From Break-Fix to MSP Evolution: Brian Weiss on Surviving Security Incidents, Building Culture, and the Future of AI in IT

Brian Weiss: Do you have the dog bark filter on over there? Steve Taylor: I wish. So today's, today's going to be real interesting because, uh, my mother in law's here and my brother in law's here, which means they brought their dogs, which means, uh, barking, Brian Weiss: chaos. It'll be great.

I'm used to that. I just locked my dogs out so that they don't get to interrupt me. But, um, I'll have your dogs. Steve Taylor: Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, you'll hear barking and it'll be great. Um, so speaking of dogs, you, do you breed dogs? Brian Weiss: I, we did during COVID.

Yeah. Steve Taylor: Oh, so you're done with that now? Brian Weiss: Yeah, it was a lot of work. We bred Frenchies.

And, and really we started cause we didn't feel like we could afford a Frenchie. And we, we thought, hey, if we breed one and then have puppies, it'll pay for itself. Yeah. And, uh, we, so, yeah, we went down that route, and, and, and what happened was, really, my wife started working for iTech, our company, and then it was, like, impossible.

Because it is, it is, especially for Frenchies, they're, they require a lot of human, uh, contact, human hours to take care of them. They're not just puppies you can have and leave in a garage or wherever and expect them to raise themselves. Um, but it was a great learning experience, that's for sure. I bet, Steve Taylor: yeah.

And I, and I'm sorry, guys, I've known Brian for years, so he and I can just start talking, you know, cause that's what we do, but, um, everyone, this is Brian Weiss from iTech Solutions. Welcome Brian. Can you, can you give everyone a little bit of background on, uh, you and your company and maybe, maybe that'll help them understand why we're talking today. Okay.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, um, I, well, we started iTech in 05, before that I was an independent contractor. Uh, and before, well, should I start way at the beginning? Sure. I started on computers in high school, actually.

In my senior year, I had my one required period, and then I went around fixing computers the other periods. So, I guess you could call me a teacher's pet. The teachers loved me because I fixed their computers. Um.

And so right out of high school, I got a job at a little mom and pop shop, computer, computer stuff, it was called, kind of a cool name. And they service residential, they also did businesses, we built computers, right? That was, I think I was building like three computers a day, you know, trying to do multiple ones at a time. I got paid as an independent contractor there, so I got paid half of whatever they billed hourly.

So if I could build three computers at a time, I'm technically multiplying my hourly rate by three. It was good and bad, right? It wasn't good to be having that much money when I was that young. Cause I looked back and I was like, I could have invested that better.

Um, I ended up buying a lot of a DJ equipment, uh, cause I became a DJ and, um, I just spent it having fun, you know, in my, in my twenties. But, uh, Steve Taylor: you're supposed to do that in your twenties now, right? Brian Weiss: I guess. What, you know, sure, why not?

We, I was with that, I was with them all in PopShop for about three years and helped them grow to three stores. I guess what I quickly realized is there is this conflict between working on a residential computer versus what I called commercial back then and, and like a business uses their computers to make money. And residential, back then I think it was MySpace, right? They're checking MySpace on their computer.

And so, you know, if Timmy's MySpace isn't working versus a computer can't get business done, you can see how there's a conflict there on which one should be worked on first. So, I came up with this idea of let's create a commercial service department is what I called it. And I took a group of engineers and we hired a couple more. I called them technicians back then.

And, and we kind of just focused only on businesses. And so that, that was good. It helped them bring in a steady set of income that they're getting versus residential service. It's like you're waiting for their computer to not work and them being willing to pay money to fix it.

And this is back in a day where computers were 2, 000, maybe 1, 500 if you're lucky. So people would buy them and just run them into the ground. I mean, I guess there's still that much depending on what, what ones you're buying. But the idea of, of, of life cycle management and proper maintenance, no matter how many times we use the car analogy of changing the oil, they just didn't get that.

So typically residential and even business break fix, you know, if you're in that industry, they're not really calling you unless they absolutely need you, but we helped them grow from one to three stores and, and I needed, I guess, I don't know if I called it this back then. I needed to be more process based. There's, there's things happening and slipping through the cracks that I was coming, trying to come up with new ways to prevent, right? Which is a process.

And again, I'm young, and you know, so I'm just learning as I go. I'm more of an engineer than I am a business minded person at that, at that time. And what happened is I would come up with these new processes, and I would, I would follow them, and I'd get my engineers to follow them. About half the time, mainly because the owner wouldn't follow them.

So there was like, there wasn't buy in from the owner of the company who's ultimately paying the paychecks, and I felt like I didn't have the ownership around maybe management, I guess. Um, and, and, and our, the clients I had developed a good relationship with, right? Um, and, and they see these mistakes happening. And I'm the one kind of stepping and saying, Hey, we're going to prevent that from happening again.

I'm working with the team on that, but then they'd still happen. So, um, we, you know, along the way, not being the business minded person I was, I was also told, Hey, if you help me grow my business, I'll give you some ownership in it. So I'm thinking along this lines of, Oh, cool. I might have some ownership.

Well, three, three and a half years later, after I helped them grow and open these stores, which I put in a lot of work, I never got paid for it because I was an independent contractor. I only got paid for the billable hours spent on clients, so, you know, I'd work hours setting up a new store, checking, you know, doing inventory, uh, coming up with new processes, um, that wasn't paid, I wasn't on the clock. And so I put in a lot of my own kind of sweat, equity, into helping this business grow with the idea I might get some ownership.

And at the end of the time, the three and a half years, I was basically told, Oh yeah, you can have ownership if you want to buy in to the, to the company. And, and, and for me, I'm good enough at math to understand, well, the time to buy in was when you're at one store, not when you're at three stores. And, and I asked the question of, well, does the, does this new employee we just hired two months ago have the same opportunity to buy in? And he goes, yeah, of course.

And I was like, Oh, so I get, I get, I don't even get like a special deal when I buy in. Um, so it was that, it was actually an emotional time for me cause I was good friends with the owner, good friends with the clients, caught between a rock and a hard place where I'd put all this sweat equity into helping build something to be better. Didn't have full control ownership wise around trying to make better processes and I'm seeing things fail that I couldn't help fix. So I made the hard decision to just leave and go off on my own as an independent contractor at 20, how old was I, 22 years old and and I was also DJing at the time.

I started DJing when I was 21. I'll get to that in a bit, but that was a hard conversation, you know, I even cried and and left. Now I knew These clients didn't depend on the business, they depended on me and our team, and, and the clients weren't under any type of contract. There wasn't even that type of sophistication with this company.

It was really just a break fix, call us when you need us, and more relationship based. So when I left, you know, I told the owner this, I was like, hey, I gotta inform these clients I no longer work for you. I'm gonna tell them in this letter that they are a client of yours, and I want them to try to use you moving forward, but They're likely not going to have the same level of service. And what does that look like?

You know, that's part of the hard discussion I had with the guy. And um, so sure enough, I sent professional letters letting him know I could at least give him a chance. Don't feel like you're just going to jump ship because that makes me feel even worse that I'm leaving and taking clientele with me. That was definitely not something I wanted to be some sort of apparent thing I was trying to do.

Well. What happened was, I was kind of a rock, uh, at that, at that place, and four of the technicians that worked under me left at the same time. And so naturally, the clients aren't getting the service that they would hope they would got, and almost immediately, several of them followed me, and now I'm an independent contractor, working out of my garage, doing computers. And that lasted for about, um, three years, three and a half years, and You know, I was making decent money.

I think I was doing like 75 grand a year, 22 years old back in those days was a lot of money. Steve Taylor: That's a lot of money. Brian Weiss: Um, again, didn't spend it the smartest. I should have been buying property.

When I look back on it, I was like, buy property. I think I was always intimidated though, to be a homeowner or own property. I just didn't feel like I had that maturity. In me or didn't understand the game.

Well, as far as that's Steve Taylor: how I was too. Yeah, Brian Weiss: you know, you're kind of just like, is that me? I don't know, but I had fun with the money. Um, and especially DJing, bought a lot of DJ equipment.

I DJed from 2000 to 2008. Um, started out with, uh, started out with turntable ism. Actually, that's what got me into it. My buddy of mine had a turntable and he was scratching.

I was like, wow, that's, that's kind of fun. And, And, and got heavy into that, and then underground hip hop kind of followed that, and then it was like drum and bass, you know, house music, kind of doing college parties, and then I started doing clubs, downtown bars in San Luis Obispo, there's kind of a big college scene there, so, um, what I, what I realized is no one wants to listen to my music, so, so I quick, I, I kind of pivoted and I realized, alright, if I'm going to make money doing this, what does that look like?

