The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unlocking IT Potential: Innovation Vista’s Approach to Cybersecurity & AI

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Well, he's domineeringly singing, so that makes it official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate it. As always, the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as the rest of your family, but we don't loan you money, so please stop asking. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, Chris Voss 1 on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the Internet. Today we have Jeff Roberts, founder of Innovation Vista on the show with us today.

Starting point is 00:01:16 He's got 30 years of over IT leadership experience, including five tenures as a CIO, and he's guided dozens of successful mergers, led multiple digital transformations, and turned around struggling IT departments into profit centers. His journey has been recognized with a myriad of awards, including nomination as the Enterprise CIO of the Year, and has resulted in 19 of his former subordinates advancing his C-level positions themselves. Since founding Innovation Vista in 2019, he's built a consulting firm that delivers C-level IT strategy and leadership tailored to the unique needs of mid-sized organizations driving over 2.4 billion in client results Welcome to the show. How are you Jeff? I'm well, thank you Chris for the invitation and thank you Give us the dot-com where can people find you on the interwebs?

Starting point is 00:02:01 in innovation Vista dot-com as You would expect and yeah, we love interactions there. There's a contact us form and it doesn't have to be about a paid engagement with Innovation Vista. We love getting questions and, hey, do you have a favorite XYZ, anything on this line to recommend, et cetera, et cetera. Send us a message. Happy to engage. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview. What you guys do, who you work with, your client size, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:31 So great introduction, by the way, that you captured all the highlights there pretty well. It's your bio, so I just read it. Yeah. So it's, we really, at this point, we have grown our consultant network to over 400 consultants. And that lets us really cover every major vertical. government to nonprofit to for-profit and every possible industry and from hospitals to you know manufacturing companies and banks so everything in between we really the common denominator of our clientele is that midsize and the reason for that is they they are large enough to have some complexity and some opportunities for efficiency or even

Starting point is 00:03:27 revenue from their technology, but they're not so large that they really need a full-time CIO in the chair to lead their IT. So there is a sweet spot there. It's a little different in different industries. Obviously, some industries, if you're full of knowledge workers and that sort of thing, you probably get to that point where you need a full-time CIO, maybe half a billion in revenue, something like that, or even below that. Other industries, if it's all about plant property and equipment, you know, they could be north of a billion dollars and still be making use of a virtual or fractional CIO doing just fine, covering their needs on leading IT. So that's the sweet spot we serve. And we provide really everything that a C-level IT leader can do.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Our consultants, they were successful in that role. They've had that role not just for six months and then shown the door or something like that. We have pre-vetted these consultants. They know what they're doing. They were successful in a full-time role. And now they have pivoted to consulting, offering that on a contract basis, short-term and or part-time. Wow. What qualifies as a midsize organization?

Starting point is 00:04:48 Yeah. So generally our low end is maybe 30 million to 40 million, you know, 100, 150 employees, something in that. It's not that we can't help companies that are smaller than that. I say this a lot, you know, people, we can help them. My worry is I don't want our help to have an economic value that is lower than the amount of the invoice that we're sending that client. It just, that's where it tends to make sense is that 30, 40 million and up kind of level where we know we will find savings,

Starting point is 00:05:27 we will find efficiencies, we'll find revenue opportunities, market share growth opportunities with technology that are going to more than pay for the cost of our services. And that's important to us for obvious reasons, taking care of the client, but also obvious reasons with respect to just making sure that we have an ongoing viable engagement. We don't feel good about charging more than we can deliver. That's pretty interesting. Yeah, I can see why. So what are the big things happening in the IT community?

Starting point is 00:06:03 What are things that consumers and people need to be watching out for? What are some of the hot things? I don't know if AI is part of any of that. Yeah, you can't talk about this stuff without mentioning AI in this day and age for sure. And that's probably our number one topic, helping clients figure out what to do with their AI. We get a lot of outreach and response to our marketing from companies that say, look, our board of directors is saying we need to do something. Our competitors are doing it. There's headlines and we don't have anything going. We need to figure out something. And it's literally that sort of during the headlights, almost, what do we do?

Starting point is 00:06:47 How do we think about this? And it's kind of a bit of a solution looking for a problem for a lot of companies. You know, we want to do it. How do we do it? Where do we use it? That sort of thing. So we help them figure out exactly that. What's a good strategy? How do you think about deploying capital to build AI? A lot of it is frankly, we use business sense. We want to find projects that have a higher ROI. We want to find projects that are actually feasible and doable, where the quantity of data, the quality of data that they have available is going to make for a meaningful and effective model in AI and not spit out a bunch of false positives and false negatives. So that's really the value we bring to the table on that is what's possible and then kind of a

Starting point is 00:07:40 framework for thinking about how do you prioritize these projects? How do you compare them against each other? And strategically, how hard do you want to jump? In some industries, it can become not just thrive, but survive. In other industries, it is, you know, it's an additive thing. It's an efficiency play. So we help them there. That's topic number one. Topic two, probably cybersecurity, honestly.

