Rick Jordan on Self-Engineered Proximity, Cyber Security Moats, and Truth-Based Leadership

Winning's everything. And it's like, I've always thought that way. It's like, why are you even in this? You don't even have to be an entrepreneur, man, but why do you have a job? Are you there just to pay bills and die?

Welcome to Big Hitters. I'm Larry Weidel, and this show is for people who are done playing small. Each week we break down what it actually takes to win at a high level, the decisions, the discipline, the adjustments that separate those who almost do it from those who do it. No theory, no fluff, just straight talk from someone who spent 50 years building winners. If you're serious about momentum, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Hello everyone. We're talking with Rick Jordan. Rick knows the drill on podcasting and performing and running businesses and making things happen. He's got his own podcast, he's got his own business, kind of a unique combination of Skill sets from going up and being on stage as a professional musician, entertaining to starting a— becoming a CEO of one of the best cybersecurity and IT management firms in the country. A lot of things going on in this young man's mind. You appear to be a lot like me in terms of a short attention span and a lot of interest in everything. So welcome, Rick. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons about winning along the way. And the great thing that I like about talking to someone with your background is the fact that you had enough success exposure to performing, competing, and the trials and tribulations and winning to where you can see the parallels. Because the thing is, it's crowded at the bottom. There's confusion at the bottom, but there's clarity at the top. Once you get to the top of things, you find out the winners seem to agree on more more things. When it comes to 2 and 2 equals 4, there's not a lot of other solutions there. So if you want to come and, you know, work your way to the top of things, you've got to kind of get all the silliness and nonsense out of your mind. So, you know, with your background, I'm sure you've been able to connect a lot of dots between all these different fields. So tell everyone, do a better job than me of telling everybody where you are today and the things you've accomplished that you're proud of. And I want you to Get outside of yourself because entrepreneurs, high achievers don't like to brag on themselves. But if you were introducing Rick Jordan, what would you say?

Larry, what's shaking? It's good to be on. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. What would I say? You know, there's a phrase that I have that says, I teach people to do the exact opposite of what you're saying, how entrepreneurs don't like to talk so much about themselves. But yeah, I think the best self-promoter ever was Jesus, who is my Lord and Savior, right? And He would always walk in and be like, hey, I am the Christ, the Son of the living God. You know, the very first personal brand that existed for real. You know, he was not shy of saying who he was, but he also did not embellish who he was. It was just straight talk. So if this is any lesson for anybody that's listening right now, a good friend of mine who's a Navy SEAL with over 200 successful missions, I was going through some mind reprogramming stuff with him. And there was some things that I said, you know, but I don't want to say, I don't want to sound arrogant. He goes, well, is it fact? And I said, well, well, it is. And he goes, okay, then that's all that it is. It's not bullshit. You're not embellishing at all. He goes, it's not arrogance. It's, you're just stating truth about yourself. You know? And I said, that's an interesting way to look at it, man. Thank you. And it really helped me. This was about 5 years ago, you know, to break through what you said. So I like to say that I do a little bit of everything, right? I mean, being a performing musician when I was younger, I still have my guitars. I still have 8 of them. I started out with drums when I was 5 years old with my dad teaching me. He was a musician, had a music degree. He was also a really good salesman because he would sell life insurance policies for cash payments to people in the ghetto in Chicago, just like $10,000 policies just to kind of pay for the coffin.

Nevitt Life.

