Building a Customer Acquisition Strategy with Bret Piatt, CyberFortress

Thanks for joining us today on the Fuel Growth Podcast.

What is the right growth equation for your company? Is it pipeline?

Brand?

Product?

Customers?

Employees?

Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. Joining us today is Bret Piatt, CEO of CyberFortress, a global company providing data backup services built for the world's best recovery. He was CEO for Jungle Disk, now a part of CyberFortress, which was a company originally created by a management-led carve-out that he orchestrated while he was at Rackspace. That's gonna be an interesting topic to dig into and learn more about.

Thank you for joining us today. Bret.

Yeah. Lizzy Clint, excited to be on the program.

Yeah, yeah. Bret, looking forward to to get to know you better. So we got a little icebreaker question that we like to kick off the show with today. So what's your superpower in the business world? What makes Bret stand out as the CEO?

Yeah, so I'm a product-led CEO. So just listening to people, customers, prospects, the market, and then figuring out innovative ways to deliver that unmet need.

Nice. Again, I think we're cut from the same cloth. That's how I like to view the world as well. So let's dig into a little bit more. Let's hear more about your background and about CyberFortress. It sounds like an interesting story, starting as a business spawned off from Rackspace.

Yeah, so my background, I've been working in the internet my whole career, been interested in tech all the way since my parents gave me a Commodore 64. I started figuring out how to program so I could fast forward while playing games. Came to being in the data backup and recovery market via, as you said, the carve-out and purchase of the Jungle Disk business from Rackspace when they restructured back in 2016. The data backup and recovery market, I just like it, it's one of these things where every business needs it. And they've got important digital records. So we're providing things of real value. That's of real utility. It's a durable market. And the thing that I enjoy is that everyone thinks that maybe backup is kind of boring, it's simple, isn't this a solved problem. But if you look at just where your data is stored today, versus where it was stored two years ago, versus where it was stored 10 years ago, you need all sorts of different backup tools and strategies to be able to protect the different types of data from different types of risk. This is where CyberFortress comes in. We built a portfolio of data backup and recovery products with teams of recovery experts with a four-step plan that identifies your data, identifies the backup strategies for each of them actually test that strategy. So many companies out there back their data up, and then the first time they go to recover, it's game day, they're actually in the middle of a real crisis. And they've never run a recovery. And we have ongoing monitoring and reporting to make sure that you can recover your data in the time that you need it. It's one of those other pieces is I've got it all backed up. But if it's going to take me 42 days to get it back online, and I'm a pipeline operator, and the gas stations run out of gas in three days. Not so helpful.

I think that's that's good insights, connecting that critical last step of of turning those backups into something useful. I like it. Excellent. Tell us a little bit more about how you approach the growth topic. You describe yourself as a product-led growth, executive, and do you have a specific approach to to driving growth in the companies you've helped lead?

Yeah, I think about things a few different ways. The first is, well, generally, in the business world, we're all really smart. And we're really deep in our own areas of expertise. So we will make stuff very complicated. One of the steps, you got to simplify the business as much as you can. And then that simplification creates areas for you then to go innovate and drive some new change. But if everything is complicated, and you try to build new stuff on top of that, it's very challenging. And then the third, as you look at the simplification of the business and innovation, then we can we can look at now do you grow by buying customers through sales and marketing campaigns? Or do you grow by buying customers through finding them, where they're working with, another business, you acquire those customers from the business or you acquire the whole business and put them on a better product platform. If you do acquisitions, if you have a better product platform, things can go real well. The times where I see acquisitions struggle and fail is where you've got a company that has a great product gets acquired by a company that doesn't have a great product. And that company that doesn't have a great product won't innovate in the future to make a great product. So then the customers end up leaving because the product that they had that was wonderful is no longer going to be great.

If we dig into that first step a little bit more. You had mentioned when we were chatting that one of the key things is identifying the customer's real need. I'm very interested to know who do you find are the interviewers and those feedback rounds if you will. Are there certain types of experts or maybe people in specific roles that are most equipped to have conversations with customers? Or do you think anyone in the business can simply engage with customers to learn from them, to understand what their actual real need is?

