Ben Chappell WINs by focusing on one thing at a time.

Ben Chappell has had a long career in the technology space, working with both Solutions Granted (you can see Michael Crean, CEO of Solutions Granted on a previous episode of WIN) and Ingram Micro.

Ben took on a new challenge, working with international technology security software application firm We Bridge.

We Bridge focused on bringing new, internationally founded firms to the North American market.  At the beginning of the year, We Bridge made the decision to focus on one solution - and that solution was Apona Security.

Learn how and why Ben narrowed his focus, and what he learned along the way!

Join Carrie Richardson, Partner at Richardson & Richardson Consulting, as she asks Ben that important question:  "What's Important Now?"

Want to be a guest on WIN?  Apply here!

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Carrie helps businesses improve their sales and marketing teams.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

 I am one half of the consulting firm, Richardson and Richardson, and I'm also your host for today's. What's Important now with me today is Ben Chappell, the c e o and General Manager of Apona Security. Thanks for joining us today.

Yes, my pleasure.

Thanks for having me. It's been a little while since we chatted, so lots has happened in your world and I'm looking forward to hearing all about it.

I can say listening to both of us, we've. I have a new last name.

I first I wanted to ask you a question about that telephone on the top of your shelf the, lamp with the old school phone there. Tell me where that came from.

Yeah, so that's a prize piece. My grandfather built it. Okay, so it's an old lamp that he had at the house and he helped to build all the telephone lines here in South Carolina and was really inundated with the phone world.

And so he turned his lamp into a phone fun little project weekend hobby thing, but he built that probably 70, 85 years ago. Something like that. Does it

still turn on? It does. Okay. So an excellent

collectible. Back in the day, the cord wasn't as long, so I can't plug it in from the top of the bookshelf, but it does work.

That's nice. So tell me a little bit about how you got from where you were last time we spoke, which was I think a couple of positions ago to your new role with opponent.

Yes. So last time we spoke I was with solutions granted. And helping them to bring man fully managed security services into the channel.

And I will tell you, Barna and I learned more from that organization than from that executive team than I've ever learned. Still great friends of ours took that into Ingram Micro to lead part of their international business, go to market strategies for some security. Made some good connections and now we are starting our own show.

So we're start, we've started our own show and the original company is We Bridge right where we've partnered with several enterprise level organizations overseas with the mission to bring them into North America and bring them into both channel and into direct clients. And from there we've learned some lessons, decided to refocus and re swizzle.

And as of January 24th of this year, we've launched Apona Security. 

I like the word re swizzle. 

Good. It's a dance. 

So when we spoke in the Green Room before we went live today, you'd mentioned that originally you were, you had several different software solutions that you were bringing into the North American market through We Bridge, and that you learned some lessons through that process.

Sounds like one of the lessons that you learned was riding one horse at a time. But tell me how you honed in on your, final. 

I think that's a great way to say it too. Riding one horse. The mission is to focus so under we bridge, which is still fully operational we have more enterprise level data governance and data lineage solutions down to MSP centric encryption style and encryption, enabling technologies.

Some really cool stuff there. But what we wanted to do was focus, right? So how can we bridge that gap, no pun intended, but let's bring this in. Let's have a hundred percent focus. And when we come to market, say we're doing one thing, we're gonna do one thing, great. We're gonna excel and beat all of our competitors at doing this one thing and be true masters of what we are bringing to market.

And with that, we've taken our background with data security, with cybersecurity, and we're bringing a holistic approach into the source code called opponent security. 

And tell me a little bit about the turtles. When I was researching opponent before our interview the website features turtles, turtle facts, was there a, strategic decision to focus on the turtle?

So a lot of this was an emotional response. Okay. So being in the security space for 15 years now, I'm a little bit exhausted. We're gonna scare you. We're gonna scare you. All right? And so I wanted to bring a brand that was far more approachable and far more comfortable. So I didn't wanna bring in a lion, something that's gonna just rip your head off.

And who doesn't like turtles? They're pretty approachable. And also see turtles are really good at swimming and navigating the depths. Opponent is our turtle, and that's what we've man. 

For anybody who would like to learn more about sea turtles, you can go to opponent, which is A P O N a.ai, and you can find out what a group of sea turtles is called.

Hint. It's also what you call a group of warships, which I thought was really interesting when you think about the security spin. I love it. I love it. So we talked a little bit before we started about the two specific things that you decided to focus on with opponent. Tell me about how you narrowed in so you not only had to narrow in on one solution, you had to narrow in on the things that you were gonna specialize in.

How did you come to the two that you chose? 

For me, a business decision needs to have a connection personally. All right? And so outside of. I have a pretty strong dedication into health and fitness and also diet, and my wife has taught me so much, right from all of her Instagram and Twitter feeds around sources and food sources and things like that.

And so the reality is, I connected with the source code technology, all and being in the security space, understanding that we can only defend so much and we can only react and respond to events that have eventually happened. I wanted to get ahead, right? I wanted to get ahead of the game, and I do believe that this is a more frontline approach to stay ahead of the game and understanding source code and not just attacks as they have.

But under going to market with a technology that reads, analyzes, source code, identifies the vulnerabilities, and then gives you appropriate plans to act on, 

was it a very difficult decision? 

Nope. No it wasn't. One, we had a connection. Two it was the product that we know and understand and can best support.

We have a team of about 30 developers that are already. Working on the next major release that's going to have a pretty strong impact on the management console. So the multi tendency and all of those type of capabilities already up and running. It's been tried and tested, okay? And it's already tested out and proven to be well beyond the capabilities of competitors.