Yeah, that's exactly what it was. You're right on, man. And he would go door to door and collect those cash premiums too, because these individuals didn't have bank accounts. So I got exposure to that really early on in my life. But beyond that, it's like I started in Learning tech really, really early, but truly my first career choice was law enforcement. I did that. I was a police cadet in my late teens, and then I was going to do military Marines, military police, get that ticket into any state law enforcement agency that I wanted to. It just didn't work out for a few reasons. One, the military didn't take me because I had a medical history of asthma. But the second, I just noticed some things going on in the police department that I was a part of that I was like, you know what? It was my first dose of Politics, you know, and learning how some of these things operate. And I just didn't like the game, man, at that point. Now I understand that it's an essential part of the game, you know, at least to a point, right? And I had a couple of those hard lessons along the way, but I was always really adept at tech. It just came easy. Yeah, it always interested me, but more so than just the coolness factor, right? The geek factor of it, it was always, what can this do for me? And it was always that case. It's like, I wanted, and here's the thing, right? You mentioned like, I don't know if I would call it scatterbrained. I don't really lose interest in things quickly, but I get to a certain point to where I know that I'll lose interest. And that means that I've learned enough to be able to apply it to my life. And that was the same when I was young with tech. It's like, and now it's like, okay, I don't need to know how to build the next Grok, but I do want to know enough so that if I come up with a really badass product, you know, in AI, that I could tap. I've got a card to play to get a meeting with Elon at some point, but I better make it a good one, right? So it's got to be something to where I know enough to where I could sell it to him and actually make an impact.

How successful is ReachOut in cybersecurity and IT, man? How distinguished is this company?

Yeah, that's a great question, man. And it's been through its ups and downs. Right now, it's very well known for what we've done. Right. And not really what we're about to do. And I say that intentionally because I had this idea to kind of bring a lot of people together, right. And build this, this first thing, this, uh, this household name in IT and cybersecurity, because for small businesses, which is the majority, as you know, of the country, right. It's the majority of the country enterprises. They can do their thing. It's like nobody is really going to sell unless you're CrowdStrike. You're really not going to sell cybersecurity to like an X.com, right. To the formerly known as Twitter. So for me, I was like, man, there's this huge gap. And if I can do this to where I can do a roll-up, which is not a new business play, it's one of the oldest ones in the book, right? Is you put all these small companies together and make a really big company, start to plan it across the board. And we did.

Private equity.

Yeah, I know. That's exactly, that's the private part that was happening in this industry. It's called MSPs, managed service providers. A lot of private equity roll-ups. To their credit, they do them well. Yeah. And I would see that they wouldn't even change the name. And that was one of the things I saw. They would just leave them with the current operators and build up a portfolio and then sell it again because they would be worth much more even with the same numbers just combined as a nice little package. Yeah. It's the economics of scale.

Yeah. The economics of scale.

A lot of things that I learned. So when I saw this, I'm like, hey, reach out is scalable. This is something that can be cookie cutter and repeat. I can inject this into other businesses. But I want to change the name because there is no brand that nobody knows about in the, in the SMB space to say, hey, that's where I need to go. Similar to like Geek Squad for consumers, right? There was no brand. Still to this day, there, there is no brand. People know of ReachOut. If you Google me, you'll see it all across the board on the front page. If you Google ReachOut Technology, you'll see it all across the board. So much that's on there. So it's known, but not to the point to where it's a household name.

Not an intuitive type thing. And so for people who have small businesses, and might be clients for you and might be looking for exactly what you provide. Give an overview there.

What we do is what most will kind of avoid. We do cybersecurity first and then we do IT because we have to. That's the way that we've put it. And it sounds kind of like, oh, maybe we're too good for the IT. You know, we joke about that in the industry, but that's not with the transitions and where things are going. We'll still get a lot of people coming to us looking for IT support because that's what they know. You know, but there's a shift in the marketplace now. Everybody understands cybersecurity and how important it is, at least from a conceptual basis. But for those who are looking for help that are listening, you're probably being forced to do something now by your insurance carrier to where they're saying, we're not going to cover you anymore unless this gets put into place. And it's a different position now, Larry, because You know, obviously insurance, you understand that, right? There's, there's things called casualties. And really that's like some events that can cause catastrophic damage and fire and flood are our 2 biggest ones, right? That exist. Well, cyber incidents are now starting to be classified almost in the same category because just like fire and flood, they can take down a business. They can stop it from operating in its tracks.