It's one where I think you actually have to have a mix of different types of folks doing interviews with customers. So if you have deep product experts, doing interviews with customers, they're going to have their baggage of their knowledge of what can and can't happen inside the industry, they're going to have their specific kind of slant and take on the way that they go ask questions. So it's one where I think if you have deep technical experts listening to non-expert interviewers, you may actually end up with better scenario. So we work through and try to have a number of ways to get out there to talk to folks and listen really, to what they're saying. Now, as like, folks will say that you don't ever end up with an iPhone in that manner. But I think if you look at that true breakthrough innovation, you can get true breakthrough innovation by listening to customers' problems. You may just have to convince them that the solution is a phone without a keyboard. So there may be some convincing there that you actually want more screen real estate on your phone, you don't really want a keyboard for half of your smartphone screen. But the piece that you go through and listen, whether it's in data backup, or anything else is trying to figure out what that customer really wants from the product and what problem they're trying to solve with the product.

Yep, that makes sense.

Do you have a favorite approach to doing those interviews? Do you use a particular software tool or strategy to get inside the heads of the customers?

Try to have a conversation of less than 10 minutes with the party. And you only need to have 20 or so conversations. After you get through 20 conversations, it's not going to necessarily be super statistically significant for a research study. But 20 conversations will if you don't start to see overlapping themes across all those, you're not getting anywhere. And if you don't hear about the pain, in that first 10 minutes of the conversation, and you've got to dig for 40 minutes and talk with somebody to be able to go back to your product meeting, everybody said that they care about X, Y and Z. But when it turns out as everyone said, after you grilled them for 40 minutes in an interrogation, they said they wanted those things. So the problems you want to solve are the ones that are obvious the ones that they bring up in those first few minutes of this first few questions, and that you hear across the board from a wide group of folks.

Yeah, reminds me of leading the witness, you start talking asking questions that you think you want to hear. And it exposes more from customers starts to think about things and then suddenly they become problems that weren't actually problems to begin with.

Yeah, much better asking open ended questions than yes or no questions as well. Because then that yes, or no question really ends up in the leading the witness.

So Bret, now you've got the you've got the needs. You've you've had your 20 rounds of interviews, if you will, you understand what those actual needs are across the customers, you've got the problem, and now you can go out and execute on them. So when your business is organizing a team to execute against plans on fulfilling customer's real needs, what have you seen as the top things to have in place within the business for a successful execution plan? Thinking of things like cross functional alignment, a vision statement for the strategy? What sort of tips would you give to folks that are out there and looking to execute on a plan that's product-led, as you said earlier?

Yeah, the thing for folks in the audience out here, it's really easy to discover the problems. Sometimes it's even really easy to come up with the solution, it's often very challenging to organize and put together the team to build the solution. And it takes a long time. So it's it's one on the teams, you certainly need cross-functional skill sets on the team to take any technology product or frankly, any product from idea to being on a store shelf or being on a webpage where you can buy it and download it. The other thing that we find really critical is not only a cross-functional set of skills, but a cross-functional set of personalities. So whether you're using Myers Briggs or Stratton or whatever system out there to determine if everybody on the team is really impatient and futuristic, then you're going to rush a product out that's not going to be well thought through, there's going to be problems. If everybody on the team is super detail oriented, and patient and really responsible and doesn't want any problems with something you're never going to ship the product. So you build a team that's got the diversity of the skills that are needed diversity of personality types, ideally, even diversity of backgrounds and geographies if you're gonna launch and sell a global product, the things that you may assume are normal user behaviors in one country may be absolutely different from the way users will engage in an other country.

Yeah, thanks for walking through that.

I'd like to go to one of the steps in your in your process that you're describing there, the act of acquiring customers. You talked about advertisement. You talked about acquiring customers, maybe by acquiring another business. Let's talk a bit about your philosophy on the mechanics of going from a plan to pipeline. Can you go into some detail on how you've seen success here? Any tips for our listeners who have had to done the push to grow to that next level?

