You Should be in the PeopleWare Business Not Just the Software Business | Mark Herschberg

Mark Herschberg joins the Small Business Safari today and talks about leadership development and getting the most out of people and opportunities using a more scientific approach. He is a Fractional CTO and coach to many software startups and brings a unique approach to leveraging peoples technical talents to achieve incredible outcomes. His training and education at MIT was in physics, engineering and Computer science, and he leveraged his “TOOLBOX” and applied Modeling the problem to help lead people to solve problems, create solutions and took advantage of the 2000’s internet ramp up to be part of a successful $20MM sale and exit of a software application that he and his team developed. He has created the Careertoolkitbook.com website and his books are a great addition to your library. Did you know our amazing voices can go beyond just the microphone? Yes, we have video! Subscribe to our YouTube channel here!

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Mark’s Links:

•  LinkedIn | @MarkHerschberg

•  Website | Careertoolkitbook.com

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GOLD NUGGETS:

(00:00) - Small Business Ownership and Career Planning

(08:37) - Skills Development and Leadership in STEM

(13:51) - Career Path and Missed Opportunities

(24:22) - Challenges of Scaling and Cybersecurity Threats

(36:54) - BrainBump App

(43:13) - Home and Apartment Features plus PET PEEVES!

(48:15) - Mark’s Free Business Services

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Books Mentioned:

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

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Previous guests on The Small Business Safari include Amy Lyle, Ben Alexander, Joseph Sission, Jonathan Ellis, Brad Dell, Chris Hanks, C.T. Emerson, Chad Brown, Tracy Moore, Wayne Sherger, David Raymond, Paul Redman, Gabby Meteor, Ryan Dement, Barbara Heil Sonneck, Bryan John, Tom Defore, Rusty Clifton, Duane Johns, Beth Miller, Jason Sleeman, Andy Suggs, Chris Michel, Jon Ostenson, Tommy Breedlove, Rocky Lalvani, Amanda Griffey, Spencer Powell, Joe Perrone, David Lupberger, Duane C. Barney, Dave Moerman, Jim Ryerson, Al Mishkoff, Scott Specker, Mike Claudio and more!

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If you loved this episode try these!

• HR Usually Sucks…but It Doesn’t Have To | Wendy Sellers

• Are Leaders Born or Trained? – Ron Reich

• Growing Small Business E-Commerce Brands | Tyler Jefcoat

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Have any questions or comments? Connect with me here!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

didn't quite make it to the billion-dollar mark. In fact we had a pretty good exit. I joined the first week of January 2000. Now, if you remember your financial history, march of 2000 is when we have the dot-com crash. So the markets crashed. The kids are really confused because the market only goes up. Who's ever seen a market go down? I was old enough to remember in the 90s and early 90s when there were recessions. Like you know, markets go down sometimes, so everyone's very confused. It's really just a wasteland out there and people are getting laid off left and right. We managed to sell our company for this $40-some million in the fall of 2000.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Welcome to the Small Business Safari where I help guide you to avoid those traps, pitfalls and dangers that lurk when navigating the wild world of small business ownership. I'll share those gold nuggets of information and invite guests to help accelerate your ascent to that mountaintop of success. It's a jungle out there and I wanna help you traverse through the levels of owning your own business that can get you bogged down and distract you from any of your own personal and professional goals. So strap in Adventure Team and let's take a ride through the safari and get you to the mountaintop. ["safari"]. Oh yeah, you guys missed this. I just called Alan of Prima Donna and if you've been listening to the Small Business Safari, you probably know that maybe the pot call on the kettle blacker that one, absolutely Cause. Let's talk about what I just finished up.

Speaker 2: 1:29

We are recording this in the beginning of football season, and how many days are there on a weekend now For you like six? So there's only two, right? I'm just reminding everybody. There are still only two days in the weekend Saturday and Sunday. I just happened to go to football games on both Went to the University of Georgia against South Carolina on Saturday, then went to the Atlanta Falcons when they beat up on those Green Bay Packers on Sunday, georgia crowd had been a little stressed in the first half.

Speaker 2: 1:57

They were a little stressed. It was spitting at us the whole time. It said pop up showers again. Back to careers. You want to get into? How about being a meteorologist? Right, you can be wrong all the time and you still get a flipping job as long as you look good. So that's why, of course, we're on a podcast and we got to get ready to rock and roll, cause we have got some really cool knowledge to start spreading with everybody. Today I came across Mark Hirschberg, who's going to be joining us today, who is the author of the career toolkit, but it's also a fractional CTO. But before he did that, he did something that this guy could not do, and that's even think about applying to MIT and actually getting in.

Speaker 3: 2:34

I can't even spell.

Speaker 2: 2:35

MIT. I know right, that's what I said. I'm like, wow, that's a lot of words. It is. Do you even know what?

Speaker 3: 2:41

it stands for, yeah, massachusetts Institute of Technology, nice. All right, good, all right so we're up.

Speaker 2: 2:48

We're gonna catch up with Mark. Mark, welcome to the podcast. We're looking forward to knocking down some knowledge and learning a little bit more about things.

Speaker 1: 2:56

Well, thank you for having me. It's my pleasure to be here today.

Speaker 2: 2:59

All right, I gotta go back to this. All right, so you started out, you go apply. And you said man, I got the chops, I'm going to MIT. Is that the only school you applied to, or did you have some backups? I?