I've heard this summer that the thing is, These guys are coming. A book I'm going to write, let people know about playing defense with your life. Like, there's a lot of monsters. You know, it's basically for all these naive kids who get out of school and go out into the business world or naive. We're all naive entrepreneurs when we start. And to realize that there are many, you know, Bernie Madoff was not the only one. And, you know, there's all kinds of monsters and psychopaths and sociopaths of all kinds out there. There's all kinds of dangers as you get out there and you don't have to be afraid. But even Jesus said, smart as a fox and harmless as a dove. The deal is that, you know, you keep your eyes open out there. But here's an example. I mean, and this is, they're coming for you. My son, who's one of the smartest, intuitive, you know, guy, you can't con him. Okay. They conned him and they got $10,000 of his Bitcoin. And the way they did it is so viciously, wickedly evil, the way they set it all up. This is the most impatient person in the world. And they kept him on the phone. In addition, Just stripping him of $10,000 crypto. They were after the rest of it, but they got that much before he realized what was going on. They kept him on the phone for an hour. Wait for this guy over here. We're trying to help you there. We got a department there. They had— it was so sophisticated. But they're— hey, hey, hey folks, they're coming after you and you gotta have your eyes open. And as big a company, I couldn't get things out of my Land Rover service this past summer. Because Land Rover in England was shut down because they were hacked and they had a demand for so many zillion billion of dollars of crypto that if they didn't pay, I mean, you couldn't order a part. You couldn't, they couldn't check their database worldwide. You know, they have databases on every, you couldn't see where your car was needing to be serviced. You couldn't order anything. They shut that global empire down. And if they can go after those guys, they'll eventually get you if you build up, if you become somebody important. And the whole idea of being on this podcast is become somebody important and build something that makes you, but it will make you a target. So sooner or later, you're going to be interested in cybersecurity.

When you say somebody important, right? It's the inverse of that are the ones that are not important. And that's a lot of those that are, we'll just say under $10 million in revenue. Right. If we could just classify that. Now, really, truly small businesses are under about 50 to 100. That's really how they're classified, but we'll just say the family businesses under $10 million in revenue. They typically think, and this is an objection, they, oh, they're not coming after me. They're already in your inbox. It's an email, right? And you'll see they're in there like, well, where are they? Show me. And I'm like, well, here's an email from Chick-fil-A, but it's not actually from Chick-fil-A. They're talking about their, you know, truly, like I just found out today, it was funny. Like Chick-fil-A is doing, uh, I picked up my 2 teens, my son and my daughter, just to have some quick lunch today. at a Chick-fil-A. I'm like, I got 30 minutes, let's go.

Right.

And I saw that it's Cow Appreciation Day on the 14th, right? Hilarious branding and marketing that they have. But those are emails that'll be sent out like, hey, it's Cow Appreciation Day on the 14th. Come and celebrate with us by eating chicken. Right. And, but there will be fake emails that go out that look exactly like the real ones. Come in and get a free sandwich or a free fry, you know, whatever it is. And just click here and then it'll prompt you to sign in with Google or prompt you to sign with Microsoft. But it's not actually their page. This is phishing, right? And to your point, they kept your son on the line for an hour. Somebody who is impatient, were able to keep him on the phone for an hour. Most of what they do these days is social engineering. It's psychological.

And the thing is, they can teach this to unlimited numbers of people where they smile and dial on the phone from all over the globe. And so the thing is, maybe you're not that big, but you're a big enough target where they can have somebody on their staff that you're big enough for.

Well, think about the scams that existed, Larry, just a few years ago. that were all in the news to where you'd get a call like 80-year-old widow, right? Was sitting at home and she would have something pop up on her computer that would say, hey, your computer has a virus. And then they'd say, call tech support, call Microsoft tech support. And it would be someone in a different country, right? That say, hey, can I remote in your computer? Sure. All you have to do is you just have to pay $100 and we'll fix it for you. But then they get in there and now they get access to their bank accounts.

