
And while that may be true, a couple of years ago, there was an MSP, a managed service provider, one of these outsourced IT departments. They have about 200 or so clients in the South Florida area, including sports teams that, you and I would have watched on TV. So they serve big clients.
The MSP was hit with a ransomware attack. And unfortunately, all of the clients who that MSP served and had access to their systems, they all got infected too. And there was about a dozen or so of those companies that we happen to share in common.
So way earlier on, they'd been with us for 10, 15 years. They called us up right away and they said, look, this is the situation. Our MSP can barely return phone calls.
Their folks were working around the clock and no knock against them. I mean, they were literally pulling people off of like the billing desk to answer level one help desk calls and try to troubleshoot what was going on. But they said, it's been several hours.
No one's getting back to me. Can you just restore my backups from your copy because I can't wait for them. And so we did.
And lo and behold, all of those local backups that were managed by that MSP were completely trashed. And it was just because you have, one of the things you learn when you're in the resiliency business is you don't want a lot of things that look the same. Too much commonality puts you at risk.
It's concentration risk. So you have the same people who are managing the production servers and machines that were also managing the backups. Same accounts, same passwords, same personnel.
And so when they were compromised, everything they touched was essentially poisoned. Whereas our team, it was a different team, different accounts, different platform. We don't actually run and save our backups on Windows.
We use Linux for added variety. We store them on a different network. We store them offsite.
So we had all these different factors where we've at this point, in that situation, but also ever since I bought the business, we have a 100% ransomware recovery rate. And we actually tested that just, I wanna say two, three weeks ago. We're a regional healthcare provider client of our same thing.
They got ransomware. Their internal backups were hosed. Ours were not.
So you gotta ask yourself the question, right? If my data is really, really important, how many layers of protection am I willing to put in place to ensure that when that worst day happens, I have a means to recover. I have experts who I can call upon who will roll up their sleeves and get into my systems and actually do it for me or do it with me. That's really the value of having eSilo backups.
So you must have to segregate data from specific industries from everything else. So for example, medical data has to be, everybody has to have their own, I don't know if they have their own separate server or whatever, but everybody has to have their own separate little area where you can't, because that can never be compromised. Like that, if that gets out, there's a huge issue with that.
I mean, there's an issue with all data getting out, but like medical data, especially, or client-specific data for a law firm. I have a client who got hit with a ransomware attack and the entire firm was rendered helpless for a week because they didn't have access to their information. And they were very tight-lipped about it because they didn't want the word getting out that they had gotten hit with a ransomware attack.
And I have to believe they didn't have an effective backup system like you're talking about. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been as big a deal. But how do you segregate that data and how is it tested for compliance purposes? Like how is your backup data tested for like HIPAA compliance or for compliance with FINRA's rules for financial data? That sort of thing.
We treat all of our clients as if whatever information that they're backing up with us is the most important thing in the world. So we apply the same level of protection, the same high bar to everyone and everything. Because to be honest, by the time the data comes to us, we don't actually know what it is.
We can't see it. Even our staff can't unencrypt and view our client's data. And we do that on purpose.
We have no reason to need to see any of the information that you back up and trust with us. So we have separate encryption keys for each of our customers, which means that even if we would have some kind of a widespread breach, that you couldn't get to all the data of our individual clients. Only they have those keys.
So that's one of the protection measures that we have. The other thing is what I'll say is it's logical separation. So even though the data might be physically stored on the same physical server as part of our private cloud, because of the way that we store it and how we store it, it is logically separated.
And so there's no crossover access. There's no ability to see from your backups, Nicola, could you see Dave's data on the other side? And so the encryption piece though is incredibly key to that. The other thing I would say is that when you are in the business of data protection, you design, we call it security by design.
So everything from the ground up is designed to ensure that things are segmented, that there's zero trust, that there isn't the ability for, if somebody were to get into our environment to be able to move between servers. So that's ultimately how I'm able to sleep at night because I know that we've put in place those correct protections. To be honest with you, the weakest link in the entire chain, and this is often where it happens, is people.
And my clients have to have access, username, password that gets them into their own backups. And that is what I worry about most, because they use the same password for that as they use for other things. So a lot of what we do is education with our clients on, here are good cyber hygiene practices that you should be applying in every area of your life, not just as it pertains to data that you protect with us, but you should be turning on multi-factor authentication.
If you don't know what that is, message me and I'll help you get it set up. That is the single best thing that you can be doing to protect your accounts, whether that's your bank account, your Amazon account, your backup account, all of it. And that just ensures that when you log into something, you're using multiple ways to authenticate yourself to that system.
It's a combination of something you have, which is a password and something you know, which is often like a six digit code that gets sent to you on your phone. And there's even layers of security within that. There's good MFA practices and not so good ones.
So that's where we do a lot of just education on here are the things that you need to do to play your part in securing your own data. So let me ask a question that I'd imagine there's a lot of people sitting in our audience right now that are thinking, I have a million passwords, Kathy, where's the best place to store those because I'm sick of saving and worrying about every password that I have to every different account. I was gonna say, so before I tell you, you tell me where you're storing yours.
