The Dangers of Ransomware

Episode 945: The Dangers of Ransomware, with Brian Gill

The dangers of ransomware, a podcast with Brian Gill. Learn how investing in data security will protect you from the dangers of ransomware.

Brian Gill is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and angel investor. Brian currently serves as Chairman of Gillware, which provides cyber risk assessments, data recovery, incident response, and digital forensics services. He is a co-founder of Phoenix Nuclear Labs and served on PNLs board from inception to when it decided to spin-off SHINE Medical Technologies. Those two companies have raised over 100 million dollars of venture capital and employ hundreds of people in Wisconsin.

In this episode, Brian will be talking about the dangers of ransomware and how it can affect your data security if you don’t do anything about it. It’s important that online threats like this must be prevented to ensure no one becomes a victim ever again.

What you will learn from this episode about the dangers of ransomware:

• How Brian first began a successful data recovery business before getting involved in funding nuclear science technology research
• How the rise in ransomware attacks has helped position Brian’s data recovery business as an industry specialist spinoff of the main business
• How the dangers of ransomware is used by criminals to can gain access to your network, and how “social engineering” scams are the keys they use to get in
• How criminals will encrypt all the data in your network and then blackmail you into paying large sums of money to release your own data
• Why many of these criminals work for state-sponsored criminal syndicates and aren’t even breaking the law in their local jurisdiction
• Why too many business owners are reticent to spend money on security systems, leaving their businesses vulnerable in ways they may not even understand
• How to avoid the dangers of ransomware by investing into your data security and prevent or minimize costly financial disasters later
• Brian shares some of the early challenges he encountered and mistakes he made and discusses the key lessons he learned
• Why choosing your investment partners to raise capital for your business is vital, and why the right investors can bring more than just money to the table
• How Brian uses both internal and external marketing and thought leadership as a powerful way to repurpose content and connect with existing and new audiences

Resources:

• Website: www.gillware.com
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/brian-gill-68997a38/
• Read about an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

Additional Resources:

• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
• Apart from the dangers of ransomware, get to know all about the other cyber threats

 

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and scaled their business. In this episode Onward Nation, it is going to be no different. It is so awesome I can’t wait to jump in. But before we do, I want to bring you into focus on something that we’ve been working on since early 2019 and continuing into 2020, and we will continue it all the way through 2020.

 

And that is how we’re doubling down on our resource section at predictive roi.com. So if you haven’t been there in a while, I would encourage you to visit it now because we’ve added more practical and tactical guides, everything from how to create your ideal client avatar, how to land your dream clients, and even our new business to business podcasting for Profit Secrets e-book, plus other success strategies that we have compiled from the brilliant insights shared by our very generous guest.

 

So just go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources and whatever you request, we will send it right to your inbox free as always. 

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Brian Gill’s Introduction

 

So before we welcome today’s guest, Brian Gill, let me share some additional context about why, when Brian and I were going back and forth about him guesting on the show, why I was so delighted when he said yes.

 

So we talk about building and scaling. While Brian has done that. Brian is a computer scientist. He’s an entrepreneur. He’s an angel investor. He serves as chairman of Gillware, which provides cyber risk assessments, data recovery, incident response and digital forensic services. But he’s also the co-founder of Phoenix Nuclear Labs and served on the board from inception to when it decided to spin off Shine Medical Technologies.

 

Now, this is really near and dear to my heart Onward Nation because all of this is taking place in Wisconsin. The two companies that I just mentioned have raised over $100 million of venture capital and employ hundreds of people here in the great state of Wisconsin. So we’re certainly going to talk about things like building and scaling the ebbs and flows that go along with that, plus also the pivots that we need to take when we see business opportunities following down a different niche.

 

But then also the power of niching, too. What’s the process of raising capital? Well, Brian and his team have been very successful with that. We’ll probably talk about how they just recently closed another $3 million round for one of his companies. So all of these things that go into building and scaling a profitable company, but yet there’s still more which again, I was excited when Brian said yes, because Brian is also active in sharing his thought leadership by guesting on podcasts like Onward Nation and many other business related shows.

 

Well, why does he do that? For two main reasons one, he takes those episodes and shares them with. Part of the onboarding process of new teammates at the companies as a way to really help them get up to speed faster. Sharing his thought leadership where the company is going, culture values those types of things, which is a great strategy.