15 years ago, I'm driving through one of those towns, I'll never forget, I'm going to visit Colorado on my way from Aspen over to Colorado Springs. And my Aunt Edna calls, 93-year-old Aunt Edna calls. Obviously I didn't get a lot of calls from Aunt Edna, who by the way, was a great Christian herself and taught on the radio Bible studies at 93 years old. Quite a legend. However, my brother worked with Tom Petty for 40 years and he was his right-hand man. She got a call from somebody in Canada saying, Tom Petty's up in Toronto and they've arrested your grandson that should have told it. This was her nephew. Because my sister, I mean, my mother, who's her sister, was the one they're saying, your grandson, but she just blew that off, figured they have that wrong, but said, we got him in jail and we want to get him out before it becomes a big publicity thing in town about Tom Petty's roadie or his staff, his team, a big thing. And said, if you send $2,500, they got her. She sent $2,500 up there, wired it, and she called me. She was calling me to say, I saved the day on I didn't want your mother to be embarrassed. I stood up for my nephew and I said, and Edna, rock bands arrested. You think that's going to make news anywhere? Plus he doesn't even drink. He's the sane one out of the whole group. I said, you really think that's a problem with the— they don't have people who can handle that. And if it was a big enough problem, you think $2,500 is going to make a difference? I said, and I tried to get, you know, go get the money back where they were gone. You know what they did? After I told her that, they called her back and got another $6,500 out of her after I'd explained that crap to her. There's, they're so good. That was in the past, folks. And so this, you know, cybersecurity, big thing. We don't, let's not get bogged down in the weeds on it, but you got a huge opportunity. And real quick, what can you do for people? By the way, if you're still listening right now, you're different. You don't just consume content, you're actively looking for an edge, and that's who I built the Big Hitter community for. Not people chasing motivation, people chasing momentum. Not theory, proximity. Proximity to operators who are actually in the arena making real decisions and winning at a high level. Inside Big Hitter, you get conversations we don't have on the podcast, direct access to people who build what you're trying to build in a room that holds you to a higher standard every single week. This isn't a hype group. It's not network marketing. Networking for the sake of networking is where serious people go to sharpen their thinking and compress their timeline. If you're done just listening and you're ready to be in the room where it actually happens, head to joinbighitters.com or click the link in the show notes. The right room changes everything. I'll see you inside.

If you're talking general people, let me give my advice because everyone who's listening is probably just their own person first, right? And beyond business. One, freeze your credit reports, right? I always say this, right? And it's very easy to— I mean, I was helping my mother the other day. She's in her 70s, you know, just set up the apps on her phone. Like, if you ever need to go apply for credit, Mom, you just tap it now to unfreeze it. That's it. You don't have to— and she had all of her PIN numbers written down from the credit bureaus. I'm like, no, it's a different era now. So number one, freeze your credit reports. That way nobody can really steal your identity, at least not without great difficulty. And the second thing is make sure you're using 2-factor on pretty much everything, meaning you get a code sent to your phone. You know, text messages are pretty insecure, but at the same time, you can use the authentication apps that generate those 6-digit codes. You can add those onto almost everything now. You know, so generally speaking, that hasn't changed much in the last few years as far as the basis, right? From a business perspective, I mean, the bread and butter about what ReachOut does and our parent company to Frequency, which is a publicly traded company. And I took it public just a few years ago and it was a, that's a different beast, man. You know, even when your operating company ReachOut is profitable, the public company has a different set of books and it cannot be profitable even when the business is doing good. It's intriguing, man, for microcaps, for small public companies. We will come in and we will just take a clean look at everything that has going on. That you have going on in the business. But most importantly, we make sure that you can survive being hacked. The difference that you'll hear most talk about is like, hey, we're going to stop this from happening. We're going to prevent this and put this stuff on so that you're protected. It's like, screw that, because you know what? People are still going to get in. You know, and it has to do with how quickly and how, how completely that you can recover from something. Because regardless, I mean, we work with the Secret Service, we work with the FBI to recover millions in those ransoms that you were talking about, because stuff Still happens. And that's the point. It's like we do the IT because we have to on the front end, but then on the back end, we make sure that if you do get hacked, you know, and I say if, because it's a gamble, right? It's a lightning strike for a lot of things, but it's becoming a lot more common. If you do, then we will help you recover. And our slowest time so far, man, you know, it was a law firm and they were going to be out around $6 million. We got them back up and running in 2 hours. Without having to pay a ransom. That was the slowest, the slowest amount of time. Our fastest was 3 minutes.