Speaker 1: 3:10

applied to a couple of different IVs, a couple non-IVs like MIT and I think Stanford was the other non-IV. I looked at University of Chicago, but I grew up in Chicago. I looked in, really want to go back and MIT was definitely. That was the right school for me. I grew up in 80s nerd and this was nerd's paradise.

Speaker 2: 3:33

Oh, that's awesome. So not only did you like it so much that you went to undergrad, you got your grad degree there. When you came out, were you immediately going to go and start in your own business, or did you go right into the corporate world? What'd?

Speaker 1: 3:48

you do. It's funny when I came out I didn't have anyone really giving me career guidance, and I have undergraduate degrees in physics and computer science. My graduate degree also Electroengineering and Computer Science. Physics was a field where funding was declining and it made me go into software. This was the 90s, this was the dot-com era. We didn't call it that yet. We didn't even know. We're like okay, software is big.

Speaker 1: 4:15

Now I knew I didn't want to work for big tech. But I knew back in those days big tech was IBM and Microsoft and I know both of them. Yeah, we all knew those were the things didn't exist. I knew I didn't want to go to Wall Street. I knew I didn't want to be a consultant. So I knew what I didn't want to do. So I wasn't sure what I should do and I kind of fell into startups just by process elimination. So well, I guess I'll take this job. I don't know, I'm not really excited by it, but I need something and it turned out to be the right fit. So I did not know what I wanted to do back then because I didn't know about career planning.

Speaker 2: 4:51

Nice, yeah, I think that's part of the course. We've talked about that. We have a summer entrepreneurship academy that Alan and I host for people in the Atlanta area who are in school, and it's amazing how little thought they put into. What do you want to do? When you come out of it, and when you actually start to talk to people who are in the business, you start to understand there's so many different things and paths you can take, and so that has led you to a lot of interesting things. So what was your first job?

Speaker 1: 5:20

My first job. I hid at MIT for yet another year and I was on the research staff because that avoided making a decision. But my first job once I finally got out of MIT, I was a software engineer at a company called Painted Word back in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Speaker 2: 5:38

Painted Word. So back to the advice, and this is where I'm gonna land the plane. Alan, who gave you that advice to go that way? Did you start to seek that out? Do you start to realize, man, I need to get some help, get some mentors.

Speaker 1: 5:50

When you say go that way, you mean in terms of figuring out, having some forward, clear direction and not just process of elimination of what I don't want to do. Bingo, yeah that. I stumbled onto that as well when I had this job at Painted Word. It was a nice job. I had a really good boss. And then one day my boss he had a falling out with the other founders of the company. So the company split in two and my boss, the CTO, said hey, I'm starting a new company. Today's my last day. I'm taking these guys with me. You should come too. And the guys at the company and this was lawyers were involved. It was very messy. They said hey, look, we know he's leaving and taking people. He probably offered you a job. We want you to stay. Thought huh, I have a decision to make. How do I make this decision? Should I stay or should I go? I listened to the song a couple of times, no help.

Speaker 3: 6:41

So I started to think How's that go again? Should I stay or should I go?

Speaker 1: 6:45

There you go. Which one is going to have more trouble? I had more than two choices, and so I needed to come up with a framework for how do I figure out what I want to do. And that opened up the larger questions of where do I want to go in life. As a competitive chess player as a kid, I always learned think multiple moves ahead. So it's not just this job, but what's it going to set me up for down the road? And that's where I started to get a little more directed in my career planning and my own skill development.

Speaker 3: 7:15

Somebody like this just makes me think. You know, everybody tells their kids oh you can be anything you want to be, but you know they really can't. That's just sort of a dad encouraging their kid. This guy could be anything you want. I mean physics, engineering, what was the third one? I got computer science, yeah. So I mean talk about being paralyzed as far as what you want to be when you grow up, Because you literally could do anything and now you're an author. Did you see that one coming?

Speaker 1: 7:44

I would not have expected that in a million years. That was so not what I was interested in, Because when I thought about my career, I was such a hardcore STEM person. That's all about STEM skills and let's be analytical, and people's stuff just get in the way. But what I realized as I started on this journey of how do I think about my career, where I want to go and what skills do I need to get there? The people skills are the tricky part, Not only because there's no hard and fast rules For every rule you can find the exception but also because no one actually teaches us this stuff. They tell us you need to be a good leader, oh, you need to network. That's so important. They tell us all this stuff, but they don't teach us how to do it. So I had to figure this stuff out on my own and then realized other people could really stand to learn this as well, and that led me down the path of teaching at MIT. And then the book.

Speaker 2: 8:38

Let's go back to a pinned word. You said should I stay or should I go? Somebody offered you an opportunity. You decided to go through door number two and go that way. When you talked about building your skills early on, what were those skills you were building? How would you list?

Speaker 1: 8:54

those. So note, I went through door number three. I didn't stay. I didn't go to the new job. I said there's more jobs out there Because I thought about what I want to do and I knew I wanted to lead people. I like engineering challenges, but people challenges are even more complex. So I said what job is going to help me develop those skills and put me on that path? And I recognized hiring people, communicating, team building, leading, managing these were all the skills I needed to work on. Now we didn't have great shows like yours. Back then. There were a handful of books and I could buy some of those books and read it, but it was a lot more limited and there weren't great communities to learn from either. So it was a lot of stumbling along the way.

Speaker 2: 9:43

That's incredible that you said you went physics, engineering and then computer science and said I'm going to go lead people.