 

In addition to that, there’s also the strategy of taking clips of those episodes and then using those assets as a way to stay in front of over a thousand managed service providers, which in his business, are his partners, distribution partners that open up relationships with end users. And being able to take that thought, leadership and always staying front of mind or top of mind with those thousand partners because they’re critical.

 

And then taking that content even further by opening new doors with new partners and continuing to extend the audience and grow the audience. So it is awesome. I can’t wait to have this conversation in front of you Onward Nation, because I think there’s going to be several big nuggets you’re going to be able to take out of this discussion and be able to apply right into your business straight away.

 

So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Brian. 

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Brian’s Path and Journey

 

I am super happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to dropping some nuggets of wisdom on Onward Nation. Well, I’m looking forward to that too, although that sounded a little bit painful. Wow. You know, I look forward to letting you all down.

 

Okay, well, before we dive into the conversation, which I know is going to be very meaty, lots of nuggets and lots of lessons for Onward Nation business owners to take out and apply. Give us, give us the executive summary here. Just a couple of minutes. Take us behind the curtain and tell us more about your path and journey.

 

Just for some additional context beyond the bio. And then we’ll dive in with the questions. Yeah. So graduated from UW with a computer science degree, flew out to California to try to, like, play the startup game. It exploded big time. Tucks tail between my legs, humped back to Wisconsin. Still wanting to start a business. Did so. And we started what’s called a data recovery business, where we helped consumers and small businesses at the time get out of data related disasters that turned into a thing.

 

And like a company and a real company and lots of employees. One of our employees was this guy Greg Pifer, who’s basically Einstein. And I’m not even exaggerating. He’s a PhD nuclear engineer, you know, physicists, electrical engineer. He’s probably the smartest person in Wisconsin. And, it’s probably not even close. And he invented a device called a flame device, which was a fusion linear accelerator to to basically create a beam of neutrons.

 

I didn’t know why we didn’t want to build such a thing, but he did and he did. And we basically raised some money with him, co-founded the company which is now called Phoenix, Wisconsin, which used to be called Phoenix Nuclear Labs. And that company in October set a world record for the most amount of neutrons produced by anything other than a nuclear reactor.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: A Ransomware Event

 

Wow. Impressive. Super awesome. And I had nothing to do with it. You know, as far as I barely understand any of the physics, but it’s amazing what those people do there in Minnesota. It’s an amazing company. I helped them out with their digital marketing every once in a while. And, that company had basically given birth to a company called Shine Medical Technologies, which is down in Janesville, which is using Greg’s neutron technology to produce diagnostic and therapeutic medical isotopes.

 

And it’s going to be like a $500 million a year revenue company pretty soon. It’s amazing stuff. Wow. So then I basically again, those two companies are crazy amazing and they’re doing crazy stuff. I’m not a daily active participant. Neither one of those ventures, I and my business partners about ten years ago at the same time Greg went and got Phoenix going.

 

We got a company that did cloud backup and cloud analytics going, and then we sold that, about four years ago in 2016. And then we founded the venture that we just raised that $3 million for. And that company is doing what’s called digital forensics and incident response services. So, you know, every day, you know, people, you know, they open up their digital newspaper and they see the breach of the day.

 

Yeah. And it’s always some crazy company. And, you know, there was a company in Wisconsin that we’re assisting basically right now, that huge company, everybody would hear about it. I’m not going to throw them under the bus. But, you know, many, many hundreds of employees, everybody in Wisconsin knows who this company is. And they, you know, had a pretty major disaster.

 

And about 600 employees or so got to work on Monday and we’re told to basically go home because all their data was under lock and key. Wow. And they lost 3 or 4 days worth of productivity as we were digging them out of the mess. And they, you know, again, so these ransomware events, we were starting to get calls for them a lot back in 2016 because of the data recovery lab and because of our reputation just in general about, hey, there’s a bad thing happening with a company’s data.

 

What do we do? Oh, let’s call Delaware. And so we started getting those calls and we quickly realized, this is different. This is different. There’s similarities. And we’re certainly technologically competent enough to tackle it. And we’re very used to dealing with these high stress data loss situations. But there’s all kinds of nuance to investigating the breach.