Starting point is 00:08:10 So a lot of they're more bad guys than ever, frankly, trying to find ways. They are getting more and more sophisticated, as we all know. And there's some horror stories out there in the client's size that we aim for. Absolute horror stories of family businesses that have operated for decades and they're hit with a ransomware attack and they don't have any other way to pull their data together. And in some cases, they pay the ransom and don't get unlocked. And, you know, it just is. it's heartbreaking stuff, Chris, honestly. And, you know, a lot of that is clients reach out to us on a proactive basis to say, we don't want to be one of those.

Starting point is 00:08:57 And that's obviously the better flavor of that. And we can be very purposeful and turn over every rock and really help them understand the risks and how to solve and mitigate those risks. The other flavor is the disaster call where there has been a breach and they need help, whether it's ransomware and they need help putting things back together or someone has gotten into their network and access data they shouldn't have, and they are extorting money from them to avoid releasing it to the public, or they're offering to sell it to their competitors or,

Starting point is 00:09:33 you know, any, any spectrum of things there. So we've got experts that, you know, part of our network of consultants are former chief information security officers that are now consulting and can bring that just very seasoned executive presence. They've been around the block. They've dealt with situations like this. They know who to call. We're generally providing that top level sort of

Starting point is 00:10:02 strategic leader or advisor to a company. But what comes with them is all of these contacts and vendor partners, and they know who's good. They know if you partner with a certain company, which team you want to ask for. They know the ins and outs like that, and that's a huge value. That can really be helpful as well. Yeah, yeah ransomware it's crazy what's going on out there and and how you know you've got to really protect your data and i'm still surprised that there's so many data breaches but i don't know i guess there needs to be more penalty for that or something did we need to create i don't know laws that basically you, I'm really tired of having my password hacked. Like it used to be that, Oh, what's that one thing? Pound P P P P P W O W E or whatever, where you basically, it tells you that your password's been hacked on some website that,

Starting point is 00:10:57 you know, it's like Walmart. I'm still suffering from the Walmart thing. Like Jesus, people still trying. I just need to change the email. I think is wanting to do, but yeah, it's, it's wild. And it used to be like once every, I don't know, year or two, I would, might say one of my passwords or show those now it's every month or something. It seems like, you're just the right. I gotta just give up. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And yeah, it's crazy. What about, what is it called? That fishing where they send you an email with the with the links in it if you click links then you're hacked yeah they call it phishing or yeah spear phishing or whale phishing trying to get passwords of key people yeah yeah you know it it is sad and we've all been hit by those you know yahoo had a huge one. I mean, there, there there's a million, every, every major company, it feels like has had a breach of some size and scale over the last decade.

Starting point is 00:11:53 Do you think that maybe we need to pass some laws that there needs to be some compensation or criminal prosecution? If you're, I mean, if you're holding my data, pat my you know my social security number my credit cards my birthday i think i don't know the whole world probably knows all that stuff by now but if you're holding this data shouldn't there be some sort of financial penalty if you don't hold it you're not alone in thinking that actually the sec just passed some rules and they've drafted others to to make it a responsibility of boards of directors, at least of publicly traded companies, which obviously are the ones that have the huge percentages of citizens on their customer sheets. If you're a major corporation, you can afford it. If you're distributing billions to your stockholders, you've got money to buy IT. Give me a break, right?

Starting point is 00:12:52 Maybe if you're over a certain size of company. Let's get the class action attorneys on this and see if we can't fix it. I don't know. Yeah. No, I think it makes a lot of sense. And honestly, there is a responsibility there that it's good to see, you know, the connecting of that. I like it at the board of directors level or the CEO level, at least a lot of IT professionals worry. And some of them have lost their jobs when something bad has happened and some facts

Starting point is 00:13:25 that's justified and they literally were unprofessional or lazy or just uninformed and you know they they were in the wrong role to begin with but there are a lot of those cases where they knew what they were doing they raised the yellow flag or the red flag in some cases to leadership to say, look, we have open windows and doors in this organization that we need to be able to lock. I need funding. I need tools. I need monitoring. I need whatever protections of various kinds. And they've been turned down for that.