Speaker 3: 9:50

Right, it's the last place you would think somebody would come out with that notion, right? And I mean, and you're 100% right, schools, in almost any discipline, aren't teaching people those skills, those people, skills of leadership, management, training, you know, networking, how to get along, how to navigate, how to manage up, manage down, all that stuff, and I think it's probably even less so in STEM. And so I'm just dumbfounded that you came out of all of that very complicated technical hire learning and you've managed to come this direction and written a book about it. I can't wait to hear about it.

Speaker 1: 10:29

You know I credit physics for that, because the thing you learn in physics it's not that I could tell you which type of particles will interact with others I've forgotten half of that but it's in physics. They teach you how do you model the problem. If you think of the classic, you've got a block on an inclined slope. You're trying to figure out the velocity at the bottom. You look at things. Or, more commonly, you have a car on a hill. You say, well, let's treat the car as a block, we're going to ignore friction, we'll ignore air resistance, we're going to look at kind of the major factors. And of course, if you forget a factor like what the angle of the slope is, you can't solve the problem. So you have to set up the problem correctly to solve it.

Speaker 1: 11:10

And as I looked at the business problems, I read a wonderful book called People Wear that said, most problems are not technical so much as sociological, and opened my eyes to as I looked at problems at work. It wasn't that oh, we need a PhD to figure this out, it was the miscommunications. It was that wasn't expressed clearly or there's a misunderstanding on the timing, and so it was understanding that the key factors weren't always technical factors, but these others, and that's why I said I have to start paying attention to these key factors.

Speaker 2: 11:44

But you really hit on some really good, good stuff. It just reminds me of my first interview at Accenture, which was an interesting consulting at the time and I was coming out of mechanical engineering and manufacturing and I went into the interview and they said what are your skills? I said, well, I can do metrology, I can measure gears, I know how to make gears, I know how to lead a small cell development. The guy's like, huh, well, we're really looking for somebody who's going to work in our financial services practice. And, as a fellow engineer, I think your skills are more like large problem solving, linear thought process, the ability to model out a problem and then solve a problem. I'm like, did you pick up on that? I was like, whoa, yeah Well.

Speaker 2: 12:28

He said, well, you can go into manufacturing but you'll travel 52 weeks out of the year, or you can get in financial services and you might travel 30 weeks a year. I said, hey, call me financial services consultant, I'm in. But you hit on that and the skills that you think you have coming out of school, that you're going to apply, are almost wholly different and they're just not taught like that. And like you said, people and getting people to solve big problems for you and having people work together and bring their knowledge and their skill set together. That's one of the biggest things that I see. Failures in companies happen is that you can't get the smartest people in the room if they can't solve a problem with leadership and social skills.

Speaker 3: 13:05

That you just talked about. So the whole time he was telling that story I was thinking, man, his kid would have kicked my kid's ass in the Pinewood Derby.

Speaker 2: 13:14

Oh that your kid is going so down there. Oh, by the way, when he said he was a chess champion, I was like is goldfish considered chess? Is that the same game?

Speaker 3: 13:21

No, Angry Birds.

Speaker 2: 13:24

So as you started to develop that, I think you know a lot of people. Your first job out of school sets the tone. So that's your grunt job, or maybe it's your job you had in high school you know for me and machine shop. Where did you start to learn the supervision skills? Was that door number three and you were immediately in charge of a team.

Speaker 1: 13:43

A lot of the jobs I've had are ones I created, that I would just make up. That didn't exist. And I found, as I was looking between these two choices go to this new spin off where my CTO is going, or stay at the current one. It was again the dot com era. There's a lot of stuff going on and I found these students at MIT.

Speaker 1: 14:04

If you think back to 1999, you could be a student if you were at a good school and say I have an idea for a dot com and VCs would give you money. And so I found these students who are on the cusp of getting money. I remember I showed up, I was in their living room, which is where they're working out of, and they had been looking for a software engineer and I was looking for a senior software engineer job that would let me do project management. But I realized all these kids and I say kids they were all still in school. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king and I knew a lot more about projects than they did, not a lot more than others, but more than these guys.

Speaker 3: 14:45

Teachers have to be one day ahead of the student.

Speaker 1: 14:48

Exactly, and I convinced them. I said you should hire me to lead your engineering team, and they said, ok, sure, and so I got into a director of engineering role and learned as I went.

Speaker 2: 15:05

Ha. So all right, Some of the first lessons you learned were off the bat Were.

Speaker 1: 16:30

I learned that they haven't been trained in these skills, so I have to train them. I started building up my own training programs. And even smart people they're not smart about everything In particular, project management, and this is a skill we see over and over again, especially in software. And we see in some other things where people will give estimates and we are, just as humans, terrible at estimating software. There's certain things we're good at, some things where we've built stuff like this for centuries and so we know how long does it take to build a bridge? We might be pretty good at that. There might be new types of bridges where we're not so good at, when it's new types of engineering in general, and software was certainly newer and continues to be newer. In a lot of ways our estimates are terrible off by 50 percent, 100 percent. We need to really focus on getting better estimations and learning and improving, because we just can't live with this low baseline.

Speaker 2: 17:31

That first one must have been a game buster. Are you just one below Zuckerberg? Where did you guys end up with your first software venture?