 

How did they get in? How do we prevent breaches moving forward? What are all the legalities like the regulatory nature of why I needed to disclose this breach to? There’s all kinds of different stuff with it. So we decided to spin off a company which was called Gillware Digital Forensics, which about two weeks ago we rebranded to be Tetra Defense.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: How a Ransomware is Executed

 

Okay, so in our pre-interview chat, you mentioned, hey, if it would be helpful to Onward Nation business owners, Stephen would be happy to give them some tips on how to avoid ransomware. And as you were saying that I was thinking, okay, this might be the perfect opportunity to take you up on that offer. So first, before we dive into how to avoid it, give us some foundational context here as to what it is.

 

Yeah, ransomware. What it is: a bad guy, a criminal usually overseas is going to penetrate your network, usually by some flavor of social engineering, or you have a fundamental weakness in your IT. You have a system that’s not patched. You have a crappy firewall that’s unpatched, you know, or just somebody does something stupid and just gives a bad guy the keys to the kingdom.

 

So what is social? You had a term for that. What was the social piece called. Yeah. Social engineering. So it’s basically the old school you know, it’s the old school confidence scam. It’s the modern version of that, you know, these are con men. And one is I could call. I could look for a company in town here that does managed services.

 

I could just call around and say, hey, I’m Bob from ABC computers, and I just need a remote into your box. I noticed you were getting a, basically an alert that, you know, somebody has downloaded a piece of malicious software, and maybe some business owner just lets me RDP out of their box, and now I can sit there and it’s, oh, geez, it’s 5:00.

 

Well, you go home, I’ll just finish up here. And when they come in to work the next morning, everything’s encrypted. So again, and that’s pretty. That’s one example that we’ve seen. There’s hundreds of different ways that these guys and maybe gals get access to these private computer networks. But their goal is really simple.

 

They want money and they will use modern technology with strong ease. 256 bit encryption. Okay. And they will encrypt all of your data in the company if they can, and they will locate and figure out where your backups live, and they will try to kill them if they’re on network or even on a network. And if they kill those backups appropriately and all your data is encrypted, they will then charge you lots and lots of money to unlock your own data.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: How Criminals Acquire Their Money

 

Wow. And, one of the other bits of technology, which has really come along and really helped them with this monetization is cryptocurrency or more specifically anonymous cryptocurrency. Okay. There’s now a vehicle for me as a business owner to send half $1 million worth of bitcoins somewhere in the world instantly and I have no idea who it is.

 

And that’s what lets them, you know, not get caught most of the time by any kind of international authorities. Okay, so let me ask a naive question because I’m learning about this issue as you’re sharing it here. Because my knowledge in this area is pretty small. Obviously, given the nature of my questions.

 

But, so are you saying that if somebody, if one of these criminals that you described him or her, seizes and encrypts a company’s data and then essentially demands a ransom to unlock it, or are you saying that that person is demanding the ransom be to be paid in some sort of cryptocurrency because it’s less trackable or not trackable at all?

 

Correct? Yep. And they usually want it in bitcoins these days. Wow. Okay. I did not know that. Yeah. If it was a wire or a briefcase full of cash, you know, they’d have more luck catching them. Okay. Wow. I just assume that that would still leave some sort of digital fingerprint, but. Okay, there’s again, we don’t want to spend the whole podcast talking about blockchain, but there is a transaction that’s publicly visible in the blockchain.

 

Okay. Like we know that money went to that wallet, but we have no idea. But beyond that it gets clean. Okay. We can even see sometimes if they reuse, you know, we can see, oh, it’s the same syndicate, you know, and you can see that they’ve had hundreds of payments over the last couple of years. And they’re not creating new wallets every time.

 

But, the good ones are probably not doing that. Correct. And, the other thing is they will have some burden to then turn that into getting that out of the cryptocurrency and into some sort of, you know, local currency. Right. So and it’s not it’s not super easy if you’re sitting on like $10 million worth of bitcoins and you’re in kind of a third world country, potentially, it may not be super trivial to do that.

 

And that might be an opportunity for authorities to try to track these folks down. But the kicker is a lot of these are not lone wolf situations. They’re criminal syndicates. And a lot of times they’re state sponsored criminal syndicates. So what they’re doing is not even illegal in their country. The government might be telling them to do it.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Preventive Measures to Take

 

Well, that gives me a lot of confidence. Yeah. Which also then makes it important. Okay. So how does somebody know a business owner who’s listening to you right now, which are typically, you know, small business owners running professional services firms typically here domestically, although we do have listeners in 120 countries doing about $1 million to $10 million a year.