Starting point is 00:14:02 And I think a lot of business leaders have this idea that, you know, we've never done that and we've never been hacked in the past. And they're not quite realizing just the speed of change in that landscape of threats that, you know, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it's not very likely in the future. And just because hackers weren't using a particular vector three years ago does not mean they're not going to use it tomorrow. And, you know, midsize companies often have this wrongheaded idea that they're not going to target us. They're going after the big banks. They're going after the, you know, department of defense level, you know, vendors and things like that. You know what, if you have a few million dollars in the bank, believe me, that's enough money for a hacker to be very interested. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:57 midsize companies certainly have that, if not more. And so, yeah, it is a threat. And, you know, I hate using fear to sell, but it is sometimes an education exercise to really let them know whether we're doing an assessment or we're building a roadmap for a client to really let them know, you know, here's the doors and windows that you have open and the likelihood of these and the frequency of attack on these is x and the impact of that is y and if you you can do the math and make a commercial decision about which of those you need to lock the door and which of those maybe you mitigate the risk and you have someone monitoring and you know you find out about it quickly if something happens. There's all kinds of sort of variation in how you deal with this, but you've got to deal with it.

Starting point is 00:15:50 Yeah. Yeah, most definitely. It's something you can't – I mean, it's something you've got to deal with nowadays. You can't just kind of ignore it and be like, I'm sure it'll happen to everybody else and it won't happen to us. No big deal. It'll be fine. And I'll tell you chris it this

Starting point is 00:16:06 is one of those areas this and ai actually both of our top themes are top themes because it's an area where the outside expertise that we can offer is is just frankly more valuable i mean leveraging that because why our consultants have seen multiple places right the nature of a consultant especially in the fractional world you're seeing two or three shops at a time you're seeing different shops this year than you saw last year and part of your job is to keep up with the industry and to be aware of that leading edge. You know, internal staff at most of these companies, if not all, I can't say quite all, but most of them are so busy just keeping the lights on

Starting point is 00:16:55 and turning the crank on what they have, they don't have that time to sort of pop their head up and look around at what are other people doing? Where are people having success? Where are people having failures? What do we have in our environment that now has become sort of less than ideal or old in the tooth? You know, just having that perspective from an outside person that comes in and, you know, our services start at a thousand dollars a week. I mean, they ramp up from there depending on what clients need, obviously, but, you know, our services start at a thousand dollars a week. I mean, they ramp up from there,

Starting point is 00:17:25 depending on what clients need, obviously, but, you know, for a thousand dollars a week, you have the benefit of a veteran seasoned expert to look at what you're doing, to make those recommendations and just make sure you're not missing something because your team is heads down and the same, it applies differently in cyber security versus ai obviously but you know it's the same idea that man if you need outside help anywhere you need outside help on these fast changing high risk high impact kind of aspects of the business. And things that are stable and they're the same as they were five years ago, no. Your internal team is probably fine,

Starting point is 00:18:11 but these parts of business and technology is the top of the list. You know, they are changing so fast. There's no better place to use an outside consultant. And believe me, I know I have a biased opinion on saying that. I scratch my head sometimes when, I know I have a biased opinion on saying that. I scratch my head sometimes when we see clients bring in consultants for other things and they're trying to keep the purse string tight on the IT. I don't quite understand that because it's moving faster than anywhere else.

Starting point is 00:18:41 And it's not slowing down. Yeah, I was going to say it just seems to be accelerating really when it comes down to it so what what are some tips you give people to protect their data say they're smaller people they're they're worried about maybe getting ransomware they're small businesses they're little idiots like me at mine with the collection of wordpress sites yeah any advice you want to throw out to us people that can't afford you? We have a checklist on our website. Happy to share this link, but the checklist to help CEOs sleep at night. That could be a book. You could make that into a book. And it literally is that. And we

Starting point is 00:19:21 think for a lot of our clientele, this costs less than the cost of a single employee. All right. This is not, this is not break the bank level stuff. It's also not Fort Knox level stuff. Okay. So if you are a bank or even a credit union, maybe you need a little more, but just for, for, for businesses and sort of a common industry where you're at risk for, you know, sort of common kinds of attacks, this would shut the major doors and windows for a reasonable cost. And those answers are out there. And then we say, look, here are the other things that are a little more esoteric. They're going to take a very sophisticated attacker, but they do require more expensive, more elaborate protections. And if you're in one of these industries where that is a little more prevalent,

