The Achieve Podcast - Brad Hawkins (Infinite Protection)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Brad Hawkins, the CEO of Infinite Protection, and you can find them at infiniteprotection.ai. Brad, Thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, I'm looking forward to the conversation and thanks for having me.

It's going to be a good one. It's already been a good one. We've had quite a few good conversations just barely before we started recording. So for those getting to know you and Infinite Protection, give us the backstory real quick on how you got into this space and who you're currently serving.

Um, so I, I actually got into this space in a consulting job that I had just helping helping this company, this startup company, who's trying to figure out how to help kids protect them, help parents protect their kids online. And we started as a consultant. I started digging into and analyzing that market and looking at the market, realizing kids are outsmarting their parents all day long, and there is there is no way to stop kids from outsmarting their parents because they're more technologically advanced than their parents in a lot of cases. And realized that market is not going to work long term. And there was some leaders in the market that were doing really well. And so we shifted gears and started working with small businesses And this is still under a consulting relationship. And in that shift, the president ended up making a pretty large life change and just kind of left the community. And they asked me to step in and run it, and we worked out what that would look like. And so I ended up accidentally becoming the CEO of the business. And so very, very, very interesting twist. And he's a wonderfully kind gentleman that left and left me with a pretty heavy lift, but it's turned out pretty well. So, but the, but the intent is, is that we are building cybersecurity, that we can put a bubble, a bubble of protection around small businesses and. And that, that is a huge desire of mine because I've been an entrepreneur all my life. I have started and built many businesses. And I have had my tail kicked pretty hard on some cybersecurity issues because I had no idea how to do cybersecurity. I was just like, I just need to sell my product, whatever that product is. And, and when I, when I realized why we were running into so many issues, things were getting shut down and and I would try to hire some people to do cybersecurity, and all the cybersecurity that I could find were built for monstrous companies. And I'm like, I can't afford that. Are you kidding me? That's like my budget for the year. I don't even understand how you can ask for that number. And so I, I knew and I felt that feeling and I was like, I need to come up with a strategy that will help entrepreneurs build true cybersecurity just like the big boys have and price it in a way that will work for a small business to become successful.

I love that. I love that because yes, that need is just rising more and more. So how big is the team and organization you have right now?

We have a development team out of actually Mongolia. These guys are amazing. They've built cybersecurity for all the Mongolian banks to connect, and then they built the cybersecurity to connect the Mongolian banks to the World Bank. And so our platform was designed on banking cybersecurity platform. And so it's really kind of an amazing blessing that we had with, with this team. And, and these guys have become dear friends of mine over the past 15 years. So, um, I've used them for other projects. They're very, very good. But they've got about 300 on their team, um, and they've— and our development team goes up and down in size, um, but it usually runs around 20 or so., and then we have a small team in Portugal that is part of our development team that does project management. And then we have about 6 in the US here that are all the sales team. And then we have another 5 or so on our customer service side. So we're just kind of scattered all over the country. And that's thanks to COVID because we had a very nice office here in downtown Arvada, Colorado. And during COVID I couldn't get anybody to come into the office. Everybody disappeared. And one of our key guys moved to Portugal because he thought that sounded fun and took another couple with him. And we just ended up being a worldwide company. Accidentally again. So yes, that's how it happened.

Wow, that's amazing. So looking back for you, what turning points have had the greatest impact, uh, and molded the way you think about running the organization?

