Brian Gill - Gillware Data Recovery

It's not often we do a little bit of tech support in the show, is it, Shannon?

It's not. But, you know, when it comes to your data and protecting your network and all that kind of stuff, as a small business owner, when that stuff falls apart, you could be out of business. So it's great to get some tips and we'll also learn about someone's business that grown around data recovery and ransomware. So I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, no, this is a great interview coming up here, folks, and it does include a little bit of tech support, but it's, it's, it's universal tech support.

Yes.

So I think, I think you'll find it helpful, especially with the numbers of newly exposed computers that have come online in just three weeks. So there's some good stuff, but also some stuff about running a business. This guy's run some fairly sizable companies. Started all by himself. Yeah. So, yeah. Good. I think you folks are going to enjoy this one.

I think so.

Yeah. All right, well, before we get into that, I want to talk about our sponsor, which is Linode. Because you're going to need a server for your business, even if you're running everything remotely, perhaps especially if you're running everything remotely because you don't want to be hosting things at your house or even at your home office. You know, Internet connections at home are not, you know, residential Internet connections are not the most reliable thing, especially these days. So when you put your server up, you want to stand your server up somewhere that it's always going to be accessible to people. And this is what Linode does. They have a 40 gigabit network. You can pick from any one of their 10 worldwide data centers. And they've got all kinds of different plans where you can pick the server capacity that you need. So you're only paying for what you use and what you want to use as opposed to, you know, overdoing it. And of course they've got the ability to scale and of course they monitor and provision things and they back things up and everything's on SSDs. They know what they're doing. They've been doing this for a very long time. And you can set up your server so easy go to linode l I n o-e.com SBS. You want to use that SBS because you get a $20 credit just by going through that link. And so that's 20 bucks in your account to use right out of the gate. Their lowest price server is just five bucks a month. So you can do some math there. Check it out. Linode.comsbs and our thanks to Linode, of course, for sponsoring this episode. All right, he is Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton and this is episode 269 of the Small Business Show.

Every company who goes through one of these data breaches, those executives are really ready to make sure it never happens again.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah, it's a, it's a mess. It's a total nightmare being held. The, the business productivity and the, the privacy of your employees, the privacy of your clients, the privacy of your vendors. You know, all of that has been invaded and it's cost the organization ridiculous amounts of reputation and pain and productivity. And they're, they're ready to ask us how they could have prevented it pretty quickly.

Hey there. So we all live in a digital world. I don't need to tell you that, you know, the devices that you hold in your hand that we're recording on now, everything we have, you know, holds critical data for your business and your personal lives. And we talk on the show frequently about strategies to, that you need to put into place to protect your data for yourself and your business, your employees that you know, may be working remotely right now. So the timing is great. And joining us this week is Brian Gill, a data recovery and ransomware expert, to discuss with ways to protect yourself and what to do if you find yourself in a data crisis. And of course, we're also going to dig in and get a glimpse into the history of Gillware and how Brian has created a successful IT business that has thousands of customers that rely on him for safety. Thanks so much for joining us today, Brian.

We really appreciate it, Shannon. Dave, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, of course.

That's cool. This is great. Dave and I are both tech guys. We, we are constantly, you know, pushing the mantra of backing up your data, but nobody listens to us. So, you know, like most people. Oh, yeah, I'm going to get going to get to it, but let's talk about your businesses for a second. It looks like you've created a group of businesses clustered around data recovery, digital forensics, and crisis management. Can you explain how. Let's talk about how you got started and then how you've kind of morphed into this group of businesses today.