And I got into top 40 music, naturally. Top 40 R& B, hip hop, I think is what I called it back in the day. It was like the, the pop station. Wild 106 was our local, is still our local radio station.

And so I started buying records at the record, I was always a turntable DJ. And, and the, I'd get these mix records that were easier to mix together. And, uh, And then it kind of just blew up because we didn't really have that in that scene. I was one of the first kind of DJs on the scene, if you will, in our, in our town.

And there used to be like lines out the door and they'd charge, uh, you know, a door charge and I'd get a cut of that, which was more money I didn't need. I think my, my biggest night I made like 2, 000 DJing for four hours just because of all the people with the door money they'd pay. Um, and then, yeah, and then I got into the, and then I started DJing at the radio station. You know, I do the five o'clock traffic jam weekends.

So I had kind of a full plate where I was doing IT during the day, DJ at night. You know, and, or on the weekends, and then I even got into weddings, uh, doing DJing as well. But it was 2005. I'm getting to, I'm getting to where we were starting out now.

Um, and feel free to interrupt me cause I tend to monologue. Steve Taylor: No, this is good, man. Brian Weiss: Um, or if you want to dig into something deeper, let me know if I'm moving too fast. Um, 2005, my clients, so I was growing and I needed employees.

And I realized, okay, I can't be an independent contractor anymore. I need to start a business. And one of the technicians that had worked with me at ComputerStuff, when he left, at the same time I left, he went to work for a web development company. And by the time I had wanted to start iTech, he was their lead web developer.

And I was just kind of like putting all these pieces together in my head. My clients needed websites. I didn't want to do this alone because I had no idea how to run a business. And I, and I respected the intelligence of this guy that, you know, became a web, a lead web developer while I was doing IT still.

And, um, I also had this, I had, I was sick of dealing with clunky desktop apps, and I had this idea that, you know, things should be web based, really. Internet connections were fast enough at this time, where we can really start putting applications hosted in the web, that we have a web browser interface that's a lot more lightweight. To, to work with and more mobile, if you will, from a remote workplace, uh, perspective. So, uh, and then one of my largest clients, um, was part of this as well.

So it was basically, he was the investor, silent investor. I brought in a bunch of clients. My other business partner, I guess he brought his website knowledge at the time. But we formed this company and then really what he brought was, you know, was the IP of what we were running on originally because he helped develop all the initial software.

So we developed all our tools initially and, you know, ticket system, billing system, password management, documentation system. We had it tied into QuickBooks, desktop, so we could bring everything in from a billing perspective. So we, we started this company in 05 and, and because I brought in a decent amount of clients already, the focus wasn't really, hey, let's grow IT. And again, mind you, 2005, we were still break fix.

Um, it was more, uh, let's get web development going. And mainly because I had all these clients that needed websites, too. They kept coming to me saying, Hey, do you know who can do our website? We're ready to have a website.

You know, I think this was about the time where the dot com boom was kind of over, but people realized I do need at least a website. If I don't have a website, who am I as a business type of thing? And so we just started landing all these website deals with our clients, pumping out websites. Our investor came from the marketing and jewelry industry.

So he had a lot of connections that hooked us up in that area where we even developed a survey platform. That he was using for market research, um, web, web really took off. And by 2008, when the recession happened, we had five employees on the web department and it was still just me on IT. Because, you know, hey, IT is running itself.

We were focusing on, on web. And now the recession hit and this was like our first kind of like, oh, this is what it's like to run a business. It's not all roses. There's, there's problems you run into, and it was really our first time we had to reinvent ourselves.

Not that we didn't invent ourselves at inception, but, um, we had to pivot for sure. Because a lot of our income from web really was coming from the diamond and jewelry industry and marketing, uh, industries, which are probably the first thing to take a hit during a recession, like people pull back their marketing. You're not buying jewelry, I would imagine, right? Right.

Um, and, and so, and we didn't want to let go any, any employees. We've, you'll understand as I tell my story, we've never really let go employees during the hard times. It's always been us kind of stepping in and weathering the storm, if you will. Because we, we do have somewhat of a family culture, which has its pros and cons.

I like the pros more than the cons. Um, and, uh, and we've always been small enough to where you, it's easier to maintain that. When you get big enough, it's hard to maintain that type of culture. Um, so we pivoted.

I realized IT is not going away during a recession. We realized, how are we going to change web to be more recession proof? So with web, we pivoted to e commerce. We built our own e commerce platform.

This is before Shopify was a thing. You know, what, I don't even think WordPress was really a thing back then. Um, Steve Taylor: not really. I mean, it was, but not, not the way it is today at all.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. Cause we, we had developed our own CMS platform as well, you know, cause we didn't have like a WordPress to, to fall back on per se. And, um, so because we had built our own CMS, I skipped over that. We're like, Oh, let's build our own e commerce platform.

And because the idea there is clients that are making money with their website, even during a recession, are still going to want to pay to maintain and manage their website. Um, that's also, um, around the time, well it was a little bit later, we had one of our clients that had a SaaS platform they had developed, we didn't call it that back then, but they were doing CEUs, Continuing Education Units, and we had built out a learning platform for them, where they could deliver the content, and issue the credits, and then they had a licensed professional that would create the content, um, so on the website we started diversifying, right, like.

How can we focus on things that are going to have recurring income and then same thing on the IT side? How can I get recurring income on the IT side? I didn't know anything about the MSP channel. I don't even know if it really existed in 08 too much, but Steve Taylor: Probably not.

Brian Weiss: Looking back, that's maybe when we could call ourselves an MSP because I went to my clients and I said, hey You're paying us X amount per year, on average, that's X amount per month, and um, I actually took about a three year span and averaged it out to be more realistic, and how about if we put you on the support plan that's fixed price per month, and then that way I have income to be able to grow with, and not worry about going out of business, is literally the discussion I was having with my clients, because I had a good relationship with them, they wanted me to succeed.

I could scale easier. I could know when is the next time to hire the next employee and then, and then I'm helping them eliminate peaks and valleys in their expenses around IT. And that was probably the first time I even got into lifecycle management as a thing, where we're not waiting for things to die before, before they get replaced because now I'm, I'm holding, You know, the, I'm holding the bag when it comes to how many hours I'm spending on a, on a client's infrastructure.

And if they've got really old equipment, that's going to require more hours. And so we got into this idea of, of not letting them age older than five years and kind of setting up that plan. And then that's when we bought our first tool. Before this, we were, we developed all our own tools and that was an RMM and it was primarily because we didn't feel like we had the sophistication.

You know, from a, from a dev perspective to develop an RMM, an agent that would run on a Windows operating system, we were, we were still very much kind of web based development that we were doing. Everything we developed was on a LAMP stack. It was Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. So that was our expertise.

You know, the minute you start getting into an agent, you know, running on Windows, you're like C like it's a different programming language. So, so we ended up getting an RMM And, and back then they were sold as a perpetual license with a follow up maintenance per year. So I think we dropped like 65 grand for this platform. And then yearly after that, I think it was like, it wasn't much, maybe two or three grand a year for maintenance.

And, and, and we even came up with our own branding. We're like, this is called iTech NetManage, you know, we're selling you, we, we, you know, on the invoice, it had to look a certain way. So NetManage was, was our kind of. Our RMM and monitoring and everything, and remote access, and then we created iTechSafeBackup, is what we called it, and that was like our backup service.

And then for the support model, we called it iTechSentinelMaintenance. Sentinel is, I think Matrix is where we got that from. Maybe. I don't know.

Sentinel is not the greatest thing to use when it comes from the Matrix, but, um, uh, I think Sentinel's Steve Taylor: great, man. Like it sounds like, uh, I don't know what it, when I hear Sentinel, I think of X Men. Do you remember the X Men cartoon? I think of those big.

Scary machines. I'm like, man, if you're running one of those, you're probably good. Brian Weiss: Well, and so the funny thing too, is working at the radio station, I've always had all these different things going on. They, they had me doing a lot of gigs that I didn't want to do because they paid like minimum wage.

And I said, how about we trade advertisement? Right? So I get, we had all this free advertisement and we even ended up doing the radio stations websites. So we'd get like three to four commercials a day on the radio station.