You know, I am always looking at the small business and what is affecting them. And I don't know, most people don't realize this, but over 70% Over 70% of the small businesses that get some kind of a hack go out of business. Now, they might not go out of business immediately, but they end up going out of business. And I look at that saying, you know, this world is based on entrepreneurs. I mean, this world, at least this country exists because of the tenacity that entrepreneurs have. Now, the interesting part is we have a— for quite a while, we were doing a podcast called Digital Desperados, and we told the story of all the famous hackers and what, what, how they got started and what they did and, and what made them successful in their hacking world. And one of the things that I realized during that that series of podcasts that we were doing and really listening to the heart of these hackers is that a lot of them start out as young kids. Some of them are kids that everybody rejects because they're not sports guys, they're tech guys or whatever. And what happened was, is that all they wanted to do was prove to their community that they could do things. They could break into a company, they could do something. And, you know, the majority of them weren't even trying to make money. They weren't even trying to steal things. They just wanted to make a name for themselves. And then they get in there, realize, wait a minute, I can make some money on this thing. And so it's this, it's this gradual growing thing. So what we realize is that a lot of small businesses are getting hacked. Simply because it's available and it's easier than hacking one of these monster companies. And if they can build skills by getting in and out of a business, leaving something to say, hey, I was here, but, but, you know, nobody realized it, building those skills, then they can break into the big companies because now they know what they're doing. But they're going— they're breaking into these small companies And they're wreaking havoc in a lot of cases. And it doesn't matter. A lot of times people tell me, well, nobody's going to hack my company because we're just a small company. As a matter of fact, I had a hot water heater put in my house, and I was talking to the owner because the owner had to come and take care of a problem. And I asked him, what is he doing for cybersecurity? And his answer was, nobody wants to hack a plumbing company. That doesn't make any sense. And I said, do you know how many times I've heard that story? Nobody cares about it until all of a sudden now you can't access any of your data. And then what can you do if you can't access your data? Well, you're likely to go out of business and have to do a restart. So the intent is to say, okay, how do we provide cybersecurity for that plumber that has no idea what he's doing cybersecurity-wise. All he has to do is plug in some simple systems to make sure that his company can run safely and, and go on with selling hot water heaters.

Yeah. Wow. And it's so true, especially in the advent with AI now where people jump on ChatGPT and just throw information thinking it's helping, but leaving themselves exposed. So that need is just rising.

Oh, so much.

Yes. So what would you say for you guys is driving growth for you guys, for the organization?

Really, the simplicity of what we operate with is that somebody can go in there and say, gosh, what we're doing is we're able to create, you know, the term endpoint device is something that, you know, half the population knows and half don't. But an endpoint device is just simply a computer, a cell phone, or a tablet, or something that you use to connect to the internet. And, and most endpoint devices are wide open. You can— a very rare person knows that you leave your Wi-Fi on, on your phone, you walk into a Starbucks, and you think, well, I'm safe because I'm not logging on to their, their Wi-Fi. Um, but what a very rare person knows, that if your Wi-Fi is turned on, uh, that little 15-year-old kid sitting in the corner can drop a Trojan onto your device because your Wi-Fi is connected and, and he's able to connect it, connect to it, drop a Trojan on that, onto that device. And you might be the CFO of a company. You walk in behind your firewall, that little 15-year-old kid accesses that Trojan that he just dropped onto your device. You're already behind the firewall, so there's not a problem. And he can go any place you can go. Very few people understand that. And, and they think, well, I'm just not logging on to the Wi-Fi. Well, it means nothing if you're leaving your Wi-Fi turned on on your endpoint device. So what we do is we create a 24/7 always-on VPN. So that VPN is 100% always-on, doesn't turn on and off, just like, you know, most VPNs, you know, companies will say, well, I need to log on to my company. So I'm going to I'm going to turn on my VPN. Well, that's just the dumbest thing in the world, because 9 times out of 10, you're going to forget. But when you turn on your laptop in the middle of an open Wi-Fi, anyone in the world can access that. Now they're on your device. You then turn on your VPN. Now they get to join you on your VPN connection. It's just one of those silly things that we do in cybersecurity. So that VPN needs to be on 24/7. It can't be turned off. Then we put virus protection inside that VPN. And the reason we do that is that if you're going to a website on your endpoint device, on your computer, and that website happens to have viruses that they're wanting to deliver to you, in most cases, you've got a VPN. You're ushering that in through your VPN into your network. And then your network has to deal with that. Well, we're stopping it before it even gets to your device. And so, so we have the VPN 24/7, always on, 256-bit encrypted. For those technical people, basically means it's bank grade. And then we have the virus protection inside the VPN, but it all goes up to a cloud. And in the cloud, the administrator might be a business owner, might be a tech guy. That the administrator can see all the activity that's going on there and make sure that it's healthy or not healthy. But we have 84 filters that allows the administrator to filter out portions of the internet that he does not want accessing the internet. So he might say, you know what, in my company we don't do pornography, I'm blocking all pornography. He might say, I'm going to block all social media so that social media cannot my employees are not wasting their time on social media. Now, in my case, I have a few businesses. I've got my sales team that I allow social media, and then I've got my in-office team that I do not allow social media. So it just depends on how you want to design your endpoint devices. So we have endpoint devices that stop all traffic that come in. But then we have what we call our Z platform, and our Z platform allows an administrator to scan all softwares, websites, or whatever for any vulnerabilities there so that we're able to make sure that endpoint devices are safe, all softwares are safe. A small business owner can look at it and say, okay, well, this is almost everything that, that, um, hackers can break in, and we can put a bubble around that business and keep them as safe as we can.