Yeah. So I think over the the last decade, there's been this back and forth of inbound versus outbound. And inbound is king. I mean, don't try to search for anything on the internet right now. And so the challenge with inbound Account-based marketing is the topic of the day, right? Yeah, that's a little counter to so much of the philosophies out there around inbound marketing. And you know, how many books or blog articles saying that cold calling is dead and outbound is being replaced? It sounds like you're saying, No, it needs to be a mix of the two. Yeah, I think absolute pure cold calling is dead. I mean, almost none of us answer our phone anymore. We may answer text messages that come in, but even those are getting spammed at us these days. So you have to be able to do something to establish trust and credibility in order to be able to outbound. If you don't have trust and credibility, they're not going to answer that outbound phone call. It's like if you are an executive and brand new research firm that that you've never heard of calls you and says, Hey, we would like to offer you 30 minutes of free advisory work on your business and your competitors, you're probably going to ignore that. If Gartner reaches out and says we'll give you 30 minutes of free advisory on your business and your competitors. You may take that that up so they can outbound to you successfully, because over the decades they've established trust and credibility. So it's a challenge for new businesses. And this is where like a lot of new businesses have to go on to an inbound first, because establishing that trust and credibility and brand is expensive and time-consuming. Yeah, so you try to search so that the challenge on inbound is the customer has to know they have the problem exactly. And then it you have to be marketing in their words and their language to solve their problem. If you have an innovative solution, if you have something like let's say we have a data backup platform, and it's solving all of your data backup use cases. So someone goes and searches for backup of virtual machines, or they go search for backup of Software as a Service applications or they go to search for a backup of one of those specific applications. We can have some inbound pages talking about that. But the buyer isn't thinking on any individual day that they need to really actually simplify their backup life. And instead of having 15, different backup softwares for their company, they can have one platform that handles all of it. They're not thinking about that. They're thinking today, we just added a new SaaS app in our business, and I have to back it up. So I'm gonna go search for that. So the balance of inbound versus outbound, you've got to understand how the the buyer and that user is going to be coming to you for a solution. So the more innovative you are, the the more differentiated you are, the more you're solving a problem in a new way, the more I believe you've got to go find those prospects. And you have to outbound to them, whether that's via email, whether that's via phone calls, whether that's via getting out and putting together YouTube videos, or whatever it is to reach them, you have to outbound and get in front of them, to get them interested to hear the rest of your story.

It's a really great point and something I hadn't thought about.

Some of your thoughts on building that trust and that credibility at the individual level. You know, there's so much being said out there about sellers building up their LinkedIn profiles and how they build out their own individual brand for themselves so that they can be that trustworthy expert, and any thoughts or advice to the individual who's trying to sell out there to how to establish that trust and credibility?

So at the individual level, I'll go back to my time working at what was Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, and then SBC and then AT&T. So the CEO while I was there was Ed Whitaker. And we had one core value as a company back then, which was talk straight and follow through. So I think if you're going to build personal credibility with folks, they're coming to you to hear things in a straight, clear and candid manner. And if you say you're going to do something for them, if you follow through and get it done, then you're going to be able to build that credibility over time and from a profile and I mean, everybody's an influencer at this point. Everyone is an expert and whatever their field is, I think it's pretty hard again to to build out a LinkedIn profile and put something up, that's going to be differentiated from the 100 or 1000 or 10,000 other people claiming the same things you're claiming. So relationships are built one at a time, networks are built one at a time and I mean, we've been doing relationship-based selling and relationship-based marketing forever. But even before the internet, I mean, you have salespeople that work. And they might sell to Walmart as an example. And maybe they were working for a breakfast cereal company for a decade, and they sold to Walmart, and they sold breakfast cereal to Walmart, the network that that person has isn't a breakfast cereal network, and they know how to sell to Walmart, they know how the shelf space works there, they know how the buying process works, they know how the shipping and fulfillment center process works. So if you're going to launch a new tennis shoe company, and that breakfast cereal person was the most successful at selling the Walmart, you can go hire that person, I'll bet they can sell tennis shoes to Walmart. So this is one as well, where you're looking at some of this relationship based marketing and selling the you don't necessarily need an expert in your industry, you may need an expert in that group of customers. And it's much easier to train them the details of your product, or even your industry, if they're already an expert in the customer. It's very hard I found to even if you can train somebody to be an expert at the customer, they don't have any of those networks and relationships. So it's back to that slow, long piece of building trust. That takes much more time than becoming a product expert.

