Matt Lee has dedicated the last 10 years to raising the security tide in the SMB market. His efforts have served in every capacity in a growing MSP that grew to support 20,000 endpoints. His leadership around technology direction and security/compliance protected and elevated over 17,000 people in Small to midsize businesses in five states. He has since taken on a new role as a force multiplier under Brad Fugitt as the Senior director of Security and Compliance at Pax8. He is driving the external thought leadership to empower MSPs to continue to grow in their security knowledge and operability. He lives to ensure his children maintain the same quality of life we do around technology, which is imperiled daily by threat actors.
Join host Ian Richardson from Richardson & Richardson Consulting as he and Matt sit down to discuss WHATS IMPORTANT NOW in the small business Cyber Security Space, as well as dive deep into not only how to survive and thrive through a cyber security incident, but also the opportunity in the market for businesses who are willing to embrace cloud and security as a core strategy for their organization.
To learn more about Richardson and Richardson Consulting please follow us on LINKEDIN at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/richardsonandrichardson/ or visit our website at https://randr.consulting
To learn more about Matt Lee, please visit his website at https://cybermattlee.com
Your hosts: Ian Richardson, Managing Partner, R&R Consulting and Carrie Simpson (Carrie Richardson), founder of Managed Sales Pros - Better Sales Leads for MSPs (https://www.managedsalespros.com)
Richardson & Richardson Consulting specializes in helping entrepreneurs scale and sell their businesses.
Carrie 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
Matt Lee has dedicated the last 10 years to raising the security tide in the SMB market. His efforts have served in every capacity in a growing MSP that grew to support 20,000 endpoints. His leadership around technology direction and security/compliance protected and elevated over 17,000 people in Small to midsize businesses in five states. He has since taken on a new role as a force multiplier under Brad Fugitt as the Senior director of Security and Compliance at Pax8. He is driving the external thought leadership to empower MSPs to continue to grow in their security knowledge and operability. He lives to ensure his children maintain the same quality of life we do around technology, which is imperiled daily by threat actors.
Join host Ian Richardson from Richardson & Richardson Consulting as he and Matt sit down to discuss WHATS IMPORTANT NOW in the small business Cyber Security Space, as well as dive deep into not only how to survive and thrive through a cyber security incident, but also the opportunity in the market for businesses who are willing to embrace cloud and security as a core strategy for their organization.
To learn more about Richardson and Richardson Consulting please follow us on LINKEDIN at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/richardsonandrichardson/ or visit our website at https://randr.consulting
To learn more about Matt Lee, please visit his website at https://cybermattlee.com
Your hosts: Ian Richardson, Managing Partner, R&R Consulting and Carrie Simpson (Carrie Richardson), founder of Managed Sales Pros - Better Sales Leads for MSPs (https://www.managedsalespros.com)
Richardson & Richardson Consulting specializes in helping entrepreneurs scale and sell their businesses.
Carrie 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
Welcome to win with Richardson and Richardson. What's important now success in business most often .Comes down to hard work, not by silver bullets and quick fixes. It's knowing where to focus that hard work that's key to winning joins. Sales prospecting expert and three times seven figure business founder, Carrie Richardson, and managing partner of R and R consulting and former owner of Doberman technologies.
Ian Richardson for radical honesty regarding strategic planning, accountability, and execution that will get you the systematic results you're working toward. Let's get into today's episode. Thought leader and your host, Ian Richardson.
Hello everyone. And welcome to win. I'm Ian Richardson, your host, and I have a very near end, dear friend of mine. Matt Lee, Matt, say hello, buddy. Hey buddy. Oh, you meant just in general. Hello. thanks for being here. We appreciate you, Matt. Uh, if you are unfamiliar with him, which means you have been under a rock in the, uh, cyber security space, Matt has dedicated the last 10 years to raising the security tide in the small business market.
His efforts have served in every capacity from growing a managed services company that grew to support 20,000 endpoints to now landing over at P eight as the, uh, lead the tide for education and thought leadership on cybersecurity. That leadership around technology direction and security compliance has protected and elevated over 17,000 people in small to mid-size businesses, across five states.