And so the minute we branded those products, they're like, on the radio, iTech safe backup. Yeah, I still have all the old commercials we did. That was a fun time. Um, and so we, so that took off fairly well.

Um, because now all of a sudden we're getting guaranteed income, both on the website, because we pivoted on the web too, we went from project based to, to, you know, You know, we took what a typical project would cost, and we divided it out by 12 months, and we'd make it a monthly cost, and we'd get them to renew it, you know, making sure we showed value for them to renew it, and then IT was kind of the same thing. So we, we shifted to this project break fix income model to a recurring revenue model during the recession, really using it as a way for our clients to help control their costs around these things they need, and then helping us.

Control Our Income, so we can scale properly. Um, so, 2008, I'd say, 2012, and then I hired my first employee in 2008, for IT, I should say. And, and we, we actually were able to stay two employees for about two years. We hired, I had my brother come work for me for a little bit.

Um, 2012 is probably when we started hiring more employees for IT. Uh, we were, I almost want to, I almost want to call us kind of still a lifestyle business back then. We didn't, you know, other than building a brand, uh, brand equity, we weren't, we weren't well versed in like scaling our company from a sales perspective. And so, and we were just happy paying the bills and, and keeping our clients happy and, and in all fairness you get kind of comfortable when there's a steady stream of income coming in every month and it's paying, you know, it's paying enough of your bills where you're not having to chase projects all the time.

Um, So 2012, we, we started ramping up, uh, Web even more, because the CEU company that we started, well we didn't start a company yet, the CEU company we were working with, we, we created a, an offshoot of another company, Um, I think they were called Quantum and we were called iTech, obviously, I know that. Um, and so we put it together and we called it QTech, because that's, what do you do when you take two companies, you throw their name together, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Um, and so we took their business model, which we saw doing really well, and we said, we're going to repeat that over and over again. And so we did it in, in three or four different industries. One of them was pest control, believe it or not. I mean, CEUs, you could pick your industry, certain industries need them, and it's just a matter of finding a licensed professional that can write the content.

We're delivering the platform, and it's, it's really, that's what I love about SaaS platforms, you know, if I own one myself, I should say. They're mailbox money. They really Steve Taylor: are, yeah. Brian Weiss: You do all the development up front, and then it's all about how much market share can we get.

From, from here on out. And so, we grew to, you know, the next three years we, we focused on growing that. Um, we hired more employees. I'd say we were probably about, um, six IT employees and maybe like seven web.

By the time 2014 15 rolls around, where now all of a sudden, they can't keep up with our needs from an IT department perspective around the custom developed software that, that, that we had built for ourselves. And we are starting to see the roadmap just slow down. This whole time, I, you know, mind you, we're also managing our own roadmap for our products that we're using with our clients, other than our RMM, to help make things more efficient, bake more processes, and as we discovered better processes, it's like, okay, now let's bake this into the tool, so that there's less human error that can happen, uh, and the process is more repeatable.

And I want, I really wanted dashboards. That's kind of my next step, because we were starting to collect so much data, we had, we had built this out enough to where we're just dealing with lists of data everywhere, you know, all the different functions in it produces a list of data. And then what do you do? You analyze it, you figure out how to adjust it, you're sorting it, you know, what's the next thing I need to work on?

Steve Taylor: So you started chasing that coveted single pane of glass. Brian Weiss: Yeah, I guess you could call it that, right? I mean, the dashboards kind of give you a lot of data in a single view. Yeah.

And then the idea is you drill down to, to, to get to the list instead of starting with lists. And, and we had, we had even tracked financially how much work the dev department was doing because we tracked them as separate entities. My, I skipped over the fact we, we bought out my business, our silent investor in 2008. So it was just my, uh, web department buddy that's running the department, web department, uh, and me.

So I ran IT, he ran web. And that we were kind of running them as separate companies and then we would meet together like quarterly talking about how things are going and what we're going to do with each department. And, um, so on the books They would bill us for all the work that they did for us because naturally he could be doing cash projects instead and that's exactly what happened. It was like, hey, uh, do you want us to really do work for this internal project where, yeah, you're giving us money, but it's just our money anyway, so it's not like new money coming in?

Or, or do you want us to focus on these cash projects where we can actually grow and, and, and make more income? And the natural answer was, okay. It sounds like you've outgrown us. Our money isn't worth anything to you anymore.

But on the books, I was spending about six grand a month with all the dev work and roadmap stuff that they were doing for us. Steve Taylor: That's not bad. Brian Weiss: And so, but that was my budget, right? To, Oh, I'm going to go find off the shelf tools.

2015 is really when I first got introduced to the MSP channel. Before that, we were kind of on our own island in the sense that. Figuring out things on our own, not realizing there's a community out there of other people struggling to do the same thing we are. And, and, and so I found, I came across Autotask PSA at that time, which just launched dashboards, and I said, That is what I wish my guys could do.

So I'm just going to get that. Which, naturally, one thing leads to another. I've definitely, I'm definitely a shiny tool guy. And, I mean, we were developing our own tools.

I know the value in a good tool. And we probably adopted four or five other tools along with it, including Centristage back then, before Datto bought them. And, um, and so within, within two years of, of adopting these tools, we grew 50 percent on the IT side. And then web grew tremendously too.

And so it, you know, it was like 2017. Uh, we probably had, uh, we had about 24 employees, um, and we were, we were about 2. 8 million across the whole company and, but, but, but we're at a point now where I'm not relying on dev anymore. You know, they're kind of doing their own things.

My partner and I was just meeting quarterly. We're kind of running two companies within the same company and, and, and we had different personalities too. So it was good personalities that balanced each other. I'm more of a risk taker.

I'm more the, the life of the party guy. My business partner was more, uh, reserved and kind of, uh, did not like taking risks. And so I was wanting to start making some moves that were a little hard to convince him to do. He was at the point where I don't think he even liked having employees.

Um, maybe, maybe I'm more of a people person than he was. You could say that too. I don't, I don't want that to come off sounding bad. More outgoing.

Steve Taylor: I get it, man. You know, some, some people are more introverted and would, would rather just, you know, for, for lack of a better term, they would rather just be in mom's basement in the dark with their lines of code in front of them. Brian Weiss: Okay. You said it.

Yeah. No, I like the introvert versus extrovert. That's a good way to put it. Steve Taylor: Yeah.

Brian Weiss: Um, I was definitely more extroverted, which extroverted people probably tend to take a little more risk. And, uh, he was, I was wanting to grow, grow, grow, and he was more, I'm happy where I'm at. I want to do more with less. And um, so that's when we really started talking about, well, what does this look like?

Interesting. Interestingly enough, we looked at our books and it was split right down the middle with it and web to where we could basically part ways, and we're not really having to buy each other out at all as, as far as value goes. The funny thing is, the Q Tech company, kind of a third part, which was under the web umbrella of the company. So, you know, even though web and IT, Q Tech was under web, it was making more net profit with a single employee than both of the web and IT were combined.

So I was like, ah! I've always wanted a SaaS company and you're telling me we're going to split and I'm going to lose my ownership in a SaaS company. So I, I, I kind of made him hang on for a little longer. I was like, nope, don't want to split.

But it only took about another year before I started, it gave me a year to think about, like, what would it be like if I own this company on my own? And I started realizing a lot of things that having a business partner was holding me back. You know, every, every dollar we made, we split. Right?

50%. That means every dollar we spent came out of our pocket, 50%. So, so not only, you know, am I, am I splitting the income and every time we spend money, it's got to be something we both agree on to really spend it with. Otherwise you end up with some kind of some bad blood there.

Like, Oh, you're spending too much in this area. You know? But Steve Taylor: the nice thing is with him being more conservative. And, and less of a risk taker, you, you may have been more profitable when you were with him versus maybe the next two years after you guys split.

Maybe. Brian Weiss: So, the answer is yes, but there's an outside force that caused that, which I'll jump right into here in a minute. Um, I will say that we did balance each other well, and he taught me enough about being conservative with money. You know, because mind you, I came, I came out of high school making way too much money, you know, so I never, I never had the appreciation for money, um, it just came too easy to me, and so, he, he, he taught me to be responsible with money though, so when I did, when we did split, it's not like I just went to Vegas and just started spending money left and right, like, you know, yay, I don't have a business partner telling me I can't spend money, so, um, You know, I was, and I was also very privy to what you're allowed to write off and not allowed to write off.

So, I wasn't doing all these crazy things where I'm spending company money that hasn't been taxed yet and, and trying to act like it's going to be a write off for me. Um, but we parted ways, our last year together was 2017. That's also right when we moved into a new office. You know, we kind of, uh, split.