Got it.

You know, I thought often about the title of that business development rep, the sales development person that's outbound inbound person, that person who's connecting with you, for the very first time who's typically somebody very young in their career, maybe right out of college, just getting started any thoughts on that person, how they get started from the absolute scratch, ie maybe even their title, I know I react to certain titles differently when that young person is trying to connect with me to sell something to me.

Yeah, I think the that outbound, the SDR role, the sales development rep, or whatever you want to call them, it's a very challenging one. Because if they're working for a large company with a very established brand, then they may be able to get through those initial filters. But if you have no personal network, and no personal history, and you don't have an established brand, that gives some level of trust or credibility, it's very difficult for those early career people. So this is one where as much as that product-led, and especially in the tech industry, if you've got a real developer or heavy founder team, where you've put together a great product, you're gonna have to go sell, you're gonna have to go sell for the first 100 customers, you might need to go sell for the first 1000 customers. And even after that, you may need to make the first intro email and the first intro call to get that SDR a warm handoff. Like I can pick up the phone and call lots of people that will answer my call that sales reps and my team will not get their phone call answered. So it's one where you've got to go balance some of that executive time with the upfront of the sales process. Because if you can get that initial, if right now you only have a 2% response rate and you can have a 20% response rate by having your executive team members make those outreach to their network, if those are your target customers, that can be a game changer on the top of the funnel.

You know what you just described there, I've heard others call founder-led growth, which is when you when you got that company just at the early stages, and you don't have that credibility necessarily in the in the marketplace yet, because you're brand new, getting that that founder, getting that CEO, getting that executive in that front spot of pole position, if you will, of initiating the dialogue. And then doing that warm handoff, I've seen that work actually very effective. We used to do that at the beginning of my own company. In the early early days, I did a lot of cold calling, because people would respond to my title. And we didn't have a name in the marketplace yet. So that resonates, that really makes a lot of sense. So let's shift gears and talk a little bit about CyberFortress here. Kind of an interesting story, you know, starting off as a management-led carve-out from Rack Space. And then it sounds like you did a merger with another company. So tell me a little bit about CyberFortress, maybe just a couple stats, how many employees, how many customers and when you got started and tell us maybe a little bit about that founding story there.

So CyberFortress combination of four data backup and recovery brands that have been around for quite a while. So going back, LiveVault is the most mature brand out of the four. LiveVault had one of the first disk-to-disk backup solutions in the market. So everyone else was backing up to tape the name LiveVault, you're backing up to disk. And so that product got a 20+ year history of serving things. If any of our listeners want to go look at YouTube, you can look at the John Cleese and LiveVault and he did a really fun style skit for them about the Institute of Downtime and Backup Recovery out there. And then you go to the Jungle Disk, which was one of the very first cloud-based backup solution. It was the name Jungle, Amazon disk hard disk but it was taking Amazon's cloud and turning it into a hard disk that you could back up to the Amazon S3 service. This was even before they launched their EC2 service, they didn't even have their Compute service at this point. They had just had the Storage service when Jungle Disk initially started. Now we call them drives, we don't even call them discs anymore, because most of the time they don't spin. Yeah. Now they're all solid state. So and then some of the other brands in there KeepItSafe was one where there's a lot of folks out there selling backup software. But many customers don't want to buy backup software, it's like they want to buy backup as a service. So keep it safe, took a number of industry leading backup software, turned those into a fully end-to-end managed service with teams of recovery experts and all of that. And then off-site data sync another managed service specifically for the Veeam products it's the way we added that in. And so the combination of all four of those became CyberFortress in July of this year. And I'm actually headed out to Ireland shortly after this recording so that we can do our the rest of our global launch here before the end of Q3.

Beautiful.

That's exciting. So how big is the company? Can you give us a couple of metrics to understand the size of those four companies pulled together?