Wow. So when it comes to your outreach, your messaging and marketing systems to get brand awareness, what's been working well to attract and retain good clients?

Um, honestly, what works the best is referrals. That is our very, very favorite. You know, our clients that love us say to their other friends, oh yeah, take a look at Infinite Protection. And that is by far the best. And if I'm honest, some of the easier marketing is international. We work anywhere in the world. We work in 26 different countries. Or worse, we're operating in 26 different countries. And here in the US, we're a lot more brand, you know, if you've never heard of us, you're like, I would rather downgrade my protection to go with a company that I've heard of than do the homework to analyze the success that a smaller company has. Where we go international, they dig in deep into our product and they're like, man, this is fantastic. So that actually has helped us. I don't quite understand why that helps us, but it helps us. So that's been very helpful. Our podcast, Digital Desperados, has brought a lot of awareness to what it is that has been going on. And really building relationships with small little MSPs has really helped us as well. So it's just that grassroots relationship development strategy that we work on a regular basis. Now, I will tell you that we've been working in a new strategy that the jury's out, but it looks like it's working very well. And, and that is, we have in our sales team, we have an AI marketing tool that's basically, uh, communicating and building relationships with small businesses. And, uh, and we're communicating, we've gotten a lot of sales out of that. Um, but I can't tell you that it's a long-term strategy, but it is working at this particular moment.

So, gotcha. And with sales and marketing, where do you still see more opportunity or money on the table?

Um, you know, in, in my experience, everything in, in sales and marketing is try and adjust and try and adjust. And so, um, you know, we, we go out there and, and we market something and it works to some degree or it doesn't work, and then we adjust and we see what happens. And so Keeping track of all those details are so critical to us, is to say, here's how much we spent, here's the leads that we generated, here's the leads that we closed. And when we analyze those things, we can say, okay, we put more money into this and less money into this. It used to be we were very heavy involved in SEO management and we're finding that that is less and less important because of AI searches. And now we've, we've really refined our, our strategy on, on our websites. Matter of fact, we're just rolling out a brand new website that is really designed to answer those AI questions that the AI bots are out there looking for. And so, uh, and that is We've run trials and showing up as an answer to AI searches is very exciting to us. We love seeing that full answer because it's new and nobody, you know, I shouldn't say nobody because there's people out there working hard on it, but it's a new strategy that is lowering the value of the SEO strategy that we've grown up living in. And working on— it's kind of the same thing, SEO, but a completely different version of it. And so our objective is to be the smartest website that an AI can find.

So gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Now AEO, new category, or GEO is definitely taking things by storm.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Exactly. Oh, with AI and automation, what tools have you guys found to be effective? What— how are you guys utilizing it internally?