That is fantastic. And the thing is that the reason why there'll always be cracks in the armor is the criminals, they have unlimited ingenuity. And you know, you're never going— because you fix things because they've gone wrong in the past. Well, they're out there just morning into night figuring out, I mean, eat, sleep, and breathe, trying to figure out how they can Trick you. And so, to use an inoffensive term, but anyway, let's talk about you and winning. When you grew up, you were interested in technology. At some point, you got to get out there and be your own man, do your own thing. The first thing you notice is there's politics out there. I get the idea you had a strong independent streak and you just did not want to be manipulated. If you were going to be manipulated, it wasn't going to be right out of the gate. And so, So you started making career choices. Talk about that.

I learned a lot. I did have an independent streak, that's for sure. It still exists, by the way. That independent streak still exists. Hence looking around and being like, is anybody going to do this? Like take a company public in this industry? No? Okay, I will. That's still true to this day, brother. I did play sports when I was young, which I played 9 years of baseball. It was really good. And of course I really enjoyed winning. I mean, Tim Grover's book Winning, I don't know if you've read it, but it's awesome, right? And he was going through what winning meant to each, all of these stars that he had helped coach, you know? And of course Michael Jackson was, well, it's the game. Winning is the game. And then it got to the point, it's like, what does winning mean to you? And I'm sitting there thinking as he's going through all these big stars, I'm like, well, it's, it's everything. It's everything. And he gets to Kobe Bryant and Kobe's response was, winning's everything. Yeah. And it's like, I've always thought that way. It's like, why are you even in this? You don't even have to be an entrepreneur, man, but why do you have a job? Are you there just to pay bills and die? Are you there to try to maybe even get a promotion or maybe try to have some kind of impact in the company that's just beyond sitting at a desk and doing your 9 to 5 and entering your data or making your calls or whatever it is? What are you there to do? If you're not there to win, what's it worth living seriously or worth doing? And I've thought that way from the very beginning. And when my dad passed away when I was just 16, Same scenario. Like, I remember talking at his funeral, you know, my, if you want to say it might've been like my second or third ever public speaking engagement was at my dad's funeral when I was 16 and looking around. And even then there was still motivational, inspirational words that I had for everybody else. And I remember looking over and being like, Dad, I'm not going to let you down. And he was always, dude, so supportive just in anything that I wanted to do. And Always showed up to all my baseball games too. And even when it was a fact to where we would lose, right? And he's like, well, did you do your best? And I'm like, I don't know. You know, and sometimes I would answer, I don't know. Other times I would answer yes. You know, he'd be like, okay. And he would always validate where I was at, you know, too. And he's like, he would never be like, I don't know about that. You know, he would always let me decide and then support that decision or challenge it. You know, he wouldn't say, no, you didn't, or whatever it was. He's like, oh, so you think you did good today? Okay.

What did you do really well?

He would I sucked it, you know? And then I get from like, oh, I guess I really didn't do my best today because I could have showed up a little better.

He was very, very wise. He kind of led you with questions. And so those of us that have, or those of y'all that have younger kids on the way up and you're wondering, how can I build a relationship with them? How can I get 'em on the right track? It's kind of like the mistake that we do when we go into sales. We think, I'm going to learn this presentation so I can say this, I can say that, I can say, and a lot of it's just asking the right question. You've got your kids. It's a matter of getting, It's not what you ram down their throat, it's what conclusions they come up to. And if you're not asking questions, and so those are some good questions to ask. It's one thing to take your kid to sports and everything, but it's another thing to find out what are they getting out of the experience by asking them, did you do your best? What could you have done better? Which the I, you can actually teach them about the most important thing is to always be improving. By ABI principle, it's like if you're improving, You know, you're going to be winning. And so improvement is winning. So as you come up now, how did you get— one thing that struck me, you said, even at 16, at my dad's funeral, I had some positive encouraging things to say for people. You obviously were paying attention to the coaching and the games and everything as you grew up in competition.