Speaker 1: 17:41

Yeah, it didn't quite make it to the billion-dollar mark. In fact we had a pretty good exit. I joined the first week of January 2000. Now, if you remember your financial history, march of 2000 is when we have the dot-com crash. The markets crashed. The kids are really confused because the market only goes up. Who's ever seen a market go down? I was old enough to remember in the 90s and early 90s when there were recessions. Like you know, markets go down sometimes. Everyone's very confused. It's really just a wasteland out there. People are getting laid off left and right. We managed to sell our company for this $40-some million in the fall of 2000. So that's a perfect profit. It was a decent exit for the time, given where the market was.

Speaker 2: 18:32

Well done. That's awesome. That's amazing. It really is, because I do remember I was at Accenture when that was happening and watching guys leave to go after that dot-com bubble, as it were. At the time Watching guys. Yeah, that didn't work.

Speaker 3: 18:47

Yeah, I just remember how smart I thought I was with my E-Trade account until that March.

Speaker 2: 18:53

Yeah, because you're like hey, I'm just like these kids, all the markets go up.

Speaker 3: 18:56

Yeah, I know, hey, I picked a winner oh, I'm on a hot streak with this one. And then they all went to poop.

Speaker 2: 19:02

All right. So you exited out of that one. You're building your skill set. You're a senior director of engineering. Was it time to go into another startup?

Speaker 1: 19:11

I was at that company for about two years and at that point my mentors had said to me, given where you want to go, I knew it was time for me to leave that company. I said, given where you want to go, you might want to try consulting because you're going to get more exposure to more things. I said, okay, let me give this a try. I had no idea what I was doing. I just said, all right, I'm leaving the company. I didn't even have a new job lined up. I fell into helping MIT set up the program where I've been teaching. Unexpectedly, that was a small side job. But the other thing that happened is I got connected to a job at Harvard Business School. Now, here again, this is a job I kind of made up. They were looking for a student to program for them for $15 an hour, part-time. I thought this project sounds interesting. I know I need to learn finance. This seems like a good way to do it. So I reached out to the professors, asked me about their project. They said, yeah, we built this thing, but it has all these problems. And here's where I go. We think we need someone to just fix some bugs. I looked and said you cannot hire a student for $15 an hour to do your grand vision. You need a professional like myself, probably multiple ones, and of course we're going to cost more than $15 an hour. And I convinced them of this. So they went out. They got more funding. They paid me a lot more than $15 an hour.

Speaker 1: 20:36

They hired someone else and I spent a year at Harvard Business School building out some software used to teach finance. But the real compensation wasn't the cash, it was that I sat three feet from a professor in his office for a year. Not only did I get direct tutoring, because the first two weeks I said look, I don't know finance, I only never even took econ. So I said, we'll teach you. So they gave me books I'd read each night. We'd have tutoring sessions each day and throughout the year not only did they tutor me and guide me, I was a fly on the wall for so many discussions with faculty, with students. I'd have lunch every day with other junior faculty members. I learned so much. So he's Joe. Harvard Business School paid me to learn finance.

Speaker 2: 21:20

Hey, there you go. Now, that's smart, that one, the smartest things he has done or who he is. That's the smartest one. I got HBS to pay me to go learn from them. That's awesome, I love that one. All right, so you get the finance. And then is that how you started to develop your consulting practice as a fractional CTO.

Speaker 1: 21:42

That is. Yeah, it was a fractional CTO. I've had one interim CEO role. I usually prefer CTO COO. I like getting my hands dirty and making things happen, and so from there, I just started taking on other clients, First in Boston. They moved to New York. I did some in New York as well, and I've gone back and forth, because I've sometimes been full-time at a startup and then sometimes I've been a consultant to either startups or Fortune 500s.

Speaker 2: 22:14

What was the best opportunity you saw? That didn't happen, but probably could. Asking for a friend, of course.

Speaker 1: 22:22

There are multiple times I have missed out on obscene opportunities. I will share one of them with you. I used to stop by my fraternity house just to check in on the kid. Most people don't know this. By the way, MIT has one of the largest Greek systems, or at least used to have one of the largest Greek systems.

Speaker 3: 22:42

That's a surprise.

Speaker 1: 22:43

That is, the fraternities are closer to revenge of the nerds than to animal house.

Speaker 2: 22:52

All right, now we're talking.

Speaker 1: 22:53

We have a bunch of fraternities, so I used to stop by and keep in touch with people. My own fraternity, pileum to Fire or Mata, is not four years but lifetime. I still keep in touch with a lot of folks and so I'd stopped by and I remember one day this was 2004, and I noticed a bunch of the undergrads. They were all on this website. I was like what's this website? They're like yeah, there's this kid at Harvard. He built this website. It's kind of like hot or not, and you can see different people. It's only open to Harvard and Yale and MIT in just a few schools I'm looking at, thinking, hey, I think there's something here Like this could probably be a $100 million company, you know what? I should go find this and go invest in it. And so I looked up the kid's name, Like all right, the directory was no longer online. It used to be. You could look up student names and contact information online.

Speaker 1: 23:42

I'm just gonna go to Harvard and I'll go there in a couple of days. I'll just wander campus, I'll find some student and I'll talk my way into like, hey, I'm trying to find this guy. Can you help me? And I'll find this guy. I'll just give him a check and offer to invest and help out. But I had just met a woman. Dating and trying to start a family was always my first priority. I met this woman. I really liked her and she said, hey, why don't you come down to New York? And I wound up. I spent the next two weeks in New York with her and we had a very volatile rest of the year, so I never followed up and met that kid and invest in his company. I'm actually glad I didn't, because I have questions about the impact that company has now on society, but that was one of many opportunities that I've missed.