 

So how does a business owner running a company of that size protect himself or herself, to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen, or at least lessen the risk? Step one: understand that it sucks. Okay, if I was to come into your company and put it through about 50 or 60 common questions as part of an onboarding process, the average company of 1 to 10 million in revenue is probably going to have correct answers to about 3 or 2 of those 50 or 60, 50 Holy bananas.

 

Okay. Yeah. And believe me, I’ve been there as a business owner. When you first hit that $1 million mark, the last thing you want to do is turn around and spend like $30,000 on it. Right. You’re excited about reinvesting it in your core competencies. You’re excited about giving it to your employees or putting it in your checking account.

 

You’re excited about spending it on marketing, or taking that next step and doing all this entrepreneurial stuff that we all want to do, right? And nobody wants to say, you know what? Let’s just take, let’s pump the brakes a little bit and make sure that we spend 2% or 3% of our revenue this year and every year, proper IT systems to make sure that we avoid disasters.

 

It’s kind of like buying that business insurance policy. Nobody wants to spend $2,000 a month on a business insurance policy when it’s you and two other people, right? But, boy, you know, if you want, if you’re if you’re accelerating and your businesses are growing and you’re listening to these types of podcasts and you’re going to sell it for $10 million someday or $20 million someday or more.

 

Okay. Like we need to, we need to have some business insurance. We need to have proper IT protocol because otherwise it can all go poof. So that’s step one is just understand that as the business owner, as the CEO, you are responsible for those systems. Right? And what most people do is they don’t spend nearly enough money.

 

And then they also maybe on board the cheapest I.T guy they can find or the cheapest managed service. Right. Or they can find or maybe they even employ a really good provider, but then they beat them up on price, because that’s what we do sometimes as executives who say, oh, do I really need that firewall or I guess, how about not let’s punt another year, let’s punt another year.

 

Oh, you want to come in and spend ten hours a year auditing all my backups and making sure that our disaster recovery plans are good? What’s that going to cost me? Five grand. Now I’m good. I don’t need that. And so it’s not even that the IT guys themselves or I.T gals themselves are incompetent, but they’re hamstrung by these SMEs that just don’t want to spend enough money to get the right systems.

 

And so again, what do you need? You need a firewall with two factor authentication. You need to have a really well known user permissions on your network who can do what and why. And not just everybody can do everything. You need to have a cyber insurance policy. We talked about business insurance and almost all of these companies have it.

 

What you might not understand is if you have a cyber rider or a specific cyber policy and if so, like how much money is it going to bring to the table in any kind of ransom event? You know, you might want to ask your insurance guy about this kind of stuff. You should have a patch management strategy.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Vulnerabilities In Your System

 

One of the most common ways that people get in to the networks is because there’s a well known vulnerability to a piece of equipment, whether they’re running windows XP, okay, or Windows Server 2003, because they could their IT guy’s been telling them to upgrade it for ten years and they want and it has very well known vulnerabilities where bad guys can literally just root it and get admin access.

 

So they’re running crazy old stuff or they’re running new stuff that hasn’t been patched or kept up to date on patches. They haven’t had any social engineering training to their employees, any email training to their employees. Because again, if you have the best stuff in the world, but one of your employees gets fooled into giving the keys to somebody, well, they’re going to drive the car.

 

Two factors everywhere. And the last thing is backups. You think you have a backup or at least a hope. You think you have a backup, but if that backup isn’t audited and automated. So again, it’s automated. So it does stuff without you doing anything. And if you haven’t audited it to make sure that it has your accounting data, your CAD designs, your code, your, you know, QuickBooks file, your emails, your spreadsheets, you know, if you haven’t actually checked it because you’ve never actually done a restore, you don’t know that it’s complete.

 

You don’t know that it’s current. And you’ve also, you know, are not going to have any concept of how long it’s going to take. You know, sometimes you were like, well, I have a backup and it’s up on a, you know, slow as molasses glacier service and it’s going to it’s telling me for the first time it’s going to take 13 days to download.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: The Cyber Insurance Policy

 

Wow. Oh crap. I guess I should have checked that because I went with the $5 a month backup service, you know? So you gotta you gotta employ the right managed service provider, and then you got to listen to them. And as the business owner, if you’re not thinking about this stuff, nobody’s going to. Okay, I love the piece on the well, all of that because it was a great recipe for protecting yourself.

 

And it’s funny when you mention the cyber insurance policy and the writer. That just took me back. I don’t know about, eight months ago when we were working with a new bank of ours to work on a line of credit for the business that was actually one of the things that they insisted upon is that we have that as a writer.