And, um, and in, um, In March of 2018, we had our RMM that we were actually moving away from, uh, because it didn't support MFA without this crazy, antiquated third party product that it required, that we did not want to deal with, and we were about halfway moving our clients off of it before there was a undisclosed vulnerability about said RMM, undisclosed, we didn't know about it. Threat actors apparently knew about it, and we had half of our clients ransomed. So, was I happy for the first three months that I was running my own company and, and calling all the shots?

Yay! But now I get to call all my shots during this crazy security incident, and I'm, and I'm by myself. So, so yeah, we did end that year at the negative 3 percent profit margin, to your point. Yeah, the minute that we split, I wasn't making money, but it wasn't entirely my fault.

That was a wake up call for us. I think what happened when I look back on that is, you know, we immediately realized, first of all, luckily, we were at our turning point. So our recurring income paid for all of our expenses. Projects were more just icing on the cake.

And so that's one of the main reasons we survived. The other main reason is the relationship we had with our clients. We only lost one client out of the 35 that were affected. Um, and, but I realized that I was work, I immediately, the minute I broke loose from him, I've got this mindset I want to grow, grow, grow.

This is back in the, you know, Robin Robbins is still around, but you know, Robin Robbins like sell, sell, sell, get more clients, get more clients, get more clients, and I realized, well, wow. What am I doing to protect the income we already have? And what type of shared risk do I have with my clients? What type of risks does this income have of going away overnight?

Well, I quickly understood that. Um, it wasn't really known that threat actors were targeting IT departments. It was kind of a, uh, it was a moment where it made sense. Oh, yeah, of course they're going to come after me because I got the keys to the kingdom of a bunch of other clients.

Why wouldn't they? But it wasn't talked about in the MSP channel. It wasn't talked about in the MSP channel. I was very involved in the MSP channel because all these products we adopted, I naturally wanted to be on the partner advisory boards with the idea that I just got done developing my own products and I want to help them develop theirs better.

So we got a ton of good support from the industry from a, from a how do we pivot and prevent this from happening again. But there was even our insurance company was not prepared for this. This was like the early days of when this started happening. And when I called my insurance company up, they literally just told me, um, alright, well, we understand what's going on, um, go ahead and remediate it, uh, track all your expenses and, and get back to us when you're done and, and we'll finish out your claim.

There was no, here's a legal team, here's a negotiator for the threat actors, here's a security team, a SOC to come in, or a, you know, an IR team, I should say, to come in and help you. They didn't have any of that prepared, and I actually had to force them to find a company for me, because I was going to do my own remediation, but I wanted them to bring in a company that verified my remediation was, was up to par. I wasn't a security expert. I mean, we did firewalls and antivirus back then.

And, um, so they ended up bringing Solus Security in, back then, right? I think that's kind of when Solus was starting, just getting started out. They're much bigger now. And, uh, they ended up verifying everything, but it took two weeks to remediate and then probably another two weeks to kind of get the wheels back on the bus, if you will, to start moving forward.

Um, but it, it made me, it made me realize that I don't want to take on new clients right now. I need to like figure out how I'm not going to go out of business. And so it was, It was rebuilding the trust with clients that, hey, this isn't going to happen again because of X, Y, Z. And what does that mean?

Well, really, I had to dive into a security framework. So CIS was the one that I got introduced to by Ryan Weeks. He was a big help during that time. Um, and, uh, really just tried to understand what do we need to do to add more layers of protection?

Or even be able to, you know, detect better what might be going on so we can respond better and mitigate overall damage and We spent the next two years really hardening our house. I kind of sadly went crazy with tools I was like throwing a tool at everything in the beginning before Ryan, you know, he's like come here Ryan Let me talk to you about a security framework. It's not all about tools, buddy It's like, there's people and processes involved as well. And so it took me a little, you know, the first year, I think that's probably around when, when we met, believe it or not.

Cause I remember going to some of your forums with my big 40 layer stack. Oh my gosh, that Steve Taylor: list was insane, man. I was Brian Weiss: so proud of it though. Steve Taylor: You really were.

Brian Weiss: I was like, here's my 40 layers that are going to prevent this from ever happening again. Man, I know ogres Steve Taylor: are like onions, but man, that was a lot of layers. Brian Weiss: Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of it was me looking for external validation too. Cause I was just, I felt lost, you know, no one was, I was like, I was like, I just shared everything about my, I went to DattoCons and, you know, different of any event I could go to, told my story.

I didn't want it to happen to other people. I was hoping to learn something along the way. So I was just kind of an open book, just trying to, in a big sponge. Steve Taylor: Yeah, I mean that, that makes perfect sense.

I mean, if you think about it, at that point in your life, you were probably experiencing some serious imposter syndrome, which I know something about. You know, you, you had a, a big catastrophic event happen that made you question, are we actually good at what we do? Whether you said it out loud or not, you know, that's, that's probably one of the questions that was going through your mind at that point. And at that point, you, you had a few different paths you could have down, gone down and you chose the path of, uh, you know, let me, let me chat with my industry peers.

Let me, let me start making sure we're protected. And, you know, like you said, you, you might've overdone it a little. But, um, I think there's something to be said about the fact that you were trying, you know what I mean? Like, you, you were taking security seriously after that event, Brian Weiss: which, Steve Taylor: you know, unfortunately it takes an event for that to happen.

But, um, yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that speaks volumes to your character, man. Brian Weiss: Yeah, it's definitely some resilience. Uh, I think you need that in our industry. Uh, so it, um, It was, we just didn't take on clients for two years, which kind of sucks because you get out of the practice of doing sales.

They say you should never stop selling. I know, I know what that feels like because the minute we started selling again, I was like, what, how do I sell again? I'm talking to a new client. How am I going to approach this?

And really, sadly, it was all about cybersecurity. So it was a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt and, and trying to scare clients into using your services. Otherwise, they, you know, they might lose their business overnight and, and that's not the right way to go about it. Um, um, you know, I Steve Taylor: Sometimes, unfortunately, they, they kind of like They'll wake up one night and go, did I just get scammed?

Yeah. Now they're stuck in a contract that they don't want to be in. Brian Weiss: Yeah. And I'll tell you other than, other than just the passion of, of feeling like, okay, wow, I went from, you know, doing IT to help businesses be more efficient and implement technology for efficiency, to now I'm using, I'm in IT to help protect them from the threat actors.

You know, it may, it probably gave me a I had a different outlook where I felt like a superhero that needed to save everyone. And how do I save everyone? Scare them about the villains. Tell them how bad the villains are.

Um, so, I mean, it was education that needed to be made, but I think in hindsight and even, even during that time, I started not liking it. You know, it wasn't what I originally got into IT for. It wasn't cybersecurity. That's not why I got into IT.

And really we're trying to talk clients into spending more money to take conveniences away. Um, so that, so that was a struggle, right? It took, we still grew 15 percent gross revenue year over year after that event because we were really focusing on our existing client base and getting them, their, their infrastructure hardened. But at that negative 3 percent profit margin, it took us two years to get back up to our kind of target 10 percent we had always maintained a minimum of.

And, um, So yeah, you know, two years later, we're, we're end of 2019 and we're like, all right, this is our last year where we feel like we're putting the pieces back together. Right? What's 2020 going to look like? I don't know if anyone Steve Taylor: 2020 was a, was a fun Brian Weiss: year.

Yeah. So, you know, beginning of 2020, we got this idea. We were all just optimistic. We're going to do this.

We're going to do that. We've got, we've got our stack, you know, down from 40 layers to maybe, you know, 15, uh, cause we, we were all over the place. We had this, you know, idea of what things look like. We had gotten plenty of feedback from, from peers in the industry where, where we didn't feel like we were as crazy anymore.

Um, that, that was definitely some humility, uh, that I went through there, which is good. Humility is good in this industry. It helps keep you grounded. That's something I'm focusing on today, even being grounded.

And, um, so 2020 rolls around. So is my Steve Taylor: son. Brian Weiss: Yeah. Steve Taylor: He's grounded.

Brian Weiss: Oh, I'm trying to avoid that type of grounded, but, uh, and that, that would come from my wife these days. Uh, the, so 2020 rolls around. I'm trying to think back, you know, um, I remember like the early days of COVID. Right.