Okay. Nicola, what do you do? What do I do? I have, well, I have a password protected file that have passwords in them. So you have an Excel spreadsheet that has a password and it's the password spreadsheet and the password is password 123.
No password whatsoever. Mine is not a complicated one. All of them are unique and they're complicated.
They're long. There's nothing that's uniquely identifiable. Yeah.
So I use LastPass and I used an assigned, like I used a randomized password to get me into LastPass. And so every time I forget the damn thing, it takes me an hour to get all my passwords. But it's, I think it's safe.
I mean, I think they had a breach at one point, but I mean, but it's, I think that's the best I can do, right? Yeah. So a password manager or password vault, like a LastPass, but maybe a different one, would be the easiest thing to do. So I love what Nicola said about, you know, having totally unique, totally randomized passwords, hopefully really long ones, because there's, you can Google time it takes to crack a password and you'll get these really scary charts that'll show you that even if it has eight characters and it has a combination of upper and lowercase and numbers and symbols and all that, it takes like 0.3 seconds for somebody to breach it with the right hardware.
So you really need a long, strong, complex password, but then you store it in a vault, like one password is a good one, there's a whole bunch of them out there. If you're on LastPass, I would recommend moving away from it because of the breach that happened. Interestingly enough, in the breach, the attacker stole a backup copy of the databases.
So that's why, you know, I advise people against it or to move on to something else, but that's really the best that you can do. But I would say if you have a password vault, you've got unique passwords and you've turned on MFA in every system that supports it, then you've at least covered off the basics of the things that you should be doing to secure your accounts. Kathy, explain to people, when I travel, I use a VPN, explain to people the value of using a VPN and why people need to use a VPN.
Yeah, VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it creates a secure tunnel between your computer and the websites that you're communicating with. And why that matters is if you travel often and you're in airports, hotels, Starbucks, right, you're on public Wi-Fi, if that Wi-Fi is not properly protected, any other individual who's on that same network can potentially be spying on your communications or even intercepting and changing the communications that are occurring between your computer and your bank's website, or, you know, whatever it is that you're doing. A VPN helps to eliminate that by creating a secure tunnel.
The other thing that's nice for folks who travel a lot, especially if it's out of country, is they'll use a VPN to be able to watch American shows in countries where that stuff is blocked. But from my point of view, that's a nice to have. It's the security value that I think is really important for anyone who's on the road.
If you've ever been like on an airplane and you go to, you open like your Bluetooth or you click on the Wi-Fi and you see Joe's iPhone pop up as an option, that's why you need a VPN. Because if Joe's iPhone is popping up, you can be damn sure your computer is gonna pop up there too. So it's, oh man, that is like, for me, that is the scariest, the absolute scariest thing, especially people who have access to confidential client information and they're, you know, sitting in the airline club doing their work on that confidential client information using the airline club Wi-Fi without any type of protection whatsoever.
It scares me. All right, Cathy, before we let you go, let's talk a little bit about how you get clients, right? So how does eSilo find companies to work with? 99% of our clients come through referrals. So we work with trusted advisors, whether that's attorneys or accountants, also their IT provider.
So, you know, you think most small to midsize organizations do some level of outsourcing to another IT provider. And those are often the ones that bring us in because they know that what we offer in terms of expertise and services is gonna be a little different than what they do day to day. So that's always been our best source of clients.
Cathy, what's the most frequently asked question that leads to clients doing business with you? Yeah, I think probably the most common place that they're at when they come to us is if I had a security incident tomorrow, I don't know how I would do. And it's that fear of the unknown and the recognition that whatever I'm doing, it's probably not enough, is really what motivates them to reach out and call us. I wanna touch on one more thing and then I'll turn it over to Nicola.
And that last thing is your business as an entrepreneur is a really good business model because when you onboard a client, I would guess, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, probably upwards of 90% of your clients are recurring revenue clients in that you bring them on and then they're going to pay you for a service monthly or annually over and over and over again. Did that factor into the type of business that you were looking to buy? And if it didn't explain, or even if it did explain the benefits of having a recurring revenue model in your business? Yeah, so having recurring revenue was an absolute core criteria. It was part of my top three criteria when I was shopping for businesses.
And what I loved about this business model was that you build the technology once, I call it build once, sell many, just like people with cloud websites, right? It's the same sort of thing. You build it once and every improvement, every enhancement can be shared by all of your clients. So that was the big appeal for me.
It's actually why the consulting side of the business, it was a little bit surprising because we do strive to make that a recurring relationship, but a lot of it sometimes is one time and that wasn't necessarily our focus in the very, very beginning. But what I would tell you is that in this space, if you treat your clients well and you do good work, they will stay with you forever. We've got customers that have been with us for 15, 16, 17 years.
When I bought the business, that was the last time I did the analytics on it, but at the time our average retention was like nine and a half years and it's only increased since then. So I think that's huge. That's part of what enables us to do what we do is we've got a core base, a core service that we can offer them and everything else is kind of value on top.