I was very fortunate, man. It was— baseball taught me a lot. You know, and even being around my dad, I mean, it taught me a lot too, because I got to see a lot of him being in leadership in churches. In essence, yeah, he was on the board in the church that I grew up in, you know, and there was a little bit that he would say here and there, you know, and I always wonder, it's like, well, why are you on the board? Like, I just feel like I can help, you know? So when they asked him, you know, it was just, I just feel like I can help, you know? And he always had a sense of, um, and Tony Robbins talks about this a lot too, right? But he always had a sense of contribution. You know, and it's something that was just ingrained in me, but here's the difference. And I try to do this, or tried, I guess I still do because my twins are 19 and my youngest is 16 now. Right. So, I mean, for all intents and purposes, they're adults. It's like my daughter just spent her first year in college in New York, right? Upper West Side, going to AMDA for musical theater.

Really?

First booking at a cabaret too, you know?

Wow.

All of them have seen me on stage pretty much their whole lives, be on, you know, top-tier media networks and everything. And it's like, They've always seen me, and this is what I had with my dad, was model. To your point with asking questions earlier, there's a lot that you can tell your kids to do. And when you tell your kids to do a lot, they'll forget a lot. But if you model what you're saying, you know, and just understand that even from the point to where they're 6 months old, right? That young, they pick up on things. They pick up on energy and vibes and how you present yourself. Whether you typically have a raised voice, whether you have a steady voice, a grounded voice, there's a lot that my dad did for me with modeling. I was always curious too, and he'd always answer.

I'm already a little bit depressed here because I can find out, I can already see that we're not going to have time to get into everything I want to get into, but we're going to make a great effort at it. We'll re-sign up somewhere down the road here and dig more out of this. You know, your background, I think, is a treasure chest of insights on winning, and you're really good at explaining things. So here we go. What caused you to have in your mind at 16 years old at your dad's funeral, of all of the things that you could have, the pressure of it, this eyes on you, my father, the emotion that we say, I won't let you down. What caused you to have that thought?

He never let me down. I had younger brothers and a younger brother and sister, 5 and 6 years younger than me. And in a moment, I'll also never forget what my uncle told me when, when he died. He goes, you're the man of the house now. It was affirming something I already knew. And I fully believe that because there were some things he was sick with leukemia prior to that, right? Had a bone marrow transplant. And there was some things just in the last 6 months to where there was a shift with him. And I've never talked about this before, Larry, this interesting component of my dad passing in the last 6 months before he passed. So I was, you know, 15. He passed right after I turned 16. 10 days after I turned 16. And he started treating me differently, you know, not in a bad way by any means, in a good way, but just recognizing the growth and maturity that I had had in a way to where he just started speaking to me as if I was an adult, almost kind of like his peer. Now, true, like maybe he knew, right? If you look back at that, maybe he knew that things weren't going that well, you know? So it was a different scenario. So setting me up and just allowing me, which he always did, allowed me to make my own decisions within To a certain point, of course. I mean, because I mean, if you're 5 and you want to play with chemicals, that doesn't work out too well. That wasn't me, right? That was my son. My youngest son, when he was 5, came up to me. He's like, hey dad, I need to buy some chemicals. Like, really? Well, what do you want? I know. He's like, I want to mix them together. I'm like, really? He saw some stuff. It was innocent. He saw some stuff on a Disney show or something where they were making the foam shoot out of like a beaker or something like that. And that's what it was. But then it was hilarious, right? So it's like, It's good to let your kid make— your kids make their own choices to the safety extent, of course, you know, but otherwise give them space. Yeah. And that's what I saw with my dad in kind of those final 6 months, just him taking a look at me and recognizing that, you know what, this dude is taller than me now, which is the case, like with all my kids, except for my daughter. My youngest 16-year-old is 6'5. I'm 6'1, you know? So I look up to him. My 19-year-old son is 6'2. So he's still an inch taller than I am. And I've always allowed them that space to be able to make their own decisions. And so when they look back, it's like I could rephrase. It's like, I'm not going to let you down, but it's like, I almost felt like I was entrusted with the care of my younger siblings in that moment. And he was good with it. That's the thing is that I felt like he trusted me in that.