You hear about the news first. Coming from China, you're like, Oh, China, that's not going to come here. Like, Oh, is that real? And, uh, pretty, before you know it, it's here, you know, I think it was like mid February, end of February, we started, you know, getting affected in our area.

Now we live in California. So if there's going to be any mandates, you know, coming from the government, they're coming in California first out of any other state, probably. So we, we saw it right away. You know, we, we had these new OSHA rules we had to follow.

Um, I, uh, I've never tried to bring politics into my business with my clients or employees, so we had to definitely wade the line of like, hey, we respect whatever you believe, you know, but we got to follow these OSHA rules and yeah, COVID, if you get COVID, you're like at home for, I think it was two weeks back then, or maybe a week. Like you can't. I think it Steve Taylor: was two. Yeah.

Yeah. Brian Weiss: And it's like, stay away, you know, and, and that sucks. Cause we had a great culture that was really in an office culture. Uh, we were lucky that we had migrated a hundred percent to teams, even for our phone system by then.

And so we, we pivoted to all of our meetings being virtual. We started, we started this. I Tech Cares meeting, which we still have today, actually. Monday morning, uh, half an hour, uh, Friday morning, a half an hour, where you're on the clock, and you're, you're not supposed to talk work, and it's just kind of a check in, water cooler time, if you will.

The idea of Monday was like, how was your weekend? What'd you do? You know, kinda, trying to, Stay, keep the, the, the team connected outside of just work topics. And then Friday.

Steve Taylor: Cause, cause you guys are, you're all remote now at this point, you know, like you said, you had this in office culture and now thanks to COVID everyone's working from home and you being in California, I mean, again, we don't have to talk politics, but I think you guys were stuck being home the longest. Um, and, uh, And yeah, I mean, I, I think the, the iTechCares thing, I think that's great. You were, you were trying to promote the camaraderie between all of your, your team members still.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, I think it worked well. I mean, we still have it and they still enjoy it. Um, we are excited. We just bought an office that we're going to be moving into in January.

We're going to kind of do a back to the office, uh, After what, 25 years, 5 years remote, and then we're back in the office, I'm looking forward to that. Why? Yeah, Steve Taylor: why go back to the office? Brian Weiss: Um, so when I, when I think, when I think about it, you know, the problem we have right now is there's way too many meetings, virtual, internal with our team, and the meetings, um, cause a delay in getting work done.

Typically, because there's things that need to be discussed in the meetings to move the ball forward. And, it's harder to, if you're all working in the same office, and there's something small you need to talk to, talk to someone else about. Typically, you're looking for a chance when they're not in front of their computer, or walking around, or you notice they're free, and you're just walking up to them. Hey!

Got five minutes? Let's talk about this real quick. When you're remote and you don't have a visual on your team, you know, you're, you're kind of in your own island and you're, you're having to ping them on Teams, which by the way, we have developed very good Teams etiquette at our company where we don't constantly interrupt each other. We're respective and, and, and, or, or set up a small meeting or do this or do that.

But we're, we operate on a triage dispatch model now where Everything gets scheduled out for our engineers. So their, their, their schedules are typically all, all full anyway. So the only time you have for internal communication are these scheduled meeting times that always happen on this one day of the week. And so it, it causes things to back up that wouldn't normally back up.

And then you're trying to cram everything into a single meeting, right? When things are top of mind in the middle and you're in the office, you're There are a lot quicker and easier to talk about when you've when you've got something top of mind You know you need to talk about and it's got to wait for another meeting What are you doing? Maybe making a note about it on an agenda so you know you talk about it But it's like warming up a car you get into the meeting and you got to warm up that car to remember all those things That you were hoping to talk about just on a whim and so it takes longer, you know and and And, luckily, we have AI now, so it takes very detailed notes, but before we had AI, it was even harder, because unless someone was taking good notes in the meeting, things would be forgotten, and then there'd be even further delays caused.

Um, there's, there's also an aspect of the type of culture we have, it's kind of a family culture that we like to promote and have. And could you imagine living with your family remotely? You wouldn't be living with them, right? It would feel like a different family.

If you only saw each other on video and you had to schedule time with each other all the time. So, so there's a human aspect, a social connection that you really lose when you're a remote company. Now there's some lines of business where that's acceptable. I mean, if I had a dev company where all they did is lines of code all day long, how much interaction do you really need?

When you're a customer centric company and you deal with people all day long and trying to keep people happy, you know, that's going to affect the quality of service if your team can't be around each other, you know, physically on a regular basis. If they're hindered by technology to provide a better quality of service in a customer centric, you know, environment. Um, these are just things I've noticed, you know. It can be done remotely.

It's not the type of culture we want to have, though. It hinders it, I feel like. I don't know. Steve Taylor: So, you've brought up the term engineers a few times, and I want to dig into that a little bit, because I remember seeing an argument somewhere, and I don't remember which forum it was in, that MSPs should not be calling their technicians engineers, because an engineer is something that You had to get a, you know, certification or a degree or something to get.

And sure, there are software engineers, but an engineer is a special term, and the guy that's working on firewalls is probably not an engineer. What are your thoughts on that? Have you ever thought about that at all? Brian Weiss: Oh yeah.

My brain's a storm of ideas. It thinks about things all the time. I mean, we used to call our employees technicians. Microsoft I mean, we've been through the gamut.

System administrators, uh, network engineers, um, you know, level 3, that's still kind of used. I think, I think where I fall back to engineer is really high level in how we think. We think like engineers, regardless of what our role is. Our brains work like an engineer.

My brain still works like an engineer, even though I'm supposed to be a CEO. So I get into the weeds sometimes. Which I like, I like getting in the weeds, but really a CEO's role is to not be in the weeds all day long. You know, so, um, you know, engineer, I think of it as we, we want to know how things work.

We understand that things work based on a process. We reverse engineer things all the time to understand how they work better. Um, you know, technician to me, why we got away from that is, it's almost a little demeaning to me. for listening.

From the value that, that my employees actually bring to the table on the service delivery machine, machine, uh, department. I was thinking machine because what I was going to say is technicians typically are working on some sort of machine. Right? Like I think of like a car technician, for example.

Like you wouldn't call a mechanic an engineer because the motor's already been engineered to work a certain way. And they're more of a technician working on the motor. Right, but, but when you think about it, we're not dealing with out of the box solutions that work like a fixed motor in a car. We're dealing with an operating system, line of business, software that runs on the operating system.

Let's talk about the drivers that the operating system needs to use to interface with the hardware, which is a gamut of different types of hardware we run into all day long. So we're really having to engineer away To keep the computer running with a bunch of different moving pieces that aren't always the same. And, and when a problem happens, we have to reverse engineer why that problem might have happened to understand it better. Um, so I don't know.

That's, I don't know if that's the answer you're looking for, but in my head, as I'm talking about it off the top of my head, that's kind of where I fall in why I call them engineers. Steve Taylor: I don't think I'm looking for. A particular answer. I just wanted to get your thoughts on it.

I don't, I don't, uh, I don't really have a dog in this fight. I don't care one way or another. Um, Well, you do have Brian Weiss: some, you do have some dogs that your, uh, family brought over. Steve Taylor: They're, they're, they're, they're fighting.

Yes. Um, you, you mentioned earlier that, you know, you, you were kind of running a, a lifestyle business at one point. I, I would argue that you still are. And hear me out.

I think every CEO is running a lifestyle business to a certain degree, because look at what, what these, what these people are doing, you know, like, look at, uh, look at, look at Mark Zuckerberg, look at the house he lives in, and all the, and all the cool stuff he does. I mean, that's, that's a lifestyle. Now, he Probably works his ass off like 80 hours a week. Like he probably lives to work at Meta, right?

Um, and that's okay. Cause that's. You know, his family has accepted that. That's, that's his lifestyle.

You know, you've got a certain lifestyle too. I don't know how, how, how much you want to reveal to the public about your lifestyle, but you know, I, you know, you, you've done well for yourself. You've got nice things and, um, I don't think there's anything wrong with that, you know, whether you're running a 120, 000 company, or a 3 million company, or a 10 billion company, it all could be a lifestyle business depending on how you as a person are kind of looking at things. Brian Weiss: Yeah, I mean, I think any business owner is running their business so that they can maintain a certain personal lifestyle.

I think where I was using the term earlier is, is your business itself big enough to maintain a lifestyle that you're happy with to where you're not really caring to grow and scale it and make it better. Steve Taylor: Gotcha. Okay. Right?

Do you think there's something wrong with people that, that are at that point? Yeah. Yeah. Brian Weiss: Not at all.