He's the senior director of security and compliance at P eight. Through that role, he's driving thought leadership to make sure the rest of the it service provider community continue to grow in both their knowledge and ability to execute. On raising and implementing and monitoring, protecting cybersecurity, his purpose to ensure his children maintain the same quality of life we do around technology, which is imperiled daily by threat actors.
Matt buddy, I feel like Ida said a whole bunch, but walk us through that. Your, your quote, unquote founders story is different than a lot of people we have on when. Walk me through like what's driving this passion around your kids and around everyone's children to, to make sure that they have the same quality of life around technology.
Talk to us about that. Yeah. So, you know, I was at an MSP that grew and grew and grew, and we started out in kind of a compliance based market. And in a lot of the, the area we were in, so, you know, 800, 1 71, those things, but as we transitioned and merged to become a much larger company, you know, we had our own kind of event, uh, at that company.
And it was, and it was, it was brutal and it taught me the post traumatic stress disorder. And. You know, we had, we had people that, that, that left our employment. We had people that left as clients, and this was all through, you know, an acquisition that kind of, that drove that. And so, as we went on, though, that, that fueled this understanding of a need for incident response and a need to understand, you know, what was attacking, what was our risk.
And as we've now seen, you know, over the last two or three years, even. We know exactly what that risk is. And I sat in front of 67, separate named events and incidents, uh, throughout the tenure of my time there, along with other members of the security committee, uh, and members of our executive leadership.
Um, and it was one of those things where I just realized that. I have this theory and you'll maybe hear me talk about it later, but you know, a product never rises much above or below the maturity of the consuming entity. Right? And so as you see this, you have this situation where just like the industrial revolution, we've built a lot of what we live on, on sand.
We we've made a lot of things that were made, you know, I've had executives say to me, Matt, a lot of money is made on crappy. Uh, it wasn't the term that was used, but it was, it was, it was worse. right. And problem is more of an alliteration there. Yeah, it was. Yeah. And it, and it was, it had S's in it for sure.
Um, you know, and, and the point was that he was serious about it and, and you you'd have these real understandings of the vulnerabilities that exist. And if they had in your house and you've had people selling you, locks that you knew did not work or wouldn't lock or windows that, or, or window breaks that didn't work or alarm systems that didn't actually function.
Um, you would. People have enough maturity to say, I need to expect this quality. We're starting to get there in the software world, but unfortunately you have that combining with people's native. Need to trust. The first reason we ever sat on a campfire Ian is, is because we had to have this built in trust of other humans or else we would've never become communities.
We'd never grown families. We'd never done those things. So we're wired that way mentally and, and in a very deep level. So the, the challenge is you put those two together and you have a lot of money to make. There's a lot of siphoning out of our general public, that destroys kind of the vision that, you know, the first time I ever touched angry birds as a middle adult, let's just say, dude, bro, that was just so amazing to me that it just worked and it, but that's the experience and, and it was a Virgin experience and we won't see it.
If we continue to degrade the security and the belief and trust in our own privacy and our own data, um, our own financials, you know, all of the above. And, and so I that's what drives me and, and I think. At a, as a practitioner at an MSP, I could serve those 15,000, 17,000 humans in 20,000 devices. Right. I could drive that inside our organization.
I could help the 170 families that worked with us, but now I can educate 15,000 MSPs with a reach of millions and millions and millions of seats and shape things around policy and shape things around education. So, um, yeah. That's kind of my origin story, but you know, it started with a massive ransomware event that was very painful and, um, LA lasted for 18 months and spent most of, uh, my stress load, uh, dealing with.
And now I participate in give back around that on a vendor response committee for incident response, you'll hear about in August and, uh, a few other things, but, um, Yeah, man, longwinded as well. Loquacious is certainly within the accusations. uh, no. When, uh, when Matt, when Matt Lee speaks, I, uh, I always stop and listen.
So, you know, a couple, couple key takeaways right there, man. If, uh, if we don't change the way that this pattern, that this trend is going, we won't have enough vulnerability. As a society to sit around the proverbial, cybersecurity, campfire, we won't have the ability to sit down through technology and build that trust, build that relationship because we'll all be too damn scared to do it.