Speaker 2: 24:26

That's a big one. That's a big one, boy. Yep, no, that's a good one. All right so, but you take the road less traveled, as it were. You keep going get into some companies when, looking back on, like the last, let's go last 10 years. It's 23 now, less the last 10 years, what are some of the most exciting times you've had in business?

Speaker 1: 24:51

Well, there have been a couple of different ones. At one company we were tracking terrorists and criminals on the dark web, so that was kind of exciting, the type of work At both that one and most of them I've been at the last few years. What's exciting for me is actually growing the business. I love taking a team that might be four people this week and a few months from now we're eight people and then after that we're gonna be 15 and then we're 23. And how do you take your operating processes and scale that up over and over?

Speaker 1: 25:27

I did another cybersecurity company where we were working with the telecoms. That was pretty exciting. We had a patent portfolio of about 50 patents, so creating lots of IP. Right now I've got an app I'm working on and it's just me. It's really small, but getting the app out. We're as the time we're recording this on September 2023, we're about to put out the 2.0 version. Just gang that out, talking to people about it. Gang people excited, seeing people sign up, seeing the app grow. That stuff is all really exciting for me.

Speaker 2: 26:00

We hit where I was hoping to go. So let's talk about scaling. You just said I went from four to 15 to 26. And so talk about the challenges of doing that. First you gotta find them, then you gotta train them and then you gotta manage them. So talk about those challenges that we try to scale as quickly as you did.

Speaker 1: 26:18

There's a whole bunch of subtleties to this. So first let's look at. You say my business is growing, we have to scale. We need more bodies in general. We'll talk about who and how to find them in a moment.

Speaker 1: 26:31

One of the biggest challenges and often why I'm brought in as a consultant on the other side of that is companies have scaled. They said everything was going well, we scaled and now things aren't working. I don't understand. Everything is going well now we're just bigger. Why isn't it working?

Speaker 1: 26:48

You have to recognize that what works at one level doesn't work at another. So, for example, I was just talking to someone today. The first 100 sales of my book that was very easy. It was family and friends. I said of course, mark, we're going to buy your book. It could have been a garbage book and they'd buy it because they're friends and family. It was getting the next set of people to buy it and then the next set after that. If you think about your business getting the first one or two customers now, there's work in that. Maybe you can use a connection. But that's different than how you get your next 10, which is different from how you get your next 100, different from how you get your next thousand. It's a different process.

Speaker 1: 27:27

Every small business I've been at usually it's an all hands on deck for those first two or three customers. That doesn't scale and you have to change the process. As another example with my engineering teams, if we're four engineers, we're all saying next to each other and someone says, hey, I have a question, turn to the person next to you, or we just quickly huddle. That doesn't work when you're 10 people, because you don't want to disturb all 10s. You turn to the person next to you and she's probably not the expert in it, but you go with what she says and really you should have brought in someone else. You have to adjust your process each time. This is very subtle, but this is what's important.

Speaker 1: 28:06

I gave examples in sales and engineering, but this is for any operating unit, also between units. My salespeople in a small company can walk in and say, hey, we got a customer to have this issue. They're just going to grab an engineer because there's three of us. You can't do that when there's 20 of us, because you don't know which engineer understands that part of the system. Stay the heck away from my engineer, because now there's 20 of you salespeople interrupting my engineers. I can't have that. We have to build the process where you have to talk to product and we have to think about prioritization. You have to constantly reinvent your systems and that's the part I find exciting. I'll pause there. We haven't gotten the other two, but let's pause there.

Speaker 3: 28:46

Well, I think it's funny, Chris, that you wanted to go into scaling when he was talking about all the things that were exciting in the last 10 years. I'm like, really we're not going to talk about cyber-stalking terrorists at all. Well, we can go back to the dark web. Are you just glossed over that?

Speaker 2: 28:59

All right, let's go back to the dark web.

Speaker 3: 29:00

First of all, thank you. Is it like it is in the movies? Can I sleep well at night based on people like you?

Speaker 1: 29:08

It's not like it is in the movies, at least the computer screens, where you see the things that go like it's going to Paris and it's going to Moscow. It's not going to work.

Speaker 3: 29:18

It's not going to work.

Speaker 2: 29:19

What.

Speaker 1: 29:21

You should probably sleep, not as well as you are I wish I hadn't asked the question now, but go ahead.

Speaker 2: 29:28

I mean, you're the one who kicked me into this. All right, fine, do you want to ask? Go ahead, so why shouldn't we sleep?

Speaker 1: 29:33

Well, go ahead, there's two clear trends happening that are accelerating. The first is the dark web is getting more sophisticated, or I should say, the people on the dark web. Think about our businesses. The great thing is we've now business process outsourcing is so standard. If you're running a small business, you don't have to worry about how do you manage your sales. You go get sales force from one of the competitors. You don't have to worry about how do I keep my books. You use QuickBooks or another competitor, you focus on your business delivery and you've got all these other resources to handle the other parts of your business that aren't core. Well, the actors on the dark web kind of figured this out and they said hey, you're good at finding exploits, so you just find the exploits. And then there are other businesses that are better at building software around the exploits. And there are other businesses saying, well, once you steal the credit cards, we'll figure out how to monetize it. And so they're building their own supply chains and creating efficiencies, just like we've done in public, non-malicious businesses.