Yeah, so we're over 100 employees globally, more than 50 million a year in recurring revenue. And looking forward to getting out there and going and growing some more, we've got more than 10 data centers, and we use some big cloud platforms. But there's certain things that still just need to be buried in the deep spot underground. So for some of our customers that are really worried about things, we've got a couple of data centers that are more than 100 feet below ground.

So well past being an SMB company, establishment market company, you're merging companies, you're merging cultures, you're merging products, you're taking this all out to market, it sounds like you know, you're in that position of being an established growth mid-market company that is just going out and competing in the marketplace. What does competition look like for you out there who's the big bad bear that you're competing against?

Yeah, the backup markets about as red is a brilliant red sunset, lining up the whole, the whole sky. This is back to those kinds of use cases and pain points and problems. So there's a lot of managed services consulting firms out there that will manage multiple backup products end-to-end for you, they may even if they're a larger one have a backup practice area that you can engage with. So they actually do have full time dedicated companies, could decide to build their own team, they could build their own data backup and recovery team as part of maybe their security team. Or they could build their own separate standalone team and built and set up and run and operate systems. And then as you get down into a little bit more of the mid-market or in SMB, they're not going to go build their own backup team, the big consulting firms are not likely to engage with them. So they might be working with a managed service provider that has a backup offering so that that backup offering for that MSP might actually be my product. So we're we're out there. And this is the era of coopetition. Almost every one in tech at this point, we are selling through different distribution channels, we might be competing in some different distribution channels, we may be handing some leads that we get directly to us down to some partners, partners may be passing some leads back to us because it's an industry that maybe they don't work in, like if I've got a partner that specializes in healthcare, and they got a financial services lead, maybe they send us the lead and vice versa. So there's all of that out there. And then we build our own backup and recovery software as well. In a way, I'm one of a number of the different backup software, we're either their largest partners or one of their top partners globally. But in other spots, we're building software that doesn't compete directly, I'm not gonna go try to be an A head on head race with Veeam. But we are going to listen to customers and solve maybe some specific use cases in a simplified manner or a more efficient manner than you can by deploying a mid market or upper end the more complex solution like Veeam.

Hey, Bret, I want to touch on something that you talked about a few minutes ago around the merge of these four companies. And Clint had said it too. It had to have had an impact on the culture to have what is now CyberFortress. Can we talk about your company culture and the values that your business has set across all of your teams? In the business?

Yeah, so culture can't be aspirational. It has to be grounded in reality. So if you get an executive team together, and you go, you know what, here's gonna be our three core values or whatever else and nobody in the company has those core values except for the people in that room. Then you just have to be prepared to turn over all of your employees are and I've done a little bit more on my background. So when I was I started initially with Pacific Bell, and we merged with Southwestern Bell then we bought Ameritech, the phone company in the Midwest, somewhere along the way, we bought southern New England Telephone. We did a joint venture with Bell South to form Cingular. At some point then we bought sing or we bought Bell South and merge that in and then we bought AT&T and it all became AT&T again, except for the Verizon group which is the other half of the phone companies. So in that spot, we were doing mergers and team and team restructuring all the time, you had a roughly reasonable overlap of values, because all of those companies used to be AT&T back then before 1984-86, when it all got split up so. But in the other areas, you might have two companies in industry that both sell whatever CRM software, both sell backup software that have wildly divergent cultures and the way they go about things. So the way they think about treating their employees, the way they think about treating their customers. And so with that, I think when you're going through a potential merger, you have to think about that culture piece in a big way. And that's got to be part of your planning to understand are you going to have something that is very similar, that's going to be a good amount of overlap, where people if they can look at four core values, and go, You know what, three of those really fit this fourth one, a little bit of a stretch for me, but I now that you've called it out, I can exhibit that behavior more often, you're gonna be fine. If folks look at your core values, and think three out of the four are garbage, or those are things that are I'm never going to do, then that's the level of analysis you kind of have to go through and do before you put that stuff together. Now, I also don't believe you can just ignore culture and allow each of the different tribes to have their own culture, if you do that you don't have one company, you have a holding company, you don't certainly have one brand or one business. And if you do, unify the brands like we did with CyberFortress, and you have one pocket of people that behave one way and another pocket of people to behave another way. It's just as bad as like using Arial, and Times New Roman font together on your website, like they're not going to look the same, life's not going to feel consistent with your customer, they're going to look at stuff and go, Something here doesn't add up. So you have to have a common culture for customers, because they expect consistency from that brand if you have one brand.