Starting point is 00:20:14 you may want to think about it. The price tag might go up, but so does the risk. And you have to scale these things depending on the risk landscape and what are you willing to take and what are the terms of your cybersecurity insurance policy. We partner a lot with cyber insurance carriers and brokers, actually, because the cost of coverage and even, frankly, the qualification for coverage on some of these policies is impacted greatly. If you just do a little bit of work, you can get protection for more things. You can get your protections for cheaper. If you can show them that you've done some of these sort of, you know, let us sleep at night. So it's like when you, it's like when you put a fire alarms in your house, you get cheaper house insurance. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:15 And they understand the risks and they understand a company that isn't really thinking about this is extremely high risk. Might even get declined. That's increasingly happening. If they're not going to be declined, they're going to absolutely be charged, you know, the surcharge for open doors and windows. So yeah, I think, again, having to share that, a lot of these things, it surprises people that you don't have to break the bank to get to the A- or A-plus level. If you want to get to A-plus, you probably, you don't have to break the bank, but you are going to need to dip into your dividend or you're going to need to think about things differently. And it's a significant part of your budget to just protect things. But, you know, in a lot of companies getting to A-, letting the CEO sleep at night, man, that's better than they are today.

Starting point is 00:22:09 And at least they don't have the risk that they could be put out of business by a ransomware attack and have to shutter the doors on something that they've put all that blood, sweat, and tears into. Yeah, it's something that's really important to pay attention to nowadays. I mean, it just seems to me like a growing problem. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I get an email with a fake PayPal invoice. You know, I get all sorts of Google folder stuff. Somebody sent me some Dropbox hack the other day. Like, I don't even use Dropbox anymore. It's really just wild.

Starting point is 00:22:41 You know, I don't trust any link anyone sends me. I refuse to click on any link. I'm just like, I'll just go directly to the website. Thanks. I'll type it in the old-fashioned way. Very wise. Yeah. The nice, that, you know, the mindset and the human kind of protection,

Starting point is 00:22:56 just how you behave with your email and so forth is the best protection of all. I guess putting staff through a lot of training on don't click stupid links on your email idiot yeah that sort of thing what was the i think it was what 2016 one of the heads of the democratic national committee clicked one of those phishing links and opened up the whole server to i think russia or whatever the hell was whatever and yeah i mean there's lots of examples of that i think the trump campaign was just hacked by russia or china or north korea i mean it seems like there's a lot of that going on out of north korea and russia absolutely state-sponsored hacking is is probably other they're the most sophisticated they're the deepest teams and they are relentless.

Starting point is 00:23:45 Yeah. And it's a new Cold War, basically. Yeah. They say that the next war will be a cyber war or it will begin that way. networks and systems, it is very scary to think about the kind of damage they could do and how they could hamstring us, really any country who is attacked. You have all this firepower, you have all this military equipment and technology and personnel and all of it. And if the systems that coordinate those things cannot work right, the impact of that is just enormous. So yeah, it's not to mention the whole war games, you know,

Starting point is 00:24:34 sort of Matthew Broderick kind of nightmare scenario where the computers actually have access to the red button. Scary stuff. Definitely. Yeah. It it's wild it's not a nuclear war it's internet war and an AI war I think I think Putin is is quoted as having to say you know the future belongs to whoever wins the war on AI or something like that some defect and AI is changing so rapidly just seeing how people can can utilize and stuff so I noticed in website, you've got a couple things that are on here, how to monetize your IT department, I guess. There's ways to monetize that, or how does that work?

Starting point is 00:25:13 Yeah, it's one of the things that really, I think, sets us apart from a lot of our competitors is that focus on top-line impact that IT can drive. There are literally tens of thousands of firms that talk about automation and efficiencies and, and those are great. And IT can do a lot of those, but we go beyond that to really help clients also find ways we can accelerate revenue streams, build market share,

Starting point is 00:25:44 win business and really take business away from their competitors with technology capabilities that they can't match, and or to create revenue streams from scratch. So there are ways to upsell, other ways to create data and analytics products that Wall Street and others have a real appetite for data and just understanding the landscape of certain marketplaces. So a lot of that is, you know, what data do you have? What data do you contractually have the right to share and do things with. Sometimes you can do things in an aggregate form that you can't do sort of on an individual transaction list kind of form. And so we walk through that with clients and we help them figure out, you know, which of their recent losses on their existing revenue, which of those might have been changed if they had technology capabilities

Starting point is 00:26:47 that were better than the competitor that they ended up losing out to. And that's not 100%, obviously, in a lot of industries. There's some commodity things out there that it's all about price, baseline quality, and then it's about price, right? But in other areas, having that customer portal, having that ability to change your order from a mobile device, having the monitoring and alerting when things come up for sale or when your order is moved from one stage to another, anything and everything in that vein we explore. And in a lot of industries, I hesitate to say all, but I would say most industries,