How did that influence your choices moving out on your own now, you know, where you didn't hold back, you know, you had to go out and make a life for yourself. What is your Biggest motivation there coming out of a stable environment, competitive environment. You had things to prove. You had interests. You were interested in police work, law enforcement. And that's really the reason I like to probe early on is because it's amazing how that we kind of come back to a lot of the things, our starting points. It's like if you scare a rabbit, a rabbit will run all over kingdom come, but eventually come back to where it started. That's a lot about where we are. You know, in our lives, you know, you can't change where you came from and those ideas that were put on early on that were planted in you. And so how did you launch out into life and wind up where you were on stage in front of 5,000 people singing and entertaining?

Yeah, a lot of that on the music side, that was my dad was a musician, as I was saying, and he had a music degree. I was put on stage by him, not even kidding, when I was 10 years old because the church needed a drummer. And at that point he had been teaching me since I was 5. So I was exposed to that stuff really early as well, you know, to where it was just kind of common. And I'm telling you, it's like, I don't know anything other than being comfortable on stage. Because I mean, at 10 years old, and this is where I truly believe, man, that if you expose kids, your kids, to things when they're really, really young, they don't have the ability to be nervous because it becomes normal to them. And I did the same thing with my kids. I mean, taking them on trips with me to To meet large characters. Like my 11-year-old at the time was talking with Naveen Jain, who was a billionaire, right? Watching fireworks. It was us with Naveen Jain and Dave Asprey from Bulletproof, right? Watching fireworks in Bellevue, Washington. And he's having it, he's sustaining a conversation even to the point to where Naveen is like, I didn't know they could be that coherent at that age. And I was like, but it's exposure, Larry. And that's the thing. And then when you look at, like you talk about like my track record and everything, I've intentionally exposed myself to so many different aspects, whether it was law enforcement or security or sales, or I even was the first Geek Squad agent in Chicago, you know, or, or just doing, uh, Radio Shack, right? And that was just business related, even though it was tech, right? A tech firm. But I wanted to be a manager, and for manager training, they taught you how to read P&Ls because you were bonused as a store manager off of your net income. You know, so you just, and then even to this day, it's like, I'm an advanced trained storm spotter. 'Cause my real, my true, very first career choice when I was 7 is I wanted to be a tornado chaser. So then, like you said, you come back around. It was like 10 years ago, I went and got the official training. And now it's like when there's storms around Chicago, which there's, there's been a lot this year, man. You know, it's like I'm out there hunting down tornadoes. But still at the same time, it's like I've got the backdoor to the National Weather Service to call these things in. And then still, you know, if there's a theme, and maybe I'll do some more self-work on this, I've done a lot of self-work in my life, right? It's like a theme across the board really is protection, like being somebody who can stand up for other people. And even to your point, like the law enforcement side of it, right? When I said, well, maybe that's not for me right now. It was 20 years later when I'd already had the cybersecurity company going, you know, this was 2017 to 2021. I ended up in a partnership in a, in a protection and investigation agency, private detective, guns and guards and all of that. And that's where I got the training by former CIA operators. And, you know, coming back to it, it's like I end up in the White House in 2020 because of the experience and what I've built just to help a startup sell their product, you know, and they were appointing me to the board at the time. And it was just incredible experiences and all of it just has come back, even though there's been tech involved and all that, everything's come back to people, man.

For people listening, I'd like to point out something I'm hearing as Rick's talking, and that is proximity. And how proximity is such a key. You know, it's like if you're on the outside wondering how to get in and how this works, it's like, shut up and get in the door. You know what I'm saying? Find a way. You know, it's like Simon Cowell wanted to get into entertainment and he got in with the biggest producer in England. And he was, he just, let me be around and let me go get you coffee. You know, when he was like 19 or 18 years old, just let me in the room. I'll get you coffee. I just want to be here. And, you know, like you were with your father, you know, he's performing and you're around all the time. He's teaching you stuff, you're learning. And then what happens, folks, these companies, no matter how big they are, they're like glaciers. They're not, you know, this big concrete monolith. It's like a glacier that's always melting and cracks coming and pieces are falling out. And Divisions are forming, divisions are dying, positions are opening up. It looks like a big monolith, but things are happening inside there. And if you're around and you've got a little bit of training and a little bit, they like you, they say, well, let's just stick them in there. You got stuck in there as the drummer, but you were part of the gang at this point. I mean, you're performing, you're learning, and then Other openings I'm sure came up where we need you closer to the stage, closer to the microphone. Pretty soon you're handling the microphone, but that's not different, folks, than business. You got to get in the game. You got to get in there, meet people, find something to do. You know, you didn't make a career out of being a drummer, but you did drumming for a while and you could probably tear it up now.