Yeah, so I got out of school with a computer science kind of programming degree and went out and played in the first kind of pets.com era bubble of the Internet and that thing exploded and I kind of Tucked tail back to Wisconsin and knew I wanted to start a business. And my brother Tyler and I and a couple of our buddies, we went through a series of kind of, you know, just brainstorming, you know, what can we do? And kind of weighed the pros and the cons of a lot of different things. And my brother Tyler actually had this particular idea to start the data recovery business back around 2004. And it was because he had experienced, experienced a data loss and had not backed up his data and had a whole bunch of stuff that he wanted to get back. And we looked, he had looked long and hard to try to find companies that could repair that stupid thing and get him his stuff back. Managed to find a couple and they wanted like 3 to $5,000 to repair a hard drive. And for us at that time, and for him at that time he was in college, it was like it was a tuition type payment. Right, right. And so he did not pay to get it back. And, and that's kind of where the idea came from. But we really liked it because it's really hard. The storage manufacturers do not supply any assistance. These devices are very proprietary and undocumented. And they are. The spinning disk hard drives back in the day were, you know, they had physical problems, mechanical problems, electrical problems, firmware problems, or computer science type problems for their own little internal operating systems. And so. And they're completely undocumented. You know, there's no use, no user's manual. You can't go to school to figure out how to fix them. They don't document anything. And they actually work really hard to make sure that it's difficult to reverse engineer their products because mostly because they're not, they're worried about their competitors, not us. And that was super attractive to us because there's this huge barrier of entry and you need to have a whole bunch of smart scientists in a couple different fields. And we thought we'd give it a shot.

Yeah, that's cool. So. So when you say you liked it because it was hard, was it the challenge or you thought, hey, if we can figure it out, then we'll have an advantage over, you know, someone that another business that maybe couldn't figure it out.

Yeah, I mean there's that and it's, it's all about, for me, just wanted to make sure that we had that pricing power, you know, I didn't, I never wanted to be in any kind of commodity business.

Yeah, that's great.

That's really smart, man. What a. Like I. We need to save that little sound bite right there. I never wanted to be in any kind of commodity business. Yeah, if you're competing on price, that's a whole different ball game. Yep. Smart. Yeah.

Yeah. And I can remember, you know, referring some of our repair customers to, you know, some, some of these other drive places. And like you say, I mean, when they'd hear the price point, they would just be like, what? You know, and so, you know, that.

That's great. It's.

It, it's a good story. So are your services now primarily focused on. On data recovery or you also doing preparation and prevention? How does that work?

Yeah, it's, it's changed a lot over the years, but right now the core focus. So. So Gilaware about three months ago did a brand split. We took a small venture capital round and we turned Gillware Digital Forensics into a company that is now called Tetra Defense. It's all the same people. There's a lot of, you know, people continue to work for both companies, but Tetra Defense is, is focused on incident response. So the, you know, the building is burning and they're the firefighters to come in and basically help companies out of data breaches. And then they are directly assisting those companies with risk management moving forward. Because every company who goes through one of these data breaches, those executives are really ready to make sure it never happens again.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah, it's a, it's a mess. It's a total nightmare being held. The business productivity and the privacy of your employees, the privacy of your clients, the privacy of your vendors, you know, all of that has been invaded and it's cost the organization ridiculous amounts of reputation and pain and productivity. And they're, they're ready to ask us how they could have prevented it pretty quickly. And so that's what Tetra is primarily doing. And Gilware Incorporated is still primarily focused on more traditional data recovery. And it's, it ranges from just consumers like my brother who want to get back years worth of pictures of their kids. And the call I got off right before I took this podcast was with a overseas government who had a hundred drive san take a crap. And yeah, I mean it was, it's a huge, it's a huge government over in the Middle east and they're, they're looking to, to basically probably pay about $25,000 to ship that stupid thing to Wisconsin so that my people can get all their stuff back for them. So it's, That's a pretty ra. That type of call doesn't come in every Week. But if it had data on it and it took a crap and you need to get it back, we, we help people do that here at Gilbert Incorporated.

That's great.

Wow, that's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. So when, when you're talking about like prevention and, or somebody who's data loss or maybe a ransomware thing, you know, I usually think of ransomware, you know, big corporations or municipalities. Is that usually the way it work or are businesses of all kinds, all sizes, are they targets as well?

So it is certainly true that large businesses, large enterprise with, in certain verticals like healthcare, like finance, like banking, those verticals are going to be. Have more of a target on their back. The equifaxes of the world are going to be huge targets for data breach. Right. But they will also, they'll take kind of easy targets. And like right now one of our. I can't remember who it was or I would give them credit for it, but a security research firm just published that they're. They've seen an increase of about 47% over the last couple weeks of basically nodes on the Internet that are open for rdp, which is remote desktop with no firewall in the middle, which is why they can see them. So this means that compared to just a couple months ago, it's moved up 40%. And that number as of a couple of months ago was static, you know, bouncing around 1 or 2% up or down for, for years and years and years. But now there's 47 or 41% more of them available. Targets for open. These are home users, possibly or small business owners, like listening to your show, who have their Windows computer open for remote desktop without any kind of hardware firewall in between them and the Internet. And this is going to be catastrophic to a whole bunch of small businesses.