Speaker 2: 30:34

September 23,. Right now we're laying this down. Not only have I heard this once, I've now heard this five times in the last three weeks. Various networking groups and then my own bank had reached out to me, wanted to make sure that I had cyber terrorist insurance with my GL. So it's a true thing. They said the same thing. It's getting more and more sophisticated and now Mark's being able to kind of dimensionize how it's happening, because they're going after companies our size because they figure they can get the money. I heard that the last story just happened Again, september. Mgm got hit and they had to pay a $15 million ransom note. So that's the dark web is out there and I assume that's how they get after us and get all that stuff right.

Speaker 1: 31:15

Well, let me speak to that. In fact, I have a blog post out today, the day we're recording this, on that hack and on insurance. So let me talk about the other growing threat and then why insurance is kind of a red heron. Here's the other thing. We're all Americans and we've had this amazing luck being between the Atlantic and Pacific. When you think about the 20th century, there were all sorts of wars going on in Europe and we were involved in that. Or even 19th century we would get involved somewhat, but most of it was far away from us, and even the damage and destruction you think of war torn Europe 1946, america we weren't bombed and destroyed and had whole cities wiped off the map, and we were protected by being distant from the front lines. But in the cyber world, we are all on the front lines. Your server, my server, as well as a server in Paris are all equally close to a hacker anywhere in the world, and so that distance that has protected us has now made us all on the front lines. Now cyber insurance has become more important for people saying you have to buy it.

Speaker 1: 32:27

I actually argued we need to make it illegal to pay ransomware, because what's happening is they're saying hey, we hacked a company and we're gonna hold the data hostage or we're gonna threaten to release data that makes you look bad unless you pay us. And these guys are doing it just for the money. This is not political hacking. This isn't like trying to destroy our infrastructure. It's just money. It's just a shakedown.

Speaker 1: 32:50

The Israelis created a policy saying we don't negotiate with terrorists. Now they will try to kill and destroy for political reasons, but no one's kidnapping for money anymore because they know Israel doesn't pay. We need to pass a law saying it is illegal to pay ransomware, because then we go, you can keep hacking, but legally I will go to jail if I pay you, so I can't. They'll eventually say there's no profit in this. But most importantly, even if you do get ransomware insurance, having basic security and backups is the best protection. It's not about the money, it's about protecting. Turn on two factor authentication, make sure you have regular backups, test the backups and use a password manager.

Speaker 2: 33:36

You don't care how big you think you are as a company, because I heard that in the beginning I started in 08 and again first year maybe had 300 customers and now we got over 20,000 in our database. I just had somebody look it up. Guys, I don't care how big you are, but Mark just hit on that you've got to have security. So the cyber insurance is one thing, but that's where I was gonna go. Forget that you've got to have. If you don't have an IT guy, get one. And you think you need one, or don't think you need one because you're too smart for that, or hey, man, I'm too small. No, you're just the right size, they'll come after you. You got to have a guy. We said last year that one of my computers was attacked 180 times a day so we had to take him off the networking Lord 180 times a day, and I'm just a little old, know nothing.

Speaker 3: 34:26

Mark, is that right? I mean, is that the kind of assault we're under?

Speaker 1: 34:31

It's possible. There's different types of attacks. So, like the MGM attack and Caesar's attack you referenced, they use what's known as social engineering. This is a common attack we see with phishing, where someone sends, to say, your administrative assistant, an email pretending to be from you, saying, hey, I've got to get $2,000 worth of little cards. You know those gift cards. Yeah, I get for a client thing. Can you just wire some money to this account Because I go buy it by five o'clock? No, that's just social engineering. It doesn't matter how many passwords you have. If she falls for that, well, she's gonna wire money to some stranger on the internet. But then there's other attacks where you just have software. The 180 is a little bit of a misnomer because you think well, my house, I don't have 180 burglars trying to break it through my windows 180 times a night. But remember, software is automated. So if they think they can get in, they can just have the software try over and over, hoping they catch a window or something happens.

Speaker 2: 35:34

I mean, that's the stuff where you talk about starting a business in today's world and doing things. You're having an IT at least a strategy that sounds really big. I don't care how small you are. If you're going to do knives and you're going to do sharpening knives which is one of the guys who contact me in homes and going to come and be the knife sharpener, right, you still got to have an idea how you're going to do this and get protected and it's worth.

Speaker 3: 35:57

It makes me want to go back to cash and checks and a Rolodex and a Day Planner.

Speaker 2: 36:02

Right, I'm telling you, dude, it is a market on it. You wanted to go back there. I was trying to skip over it, but you know what? No, we've all learned something, haven't we? We sure have the dark web stuff.

Speaker 1: 36:11

Tell you why small companies are sometimes even a bigger target. When you look at some of the older hacks, I'm trying to remember if it was Home Depot or one of the I think, target, maybe they couldn't get to that large company. They got in through I think it was the HVAC vendor and so they go to the vendor because they say, well, it's a small business that maybe only has 40 or 100 people. They don't have that level of security that Home Depot and Target had their own security teams. So they got into the smaller company, gained access to their systems and from there were able to get into their main target. So, small companies, you're the Trojan horse that they're looking at to get into the big companies. Now they'll certainly steal from you if they can, but that also, when the big company finds out that you're the one who brought in the Trojans, you're losing that business and a heck of a lot of others.

Speaker 2: 37:08

Boy, we knew we're going to cover a ton of ground and we're going to start running out of time, but I got to get back to this book, the book man. So when did you publish it? Tell us a little bit about it and where people can go find it.