 

And so then I worked with State Farm. It was a piece of cake. And to get that added, I’m like, and but I had never been asked for that, by a bank before. And I thought, good on them. And, and that forced us to do something to further protect the business. So, that was awesome. So yeah.

 

And this is a trend. So if you’re a business owner looking to get loans, that bank doesn’t want to see your business go out of business due to a ransomware disaster. Right. They don’t want to see the money they’re loaning. You go to cyber criminals in Iran. Okay. So it’s in their best interest to do so.

 

But you also, if you’re doing B2B, there are companies that are your biggest customer. Whoever your biggest customer is, that train is coming down the track where they are going to circle back and they’re going to demand to see all these things. And especially if you’re in like some of these companies in Wisconsin that are like aluminum foundries that like to sell bolts for submarines, right?

 

Like they are going to need to get CMMC certified, like, which is a new federal regulation which basically talks about everything I’m talking about. And like another 40 or 50 things and they’re not going to be able to sell those bolts to those companies if they don’t have this, because those companies want to protect their own intellectual property.

 

And they also don’t want to have any disruption of their supply chain. That’s interesting. I didn’t think about it from a supply chain perspective until you just now said that, if you are one link within a total supply chain, you know, in the OEM kind of process, that your weak link actually makes the entire chain vulnerable, right?

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Third Party Backup Sources

 

Sure does. Wow. I never thought of it until you just now said that. Okay. So then from a backup perspective, and again, you know, naive question here, but are there some, I know there are, but can you suggest some, third party backup sources that might be helpful for Onward Nation business owners? Yeah. So again, like the two leaders, I mean, there’s a few.

 

I mean, data is a big one. Storage craft is a big one. Okay. You know, Veeam is a virtual backup that’s got a lot of things. But the thing about all these things, the actual mechanism, the actual vendor that they’re going to pick, it’s going to be your I.T staff. If you’re big enough to have a staff or it’s going to be your, you know, managed service provider that’s going to pick those rails.

 

What’s more important is that you know, that those rails exist and that your managed service provider, once every quarter sends you an email with their audit of it that shows that the data is complete, that it took four hours to do that mock restore and that here is your most recent version of your QuickBooks file. Here is your most recent version of your architecture designs.

 

If you’re an architecture firm or here’s the last version, there’s 89,000 word documents created this quarter because you’re a law firm or whatever it is, you know, so the the 5 or 6 areas that are key to your business, make sure there’s an audit record that it’s all there and it’s all current and that that mechanism worked. And they want to know how long it’s going to take if you ever have one of these events.

 

And then what I’d also recommend is spending a little bit more money and actually getting an offline backup so that an IT provider once a quarter or once a month, or once every two weeks, could take a full snapshot of that and dump it to a physical disk or a tape. And that is not on a network. So if you get owned all the way, and the bad guys get into everything and somehow clobber everything you have, that physical, they couldn’t touch this because it literally was in a safe.

 

And it’s still problematic because you still have to rebuild your network, but at least you have a foundation of the data that’s accurate, right? Well, and you won’t be paying anybody to get it back. Right? Smart. You pay small amounts to your MSP to get it back every week. You know it’s a small amount.

 

It’s just like business insurance. You spend a very small amount of money so that if a disaster ever happens you don’t go under. Okay. This has been awesome. Thank you very much for the kind of ransomware 101, actually, that was a little bit more of an accelerated class than just 101. So thank you for that.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Growth and Scalability of the Company

 

I’m grateful there, still a couple of big topics here. And I know that we’re quickly running out of time here, but I want to go back to when you sold. I think the name of the company that you sold to the company in Draper, Utah, was, I think you sold Gill. Where?

 

Data services. Right? Right. Yeah. Okay. And so take us back to spinning that company off and in. Why? You spun it off. And then fast forward into today, raising the $3 million and then using that for tetra, because that was a really interesting pivot. And the reason why I say that is because in the green room in our pre-interview chat, you talked about how, you know, look, this company is going to get to this size.

 

We know that we want to grow a little bit more. So we’re going to have to do something that’s unique and different over here that has more scalability to it, and then raise some VC money to put some gasoline on the fire. So take us into those decisions because I think they’ll be helpful for business owners.

 

Yeah. So when we founded Gill where data services, the primary reason for a basically a founding a new company was because I had an agreement with our lead software developer at the time, a gentleman named Steven Clemente, to basically build all of the software for the backup server, the backup client software, and all the management console in exchange for basically sweat equity.