Yep. That's a, that's a key takeaway. And then the other one, man, what just goes right down to my core right down to my soul. When I went through my Patterson life, life plan. One of the big bubble up, uh, rest items was Ian, what is your purpose? And the purpose that I have is if I can help enough people in enough different ways that the world's materially a better place that's legacy to me, that's there.
And it sounds like our legacy statements are, are right and locked, stepping a line, buddy, which, yeah, that's, uh, the soul always knows. Yep. Hundred percent brother. So on win. We always, we always dive into three big topics. And, uh, one of them, when we, when we spoke on our prep call, which was yesterday, everyone, that's how quick we're turnaround this podcast was.
Uh, you, you had mentioned that when you were making the decision. To leave the MSP that you were at and move on to your next step in your adventure to kind of pursue that legacy. You wanted to be able to maintain the persona of Matt Lee. You wanted to be able to have your unique voice while being able to grow and educate the managed it space.
You needed to be able to find someone, an organization, a group of people that would recognize and honor that need. Talk to us about that. Talk to us about how you, how you tackled that challenge. You know, what's funny is you, you talked about your Patterson life plan. I went through, you know, a similar life plan with HTG you.
Uh, through them and it was something at the time. I didn't understand the value of it. Right. I was a younger man. Uh, I didn't understand. I didn't fully believe it. I, I kind of did. I understood the recharge cycle. I understood some of those things, but one thing that really stuck with me was this HaBO, this concept of highest and best use.
Um, and it came out of this understanding. I try not to be selfish. Uh, there's a lot of things in life that you have to be selfish about, but in general, I try not to be selfish. I try to give more than I take. That's kind of my, my life ethos. I wanna leave people with. Right. Like, um, and so when I started thinking of this hobby, it was this, I really loved being an engineer.
I really liked doing projects. I was very good at them. I was very good at saving the day. I got to feel like a hero. In a direct response, right? Like, I, I literally got to have people go, Matt, you just saved us. Like, and that's very rewarding to me that one to one exchange, but turn it wrench you. Yeah, man.
Um, and that's where, you know, my happiest reward center is personally that said, I understood this concept of giving back and, and more than you take, and this HaBO concept says, you know, find what your highest and best use is, whether that be to an organization to fulfill a need to whatever it may be.
And so you have this unfortunate collision of this, like planting of that seed in my head. And now wait a minute, I have a voice to be able to deliver education, to be able to deliver hell, just sometimes picking somebody up, pat 'em on the back and telling 'em get back in the damn game. Right. But that role, and I realized that the highest and best use would be to be able to do that for.
Every MSP or every small to mid-size business I can educate. And so as you drive that that's a common goal. As I educate an SMB, they work better with their MSP. As the MSP SP work better with them. They get better at the processes because they have the funding and the people and alignment to do it. And so for me, it's about.
Meeting that ha. And so when you talk about like, I had this vision and it was somewhat one eyed, right. You know, I mean, I gotta throw in an eye joke every now and again but you know, I, I had this vision of, of driving forward with, you know, kind of a thought leadership and I hate self ascribing. It, which I just I'm a student.
Right. And I, I honestly constantly, constantly just want to learn and give back and help contextualize and, uh, uh, uh, make analogies for, um, To help people understand cybersecurity is more than just tools and to help people through their journey in the way that I went through it. Um, and so I, I asked for people to give me the leeway to partner with people that would not make business sense.
Sometimes that would not be things that drive towards marching towards this mission of our own. And while I think that's valuable, I feel like you have this greater community need that can Patterson lives in his heart that, you know, is this drive towards like, Being able to give back and have no direct, immediate impact, but you have this indirect impact of, as you educate, and as you drive people to increase their maturity level, the requirements of driving that bar up means that hopefully you're both rising together, which goes into my rising the tides concept.