It's the heart of America. Lifestyles, small businesses, that's the heart of America. And it's typically where you get the better quality of service because it's more relationship based, right? The minute you try to start growing and scale, I would say at least half the time you're starting to leave that, that relationship.

You're, you're, you're, maybe your clients are turning more into numbers than names, right? Steve Taylor: Now, what would you say, um, gosh, I want to tread lightly here, and it's, it's not you. So we know a guy who I feel like probably is just running a lifestyle business. But keeps telling himself that he wants to grow, but also at the same time, he just keeps falling further and further behind when it comes to IT knowledge.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, um, you know, I've been there before. I mean, especially in the earlier days when I first started iTech, I had no idea what it was like to grow a business. I just thought, hey, now that I have a business name and I can hang my shingle up that I'm a business that I'm just going to grow one day. Right?

Without even having to learn how to grow. And, and it really took me, you know, a recession, a security incident, COVID, the great resignation, which I didn't talk about, where we lost half of our staff. Um, and it took, it takes those hard pains to, to really get, give yourself humility that maybe you don't got this and maybe you need to rethink what it, what it really means to, to, to grow and run a business. No one's just going to hand you money.

Because you have a business name, or because you have a set of skills that you might be overconfident about even. Um, I, you know, in my mind, in my mind, what I've learned, so what I've learned up until today, and where we're going with our business, is, and especially in the IT industry, there's kind of two convergences happening. You're either gonna fall in line with a commoditized model, which means you're not really offering much more value than, than your competitor. who's also commoditized, and it's, and it's a race for market share.

And how are you getting that market share, right? Um, or you're actually developing some real IP that's differentiating yourself from your competitor. And, and the MSP channel has done a great job at commoditizing MSPs. So we've stepped away from the MSP channel a bit because the intellectual conversations I've been trying to have about the things I'm learning and the direction I want to go with.

With our company haven't been welcomed too. Well They've been hit with criticism, you know, and and and a kind of a you're doing it wrong And why would you do that? You know, we're a Microsoft first shop So there's a lot of like why you put in all your eggs in one basket Right? And I'm like, well, it's better than 20 different baskets with all these half baked MSP channel products that I know first hand really are half baked and they're not getting better because I've been on all the partner advisory boards.

Steve Taylor: Sure. Now, now, hold on a second though. So you say you're a Microsoft first shop and there's nothing wrong with being Microsoft first. Um, The, the part that I would caution you in, um, when you, when you think about the fact that all of your eggs are in one basket, they're all in the Microsoft basket.

Okay, so, if you were to look at, um, let's just say a company that rhymes with Matto, and, uh, you put all your eggs in that basket, right? And then they get purchased by a company that rhymes with Keflaya, and, uh, and, and now your eggs are in a basket, you don't want them in. So I get that because right now what's happening in the MSP industry is, is there's a lot of like consolidation happening with, with a lot of the MSP products. And I think the reason for that is, um, Uh, let's, let's be honest.

You know, a lot of these companies are startups that the CEO has a goal. He has, he has a goal of, I want to get this valuation. I want to sell it for this much, and I'm going to, I'm going to make a big nest egg. Right.

And when you look at companies like Microsoft, you know, they're, they're much larger, they're more established. They're not looking for an exit because they're already a publicly traded company, so I get that. But let's look at another behemoth. Okay, of a company, and I'm not going to say Apple, CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike is not an MSP first company, right? They are, they are a company that's publicly traded, and there are many MSPs that had their eggs all in that basket, and when CrowdStrike had that big crash, a lot of MSPs kind of weren't, weren't a pickle, right? So, that's, that's my only, That's my only thought, is it doesn't matter if all of your eggs are in an MSP basket or an enterprise basket, shit can still hit the fan. Brian Weiss: Yeah, I would say from, uh, with the studying I've done about security frameworks and around cybersecurity.

First of all, I want to point out that competition has ruined cybersecurity, in my opinion. Antitrust laws should have never been allowed to be passed by the EU, or the EU Commission should have never forced Microsoft to open up the kernel the way they did. A good analogy is, you know, uh, and it's not CrowdStrike's fault. They just took advantage of a market that was there to, to compete with, you know, uh, other third party security comp, uh, products, where Defender wasn't really up to par back in the day anyway.

for listening. Right? But, if you look at how far Defender's gone, and you look at Defender as the secret service who is protecting the president, we shouldn't really have a situation where third party security companies are saying, no fair, I should be able to protect the president at that sensitive level as well. It creates single points of failure.

And I think to your point, no matter where your eggs are, how many different baskets they're spread in, whether they're in one basket or not, Really what we have to start looking at is what are our single points of failure. And that's really what happened with the global outage, is there was a single point of failure. Now, could there be a single point of failure with Microsoft? Of course.

Microsoft could come out with a Defender update that did the same thing that CrowdStrike would. However, it's Microsoft's kernel. So who are you going to trust that's going to come out with an update that's not going to cause a kernel issue? Is it going to be a third party company?

That's growing on the stock market and has capitalism at its back to try to make numbers to compete with other third party security products, right? You know, the minute you start getting competition in cybersecurity, that's when walls start going up. People aren't sharing information. What about IOCs?

Indicators of Compromise? Why are third party security companies Having indicators of compromises of threat actors that they're not sharing with other third party security companies and they're IP to drive up their stock price. Do you think a state in California, or a state in the US, if there was a criminal in California that went over to Nevada, California is going to be like, sorry, we're not going to share any information about that criminal that just entered your state because we've got IP we need to protect.

Because it helps us be worth more money from a security standpoint, right? So, you know, it goes up all the way up to capitalism, I guess, right? And the fact that this was allowed, uh, in cybersecurity. So, but, but it's, let me use another analogy.

So, why are we Microsoft first, Defender first? Now, they can't do everything. We augment Defender with, with ThreatLocker, shirt I'm wearing, right? I love third party security products.

That don't try to displace or compete with Defender, because if you've already got a bouncer inside the room with you, why are you going to fire that bouncer to depend on a bouncer that's outside of the room that has to ask Microsoft for permission every time just to come in the door to protect you? Right? That's another single point of failure. Different from the kernel level where third party security has to maintain permission with the Microsoft operating system or even Microsoft 365 tenant to Protect you.

There's an, there's an Azure Enterprise app for any third party security that is a single point of failure. If you had an insider threat or a threat, threat actor that gained high enough level of permissions, they could delete that enterprise app and blind your third party security product. So, so when I think about a stoic approach, I knew you were wanting me to get to this, is, is we really need to avoid, avoid the FUD, the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, which is really the smoke and mirrors the truth.

That you see in cybersecurity around why one company says they're a better security company than the other, and they're competing with each other when really they should be sharing information so that we can rise the tides. Or on the opposite side, fomo. Fear of missing out something you may not have yet that you feel like you need. Like my 40 layers of security that I jumped to , right?

Where now I've just overcomplicated my life. And maybe added, like, several layers, single points of failure, and all these things I'm not even thinking about. My threat landscape's bigger now. You know, I got 40 vendors I'm working with versus 15, you know, that's a bigger threat landscape to manage.

So, so my idea with the stoic approach to technology is, uh, and you look at a security framework, It doesn't care about users and devices. Really, those are cattle. Uh, I never tell a human they're cattle, a user, a user account, let's call it that. User accounts and devices from a security, um, framework aspect, they don't care about them.

Now, if you're storing data on a device, then naturally it cares about that, but now you're understanding where I'm going. All it cares about is data. And so where does all your data live? And the users and devices are typically vectors to that data.

So, the more applications you use, I also blame Apple. I'm in a blame game today, if you haven't noticed. Steve Taylor: Now hold on a second, you leave my beloved Apple be. Brian Weiss: Okay, here's one criticism that I'm hoping you can't argue with.

Apple came out with this commercial that they thought was great, and it kind of was fun at the time, but now I'm looking back at it and I hate it. They taught a whole generation that there's an app for that, right? So you have this generation that comes into the workforce and wants to do more with technology and maybe they're not getting the support from their manager or IT. And they're just finding their own app to solve their problem and that's, therein lies shadow IT is another thing we're battling with today.

So how many apps are you using? And where's all your data dispersed? And how big is your threat landscape? And how do you build a security framework around that?

Well the easiest thing to do is to talk about it in users and devices. We're not gonna, we're not gonna care about where the data is. And by the way, it's hard to sell security with a data centric focus. It's a much different conversation and, and how do you even price that out?