So you said something, sounds like you were asking yourself, can I exhibit that behavior? Are you asking as an executive that and more of a top down approach where you exhibit it first, and then it it trickles down through to the rest of the organization?

So I'll take one of our core values. So one of our core values is to act on the truth. So that core value basically means if you get data and you get information, even if it's uncomfortable to confront it, you have to confront it, and be able to willing to make the decision and take action based on that truth.

I like that.

For some folks that might normally be more hesitant. They might be, they might want to hide from the data, or they they might want to go you know what, all this first, this first set of data doesn't add up with my worldview, I'm gonna go pull a second set of data, you pull a second set of data, and you're like, oh, it still looks the same, I'm gonna go pull a third set of data. So at some point, you have to be willing to go move and act. And so this is like if you call this out. And if people do it, sometimes it's much easier to go from a sometimes to, I'm going to do it on an exhibit and on a regular basis. If someone is so grounded in their own worldview, that no matter how much data they get presented with, they're never going to change, then you don't have a team that's acting on the truth. And if someone's never going to exhibit the behaviors of one of your core values, then you you need to manage that.

Yeah, you gotta move on. You know, everything you're saying is resonating with me, in the world of mergers and acquisitions, you have to integrate those cultures, you can't avoid the hard topics, you have to go at them, you have to resolve them. And in the end, you know, some people might not fit into the organization of the future. And if you try and ignore that, or pretend it's not happening, you end up with cultural terrorists inside the organization who just create big bombs, right, and you have to get ahead of that. And you really do.

Yeah, and then for for anyone in the audience listening, if you're a larger company, doing product add-ons, or kind of tuck-in acquisitions, those sorts of things. So you want to keep the founders of that business engaged, because those founders are brilliant in the industry, and they're going to be super valuable to you as a bigger company. So my one tip on this is you have to evaluate how companies make decisions. So if you if you could draw a triangle in your head right now, and on the triangle at the top, you have, I'm gonna call it benevolent dictatorship. So where you've got a leader that is making the decision, they've got supreme decision-making power, their decision goes in, it's always correct. On the bottom left corner of the triangle, you have process and process makes the decision so that the organization has established a set of rules and you can build stuff out like an RFP and the process is going to give you a score and tell you what the decision is. And then you have relationship-based decisions where everyone gets together and discusses until you reach a consensus and then everyone buys on the decision you move forward. Effectively what we all do at work every day is make decisions. And if you have two cultures that come together with a very different decision-making process And people don't want to change the way that they're making decisions or they aren't comfortable with being closer to one of the other areas of the corner of that triangle, you're gonna lose those people. And very often you see these innovative founder-led, that are benevolent dictatorships, those people are brilliant, they're making great decisions for the benefit of the organization. But they get into a larger company that is very rules and process based where the executive team establishes governance and standards and policies and everything feeds into those, and decisions now made by the policy, the founder is going to get impatient, and they're going to quit and leave. And you can just watch it happen over and over and over in these these larger acquisitions. Or if you get to an organization that is much more collaborative communal culture, then it is that top down decision making culture, similar spot there where things will break down.

All this is a great interview here, great session, I'm really enjoying all of this. Let's shift gears here for a second, I think you've kind of maybe hinted to it a little bit, but tell me about the three mistakes that you've made in your career, and how you recovered for them, any advice you'd give to our listeners along those lines.