Right? You're hoping those companies are floating that boat as the maturity goes up. And as the level of that product has to go up, you hope that the product is, and so. I wanted to find a company that allowed me to have both sides of that, where I, I believed genuinely in my heart that they would go through their own security evolution, but also that they would allow me to just collaborate and do and give and, and pay for it in a lot of ways.
Thank you. PAX eight. Um, you know, and, and the point is, is that I pitched that to a lot of different ones and everybody had a different vision of, of consumption of that, um, where I ended up landing at P eight. Almost allowed me my vision, which means I can sink or fail on my own, uh, and see if it adds value.
And that's very tough because you don't have a lot of like validation factors. There's not an immediate skew sale. There's not a, you know, return on investment or marketing eyes or emails gathered or Nope. I just collaborate. I just spend time with MSPs. I speak for MSPs at their events. I go and do industry things.
I participate in, in different community boards, right? Like, um, you know, I'm on the CSA, uh, zero trust advisory board. I'm writing the documentation for that test. And so I, I, I just get to live that life. Like it literally is, um, you know, the perfect role and a company that gives me the leeway to do it in a way that I think they just genuinely care enough about the community that it's worth it to them to take a book at.
And here we are a year almost. Yep. So, yeah. Sorry. You know, I can get going, but, uh, well, no, no, no. That's um, you kind of, what, what I heard there was, uh, was a couple of different captures on there that you've got this. Not only was there the challenge of, Hey, how can I keep my voice? But while tackling that challenge, you also were able to capture an achievement around.
Forcing vendors, the space, the service providers and tangentially, or, or in an indirect way, the end users to gain more maturity. And to get them to, to become innovative in their approach to cybersecurity, to start viewing cyber security, uh, more as a, as a strategy to become and as a business function.
Yeah. Right. yeah. And, and to make this something where you can't keep ignoring it, it's more and more. Yeah. And you, you you've got it. And you always capture me well, in that statement. So I'll. But like, here's the lawnmower back. I apologize. This, you, you got this row. the long bird surfing reference. Oh, that's uh, I, uh, I was surfing down in PVR.
One of the first times I was surfing and I had a massive nine foot long board when people saw coming on that they got the hell out of the, oh yeah. Yeah. That's a headache waiting to happen.
people bug me over. So challenge challenges that turned into achievement. That's some of my favorite story. Um, one of the, one of the key items that we always like to talk through is around an opportunity and you and I, we, we met for maybe 45 an hour yesterday, and I would say about half of that was talked about shifting of mindset, that there is a fundamental opportunity for every entre.
In the world right now. And it could even apply to an existing business if they're brave enough, if they've got the junction, if they're willing to jump off of a proverbial and very real cliff around cloud and security. Yeah. Talk to us about that. Talk to us opportunity that you see and that you're helping people capture.
If they're willing to take the. Well, I'll do it with a couple of stories as I'm one to do, right? So the, the first one is around. We had a, a, a market. Person who she, uh, had her masters in marketing from a prestigious marketing school. She had come on board because she was kind of forced to by her father.
No, I tease, but definitely related to Chris hus and you know, she came on and, and it was funny. We were chatting one day during a call that was prepping for a meeting. And, and she said, you know, I had this internship. That was horrible last year. I'm so glad I'm here. And this technology works the way it does.
I said, wait a minute, you just grab my interest, help me underst. What was it about the technology? So well, I had, I had this Vdrive thing and I had a VPN that I had to connect and I said, well, wait a. Hold on. And, and it dawned me through a little bit of back and forth that since middle school, she had been on Google drive and Google Chromebooks since high school and college, she was on Microsoft products and consumed everything through SharePoint and through school systems that were using those systems and the identity was tied to it.
And so you had this world where. The technologists that are coming out of college that are gonna be your desired candidates. The ones you love and want to hire are going to take a step back in time to use your technology. So there's the first point. The second story that goes along with that is if you closed your eyes and dreamed and said, okay, I'm gonna start a company tomorrow.
Let's call it R and R uh, Robertson and Robertson consulting. Let's call it. right. If you, if you're gonna start this company, would you buy a server? Would you put it in, in your closet? Would you go to a data colo or an IAS provider and start up a server, an active directory and all, would you go to Azure and run servers and have host an structural based a applic.