Yeah. I imagine with so many people working remotely, you know, right now especially it's, it's got to be really common.

Yeah, they, they probably panicked and they said I need to work from home. And they had that desktop computer at work and they just opened up remote desktop and they never had that firewall right at their small business. And, and, but that's how they're getting to their, their thing and they didn't have time or maybe the money to go out and hire an IT guy to come in and put a firewall in front of that. And because of that, all a bad guy needs to get out of that box and they could be in Pakistan or wherever. All they need is a username and a password.

That's it. And they can hack that all day long?

Yep, yep. They can hammer that damn thing all day long hundreds of thousands of times in an automated script. And those new 41%, that's definitely happening tens of thousands of times right now. Like probably half of them are already under attack and don't know it. Wow.

Wow, that's incredible.

Do you have a link or anything that we can point people to that? I mean, we can find one certainly. But if you've got one specifically that you've put together an article or a white paper or something on what people can do in, in that scenario, I'd love to, I'd love to share that.

So I'm going to give you a rapid fire, like 45 seconds if I can.

Yeah, please do, please do. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. So first off, you, you mentioned it earlier, backups. Those backups need to be automated. So they're happening without you thinking about doing anything. Some of them need to get offline at intermittent variables so that they're basically air gapped or not available to be hacked. You need to have a real firewall, not a. Oh, my operating system has a firewall. That's not a firewall.

Right.

Get a real firewall in front of business data or even your consumer data in this day and age. Get a real firewall between your computing systems and your data centers and the Internet. You need to think long and hard about user authentication. You are probably a lazy human. Not you guys, you guys aren't, but everybody listening. You guys are lazy. And you have three or four passwords that you use for everything. Or maybe you put like a little twist on it. It's the name of my dog. And the number two with an exclamation point this time, like that crap doesn't fly. That will get hacked rapidly. So you need to think long and hard about something like a universal two factor thing, like a Yubikey that you can buy on Amazon for about 45 bucks that will do passwordless entry for you kind of everywhere. And those archaic websites that require username and passwords, it will generate huge, big nasty ones that are unique to that site. So that if that service has a problem, because like a lot of these passwords, we have them at like a Yahoo. And then Yahoo gets hacked, right? So it wasn't even your fault.

Right?

But if you had the same password for Yahoo as your desktop and you didn't have a firewall in front of it, now you're an RDP target, right? So if you're, as this show is all about Small businesses. A lot of your listeners have small business insurance. Many of them might think they have cyber insurance and they would be wrong. So you need to talk to your small business insurance company about adding a cyber specific policy that covers things like ransomware attacks and then understand what are your coverage limits. If a ransomer does hack into your systems because you didn't listen to any of this or just didn't have time to do it, and they're demanding a 10,000 or a 20,000 or a $50,000 ransom payment, is your insurance company going to write that check or not? You know, so you need to understand, you need to get some cyber insurance and understand what those limits are. And then ultimately, you know, email and phishing, these things are, if you can, if you're a slightly larger organization with maybe you have a few dozen employees who get a lot of email, it's probably time to think about a little bit of social engineering training, email training, just to try to teach some people how to deal with the constant attacks that, that these automated screening systems that you should also have are going to miss.

Yeah, fascinating.

Thank you.

That's, that's outstanding advice.

Great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sitting here nodding along with it. We, well, as Shannon said, we're tech guys and so, you know, on one of my other podcasts, we give this kind of advice all the time, but this. So it's like, yep, you got to do it. I mean.

Yeah, and, and it's what, like if you had to ballpark a range of, you know, you know, that has like you said a dozen or maybe you know, less than 20 employees. I mean, what kind of investment do they, are they looking at to protect themselves? It's not crazy expensive, is it?