So that's really one of the things that I love the most about this. What do you think, Cathy? I mean, what's your vision for the company for the next few years? Where do you see the company? And I'll use a benchmark for you. Where do you see the company in five years? That's a hard question.
Where do I see it in five years? So I would like to say that we're 50-50, the cybersecurity consulting side and backups. As much as I love the backup side of the business, it is harder and harder to sell standalone backups as a service. There are so many other service providers that bundle that with other things.
So I would say we would be 50-50 on that mix and we would play an even bigger role in terms of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. And what I mean by that is, a lot of small businesses don't put a lot of thought into those business continuity plans, but mid-size organizations absolutely do. And they understand that it's an orchestration of not just technology, but also their whole operations and people process as well as tools.
And so I think we are uniquely positioned to help them build business resiliency, business continuity plans that take into account both the technology component, but also the cyber side. So things that intersect across those different areas, that's where I would love to be twice the size as of where we are right now in those couple of years. Cathy, when you're thinking about, and I know you've thought about this, cause I know you, when you're thinking about how this ends, right? What would an exit look like? Would an exit look like eSilo being acquired by one of the bigger players? Or would an exit look like you, merging with another local technology provider that's complimentary to you, where you just, you remain an investor, but you step out of the day to day.
What's your vision for an exit from eSilo? It'd be a strategic acquisition by another, and I'm gonna use local in quotes, cause it doesn't have to be in South Florida, but most likely another service provider where what we do and what they do is very yin and yang, very complimentary. I don't foresee us being acquired by a big player in the industry. We're not that tools focused where I think we would be an attractive acquisition candidate in that regard, but definitely on the services side, I think that's where we would have our play.
And do you envision yourself as kind of a serial entrepreneur, maybe investing in something else, or, I mean, you could do that as the CEO of eSilo and invest in something else. I mean, is that something you see yourself doing, or are you just sticking to the knitting and focusing on eSilo? I would say I'm a very, what's here and now, what's right in front of me person, I give it all my full attention. When I bought the business, I remember someone asked me, well, what's your exit strategy? I said, I don't get married to plan my divorce.
I get married for life, and this is what I'm gonna do until I'm unhappy, and then I'll start thinking about options if I ever get unhappy. But I would say that a dream of mine, so my husband is also in the cybersecurity space, and he's pretty active in the scene here in South Florida. He's actually on Governor DeSantis' cybersecurity committee, and he has all of these amazing ideas.
He's a big ideas guy. And I would love for us to be able to go into business together where he's executing on the vision, and I'm kind of standing behind him and making sure the trains run on time. So I would love to do something like that, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to have both of us take the leap into entrepreneurship.
It's nice that he's still on the corporate track, and I'm able to have the freedom to do this. So we'll have to see. There it is, complimentary partnerships.
Complimentary partnerships. We need to have a conversation about that, because let me tell you, oh boy. The way you have it set up now, Cathy, is probably ideal.
You both can understand each other, but your worlds are completely separate, which is fantastic. All right, Nicola, what have you got for Cathy? You know, what I wanna do is kind of bring this full circle. So we've spent a good deal of time getting to know you, really digging into some of the technical aspects of cybersecurity for our audience, and we buried the lead a little bit.
We want to have you come back as a reoccurring guest for a segment with CyberCathy. And so I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that, you know, what might be, and you can just give a short preview in store for some of the things we can discuss with and bring to the entrepreneurs who are listening to the podcast. Well, I would absolutely love that.
I have so much that I always want to share with other business leaders. There's a lot of myths, I think, that people believe about cybersecurity, either how easy or how hard it is. And so I'd love to dispel a lot of those myths.
I do a ton of different trainings for business leaders on those exact topics. So I think that's a great opportunity. And then the buzzword right now is generative AI, and everybody's thinking about how to apply it in their businesses.
And not that I ever wanna be a naysayer, because, you know, a cybersecurity and kind of risk management people can get a reputation for being the poo-pooers of things. But I think being smart about how you use tools like that and where your data goes and how to still take advantage of those tools, but in a safe way, I think would be a really important topic for us to dig into on a future episode. Well, that's great.
I love that. I think that's a fantastic idea. All right, so CyberCathy Myron, thank you for joining us.
I want everybody, we're gonna put down in the show notes, I want you to subscribe to Cathy's YouTube channel. I see her shorts pop up all the time and her shorts are outstanding. You're doing a great job with the information that you're sharing with folks on YouTube.
And I will tell you that every time I watch one of those, I'm like, oh man, there's another thing I didn't know. And I gotta go too. Thank you for watching and for listening to us today.
It's been such a pleasure having you, Cathy Myron, join us today on the show. We've learned so much, and yet there's so much more in store for those of you who are following our podcast. So if you enjoyed today's episode, please watch another one.
This is The Inside VS Show. I'm Nikki G, and you are? I don't even remember. Dave Lorenzo, the godfather of Brooklyn.
We'll see you tomorrow, folks.