 

So he would come in and, you know, earn a big chunk of that equity for that entity by basically building the core framework. And he didn’t bring any cash to the table at the time. Right. He just brought his time and his expertise and after a year, we put him on salary and all that kind of stuff, and it kind of started to happen, happen.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: A New Ownership Group

 

But, so that’s the core reason is we had a new ownership group, right? And we wanted to bring in and we also wanted to have a brand new stock option pool to basically have that 10% of the company just kind of sitting there as we onboarded new employees. So they all felt like they were in it with us.

 

Right? And they were all going to win when we got acquired or whenever we exited. So that was the reasoning behind it. We really bootstrapped it way too much. So this was one of my mistakes or not my personal mistakes, but I think as a collective, the the 5 or 6 people that we work together to start that entity, you know, we and I was probably the loudest voice because I had gotten burned by VCs when I was out West and I had a very negative I wanted to bootstrap everything.

 

So I bootstrapped you into the first data recovery lab. And then we invested that money in these other things. But we didn’t invest other people’s money. It was our stuff. Right. And we held that equity very tightly. But we didn’t ever go out and raise any capital for this cloud services company. If we had, you know, again, hindsight’s 2020, it was a successful exit and it was kind of our first win.

 

And that was kind of a single or a double. And it felt pretty good to build a tech company and sell it. But it could have been a lot bigger had we not been so tight with that equity and just traded it for some money to accelerate things. Because the problem is we have these things called competitors and capitalism.

 

And when your competitors are equally skilled and capitalized because they are taking, in our case, you know, two of our biggest competitors around that 2016 raised over $100 million in VC. And then we’re like, oh, crap. Like they already had a pretty good head start on us. And it’s, you know, and one of them bought us.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Picking Your Partners Strategically

 

So, you know, it is what it is, you know. But it was a good win. Everybody retained their jobs. Everybody who was a part of the story got a check. And it was definitely not a sob story, but it could have been better off had we accelerated it, which is maybe why this year we decided to to take the first VC round, give up some of that equity to get a bunch of juice.

 

And we’re trying to hire about 40 people this year in tetra. Yeah. And so that’s where you just recently closed on the $3 million round. And I know that those types of rounds, in a tech company that’s an early on round, I totally get it that you position yourself for future rounds, probably depending upon how you grow.

 

But it sounds like it was. Okay. We’re going to sell off Gil. Where data services. But what are the lessons that we learned through that process now that we’re building tetra, now we’re going to take on some additional fuel to accelerate faster because that’s going to position us better for future rounds and or, another acquisition. And if you choose to do that in the future.

 

Right? Yeah. And we picked our partners really strategically. So, the partners behind that investment are a place called Mendota VC, which is kind of an active angel investor slash kind of venture capital company here right in Madison. That is very, they bring more than money to the table. You know, they sit on the board and they’re not just an empty seat.

 

They are very active participants on that board. And they bring a lot of advice, and they’re going to really help position us for that series B or or possibly just provide it for us. Maybe someday. And then we also a big chunk of that came from a strategic investor, which in Wisconsin there’s a company called M3 insurance.

 

It’s, I believe, the largest business insurance company in Wisconsin. And they also were big investors in that round. So again, and they also bring some board guidance. So we’re like we were just talking about like it’s a really important thing that companies have good business insurance and good cyber insurance. But then it’s also really important that we spend the appropriate amount of money to play enough defense.

 

And so again, what a great opportunity to. Yeah, put some fuel on the fire, but then also add some brainpower to, you know, fantastic. Thank you for taking us behind the curtain of those couple of transactions and the strategy behind it, the lessons learned. So again, I know that work quickly runs out of time.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: Strategies on Growing an Audience

 

But before we go, I want to make sure that we chat just a little bit about how you’re using your thought leadership. Because you’re a guest on a wide variety of podcasts, or I should say a large number of podcasts in a variety, a large number of podcasts. And as we talked about in In the Green Room, that you’re using those, the content from those episodes strategically in two different ways, one for employees and then another for building an audience.

 

But then also, you know, seeing top of mind with managed service providers. So, tell us how you arrived at that strategy. Kind of that dual prong approach, or maybe there’s three different prongs there and how that’s working for you as the thought leader, creating that content. Yeah. As marketers. And that’s kind of what I am at my core.