No. I mean, you should have a managed service provider that is familiar with your industry and, you know, so you can hire basically a timeshare and IT guy. Every city in America with more than like 10,000 people has more than a couple managed service providers. Because you don't, you're not going to get benefit from hiring a full time IT guy and you're not going to be equipped to even hire them in the first place. Right. Even if you had the budget for it, you're going to be, you're going to do a bad job of hiring that first IT guy because you don't know how to screen them during the hiring process. Right. Yeah. So, you know, you got to, you've got to, you've got to try to find a managed service provider who's going to give You a third of an IT guy per month. It's going to be about a third of the cost maybe for a company like 20. So it might cost you a couple grand a month to have that IT guy up front. For them to install something like a real like Fortinet or Sonic wall or Cisco firewall in front of your business. That might cost two or three grand like one time. And then there might be some like two factor authentication licensing fees. It's like 50 bucks a year per user or something. So yeah, you gotta spend, you gotta pay now or pay later, you know.

Right. And, and paying now is going to keep your business from, you know, being interrupted where you can't even do business. Right. If you're losing data or if you get attacked like that.

Yeah, I mean we had a, we've had. And I don't want to belabor the point, but some of our clients don't make it like even though maybe we get them their data back. If, if you were say for example, a tax preparation firm with you know, 30 accountants and, and another 20 or 30 staff and the bad guys penetrate your network and steal all your clients data and file taxes for a bunch of your clients.

Clients.

Yeah, that's a, that's a true story. Wow. That, that, that firm is gone now. You know, I mean they're, that's, that's not something that a business or a brand is going to recover from. All those accountants are working other places, you know, but that particular brand took a pretty bad hit.

Yeah. Well, and even, I mean, even if your, your brand image doesn't take a hit, simply the workflow interruption can be huge. I mean I've, I've, I've had several people over the last couple of years and I'm not in the business of consulting as much anymore. You know, I used to do it full time and now it's only people that, that find me and force me. But you know, my phone will ring and somebody will say, okay, I got ransomware here, I need the data back. The only reason they're calling me is they say you can probably figure out how to help me buy the Bitcoin that it's going to require to get my data back. Can't you? And it's like, yeah, I can help you with that. Like this scenario sucks to have to actually walk through that with somebody. But I mean when you're in that scenario and even if you have the backups. Yeah.

Sometimes our clients understand and they may even have accounts and they may even know how to Buy the bitcoin, right?

Yeah, Right.

But they, they've never done a ransom negotiation.

Right.

And they may not have the juice on their bitcoin exchange to buy the quarter million or half a million dollars worth of bitcoins that they require, because it takes a long time to get that type of. To build up that relationship with those exchanges so that they can actually trust you. Because that's the stupid thing about bitcoin is, I guess it's. It's what, is what it was designed to do. So, but once that money's gone, once that cryptocurrency is sent, it is gone. It doesn't come back.

There's no refunds. That's right. Yeah. You can't call the provider and say, refund that transaction. It's like, no, no, no.

Yeah. There's no takesies, Maxis. I mean, it's gone. So it's really a situation where if you want to get a quarter million or a half million dollars worth of bitcoins in a hurry so that you can transfer those off network to some shady criminal. Well, let's just say the exchanges are not going to make that super easy, even if you know fully how the whole thing works.

That's a good point. That's a great point. Yeah, man.

The whole thing is a nightmare. I mean, it's just prevention, you know, it's such a case where, you know, you have discussions like this and it's prevention, you know.

No, and again, it's not just those big companies. So yesterday I talked for about an hour with a company that did machine tooling. They had about 22 employees. I think they were out of Iowa, and they got bit, you know, and what you find is that the bad guys, they set their prices pretty effectively. Because that's another big misconception is, oh, I just clicked on a link on an email and now it infected my computer. No, like, at least the clients that we see. There's been a cyber criminal who's pretty damn savvy on your network because they, like, RDP'd onto the CEOs desktop and they have opened the QuickBooks file and they understand to the nickel what that company generates every month. And they're going to set their ransom demand, appropriate to be painful, but doable for that company. They're not going to have it be a quarter million dollars, but they're also not going to have it be $1,000. You know, it's going to be nasty, but it's going to be effective, you know.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's crazy. Yeah, that's good.

So.

Okay, let's jump back in. I want to. I want to ask a few more questions about you. Now I'm freaked out.

I know. We can, we could div this path for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you folks, before we get off of this, if, if anybody listening has any questions, send them in to us@ feedbackusinessshow.co if Shannon and I can't answer them, we can, we can, you know, see if we can ask Brian to, you know, to maybe help out a little bit. So that'd be great. Thank you.