Speaker 1: 37:21

The book came out about two years ago, from the time we're recording this, and the book has 10 chapters, 10 skills. Skills like networking, negotiating, leadership, team building, hiring from the hiring manager side, lots of stuff for how to be a good candidate. We teach you how to hire from this side. These are all the skills no one teaches you. So 10 chapters, 10 skills, and they're. Each chapter is designed. There's a mental shift how to think differently about it, how to concretely use these skills. And then what are next steps? The book you can find on Amazon or other places. If you go to thecareertoolkitbookcom, you go to the website, you can see more about it, including where to buy it. Now there's also a free companion app which you can get even if you don't buy the book.

Speaker 1: 38:10

If you use the BrainBump app free on the Android and iPhone store, it has all the tips from my book, plus an ever-growing set of other books, blogs, podcasts, talks, because I know what happens when you listen to a great show like yours or read a book like mine. You say, wow, this is great advice. How much are you going to remember next week? So we take the key ideas we put into the app. They're in little tip cards. They're tagged by topic so you can access it one of two ways. I mentioned networking in my book. Where do you read that Sitting at home? Where do you need that At the conference? So as you go into the conference, you pull out your app, you open it up. Everything's tagged by topic. So you go to write to networking. There are all the networking tips that you're reading two minutes before you walk in the room BrainBump, brainbump.

Speaker 1: 39:03

Is that your app, that's my app, so we created the app. We just got awarded a patent on it that will be issued shortly and 2.0 versions coming out end of September 2023.

Speaker 2: 39:15

Get out there, go get it. I know I'm doing it right after I'm done doing this podcast everybody.

Speaker 1: 39:20

I'm BrainBumping.

Speaker 2: 39:21

I need a lot of BrainBumps. I actually need a brain shove. Who would have brain shove it right over the freaking edge? But anyway, back brain transplants.

Speaker 3: 39:29

That's going to be the name of your app. So who was your, who was your intended target audience with the book?

Speaker 1: 39:39

With the book. It's people in generally, I'd say, small, medium and large-sized businesses, pretty big non-union jobs, really anywhere from about 20 to 40. We get so much feedback, even from people in their 50s and 60s, saying this is great. I wish I had this 20 years ago and I know that's a very broad audience. No, I got to know. I got to know.

Speaker 2: 40:05

Why not union? I have a huge thing against unions because they can't think for themselves or they can't possibly get their brain bumped. Is that why?

Speaker 1: 40:16

We need a different app for them Because you could be a secretary or CEO and this book will help you. But if you're in a union job, the way you get promoted is through the rules on time. The way you get a raise is whatever the rules are. We're not going to be much help.

Speaker 3: 40:35

Not very many people break Chris Mark. Oh my God.

Speaker 2: 40:40

So I grew up in Michigan in the auto world, started out in a machine shop. Everything I did was non-union until I got my first engineering intern job, which was a union shop, and I happened to move parts literally five feet across one aisle and I got rung up by the union steward because I moved parts and I didn't have the material handlers union card. So I had to move them back and then they found out that I was making $8.50 an hour. They were all making $19.50 an hour and they went ah, kid, it's all right, you know you can move next time if you want to, but just remember, you know it's our job. So back to union.

Speaker 2: 41:14

That's I, I, I, you all right, I'm going to lose it. Let me get it back, mark. Great book career toolkit. Go out there, go find it. We're going to start running out of time and I don't want to lose that time because you got to get your brain bumped. You got to get your career toolkit. I love that you're talking about that. You did. You went to MIT, did all those years. They're at a very prestigious institution and Al and I talk about this all the time. You know, I think a lot of times a lot of people are missing the real story. You talked about networking and leadership and social engagement, and that's what really propels you in your life when you get out there.

Speaker 3: 41:50

Not just I don't interact well with humans, I interact well with the computer and we're sure on the dark web, well, and I mean, you think about the way our kids are being raised and the whole COVID bubble thing, and they have so few social skills, even you know they're worse than they've ever been, and so you know, it's great to have a book like this, where maybe you can pick some of that stuff up but it's not being taught in school, and yeah, and where there are fewer and fewer people in leadership positions who actually know how to do it, so they can't pass it on. No, that's great.

Speaker 1: 42:22

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of companies saying my rising managers because they also were we're starting to learn during COVID, and they don't have these skills either, and so there is a dearth of these skills. The book is a starting way, but remember learning these skills it's like learning to play baseball. You can't just read a book and say I've got it. You have to practice, you have to do it. I always recommend getting peer groups together to learn together, and there's a whole free download on the resources section of the website for how to do that. But you need to apply and practice these skills.

Speaker 2: 43:15

Mark, this has been awesome. We're going to get all this stuff knocked down in the show notes, but we got to go with our final four questions before we let you go and hopefully you've read up and you've studied up, because we know you have, because this is going to be worse than a thesis defense right here, my friends. All right, number one I'm looking at brain bump. All right, come on now, let's finish the book. All right, give us a book that you recommend, other than the ones you've already recommended.

Speaker 1: 43:42

Another book I really like is range. I want to say David Epstein I'm forgetting the author. He was a sports writer and he wrote a book saying we teach people to be deep and be experts in their field, but having a diverse set of skills which is how I've lived my career really provides you certain competitive advantages. So I really like range.

Speaker 2: 44:06

That's a great one and that's why we talked about this on the podcast quite a bit. Could we go niche down and get right into home services all the time? Because that's what I know the best. We're thinking. You know, you learn more by going outside of your industry and where you're at and go play in the playground with other people who don't play in your playground. You always pick something up and you're right with range. I think that's a great point. All right, all right. So our final four questions.