Starting point is 00:27:34 there is a way to move the needle with top line. And the ROI is obviously the critical thing there. But again, AI, the cost of cloud computing, all these things are going down and you're getting more horsepower for less than ever before. It'll never again be as expensive as it is today. So all of those things we are getting more for less. And, you know, it's a little bit like Moore's law and that whole concept, but you know,

Starting point is 00:28:04 that's a trend that is showing no signs of slowing down, which means there are things that maybe miss the ROI cut in 2024. But if you look at 2025, 2026, you know, they belong on the list because that price point for the cost of running some of these models or building some of these systems is dropping. And so anyway, that's a fun landscape. We talk about really the journey that we try to help clients go through with respect to the maturity of their technology. Generally, the first step is to stabilize. Right. their technology generally the first step is to stabilize right we sometimes get contacted by

Starting point is 00:28:47 people that they want to start an ai program let's say and when we begin talking with them we realize that their systems are crashing on a daily basis everything runs slow people can't stand it you know okay so we probably need to do some things first to stabilize your environment and get some basics in place and security certain is in that category as well let's make sure the doors and windows are locked before we start talking about ai do the basics first yeah so stabilize then we optimize right so even before there's still an intermediate step, if you're stable, but your data is not talking to each other from systems that you have in accounting, operation, sales, R&D, et cetera, that needs to happen. And really AI is all about data.

Starting point is 00:29:40 So if you think about just AI as your goal on the monetized level, optimizing, getting your data in a place where it's usable, it's integrated, it's cleansed, it's enriched. You have monitoring on the data quality to make sure that you don't have garbage in, garbage out. That cliche has never been more true than it is today. Then you've stabilized, you've optimized, then you are ready to think about monetizing IT. And yeah, we, you know, there are a lot of things we look at. Some of it is just honestly empowering the existing sales team. And this is particularly B2B clients. B2C, we can help in some ways. It looks a little different, obviously. B2B, there's so much repeat business. There's so much data around the patterns of what they do.

Starting point is 00:30:34 And some industries, you can get access to data of what they do with other competitors as well. And there's a spectrum. Some industries, it's available. Some available some it's not but if you can get that kind of visibility you really can build predictive ai about your customers that you talk about handing it sort of the the secret weapon to a sales team you know predicting what they're doing analyzing why is it that they do certain things with competitors and not with us. Some of those might really be solvable problems. Some of those might be personal connections or what have you that, you know, if you could go in and make it clear the features and the price point and the capabilities you offer, you might be able to break through some of that and take that business. And so that's a fun part of what

Starting point is 00:31:26 we do it really is is it goes beyond it it really is innovation consulting or even whole business you know management consulting in business model strategy and things at that level because it frankly can have that kind of impact today. It's everything from supply chain to operations to delivery chain, like everything in between. So it really turns into a business model strategy. Yeah, we love those kinds of engagements, and those sorts of things are a big part of our tally board of the $2.4 billion that we've driven so far.

Starting point is 00:32:07 Yeah. That's why you're called Innovation Vista. Thank you for that, Chris. Got the plug in tight and all the other thing. So as we go out, tell people how they can onboard with you, how they can reach out, find out more about you, see if you're a fit, all that sort of good stuff. Absolutely. I mentioned the website earlier, innovation, vista.com. There are tons of articles, thought leadership things.

Starting point is 00:32:31 I've got webinars links to other interviews like this. So a lot there, the other place to really look for us is LinkedIn. And we are very active myself and our team, you know, posting content, trying to add value to these discussions, right? So again, it's not all about trying to get a paid engagement. A lot of it is just being active, sharing what we see,

Starting point is 00:32:57 hearing what other people see, just collaborating on those things. And yeah, we love to do that. I truly do mean that we get just questions like, hey, do you have a quick answer for me here or a quick suggestion for me? Happy to do that and pay it forward if you will. And the way we look at that is the more people who think highly of us and who appreciate what we've helped them with, the more people who, when their buddies are asking them, Hey, do you know anyone that kind of has like top level it consultants?

Starting point is 00:33:33 They're going to say, you should talk to innovation Vista. Thank you very much for coming to the show and giving us some of the insights and insights and things to think about what we need to do with our marketing and also with our IT to protect our data and try and keep from being on the just hacked and destroyed. Because, I mean, my website is my business. Most people's website is their business. So you got to protect it. Just like your bank account.

Starting point is 00:33:59 So anyway, thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. Likewise. Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1, Tick Tockity, all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other.

Starting point is 00:34:13 Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unlocking IT Potential: Innovation Vista’s Approach to Cybersecurity & AI

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