That's awesome. So let's talk about back into business. You know, I understand you had part of the company acquired back in 2016 to spin off the as a. Well, they took over your cloud services, I believe, if that's correct.

Yeah. So. So back in 2004, we started the recovery lab, which is kind of like the firefighters. A crisis happened, the data was lost. We needed to deal with that immediate crisis. And because it's always easier in business to. Once you've established yourself and you've established your relationship with your clients, it's always easier to sell them more stuff. Right. Than it is to acquire a new client in the first place. And a lot of these clients were asking us, how could I have prevented this? And maybe you're going to detect a theme here with some of the more recent things that we're doing. So we said, well, we looked at a lot of the different possibilities and we weren't really super satisfied with a lot of them specifically for small businesses. So we started a cloud services company around 2006 and that was called Gillware Digital Services. And it was essentially a backup company and a data analytics company. So it would for. Primarily for small businesses. It would allow them to roll out these automated backup platforms to everybody's computer. It would kind of configure itself. Because configuration is a big problem in the world of backup, where you think all your data is backed up and. And then you need that backup and then you go to that backup and oh crap, where's my accounting data? Like that kind of thing is super duper common. Even still in 2020 at get at the Data Recovery Lab, probably two thirds of the cases that we get coming in here, the client thought everything was backed up, but they missed something. They, they, they changed out their point of sale system two years ago and they did not adjust the backup. So we made a system that would kind of configure itself and as New data, as new software was installed, as new data would appear on the network if it looked important, because we had some analytics that defined what important meant, it would just grab it and back it up. And so that was. That company was a lot of fun, but a larger fish. A great company called Storagecraft out of Draper, Utah, purchased that from us in 2016. Yeah.

And. And how did. What did you learn during that process? Was it pretty straightforward, or were there things that surprised you? How'd it go? Having gone through this a couple times before, I' always curious.

I was very surprised how much money we had to spend on lawyers. For sure. The amount. I mean, I knew there'd be lawyers involved, but, like, no offense to any lawyers out there, but that's okay.

You can.

I mean, it was like. I think. I mean, it might have been. It was well over, I think, four or five hundred hours of lawyering.

Wow.

It was just a ton of lawyers. And it surprised me how long it took because it looked so simple on paper. And the verbal back and forth over the first couple of weeks was so amicable and easy. And then once they got into the diligence phase, and they did a great job of diligence. Right. And they had. They had executives and lawyers whose job it was at Storagecraft to make sure that nothing was unturned and that there was no surprises with this deal. Right. So that's how they earned their living, and we respect that. But the. The granularity surprised me for sure, how deep they went into, like, reading individual lines of source code to make sure that it was ours and things like that. It was. It was pretty. Pretty involved.

That's good. That's interesting. Yeah. If. If you could keep it to the people at the beginning that shake hands and say, yeah, this sounds. Let's do it. It would go much quicker. Right.

So many more deals would happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great. And then spinning off the analytics part of your business to this new entity, Tetra Defense, what was the impetus to do that?

So, yeah, so in 2016, we. We sold that business. And that's a bittersweet moment when you, you know, watch this thing that you did for 10 years and. And it all goes away, and a whole bunch of your best friends all, you know, get on planes and move to Utah and stuff. It is definitely, again, it's. It's why you started the company in the first place, is to. Hopefully it's good enough to get acquired someday. But it definitely was weird, and we were at that okay, what are we. The executives at Gilware were like, what's next? And this whole ransomware thing was really starting. You know, we saw some ransomware in like 2013, 2014, but it was really starting to be a very common phone call for us around 2016, because we, everybody knew that we did this disaster, data disaster company thing. Right. They didn't differentiate between malicious humans causing it or, you know, oh, crap, this hard drive is clicking like they, Our customers didn't make that. That different. I can't say it, but our customers did not pick up on that distinction. And so why would we. So we started to get a little bit more serious about it. And we had a wonderful lady named Cindy Murphy who's local to Madison, Wisconsin, and she's a worldwide leader, thought leader in digital forensics. She just happened to be in her backyard. And of course, we knew her pretty well. And we decided to. What was next was going to be to take all that ransomware stuff and to take all the digital forensics, the civil litigation support type stuff that we were doing and roll that into its own entity, make Cindy the president and my buddy Scott the CEO, and. And that was really the catalyst.