Okay, so let's see, we'll go through one. So as a kind of upcoming engineer, or product manager, or sales person, if you don't have the buy-in of the organization, even if you think this is the greatest thing for the company in history, you can go get it all figured out, and then it can all land flat. So there's one spot early in my career where I went to, to sign up a big sale, that would have lifted the company's revenue by almost 30%. And pretty low risk, it was going to be a profitable sale, but it was kind of a bowling pin adjacent to what we did right now. And I figured out as a product thinker on how we would line up some partners to help us execute some of the pieces that we couldn't do internally, but we would kind of solve the problem for the customer. And had it all figured out with the customer and everything figured out went back to the founders and they said, Nope, we're not doing that. And for me in my role there like that would have been a roll where I would have that commission kind of on that would have doubled my pay for the year, instead of doubling my payment wasted a whole bunch of my time and, and really set that customer up, then for a spot where we couldn't fulfill the thing that we had designed together. So bad for the customer there and bad for the other I, the thing I would have done differently there is go back to the founders and get them and the real decision makers involved earlier in the process, rather than coming to them at the end with something that even if it looks wonderful, and it looks great. But if you don't have folks along the journey with you for the buy in, they can kind of fall apart.

Getting buying in early, very helpful tip, fully agree with that.

Second one was in a engineering organization. And this was one where we had a big forecast from sales and marketing. And we didn't this was going to be a brand new product launch. And we in the engineering side and the operation side, they said go hire up a team of about 150 people. And we built out this whole big new system for this thing, spent months on it and did not have ultimately, it didn't hit even 1% of its sales forecast. So 90 days after launch. On the operation side, we were turning around and laying off 150 People basically, and then take a whole platform we had built trying to figure out how we could roll that back into another product offering. So again, that was one where I spent a year of my career on a project that we had all of our goals and milestones, but they were the wrong goals and milestones. And it was not good for all of those people that were on that team that we all had to go either find other jobs inside the company or we weren't there anymore. And so I think the the lesson on on that one for me, it's like if you're going to go be part of something new, don't be afraid to ask the hard questions up front. And to find out because I wasn't new enough to really are I was too new in my career, I wasn't really, the sales and marketing folks said, we're going to sell this, we're gonna go sell this. So I'll go build it, I'll help higher up the team. But I think that needs to be a believable story. And I think even regardless of where you are in the organization, you should have the right to ask hard questions, and you should be able to get answers that are believable, and if I would get the heck out of there. And then let's see, you asked for three figured you had a third. Yeah, this will go for the strategic impatient types. There'll be a few of those listening to this. Just because you can see the finish line doesn't mean everybody else is going to get there with you. So if you have this vision, and other folks are not understanding it, it doesn't mean that they're stupid. And you shouldn't tell them they're stupid because they don't see the finished product. They're just thinking about things differently. So if you'd like to lose your team, and you'd like to lose an organization, you just want to turn over the whole thing and like Clint said go hire a team of whole people just like you It'll have a whole separate set of blind spots, feel free to build those. And I've built those on a couple of projects in my life where maybe we got stuff done, but by the end of it, the team was a mess. And the long term sustainability of that was was a mess as well.

Wow. I feel like you've had a view inside my head. I think I've suffered that last one myself a couple times.

I've enjoyed the sport analogies today. Bret, thank you. It's been awesome having you join us and share your lessons and your strategies. I have a very hard question on the topic of hard questions earlier, where can our listeners learn more about you and CyberFortress?

So if you'd like to get my views on, I don't know, macroeconomics and maybe some data backup stuff. Every once in a while you can follow me on Twitter, bpiatt, I post a little bit on LinkedIn, you can find me on there. CyberFortress is just as you would think it is cyberfortress.com. And then with us getting this, this merger and the brand launch, I'll be back out around the world. As I said, I'm headed to Dublin, Ireland for TechConnect. So gonna talk there about cybersecurity and artificial intelligence and how that's going. So stay tuned. If you do enjoy listening to podcasts, I host a program called Cyber Talk Radio is out there. We'll probably get that started back up again after COVID. We shut it down right at the start of COVID. But I think it's time to get it back. I enjoy having the guests in the room with me. So I'll be while I'm out on the road, I may interview some folks out there while we can get people into San Antonio, Texas where I live and happy to get them down to our studios so that we can have some good fun conversation about all things cybersecurity.

Very nice. been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Bret.

Yeah, enjoyed it. Clint, Lizzy. Thank you.

Bret, it was a real pleasure. Lots of great lessons in there. Thank you so much for your time.