Um, well, we've got internal and external. Our product is really driven a lot on AI now. We've done a complete remodel of what, what it is that we do. Um, internally, our development team has been working hard on it, uh, and, uh, we, we do a lot of development now. And what's fascinating is most AI development does not take into account cybersecurity. There are more apps being developed out of Claude or some of these other AI tools, and they are the most vulnerable tools in the entire world. I mean, it's unbelievable how you have a very secure, highly powerful company. It's amazing to me that they're allowing their employees to develop apps for their business through some of these AI tools because it is, it's just a wide open door for any hacker to get into. So our, uh, we're doing a lot of work behind the scenes building out of AI, but also building with a very strong cybersecurity focus out of AI. So that's a very interesting twist and turn in the market. But, um, What we're also doing is in our endpoint device, we have a grading system that reports to, you know, if I'm pulling up my, my phone and I'm taking a look at what it is that I'm doing, I get a grade that says, okay, my search history or my internet usage, I'm getting a 40%, let's say. Well, that 40% is being notified to the, to the administrator, say, hey, you need to pay attention to Brad because he's, he's, uh, he's putting your business at risk. And, and he's, he's taking a look and saying, what, what do I need to do to make this a little safer? But an AI is educating me and saying, hey, you need to not use this, these, uh, you need to not go to these websites, you need to avoid this, you need to change this, you need to set your settings here. And it motivates me to say, "Oh, I'm at 40%. I need to get myself to 70%." And I start working hard on it, and it's a competition where, you know, I can go to one of my employees and say, "Well, I'm up 10% today. Where are you at?" So, it encourages people to operate operate on the internet in a much safer way. And so, and it's just simply an AI saying, hey, here's an idea, here's a strategy, do this, think about this. And, and it really has, has, uh, helped in, in growing that, uh, aspect. Because safety is simply a, uh, it's really knowing what you're doing. For example, I can go on there and click a link on a website and it will notify me that, you know, that is sometimes dangerous. Are you aware that this link is a, is a good link? And you will take a look at that and say, okay, if there's no time in between that thing popping up or not, um, if at least it should stop someone to think for a minute, and if there's no time, it just clicks right through, it's going to drop your, uh, drop your score and say, hey, do a little bit of homework if you're clicking a link. And because ransomware is one of the most expensive, most destructive tools, and it comes through on links most always. But the other part of the beautiful thing of our design is every endpoint device is secured through a VPN tunnel 24/7 again. And so if you click on a ransomware link, it will silo that one device and the ransomware cannot hop through the network and connect to anything else. And so the worst case scenario in a ransomware attack is that one device is trashed. I mean, you just pick up the computer and throw it away. Don't even try to recover it., but it does not connect to all the rest of the network. And so you're safe. You've operated in a way that has saved your business because of the operations that we use. So, but I love that there's a lot of AI. We actually use AI to run our scanning devices. We have pen tests. Some businesses, they'll spend $50,000 to $100,000 doing a pen test for their company to find pen or penetration test to find all of the vulnerabilities in their software. And we can run an AI-driven pen test and it'll take minutes compared to months and it will be pennies compared to thousands of dollars to do a pen test. And it'll quickly give you a report that says, here's your vulnerabilities., and then you can have us fix them or you can fix them yourself. It doesn't matter. But that pen test will save you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of just pen testing or hacking.

So, yes, I love your approach with this because people are aware that there's a problem. They don't know where to start often. And you, you just bring awareness to the habits that you have as an employee or employer. And then you're gamifying it, making it fun and enjoyable instead of like a burdensome or punishment. So I love that.

Exactly, exactly.

Wow, I love this, Brad. So if you were to look at the trajectory of the business and think about if you could focus on one constraint to solve over the next 90 days, what would it be?

Um, one constraint to solve Well, I can tell you the one thing that we're working right now on for the next 90 days is— I don't know if you know what an MSP is, but an MSP is a tech guy that works for small businesses to manage their technology. And we've designed this product to work very good for a business owner, work very good for a business. But we're in the process now of building a dashboard where a tech guy or an MSP can manage 20 different businesses. And so we're just building a dashboard above our tool to allow them to manage many businesses in one. So that is, that's, that's our objective for the next, 90 days, and we might be able to get it done in about 45 days. But in the entrepreneurial world, you know as well as I do that 45 days turns into 90 days, and 90 days turns into 120 days very, very fast. So, but I have been told we'll be done way before the 90 days, but I do not hold my breath for anything.

Plan accordingly. It's going to take longer and cost more. Exactly. So looking at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you?

Um, you know, I, I'm a firm believer in— and I just actually written a book on, on the concept of this. It's, it's called The Power of Or. And, uh, but I'm a firm believer is, is that Things are not a mistake unless you stop, and you cannot stop. You educate yourself by finding what slows you down, by finding what's not working, and you continue to move forward. And a good entrepreneur always understands that your plan is never going to work. Your plan is going to get you to the next road map. And I I say this to people all the time, is that you will never go anywhere. Uh, say for example, you want to go to the grocery store. You can't sit at your house waiting for all the lights to turn green before you get in your car and go. It's just not going to happen. You've got to get out and there start going. And if you run into a red light, you have a choice of sitting there and waiting or turning and continuing going. And so That's really what it is that we do, is I know nothing that we plan is going to work. Nothing is. But what it does do is gets us to the next roadblock, and then we have a better decision and more knowledge to be able to decide what direction to go from there, and we just keep going. So if we get stopped, we're like, wow, we've gone a lot further than we thought we were. Where do we go? What do we change? How do we make things work? And, and we make the adjustments and then we keep going. But sometimes the view from the wall you just ran into is much different than the view before you realize there's a wall because you don't have that knowledge base. As one of my developers says, you don't have that domain knowledge that takes you from point A to point B until you get to point B and you look around and say, okay, well, that worked and this didn't, so let's adjust.