That's good. Great story. Yeah, it makes, it makes a lot of sense, you know, taking advantage of new opportunities that are coming along. You know, your branding. Yeah, that's really cool. We'll link up on in the show notes to the Tetra Defense website too. It's cool.

Yeah.

I think you have a good thing going up there.

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's going incredibly well. You know, our biggest problem is not being able to hire fast enough. It's. It's. We've gone. We've gone from just. We've probably. And again, we're a small company, you know, I mean, in 20, probably by the end of 2017, we might have had eight or nine people working there, and we've hired probably 15 people in the last three months.

Wow.

So, yeah, for us, you know, again, it's for a lot of size companies. That's not that big a deal. But that company is. Is experiencing a little bit of that exponential growth that everybody wants.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's what everybody wants. I mean, as long as you can, the, the increase in business and all of that, that goes along with it. But that's. Yeah, that's great, man. That's awesome.

Yeah. I mean, and the way we're handling that, frankly, is, you know, we're. I, I would estimate, I, I haven't looked at the number for a couple weeks. But we're probably only taking on about half the engagements. You know, the people that want to hire us to help them out of these jams, you know, we're only saying yes about half the time right now because we're trying to maintain that level of quality.

Right, right, right.

Makes sense. And how do those people find you? I mean, are your, you know, is your marketing team reaching out or is it there's just the demand is there and they're finding you based on your reputation or referrals? What, what works best for you guys?

Well, I mean, so they come from a couple different places. You know, as Gillware, we have a partner network of a lot of those managed service providers that I was telling your audience to hire. We probably have about a thousand or twelve hundred active MSPs in our system that when they bu related crises, they call us. So that's definitely where a lot of them come from. But with the, with the, the ransomware stuff, a lot of them are coming from the insurance companies themselves. So a company has bought a cyber insurance policy just in case I ever get ransomed or I ever get data breached. And they know that they bought that policy. They remember that they bought that policy. And when that stupid event happens, they call their insurance provider and say, hey, I'm in the thick of it here. I bought that policy. What does this mean? And then their insurance provider has a set of pre screened companies that are, you know, vetted to be able to go in and assist them. And so those direct referrals from the insurance company are how a lot of them happen.

That's great. I would, you know, think that the insurance companies would also want to get you in your, in companies like yourself involved on the front end. It's like, okay, you just bought this package. Part of the requirement now is to connect with a service provider like you know, Tetra Defense and put a plan in place before this happens. So it would save the insurance company, you know, and the business money down the line.

It's starting, you know, so what? Yeah, I'm surprised it wasn't happening that the very first cyber insurance policy that was sold. But you're exactly right. Like that, that stuff, that rapid 45 seconds that probably took me 75 seconds. Like why that would not be on a sheet of paper? Like, do you have a big boy firewall? How do you do patch management? What's your backup strategy? When the last time it was audited? Yada yada yada. Like all of those questions should be in that insurance application. Right, right.

And in, in a routine audit too. I mean, you think they'd want to make sure everybody's staying up on that once a year or something too?

Yeah, you would think so. Yeah. I mean it's not, it's not 100. True. Unfortunately. But some of the insurance providers are more savvy than others.

Sure, of course.

And you know, the, the more savvy ones especially, you know, if they are having, you know, thousands of clients getting burned by ransomware and they have to pay out on a lot of those policies now they're like, wait a second.

There might be a better way to approach this.

Yeah, yeah. Or maybe we should have some variable rates based on how prepared our clients are.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. So we come to the part of the show where I always ask this question. You know, we're big fans of mistakes on this, on the show. We just published a book all about mistakes and how that we think they're the foundation of your business, you know, since they teach us so much. So if you look back on, you know, you've had a long experience here and done lots of different things, what would be one of your best, and I'm quote marks up in the air here, your best mistakes, one that stuck with you and taught you, I know, a valuable lesson as you built your businesses.