I'm a better guitarist. Truly, but it's, I'm a really good drummer, but a better guitarist. And that's, you know, they get more girls, man. Good guitarists doing frontmen, you know? So it's—

Before we have to wrap up this public part of things, could you tell us how you wound up in the entrepreneur world and the cybersecurity world where you were in a company and you were able to move up so fast in management? What do you think was the reason behind that? Did you do right to cause you to climb?

Within companies, it was just asking. That's it. Like, can I be a part of this? Or as soon as I started with another, you know, in another segment, it's like, that looks pretty fun. How do I get involved in this? And I would just continue to ask. It's a fear so many people have, you know, even getting Kevin Harrington, one of the original Sharks from Shark Tank, on my board in the public company, right? I had met him at an event, And I saw him just sitting there eating breakfast, right? And I'm staying in the same hotel and I walk up and he saw me speak. I was only doing like a million dollars a year at that point, you know, small, small business. And I just walk up, I'm like, Kevin, could you use some company? It's that simple. And we became great friends. And then he became a mentor and then he started working with me and is on the board of the public company now of Frequency Holdings. And you just got to ask. That's the thing. It's like, don't expect things to happen for you. Don't expect to be discovered. You know, to your point, the proximity that you're talking about has to be self-engineered. You have to walk through the doors when you see them. People are not just going to say, hey, would you like to come in here?

They're not going to come into your house, get you off the couch, and take you into their world, folks.

Even if it seems that way, which Larry, sometimes it can seem that way. It's like you're discovered, right? But then when you, when you do a true analysis and a reflective position of the last 5 years, you could pretty much pinpoint the areas where you did take the initiative and cause that proximity that led you to that moment where you were noticed, right? They probably noticed you on a stage somewhere or on a podcast like on yours. It wasn't overnight to where Larry's like, hey, why don't you come on, Rick?

So let's do this. Let's wrap up with a shout-out for your podcast, All In, With Rick Jordan and how you got the name and how much fun you're having with that and what you're learning from that. And we'll wrap up with that.

We just rebranded it to Frequency with Rick Jordan at the beginning of this year. And it's after 6 years, we're close to 700 episodes now, man. And I was grateful that after the rebrand, we got into the top 100 on Apple in entrepreneurship. Just incredible. Incredibly grateful that the show started. Everyone has asked before, it's like, well, why just start a podcast? And I said, well, because my branding agency that I hired told me I needed to. It was just like, okay, but that, that's the whole point, right? But then I saw things just like you're talking about proximity because of who else they were working with. And within the first couple of weeks, I was guesting on large shows and I had some pretty big guests like Naveen who became a friend on my show. Just because I did these things. There's a mentor of mine that always would just say, hey, just say yes. And it sounds so simple, so cliché, But unless you have some kind of moral adverse reaction in your gut to it, you should probably do it just to see what it's like, no matter what it is. And the show was that exact thing. You know, I was no stranger to being on stage with microphones, obviously my entire life. And this was just a lot of fun. I never expected it to go where it is, but I'm never going to stop it now either.

Frequency with Rick Jordan. Is that it?

That's it. Right on.

Where you can find him. And without having been there, I know you're going to be wildly entertaining and it's going on my subscription list here as soon as we get through. Rick, thanks so much for being with us. And parting word, what would you say for people who stayed with us and they want to do big things? What takeaway would you want them to remember from this?

I know a resume Something like mine can be intimidating and think, oh, well, that's not me. I just want to do this little thing. But everybody has their parts, you know, and all of that stuff was just compounding on top of each other. But if you, if you don't get out there, you just don't take the risk. None of that stuff can ever happen. So if you've got the idea, just do it.

Well said, Rick Jordan, folks. Thanks so much for being with us, Rick. Look forward to the next time.

Hey, my man. Thanks for having me on, Larry.

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