It's much easier to say, our, our, our service costs X amount per user or X amount per device. Now go scale with that, right? It's really a commoditized approach to security in my opinion. And, but when the minute you start talking about data, it's like, whoa, So, we can't even give you a price yet until we understand where all your data is.

And, and first we got to figure out all the apps you're using, you know, and then we figure out where your data is. And then we understand, okay, what is that going to cost to actually secure? Well, the next logical step is, well, there's user accounts and devices accessing those apps that access that data. So there is some, there is some reasonable aspect or there's some reasonable thought in that approach, but it's not really the core thing that a security framework needs to.

Protect. So a stoic approach would be, let's not just throw more tools and more layers of security so we can sleep better at night. Let's understand, do we even need all these apps? Do we even need our data dispersed in the way that it is?

What's the value that we're getting out of doing this? Other than the fact we just allowed this to get out of hand because everyone and their mom at your company decided to go get an app that they thought was going to help them. When really there should have been more leadership, a better leadership approach and oversight to make sure we're trying to keep all the horses in the In the stable, right? Um Steve Taylor: That's good, man.

So, the only thing I want to say, you know, on the Apple stuff is I'm torn. You know, you said earlier you hate the EU and all their antitrust stuff. I'm torn, okay? On one side, I agree.

I think that if they keep going after Apple for things, they're going to ruin what makes Apple Apple. Yeah. Yeah. Brian Weiss: 100%.

Steve Taylor: But, I gotta say, I really love that I've got USB C on my iPhone instead of Lightning. And I love that I now have RCS communication, whatever it's called, uh, so I can, I can do rich messaging with my Android friends. Um, those losers, uh, but, but on, you know, at the same time, like, you know, I don't love that they've made it so in the EU, you can use a third party app store. Like, no, that, that's stupid.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. I, some of those I agree with. I mean, some of them I wouldn't consider security, right? I mean, lightning port versus USB C.

Steve Taylor: Yeah, I don't think that was for security. I think that one was, they were, they were trying to make it so that, uh, I don't know why it mattered. I really don't. I think they were trying to make it so that way all, all, uh, consumer devices were standardized across the same type of port.

Brian Weiss: And they should be, because I hate carrying multiple chargers. I love Apple devices. Well, I should say I like iOS. I started out with with app with Macs in high school.

That's all I knew and worked on before I got involved with delivering business services in IT where no one was really using Macs. Now I love Windows and Microsoft, but I use iOS for mobile and I really don't trust Google is, you know, at all, especially a lot of the stuff I've been reading lately, uh, paper that Robert Epstein put out, uh, with his project, um, really opened my eyes. That's, I knew you were going to say that. Different, different Epstein.

God, that name's got such a bad connotation. It Steve Taylor: really does. Brian Weiss: Um, so I don't, I don't want to get into the Google stuff because. They might take your podcast down if we get too deep into it.

Uh, they've been known to do things like that. Steve Taylor: I'm not scared of them. Brian Weiss: Come at me, Google. No, don't say that.

You need to take the stoic approach. Steve Taylor: No, honestly, um, so, so I, I'm torn on Google. I love Google Workspace, uh, much more than Microsoft 365 and not from an administrator perspective, from a user perspective. Okay.

From an administrator perspective, I think. Microsoft is much more secure and, and has much more capabilities, but from a user perspective, Google, Google is like Apple to me, where it's, it just works. You know what I mean? Um, so I really, you know, I say, come at me, Google, but I like Google.

I don't have anything against you guys. Um, we are, no, please go ahead. Brian Weiss: One thing I'll point out there is that Google started in the web, right? And Microsoft didn't.

So Microsoft's been building the airplane while they're flying it, getting it out to a web platform. So it's, it's natural that you're gonna not have as seamless as an experience as you might feel you get from Google. So I think we should understand that as well. Steve Taylor: Yeah, that's fair.

Well, hey, we're, we're like way over on time, but I have one last question, Brian, and it's a fun one. Are you still wearing your AI necklace? Brian Weiss: No. What happened?

So I actually, so I, I, I found another one. I found actually two other ones that I ordered. Why am I not surprised? And I'm going to try them out.

This one was just too expensive. It was like 19 bucks a month and I wasn't getting the value out of it. Like I was wondering like, why can't I just open up Copilot on my phone and use that instead or have it record and then transcribe or whatever. I mean, it is nice to have it on your neck, but it was too expensive.

I actually reached out to the CEO. And had a conversation with him about it. And why does Steve Taylor: that not surprise me either? Brian Weiss: Because I was trying to understand why is it so expensive?

And, and maybe, and I even pointed out these other options. I was like, why wouldn't I go use these other options? You tell me what's different about your product. That's going to make me want to stick with yours because.

It's brand spankin new, so it's not, it's not perfect, and you're already charging this much money? Like, you're charging the same amount that I could pay for Copilot, or, or MetaAI, or a lot of these other AIs that, that, uh, that give me a lot more value. And, uh, and his, the only thing he can come back with was, he keeps all the, you know, he doesn't use the data for any training, so it's all private. And then I was like, so, you're selling this AI model, how are you training it then?

If you're not using any of the training from all your end users that are sitting here, literally training your AI for you, and how are you going to grow a better AI? How are you going to make it smarter so that it improves over time? He didn't have a Steve Taylor: good answer, did he? Brian Weiss: Well, they're, they're doing their own training.

But they're not using crowdsourcing for training. And, and, and in my, really, in my opinion, all AI should be open source. You know, like I don't trust open AI at all. The fact they started out nonprofit, open source, now they're closed source and they're all about profit.

I do not like that. You can't see how they're training their AI. It's behind a curtain. And, and so I think AI really needs to be open source, uh, as far as the model goes.

Um, but you can't make as much money off of it that way. Um, so I'm okay with, with sharing my training data if I know it's going to improve the AI. Um, you know, I'm still battling with, you know, well, what data is it collecting? What data is it not collecting?

And understanding that better because there's a lot of things that could be said just for a placebo, you know, button that you're pressing, you know, telling yourself it's, it's private when maybe it really isn't. But in all honesty, we've got. Alex is out there, you know, we've, we've got our phone listening to us all day, not going to get into what Google's doing because I don't want your podcast to get banned. That stuff is already happening, right?

And if, and I'm using AI to help cut through a lot of the narratives about whether or not that stuff is happening. And the problem is when you have a closed source model, that's for profit, it's driven by special interests, it's driven by people wanting to make more profit. These people also want narratives to continue that might be false. And so, you start to trust even using the AI in the first place of whether or not you're getting factual data back.

You know, is it going to be just like a Google search, where you're searching for something that you know is there and it's purposely not coming up? Um, so, so yeah, back to, back to your question. I got rid of that one. I did have a talk with the CEO to try to figure it out a little bit more.

I'm trying out these other two ones. These two other ones with a stoic approach, um, but I love that idea. Now these other ones, one of them's completely free, which tells me they're probably collecting anything and everything, because how do you offer a free service? The other one charges you per minute, which is even more expensive.

So it's like, hey, I'm leaving yours that's unlimited 19 a month, because I like this other one that charges me per minute. It doesn't make sense, right? Steve Taylor: So, I, I gotta say, uh, have you used Fathom, that AI recorder for Zoom and all that? Brian Weiss: Love that company.

Um, we stopped using Copilot for our meetings, because Fathom has a better hyper focus around delivering value for meetings. And so we've moved to that in our company for now. Um, I've got a meeting with them next week to talk about, uh, A lot of security questions that I have to see whether or not we would refer this to our clients. We're kind of POC ing it right now.

But I even invested in the company in their last series. And I've talked to their CEO and developed a relationship with the CEO as well. So, I love what they're doing. 100%.

Steve Taylor: I want Fathom for my life. Brian Weiss: Yeah. Steve Taylor: I want Fathom on a necklace. You know, I want to be able to have it, uh, you know, and this is me just spitballing, you know, push a button to start and stop meetings, or what have you, so that way it can summarize different parts of my day for me.

Because, man, I love it. I, I love Fathom. It has, it has made my life a whole lot easier. The only thing I think it's missing, it, for me at least, is the ability to like, link up to a to do app of some sort to take those action items and put them in my to do list.

Brian Weiss: That's, that's a great idea for Fathom actually as kind of a next product. I would say, I definitely don't like it that it's listening all day long. That was the other one that I got rid of. It just listened all day long.