Yeah. So I would have to say so again, like I had gone out to the west coast and played in the initial startup game and I was having a lot of success at a company called I Sharp and it had raised its Series B and it was like, I don't know, 25 or 30 million dollars or something. And we had raised it and we were growing like crazy. And you know, I was, I was, I was one of the first 20 employees and fast forward a couple two or three years later and we had about 180 employees. So this company was growing fast. It was awesome. I love my job, I love my co workers, life was grand. Then the market crashed, the VCs got cold feet and they yanked the fund, which I didn't think they could do, but they did. So I got, I developed a very negative thought process in my brain about working for VCs. And when I started Gilware, and when we subsequently started Gilware, the cloud services company, we, I was hell bent on bootstrapping that thing. I wanted to hold on tight to everybody, ounce of equity that we could. And we did. You know, it was only employees and the early founders group. At the end of that acquisition Period. So we did exactly what we wanted to do. But over, though, over those 10 years, we did have multiple opportunities to go and get some financing and get out of this bootstrapping mode, and that would have led to a much more successful exit. We had. We had a lot of competitors that raised a lot of money, and we just went a lot slower than them. And so if I had to say I made a mistake, that that would be a big one. I didn't make it in a vacuum. Obviously, all my partners are on board, etc. But, you know, for Tetra Defense now, so we're in, like, you know, year four or like, very early in year four now, and we had easily the ability to do that total bootstrapping thing. Like, we have clients coming out of the woodwork, they're paying us reasonable rates, and we could afford to grow slowly. But we decided, you know, kind of back in December of 2019, that we had an opportunity to take not a big round, but we had an opportunity to take about a $3 million round of investment and give away a chunk of the company for it. And that even though we had plenty of cash in the bank, we decided to. That it made a lot of sense, both because of the investors that came along because they're the right kind of investors, and then also because we had that war chest where we could feel comfortable hiring, like, 20 or 30 people this year.

Yeah, no, it's great. And. And I mean, we talk about it a lot. You know, the best time to. To go out seeking, you know, cash, whether it's, you know, outside investors, your bank, whatever it is, when you don't need it. So, you know, doing it at that time, certainly, yeah, we didn't need it.

We definitely did not need it. But it was a situation where we wanted to grow fast. We wanted to try to build this thing. And we. We understand that. We didn't live in a vacuum. We have competitors, and a lot of those competitors are going to go raise capital. And it's, you know, it's not like a. A situation where you could just, well, I'm not going to do that. It's like, well, there's ramifications to not doing that, which is maybe they grab more market share and maybe they're buying you five years from now instead of you buying them. Right, right.

No, it's. Yeah, it's fascinating. So going forward, you know, what's next for you and your companies? I know you're an active angel investor yourself. I mean, are you focused on growing new businesses? Or focusing on Gillware and Tetra. What's the next few years look like for you?

Yeah, so me personally, I've got three young boys, you know, ages like three through nine. And as part of that brand split, you know, I had a personal decision where I needed to decide which, you know, what I was going to do. And did I want to in like, you know, year 21 or whatever of my career, did I want to go into that 65, 70 hour a week startup mode that I would have definitely needed to be in, especially with the added, with that added pressure of those investors. Right. Or did I want to focus on Gilware Incorporated, that, you know, 16 year old mature business that kind of runs itself at this point and have a little bit more of that work life balance that I've heard everybody talk about. And it was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. And long story short is I decided to basically stick with Gilware and try to, at least for the next three or four years, make sure that, you know, I can be daddy for 40 hours a week and work for about 40 and maybe sleep for some too. Yeah. So, yeah, so Gilware, obviously we're not sitting still. There's all kinds of stuff that loses data. And one of the things we're starting to focus on is crash reconstruction. So, you know, if a car gets in a car accident, it's pretty common these days that a lot of these electronics in these cars capture a lot of that information about why this crash happened. And there's a lot of, you know, civil and criminal litigation that happens as a result of a lot of these accidents. Right, right. And a lot of these lawyers are starting in some of these accidents. The problem is there's a whole industry of people that do crash scene reconstruction and the data that they utilize comes from these vehicles. But when these vehicles are in terrible condition, like a fire started as a result of that crash, you know, when that car gets barbecued, that thing that stored that data is damaged heavily. So that's one of our kind of emerging business units is helping that crash reconstruction community with those, with those crashes.

That's really cool. Some great advice on this show, not only just with your, you know, the ransomware, the protection, the data backing up, but also even, you know, to your point of making the decision of having some more time to spend with your family at this point in your career, I would argue that you look back on that as one of the best decisions you ever made.