So let's go ahead and lead with our strongest. And what we're best at and the greatest demand. So recently there was a so there's a new regulation that was pushed out by the government, and the standard is that every organization that produces code is required to produce an s b. So we said, all right, we've got demand.

We have an action in place, and now we need to be able to fulfill and need, and we can offer this in ways that others can't. So we can bring it into mid. And I'm not trying to get I'll pitchy on this, but look, these are the golden opportunities that we say if we have an opportunity to succeed, then let's put a plan behind it.

And then we apply the right resources and hopefully we come out on the other end. 

So the first thing that comes to mind when I hear about an opportunity like that is how many people are going to have to educate themselves in this? And how many opportunities are gonna be in the market? What's the depth of the market that's addressable for an organization like yours 

deeper than what the surface would tell you.

Okay? So when you start thinking of every single organization that has their own code, then we start looking at the greater landscape of all mid-size. So every mid-size business, and really like a rule of thumb finger in the air is any company that has over 200 employees has probably been forced to develop their own code at some point in time, right?

Think of year, years in owning your businesses. How many times did you need to go back to platform teams and say, Hey, we need something special done. 

More times than Zoho would've liked, 

right? Yes. And so that's where things start clicking, and eventually those special. Requests can't be accompanied for, and then they develop their own.

Okay. So if you have your own code, or if you are selling through and passing through any of these code to any other clients, you're required to have an sbo. So we have tons we're talking hundreds of thousands of businesses that are gonna be required if they're not already using it. Hopefully we can educate these guys and we can help 'em out before the irs.

The one thing that blew my mind when we were talking earlier was fact that there are companies that are using more than a hundred software applications to run their businesses right now. Yeah. So that's a hundred different SBOs. I just like saying sbo. It's the sbo. Yes. It sounds like it's going to be the S 

bomb.

It almost sounds bad, but it's a really good thing. Yeah. Average businesses is somewhere between 40 and 65. Depend on which reports you're looking at on, that's how many applications they're running in-house. Now you get into mid-size companies and you're getting above a hundred applications.

Enterprise organizations are above 300 and sometimes above 500, right? Depending on the environments. All of these applications are built with source code, right? It's the source. And it goes back to what I connect with and illustrating it is look, we're in a new generation that's finally waking up to like healthy food.

For the first time we see packages that are saying non GMO or manufactured with 3000 different chemicals to. A peanut and hey, I get that's probably not good, right? We don't know what all these things do to us. There's no way to analyze it. And so that's why just like those organizations have broken down food to say, these are your potential outcomes of digesting these things.

We're taking the same approach. This is the potential outcome of what you're digesting through your organization. 

So how educated are your prospects at this point when you're going to market? When you mentioned, obviously I didn't know a lot about what you did or how you did it before we spoke today.

How educated is the average consumer or prospect that you're going after right now? Do you have a long education cycle or are people like, do they understand it and they're like, oh yeah, no, we have to do this. 

They get it That's what part of the grace and this journey is that we haven't had to exhaust so many cycles like I have in other roles or in other focus.

Around sbo m the way that this has been tackled previously is we're gonna take John Smith and we're gonna give him 15 days to say, take all of these applications, download, copy, paste, export, put 'em into Excel, and that's generating these SBOs. And that's just that's taking inventory of the source code that's in these applications.

And so right now they're taking weeks, if not months, to get their S bombs in. Some organizations market tells us they're somewhere between five and 10,000 organizations that are using our competitors ASBOs. And so there's a standing market for it already. The quicker wins are the guys who are saying, yeah, man, I'm really tired of using Excel.

This manual approach is really not fun. And it takes a long time and it produces a lot of errors, right? Technology has shown us for years how much more efficient it can be. And we're providing an action path afterwards, right? So if we can take those and then show remediation paths after the fact, you've got a win-win on both sides.

So without giving away any big secrets, what is the next thing that you're going to be pursuing through opponent? What is the opportunity that you're seeing in the market? 

Look, I think it's just being better, right? Right now we're heads down. We're focused on improving and we can always improve right through.

It's, whether it's through processes, experiences, or the technology itself. We just want to keep being. And I believe that's gonna be one of our better advantages. Our competitors are so distracted now with trying to repay the, hands that have lent the money and so they're expanding portfolios.

We see that with tech companies all the time. We take one thing that we can do good, but then we have to expand the portfolios and get into nine or 10 other horses to ride. But we're gonna stay focused and keep doing what we can do, and at the end of the day, we're gonna be the best.

All right. I think there's a no better place to stop than there. Thank you. So I really appreciate you joining us today. To summarize what I learned today Ben's winning by narrowing his focus and putting a hundred percent of his attention into one thing instead of being distracted by 10. That's fair.

And of course, he chose the best organization with which to do. 

And probably the best podcast host to talk to today. So 

thank you O. Obviously that went without saying. Yeah, 

that was in my script. 

Yep. Yeah, no, we pay them at, we pay people extra to say that at the end. It was a great catching up with you.

Thank you so much for being a guest with us today. In the show notes I will have Ben's contact information. There'll be information on how you can get in touch with him at Aona, but if you wanna share that right now, you're more than welcome to. How can people get in touch with you if you wanna learn more about this?

Email is the best way at nc. And you can follow our LinkedIn pages and we're all over the internet now. 

Wonderful. And make sure you get back to me with the answer for what is a group of sea turtles called. I will be expecting everybody to know that by next time I host win. Thanks for joining me today on Win Ben.

It was a pleasure. Have a great day everybody. 

Always a pleasure. Thank you.