 

One of the things that you can often and I’m guilty of this, you know, sometimes you can make the mistake of not doing enough internal marketing. And, I’m not the kind of personality where I’m going to sit down with, you know, my roughly at the time, right now I’ve got about 40 employees and Gill where incorporated.

 

I’m not going to sit them, sit down with all of them and wax philosophical for an hour about any particular subject. I kind of respect their time too much for that. And my ego is small, but it’s a great opportunity for them to kind of and for new people to the organization or people that are thinking about joining the organization to familiarize themselves with some of our executives.

 

And then they can decide, like, does this sound like the kind of person I want to work with? So it’s a great vehicle for that for us. We always want to be front of mind with our managed service providers. All right, companies in the United States, because when they bump into these data related disasters, whether a server started on fire, a hard drive started clicking, or their companies getting ransomware, we want to be the first thing at the front of their mind.

 

And these types of events don’t happen every day for them. They don’t happen every week. They might not even happen every month. They might happen once or twice a year or every other year. So we have the burden of trying to stay in front of them, and we’re not going to email them crap every week about our industry because they don’t care about it.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: How and Where to Market

 

What a great vehicle. What a consumable vehicle, just to have a conversation with a couple people like we’re having right now. They can listen to it in the car and we take it. We obviously will occasionally use email because we try not to use too much email marketing because it just is so ineffective. But we send the occasional email with a really good nugget of wisdom, maybe from a podcast like this, we’ll write a little blog about it and tie that back to the actual podcasters.

 

So they get that link and they get that possibility of growing their audience. But then we also will take it into Facebook and, you know, Facebook is a wonderful opportunity to take a particular ad, and we’ll take a video ad like a 30 to 60 second video ad about this type of appearance, and we will push it out to our existing audience, to our existing, email lists, to our existing prospects that have kind of coated themselves on some of our websites at some point, and we’ll also send it out wider than that to lookalike audiences, because Facebook’s really good about saying, well, you know, this core audience looks like they’re a bunch of managed service providers, and it’ll find doppelgangers for those people. And it gives us a great opportunity to introduce myself to those people for the first time and start to build our brand in their mind so that if they ever bump into data related disasters, they reach out to me on LinkedIn or they send me an email and they say, hey, I heard you on XYZ podcast, I’ve got a client in this type of disaster.

 

Please help me. Yeah, because you have a thousand managed service providers today, but it’d be awesome to have 1001 or 1010, right? Yeah, there’s about 20 or 25,000 of them that I would covet as clients someday. And the thing about Facebook ads, if you’ve never done them, is they’re basically free. If you marry content to an audience and it’s that ten out of ten relevancy and you put it in that digestible format like video, it’s almost free.

 

Like we’ll get like three sent like 62nd video plays. They’ll cost $0.03 apiece. It’s like I said, it’s free. We’ll get a thousand views and it’ll cost us like 30 bucks. It’s amazing. That is amazing. This has been awesome. An amazing conversation. So I want to be respectful of your time. I know that we’re coming to the end of our time together.

 

And I’m grateful that you took the time out of your compressed schedule. So before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, Brian, please tell Onward Nation business owners the best way to connect with you. 

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware

 

The Dangers of Ransomware: How to Connect with Brian 

 

Yeah. So LinkedIn if you just Google for, you know, LinkedIn.com and you know, Google for Brian Gill Delaware I’ll pop right up please reach out.

 

Connect with me. I connect with pretty much everybody. And if you have anything that you need advice about, if you’re wondering if your network is prepared, you know, I’m always happy to answer these questions. Awesome. And onward, no matter how many notes you took, and I hope that you took a bunch or how often you go back and relisten to Brian’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do.

 

The key is you have to take action. If we’re talking about ransomware, if we’re talking about ways to leverage your thought leadership in new and unique ways, the key is you have to take what he so generously shared with you, take it and apply it into your business right away and be better for it. And Brian, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day.

 

And I’m grateful again that you said yes, took time out of your compressed schedule to come on to the show to be our mentor and guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, Brian. Well, well, thank you. And I just want to say, you know, it’s a really good show. And, you know, I’m a fan.

 

I’m so happy that you’re fellow Wisconsinites. And I just want to congratulate you on nearing. You’re creeping up on episode 2000. And what an amazing accomplishment that is. Thank you, my friend. I appreciate it very much. 

 

This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

Here’s an in-depth look into the dangers of ransomware