No, you probably bind straight Azure active directory. You might have an independent IDP before that, like Okta or somebody like that. But then you're gonna bolt that in. Hopefully with single sign, I want a very, very low number of passwords into SAS based applications, with shared responsibility models and data sets that you need to start pushing those vendors to be better and better about helping you meet.
But ultimately if you take those two concepts together, it means that. If your competitor starts tomorrow, they'll gimme more agile able to attract talent, have better technology, be able to more secure it. Now, granted, there are people that will listen to this. That would argue me to the death that going cloud has its no, you know, it's not perfect grant.
Granted, every system security plan has a system security plan, but I'll take that over architectural, structural death and delay and decay of tech debt. They both have their own enemies. They both have their own challenges. But the point is is that if you take that then from a business perspective, You take a lot of the plate spinning of what MSPs have done.
The things that we did that were I'll reboot your server. I'll do your update. We'll get your schema update. That doesn't happen. You might have some rework of, I am, you might have some different conditional access things, but those are quite centric. And so you work at this towards, in a, in a final stage.
The companies that start that way, I think I hypothesize will be able to attract the talent will be faster and will be better and more profitable. And then you can focus as an MSP on those customers with a script. It just changes the grid of the tenant ID and the secret I'm using for the application.
Those are scriptable delineations. Look at C I P P or some of those things, but the point is, is that now if we're gonna succeed, we actually have to be consultants. We have to start teaching someone to use the same hockey stick, the same puck, the same pads to beat the other team. H how does one win the Stanley cup?
It's because they have better coaching. They have a better plan. They have better. So, so our job becomes that, right. Which I know is very good to Robertson and Robertson cons uh, consulting, uh, over there. But, uh, and I know it's Richards and Richards and I'm, I'm being, apparently it's just. Robbing my marketing capacity.
I, I am, I feel terrible. Just say Richardson and Richardson consulting. So then I can steal that on this podcast and use it in all sorts of, oh, I try. Well, I'll say it Richardson and Richard can Richardson construction, uh, consulting boy that was butcher Richardson and Richardson consulting. Um, you know, are, are that kind of a model, right?
Where you could be coaching people on business outcomes, on the growth of their marketing, on the strength of their product, on the use of their technology in ways that MSPs wouldn't have considered themselves part of that table in the past, but on the second. The next opportunity that comes hand in hand with this is this raw of an understanding of I can buy all the cloud pieces, but if I bolt don't bolt them together correctly, they still don't help me and aid my security plan.
And so a lot of the things that'll come from this is the growth in, in MSPs, delivering, you know, or TSP, XSP, whatever the hell you wanna call it, delivering security services and business consult consultation towards driving success and growth while also securing it that. Pretty much what the technology arm of MSPs is going to deliver.
And if you took that forward, you could imagine a different human. They might might hire. If, if you're dealing with one very Hogene, you know, set of everybody's on AAD, I have 400 customers. They're all Azure active directory. They all use one of 42 main applications. Sales force, this line of business app, that line of business app, you now can have very robust procedures and processes that are very scalable.
That don't take the. You know, quality of technical delivery, but then you have a couple of engineers that help work through that. As those companies change as their, as their bolt ends change, as they now offer skim, or they switch to, you know, OAuth instead of, you know, SAML or those kind of things as that changes.
But. You can go hire a lot of Ian Richardson type people to go have conversations about business, right. And drive that. And so the opportunity, I think, is this shift in we've always wanted to be the CPA. We've always wanted to be the attorney. We've always wanted to be right. Those trusted advisors in that space.
And this is I think our grand opportunity to start behaving like that, um, and start giving that. So what I, what I hear there, there's, uh, there's an opportunity. There's two big opportunities. Um, one which you absolutely hammered on the head for the business. That's willing to take the leap. You can gain back the nimbleness of your youth, where you're able to rapidly pivot rapidly shift because you are not dragged down by a technology anchor.