Speaker 3: 44:30

number B would be what is the favorite feature? That's a dumb joke of ours. I'm sure they don't tell them at MIT. No, I know.

Speaker 2: 44:39

I know, but that's all I got, though I love it. I mean Goldfish. That's all I can do. All right, what's the favorite feature of your house?

Speaker 1: 44:48

I have an apartment because I live in Midtown Manhattan. There's not much of it because I live in Midtown Manhattan, but favorite feature for a small one bedroom in New York, I have a pretty good layout. I, pre-covid, would do a lot of entertaining at home. I would have parties where I'd get 60, 80 people, and being able to fit lots of people in my apartment was very important to having a good social life.

Speaker 2: 45:19

I'd say location would be my favorite feature of yours.

Speaker 1: 45:21

That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 45:22

Midtown yeah, midtown, that's awesome dude. We're just sitting here slumming around in Atlanta. By the way, you want to be an hour away from Atlanta? Be in Atlanta, because this morning I tried to get somewhere. It took me an hour and a half to get there. I'm like you got to be kidding. I just went 22 miles an hour and a half. All right, one of the things that we are big on is customer service, because we are customer service freaks. What is a customer service pet peeve of yours when you're out there being the customer?

Speaker 1: 45:49

They ask me the same questions over and over. I call up, I say okay, give me your customer number or whatever else, your name or whatever. I say okay, well, now we have to transfer you and I go somewhere else. And I say, oh well, give me your name and give me your ticket number. I just gave it to the other person You're waiting for my time.

Speaker 2: 46:09

You're coming from a process guy. That's good. Here's my other question what's a customer service pet peeve?

Speaker 3: 46:15

I couldn't resist. I had to do it. Maybe I should be the one who asked the question. You should ask him to get up.

Speaker 2: 46:20

I don't know what Chris just asked, but all right, you live in an apartment now. I don't know if you've ever had a home, but one of the things we love doing, because I'm in homes all the time. In fact, I was in a home today literally standing and prepping for a paint job with one of my guys. Everyone's smiling, you think you're a big deal? Yeah, you got to go in there and do it.

Speaker 3: 46:39

I think it's good for you. It's healthy.

Speaker 2: 46:41

Chris, All right For my team. They're going to hear about it all tomorrow on training. What is a DIY nightmare story in a home?

Speaker 1: 46:52

I can give you one right now in my apartment, thanks to my landlord. When I moved in we had an old radiator, so an old P-TAC system. The previous tenant had built this wonderful shelving unit around it, which in New York City shelves are not very common so this great extended window sill. I was losing almost a foot of space in my apartment, but that's okay. A foot from the wall I have these shelves I loved and it was flooding. I called the landlord as trying to negotiate. It already flooded. It had ruined part of the floor. I just wanted to make sure they weren't going to take it out of my deposit. I called them. I said look, you can fix the floor. I'm even willing to not have you fix a floor and live with it, but let's negotiate rent and other things. They came in and said oh, we have to replace the P-TAC because it's flooding. That could cause a problem in other units. I came in they ripped out my lovely shelving unit, put in the new P-TAC and the P-TAC's great Loss of shelving, which I didn't want.

Speaker 1: 48:00

It has now been months. They did this back in May. We're recording this in September. They still have not finished the job. I still have these open holes. I've been saying to them I sometimes have mice coming in because there's literal holes in my wall because you haven't replaced the baseboard. They keep giving me one reason after another. This has just been a continual nightmare. This is not a complicated job. Put in the baseboard, repaint the area. I got a solution.

Speaker 2: 48:29

All right, here's what you're going to do. This is coming from a contractor. I'm a licensed contractor in Georgia. You're going to love this. I want you to set up a bunch of mice trap when the mouse gets snapped, I want you to go ahead and put them on a tack board. I want you to bring them down to the landlord and put them right next to his room and go hey look you guys, let these guys in. I just figured I'd bring them back to you.

Speaker 1: 48:51

That's what I'm saying as a licensed contractor. I love it. I am going to start doing that.

Speaker 2: 48:57

There you go, everybody. I just gave another tip. There you go Gold nuggets. You can always count on them here. We went from MIT to Chris Telly. Let's go ahead and snap mice heads off and send them back to the people out on there. All right, this has been awesome. I hope you had fun. I'll tell you what everybody. If you weren't listening and figuring this thing out, you need a brain bump, Uh-oh.

Speaker 3: 49:14

I'm on brain bump right now. I know, in fact, we've lost Alan. I'm looking content, I'm getting smarter. 33 ways to not screw up your business emails.

Speaker 2: 49:23

All right, go out and do it, guys. I think brain bump is probably the biggest one, but go out there and check out that career toolkit book. It's on Amazon. You can go check that out. If you're not going to do that, you want to do the free thing, go out there and check out his website, because that's the thing we talk about. Put that free content out there. We're doing this for free for podcast people. You don't get out there getting the information out, but you know what? You might get hooked and you might want to have Mark come help you a little bit in your business, because if you're trying to go from five to 15 to 36 and stay away from the dark web, I think he knows how to do it. I don't like the dark web. Don't like the dark web, mark, but we like you. Thank you, mark, for coming on. Let's go make it happen. Everybody we're getting out of here.

Speaker 3: 49:56

Cheers. Hey, I've got aside some choose from some other stuff. Wow.