EP 212: Space Whiskey and Business Wisdom: A Chat with Adam Anderson

Hey, everybody, this is David Chudick here, and we are taking a break this week from talking about stock market volatility.

While it's been fun empowering you to make some smart financial decisions during this time of up and downs in the stock markets, I thought it'd be fun to talk with my friend Adam Anderson about his entrepreneurial journey.

Adam is a really cool dude and an interesting character, so I hope that you enjoy this episode.

Welcome to the weekly wealth podcast.

I am certified financial planner David Chudick.

This podcast and my wealth management practice are both designed to help the mass affluent to live better lives by how they handle their money.

We talk about financial strategies, prosperous mindsets, and simply how to build true wealth.

So come on and let's enjoy this journey together.

All right, everybody.

Well, welcome to this week's episode of the weekly wealth podcast.

Today we have a friend of mine, Adam Anderson, and we're talking about cyber security.

We're going to be talking about some ways to make your company more valuable.

We're going to talk about his books.

We might mention his beard.

My beard.

And I get the second best beard on the podcast.

This is no Shave.

November 2017.

So this is as good as it gets for me.

And then we're also going to talk about bourbon and outer space.

So lots of cool stuff that you've probably not heard about on podcast before, but.

Hey, Adam, how are you, man?

Oh, I am very, very good.

I'm having a blast.

And I'm just remembering all the giggles we had when we talked at Fire Forge Brewer the other night.

And I'm looking forward to it.

This is going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah.

So you and I are.

We're a member of an informal group called Wall Street Greenville.

And it's just a bunch of people in finance and professionals.

We just get together once a month.

I make it there probably 90% of months, and you make it there month.

And I just think community and just bouncing ideas off people.

It's so important to success.

And that's how.

How you and I, you and I met.

And I've already learned a good bit from you.

But.

But I want to learn about something that we've never talked about on a podcast, and that's liquor in outer space.

So you have a plan?

Let's hear your plan.

This is pretty interesting.

Yeah.

So I will tell you the fun part and then I'll back into why I'm.

I'm actually working on the project.

So I sold my company, my first company in, and I had this huge Identity crisis.

If I'm not the CEO and owner of this company, then who in the heck am I?

And so I went to this talk and there's about 75 of US CEOs sitting in the audience.

And there was a, the former commander of the International Space Station.

He was up there for six months and he was giving a talk.

And the only thing I can remember from his whole talk was, I have worked out perfect for six months.

I've eaten perfect for six months.

I had doctors on me 100% of the time for six months.

And so when I stepped out of the shower, when I got home, my wife said, thank God for NASA.

I was the perfect human specimen.

So in my head I was like, space fat camp.

That's what I'm going to build.

And so I have in my head, I'm going to build a space hotel.

And one of the gifts I gave myself after I sold my company is I always wanted to go to Necker island, hang out with Richard Branson, do all that stuff.

Turns out it costs like 50k and you can go do it.

So I did that and I went and I'm strutting around the island with 30 other people who spent 50k to be there.

And in my head, because of the kind of entrepreneur I am, I've already built the space station.

It's already happened in my head.

And so when they ask me, what do you do?

I'm like, I build space stations, I build space hotels.

Well, that's the wrong island to be saying that kind of crap.

Because this nice lady, Nicolette said, oh, you too?

I've got six that I've invested in.

One's attached to the International Space Station now.

And in athletes, I'm like, oh crap, ma'am, I lied to your face.

So she helped me network my way into the space industry and I began to see things that were possible.

I got really obsessed about orbital manufacturing.

But there was a capitalist, there was a capitalism problem.

Money doesn't work well in space.

So I was like, I need to come up with a product that it's easy for me to make but really hard for anyone to get access to.

What can I make?

Oh, what if I just aged liquor in space?

What if I made space whiskey?

Spaced aged whiskey.

And I built reusable orbital manufacturing platforms.

And so I use running booze to pay for infrastructure for advanced pharmaceuticals and things like that.

So I am using luxury high end products, starting with whiskey, to make dump trucks full of money so that I can then fund the infrastructure projects I want to see happen in space.

I mean, you just can't ask for anything cooler than that.

And I love dump trucks full of money and I want, I want to get at least, at least one half of a dump truck full of money for myself.

So, yeah, pretty, pretty cool stuff.

I love it.

I love it.

Well, let's talk about business.

And I heard a quote today, actually that behind every practitioner is a business.

So like, doctors are doctors, but they also, at least in the past, before they were all taken over by the hospital, they owned medical practices.

And like, those are two very different skill sets.

Yeah.

So talk to me about a little bit of your experience with, you know, owner led sales.

Like, why is an owner led sale such a horrible idea?

And what are some things that if you have a company you could do to make the whole, you know, if selling your business is a consideration, what are some things that you can do as an owner to make sure that you can sell the business for the optimal amount of money?

That's right.

So the, the catch 22 is that owner led sales is the absolute best kind of sales until it's not.

And as soon as it's not, it's really not.

Because no one's going to be able to talk about the product the way you are.

No one's going to be able to have the passion.

You're going to be able to make deals on the fly and not have to ask permission.

So for the first little while, you're going to be really, really effective at honor led sales.

But eventually your business is going to scale beyond your capabilities.

Not your potential, but your cap, your capabilities.