It's, it's still, it's hard, you know, like Obviously I love my kids, love my wife, love my family life, but it feels super weird, not like being in the thick of it over there every single day.

Yeah.

I won't lie to you.

No, it will. Yeah. I went, I went through a little bit of that. My kids are now, you know, 18 and 20, but I did a little bit of that. Some intentionally and some just sort of happened, you know, sort of naturally as I gravitated more towards my family and in there, even looking back on it, like I would not change that decision at all. But you know, the business didn't grow as fast as it could have. And you know, there were some things where I say, well, if I was paying more attention or whatever, I would have kind of done this differently or whatever. But you know, the business survived, it's fine. And, and I got to be with my kids while they're growing up because that's. That happens once, so.

Once.

Yep. Yeah, it's not a bad thing. It's one of those hard things is, is running a small business, being an entrepreneur.

Yeah.

You know, part of the reason that you're attracted to it is because at least I was, is because I didn't want to be like in one of those corporate pyramids where I can just get furloughed or you know, I can get a boss promoted above me who I don't agree with on a lot of things or doesn't fully appreciate what I bring to the table or at the largest companies where they kind of really try to pigeonhole you into one specific skill set.

Yeah.

But then if you're not careful, when they're successful, they can actually be the boss. The company itself can be your boss.

Yes, that's right. Of course, of course.

Yeah.

You work for your employees all day long.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great. Well Brian, you know, thanks again for, for being here. There's some really great stuff that you shared with our, our listeners. What's the best way for folks out there listening to connect with you and to learn more about Gillware?

So definitely check us out on Gillware.com G I L L W A R E My personal kind of platform of choice is pretty much LinkedIn. So if you just kind of Google for LinkedIn. Brian Gill, I should probably pop right up. Please reach out, connect with me. I'm one of those open connection folks that'll connect with just about anybody. Any questions about this stuff, throw it my way. I'm always happy to help. And obviously if you're kind of a mid sized company Looking to prevent disaster. That's available over at Tetradefense T E T R A defense dot com.

That's great. We really appreciate it. Thank you for, again, for coming on some, some great stuff this week.

Shannon, Dave, thank you so much.

That was killer, man. Some great information there, smart guy.

Really articulate.

Yeah, I love, was great. I hardly needed to talk at all.

Oh.

Which is, you know, same. Our listeners probably enjoyed that this week.

Well, you know, we got to give them a break every now and then.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it was great because I.

I liked how he, how intentional he was about, you know, talking about his decision to spend more time with his family and all that. So did I. Yeah, that, that, that really kind of resonated.

I mean, it especially, you know, my kids are just about to leave the nest. I know yours are as well. One of yours already is. One of mine is. So I, I, I didn't say it when we were there, but I wanted to say, Brian, you, you're gonna have another run at it once, you know, these, these kids are out, but you'll have one chance, you know, to be with them like that. So I, it sounds like he gets it, which is.

He totally gets it. Yeah, no, I mean, he, like the, the fact that he sees that and for somebody that clearly knows how to dive into work and let it consume him, the fact that he's able to also have that perspective of, you know, I might look back and regret this, even though I know it's going to be hard. I'm going to do it anyway. That's, I like it.

Good.

Smart guy. Yeah.

Yep. Hey, before we go, I want to thank all the early adopters, buyers of our, our first small business Pocket guide Mistakes. The foundation of your small business. We had a great, you know, run on them last week. Starting to get some reviews in. You know, if you don't know about that series, it's a, the group of guests that we've had on over the last five years talking, talking about their best mistakes. We've put them all together, added our own comments, talked about some of our own mistakes and would encourage you to take a look, read the reviews. There's a lot to be learned from it at BusinessShow Co guides that'll take you right over and we look forward to getting your feedback.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, I'm stoked. People are loving it, man. It's great.

Kindle Edition is out now. The ebook and we're, we should have the paperback edition out later this week. And then we'll be working on the ibooks version for. For Apple as well.

For Apple.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cool. All right, well, thanks so much for listening. Thanks to linode@linode.com SBS for being our sponsor again. Feedbackusinessshow. Com. See you next week. Keep living that charm life, huh?