I love that. The plan will never get you there, it only gets you to the next roadblock. I love that. Okay, so last question for you. When you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

Um, now this is a very selfish, self-serving comment, but I got to tell you that my favorite thing in life is seeing the people that that I work with become amazing leaders, to become amazing human beings, to be able to see things in ways that they never saw before. And, you know, it's really funny to me is you get somebody out of college and they somehow think they're geniuses, and they start working and they realize how dumb they truly are. And I don't mean that mean. I mean, it's true. You know, you don't learn much in college other than how to learn. You don't learn what you really need to learn. And so they get in there and they start working and massaging things and start moving in the right direction. And then when they start realizing, okay, things are falling apart, how do I handle this? And we pick up and move forward. It is absolutely a blast to me to see these people turn into highly productive, meaningful people. They start owning their mistakes and adjusting their own mistakes. And I got to tell you a real fast story is I had a— in a different business, I had a husband and wife working for us, and the wife convinced the husband to to do some things, to take some stuff that was not entitled. And so I caught it. I had this discussion with them. I ended up letting the wife go, fully expecting the husband to walk, but he couldn't. And I put him on shutdown. I locked them all up so that nothing bad could happen. And that guy has turned into the very best employee I've ever had in my life. And he is without a doubt the hardest working, the easiest going, the best leader I've ever had. And in my mind, it's a matter of allowing someone to make a mistake, guiding them through the process, and building loyalty in them as you allow them to make mistakes and grow. And I'll probably end up selling the business to them at one point. And so, but my intent is, is to say, okay, how do we, how do we invest in these people and make these people highly meaningful, highly qualified people? And I've done that with people all of my career, and it's fun to see them even go to another business and become a massive leader in that other business. And as a matter of fact, I have lunch today with one of my old employees 20 years ago that is now running, uh, a second in charge of, uh, one of the largest finance companies in, in the world. I mean, he's quite a, quite an accomplished person. Now, that doesn't have a lot to do with me, but. But I still love the aspect that I've been involved in, in that part of that journey. And so, um, so what do I look forward to? I love seeing the long-term benefits that we can invest in people's lives.

Wow. So for those who want to learn more, who want to associate, who want to be involved, I know you've written some books on Amazon, you have other businesses as well, but right now they go to LinkedIn. Then go to infiniteprotection.ai, anywhere else you want to send them.

Um, I usually, when, uh, when I write a book, it will end up showing up on a website called unshakablelife.com. That was my first book, is Unshakeable Life. Um, and so that will— I do a little bit of blogging on there. I'm soon to have an AI bot that says, you know, what does Brad's books have to have to say about these things. But, um, our, our AI guy is taking a little time longer than I expected out of that. But, um, but the, the goal is, is to be able to— hey, how do I, how do I write a book that's going to help somebody in the long run build a life for themselves? So I wrote a book called Unshakeable Life. I wrote a book called God, the Devil, and the Internet, and that was all around cybersecurity. And that's been a journey that has been very fun. And that title has gotten me on many, many different podcasts, sometimes an interesting journey. But I also wrote a book that Trilogy just put out, and that one just came out in April called The Power of Ore. Wow.

Wow. And I know some of these are in Audible version as well, so they can listen to them if they want to, or they can buy them, download them. So yes, get involved, reach out to Brad, look, go to his website, go to— again, protect your company from the Trojans that are coming in. Like, this problem is just escalating, it's not going away anytime soon. So reach out, see where you're vulnerable, get that pen test done. See what your habits are and how you start changing them intentionally. So Brad, thank you so much.

Absolutely. I, I loved, uh, being on your podcast. Thank you so much.

Oh, my pleasure. And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're not sure where where your weaknesses are, where your vulnerabilities are, reach out to Brad and the team. They'll go through that, walk you through that, and help you secure things up. So reach out, and we'll see you all in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.