Yep. But even, and, and I would pause it that this one might be even a bigger. Opportunity is, uh, is the fact that if you are, if you're focused in on it, if you are, if you're, if your eye is on the ball, you can, as, as a business today, you can have a blue ocean opportunity where sure. By embracing cloud embracing security is your core strategy.
You're able to run faster, jump higher, hit harder than your competition, because you don't have that disconnect and it allows you to shift the conversation. And so, as a, as a, as a managed it company, you can shift the conversation because you can now hire paralegals to use the industry, speak from legal.
You can have. The lower level technical talent do 95% of the doing. And then instead you can go have a consultative relationship with someone on their business objectives, their business goals, and truly become, have a seat at the quote unquote grownups table with the attorneys, with the CPAs, with the financial advisors who are really delivering that high impact value that an entrepreneur and a business owner values.
Where they will never value. Hey, my computer turned on and worked. That's just like, Hey, my lights worked when I turned on the switch. yeah, no, totally. And that is a commoditization. If you look back, there was a book that was written that kind of compares in the industrial revolution. You had to have a electricity plant manager, the person that managed the electricity coming into your plant for your sewing machines that were gonna run on that.
Like legitimately, that was a role. But now. No, it's three phase power. It's gonna come in in 1 10, 1 10, 1 10. We put it back together. We have this much fuse amperage, like it's just designed, right. It's commoditized in a lot of ways. Um, you know, I like the fact that you touched on financial advisors though, because I think that's one of the other missing components when it comes to why this is an opportunity before it's a.
Risk. Right. And, and I think the point is that as an MSP, if you start realizing that we have to have some barrier to entry, to be a professional service and as the United States, government and other governments in the five I's community. And especially as you see this kind of globally, start to realize that this is a real challenge, just like.
We had to make roads that deadlines in the middle that were the same space. And we had to have the right road signs and things that all worked everywhere. We had to have, you know, you have this kind of like need to start figuring out and, and managing this. But FINRA is a great example of how we could accomplish this, um, right.
In the sense that, you know, FINRA is a self-regulatory agency, it actually has this idea and concept of. Agents as well as the agencies that do business under that, right? You have a registered investment advisor or a broker dealer, and they have a broker and Ian can lose his license and the broker dealer can lose their license.
Yes. And you start getting into a world where you should start getting ahead of this transition and understanding how to deliver these other functions inside your world and reducing the chaos of the current structural space. Because it'll allow you to be ready as those regulations and changes start to occur.
You'll already have those very scalable processes in place that, that work and, and meet that needs. So, um, yeah, I, I like the comparison. Uh, FENRA did this. We can do this ourselves in the MSP and have a self regulatory model where we ultimately are kind of in control of more of our own destiny and set those standards as we raise.
Um, and I think getting ahead of that helps is my. It's much better to much better to instill the regulation that we want and need versus to have, uh, regulation dictated by people who think that the internet is a series of tubes. Coin the, uh, to coin the phrase. That's awesome. Everyone. That's. This is Matt Lee.
You can learn more about Matt Lee by going to cyberMattlee.com. And, uh, while you're there, if you're looking between now and November at 2022, you can also fund the removal. Of the beard on Matt Lee's face and do quite a bit of good for charity. So this is a, this is a big call out. You're gonna hear these on every single win podcast from now, until that happens, but thank you.
Get out there, donate, do some good in the world. Matt really appreciate you being a guest on here. You can connect with Matt on LinkedIn, go to the website, have all types of information. If you have any remotely, any type of question about cyber security at all, this is the man you should be talking to.
Matt from the bottom of my heart. Appreciate you being here on wind. You can see more win episodes @ randr.consulting. You can connect with me or carry on LinkedIn. I'm Ian Richardson, your host, and as always. Thanks for joining us on wind, Matt. We'll see you next time. Thank you brother. Appreciate you having me on.
You've been listening to win with Richardson and Richardson. What's important now. We're so glad you've joined us and know you're one step closer to winning big in your business too. We'd love to connect with you outside of the show. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to connect at R and R. Dot consulting. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast. So you'll easily know when new episodes are available until next time you can win. And we are here to help.