There was no stop start to it. Like, unless you went in, I guess you can go into the app maybe and disconnect it or something. I like the idea of, cause I run my life based on a calendar, and so I've got two things where AI could understand when it should be listening. One of them is, look at my calendar, and have me tag a few things.

Which time frames in my day based on my appointments. I want you to be listening and then I you could also do it GPS based Right. So maybe maybe you're running a bunch of errands and you don't want it to be running based on a GPS Location, right? That would be another thing I'd want to have because I don't really like the idea of having to remember to start stop at all the time But that would be the the fallback right and that's that is one of them.

I ordered it is a start stop button Um, the, the other thing I'm intrigued about is I just bought the new Apple watch, uh, the Ultra 2, and I'm interested to see what type of AI capabilities that might have, because I also like the idea of just having it on my wrist, and being able to flip up, or something, or give it a command, I mean, commands are kind of clunky, maybe press a button on my watch, you know. With Apple Steve Taylor: intelligence, realistically, you're not going to see anything truly useful out of it on the watch for probably until February, March.

Brian Weiss: Yeah. That's what I was reading. There wasn't really anything out of the box yet, but I at least wanted to get the hardware, the new hardware, because my old, my old watch is, it's like three generations older. They wouldn't even give me any trade in value for it.

Steve Taylor: I'm wearing a Series 7 right now, and, uh, it's fine. Brian Weiss: Yeah. And then I got the new iPhone 16 as well. So, I, you know, while I'm trying out these necklace type watches, You know, AI devices.

I feel like ultimately it's going to be something I want Apple to handle for me, because I've already got an Apple watch and an Apple phone. So what might Apple come out with if there is a necklace or if it can just be part of the watch? Um, I, the future I see with AI is there's not going to be one huge all encompassing AI. There's going to be, you know, personal AI, like ideally everyone has their own personal AI that knows everything about them and also acts as their gatekeeper to share information, share information with other AI or humans.

And so you become almost symbiotic with your personal AI because it's got to know everything about you to truly protect you. It can't know less than the threat actors AI. Um, and then you're going to have like, you know, the company you work for is going to have a business AI. In my mind, that's Microsoft.

They're really the leaders right now in AI that's really good at business applications. So then, so you go to work for your company, and you set up a relationship between your AI and the company's AI, and your AI knows what to share and not to share, but it's automating a lot of the things you'd have to do normally from a personal level. Microsoft MFA for example, right? I mean is that even gonna be even a thing?

We'll be passwordless at some point in time? I hope. You know right now we're moving to tokens, but maybe, maybe your token is your watch and your AI at that point. Your own personal AI is your token.

Assuming it can't be duplicated. That, that's where maybe something like blockchain comes into play. Who knows? Steve Taylor: Oh man, I thought I was out, I thought I was over here at blockchain.

I thought we were done with that buzzword. Brian Weiss: It's got, it's got some usefulness to it. I'll tell you what, I'm moving a bunch of cash over to USDC, uh, digital currency. I get 5%.

You know, I get a monthly report of this interest I'm getting that I was definitely not getting with my savings account in my bank, that, you know, they, the bank, by the way, even though you see your money sitting in the bank account, it's not really there, you know, if they leave money in the bank, they're not doing their business model properly, they're immediately lending on that money, so it's a really fragile system we have right now, so I do think digital currency, which uses blockchain technology, So you're not going to stop hearing about it, uh, is going to help balance, uh, you know, the banking system in the future, and in fact, every big bank I know of right now is coming out with their own digital currency.

Um, I don't know, we're going off on all these tangents. What was the original question? AI necklace. Steve Taylor: I think the original question was, do you guys get hurricanes in California?

No, we were talking about the AI necklace thing and, uh, no, you answered the question, man. So I appreciate that. And. And we could talk about AI probably for hours, but we're not going to.

And I, I do want to, um, Before we sign off, I want to say one last thing, and it's, uh, you, you mentioned earlier that you're okay with AI using your training data. And I just want to clarify that you're not saying That you're okay with AI having open access to all of your confidential documents and your IP and all that stuff. You're just okay with them having access to the training data, which is very different. Brian Weiss: Thank you for clarifying that because that could be taken out of context.

You are correct there. Steve Taylor: Yeah. And the last thing I need is for you to be on a soundbite somewhere. Brian Weiss: Yeah.

Well, they'll take soundbites anyway. I mean, we've got, um, all right, last thing. I'm working with a stealth company right now. They're in stealth mode, I should say, uh, where we're doing, we're setting up vishing because I've done enough of these podcasts.

You have, uh, threat actors are going to be able to copy our voice. And literally call people we know and get them to try to do things with a normal phone call, where the person really thinks they're talking to us. And, and so, that's going to be the next revolution, I think, when it comes to security training, is this idea of, are we preparing everyone in the world for getting a call out of the blue, that could even have a masked phone number, that looks like that person's phone number, sounds like them, where they're going to get sucked into doing something they regret.

Right. Um, so that, that's, that's one thing too, to, to understand is, you know, our data's already out there. We've all got a digital footprint and, and when, when AI, when the threat actors really start harnessing AI, no human SOC, no human IR team is going to be able to keep up with the advancement. We're going to have to use AI ourselves to protect ourselves.

And it's got to know enough about us It's got to know more than the threat actors AI knows about us, ultimately. Steve Taylor: That's, that's a really interesting thought, but, um, great. Now I'm going to have nightmares about people using my voice. Thanks.

Brian Weiss: Well, and they'll get to videos too, pretty soon. Videos are a little easier to tell that they aren't real, right? Mm hmm. Steve Taylor: Did you see that video of Arnold Schwarzenegger doing, uh, that, what was it, an 80s song?

I don't remember what one. Brian Weiss: I haven't seen that yet. Steve Taylor: I think Kyle Christensen posted it. Oh.

One of the cybersecurity guys posted it. Will Brooks, that's who posted it. Brian Weiss: Okay. Steve Taylor: I'll find it and I'll put it in the show notes because now it's going to bother me.

And now he's going to get at least three more views on that post thanks to me. Alright. Brian Weiss: Is it weird that I actually want to get a Neuralink as well? Steve Taylor: You know, I'm torn.

I'm, I'm really, I'm between wanting one and thinking that's the mark of the beast. So, I, I totally I want to be able, especially because I've got these neck issues, right? So I'm totally all about like, what can I do to, I don't know, make my life easier if, if the rest of my spine and the rest of my bones all seize up? You know, am I going to be stuck in a wheelchair?

Am I going to, am I going to, I won't be able to do this into that thing in the side because my neck doesn't move. So, you know, how, how can I control this stuff? So trust me, I'm, I'm all about. Uh, embedding technology into me, I'm just not sure if I want it to be Elon Musk's technology because he just seems to have gone off the deep end.

And I don't even mean politically, okay, we'll just skip all of that. He just, I don't know, something about, like something, a switch was flipped. Around the time he bought Twitter or maybe even just around the time of the pandemic, you know, he, he started manipulating the, the stock market and, you know, Dogecoin and all that stuff. And, and then he, then he buys Twitter and then he just kind of went off the deep end.

Brian Weiss: Yeah, I see that as him, uh, pointing out vulnerabilities that we are taking for granted. Oh, Steve Taylor: sure. And, and I'm, I'm all about that. But, um, you know, because, because you look at, uh, look at what John Stewart and Stephen Colbert did, gosh, was it 20 years ago now?

When, when they made a superpack? Brian Weiss: Yeah. Steve Taylor: And all that stuff. Uh, and, and Stephen Colbert was running for president and John Stewart was running a superpack.

And oh, it was, It was, uh, it was fantastic. It was very eye opening, educational, and I feel like they revealed some vulnerabilities in the political system, if you will. So I'm, I'm all about people finding creative ways to educate the masses. I just, uh, I don't know if he was intentionally trying to educate as much as he was trying to Take advantage.

Brian Weiss: Well, maybe by the time I get a Neuralink, I can just ask my own personal AI if it's safe, and then it'll let me know. Steve Taylor: That'll do it. AI would never lie to you. or, or anything.

Yeah. Brian, this has been awesome man. Thank you so much for coming on here and having a chat with me. I can't wait to do it again where maybe next time let's just dive into AI and make that be the conversation next time.

Man. Brian Weiss: I'd love that. I'll, I'll get my notes arranged better too, so I'm not thinking off the top of my head as much when it comes to ai for sure. Yeah.

Steve Taylor: All good. Cool. Yep. Have a good one, guys.