Because don't forget your CEO, cfo, VP of.

You're all of the things.

Right.

Plumber.

Yeah.

Floor.

Yeah.

So eventually you get to the point where you start assigning those roles to other people.

And if you really love sales, that might be the last thing you give up.

You might first say, well, I need an HR person, but at some point you are going to pass the baton from being the tip of the spears and saying sales to someone else.

And the reason why you're shedding all these roles, number one, is so that you have the bandwidth to grow or to have more free time.

For me, it was more of a time thing.

I actually left my company three years before I sold it.

I put it under full protect professional management and I just got a, a check every month.

That was how I wanted to live my life.

So time got very important to me.

So I automated and outsourced my way to freedom and the on the flip side of that is selling your company.

So it turns out that was the smartest thing I could have done because when you sell your company, I think I was doing around 850k of EBITDA.

And the first thing that the buyer wanted to do was add my salary to the math and saying, well, we know you're paying yourself $350,000, so we're going to reduce that EBITDA from 850, buy that 350 because we're going to have to hire and replace you.

Hey, can I stop you one second?

Now most people know what EBITDA is, but give like a 10 second, just cliff Notes version of kind of what it is, why it's important in selling a business.

Yeah.

So EBITDA is another way of saying profit.

Right.

And so it's how much money is left after.

And it's a way for, for someone else to look at how you're running your business to see how much cash you're throwing off.

Depending on your business, EBITDA may or may not be important.

The company I'm building now, threat Captain, we don't care about ebitda.

It is all going to exit multiples based off of my revenue.

So if I made a million in revenue and I sell my company for five times revenue, I'm going to get a five million dollar check for professional services and for other different kinds of companies, it often goes over to EBITDA or profit ish.

And so I got a 3 times EBITDA on my exit or roughly 1 times a revenue for a professional services company.

So I had 25 nerds, we're doing professional services.

And so that's kind of how you think about when you exit.

And your valuation multiple will go up and down based off of how well you've configured your business to operate as a business rather than, hey, I'm a superhero entrepreneur with a bunch of helpers.

That business isn't as valuable or even sellable as someone who's like, hey, I built this engine that prints money.

I don't have to be there.

Do you want it?

Right.

Does that make sense?

No, I love it.

And I try to get that across to business owners is there's like this weird fricking badge of honor that I'm so important I have to work a hundred hours a week.

Nobody can do things like I can do blah blah, blah, blah, blah.

But you got yours to where you were literally just collecting a check and you'd systematize things.

Right.

And how did you get past maybe that mental thing like I can leave and it's okay and I don't have to be a work.

Cause I think some entrepreneurs think that they have to be a workaholic or else they don't deserve to get paid.

Oh heck yeah.

I resonate with that, right.

Even right now with this.

So I don't know why I keep starting companies.

I guess I'm, I've got muscle memory.

But like you get the screw it, I'll do it myself mentality when you start a company because you're literally doing everything and what happens is that you train your behaviors in the middle of a very high stress crisis scenario, which is the starting and the startup and initial growth of your company.

And the neurosis of I must continue to do old behaviors because otherwise I won't begin, I won't see the same results coming out.

Right.

These are old behaviors that no longer serve, but it's really hard to put those down because of the momentum of the trained behavior.

So my story is very much like most entrepreneurs, you don't just decide to be better at it.

You have a horrible event in your life that you have to make a decision.

So for me, I was the number one sales guy.

I'm number one consultant.

Nothing can happen in my company without me.

We're doing around three half million in revenue at the time, 20 something employees.

And my two year old son would refer to me as Adam, not dad, because the only time he talked to me is when he told Siri to call FaceTime.

Adam, my wife said, hey, I respect what you're doing.

I know that you're going to war, but you know, the family isn't here just for you to come visit.

We want to be part of your life and it's.

If this is just going to be a financial thing, we can do life in a different way.

That's a very polite way.

She did not use those words.

There's a lot more F bombs.

All right, so sometimes an F bomb.

Is what's required, by the way.

So this was what we call the time of troubles.

The we call it this is my asses phase.

And asses stands for alone, stressed, scared, encumbered and sacrificed.

Because I felt I had to do all that by myself.

And when you're conditioned to do it all by yourself, it's really, really, really, really hard to slow down enough and feel safe enough to do something different.

Because I was, I had an external veneer of self confidence about what my company was doing.

But I went to every event, talked to every.

I did it all because I didn't know what was working.

So I had to do everything.

And so I didn't give myself permission to do that until I'm in Vegas.

My wife calls me.

She's like, hey, this isn't going to work out.

You know, we gotta do something different.

I had two people in my company.

One would eventually become my president.

And they're like, hey, we have this.

There's 16 of us at this conference.

Your wife is flying out.

Why don't you guys just spend a nice week in Vegas and you don't show up to any of the meetings?

And that was the beginning of me being able to retrain myself to not have to be a CEO.

So there's a difference between owner and CEO.

And I like being the owner.

The owner is the shareholder, the owner is the board.

The owner gets to say the things like, this is where I want the company to go.

The CEO has to do all the things.

Now you could be filing like, it all depends on your methodology.

Right?

You could be, what is it?

The EOS type stuff.

There's a lot of different ways to do it, but I.

The way I like to think about it is I like to fire myself as the CEO of a company so I can fully move into the ownership of my company.

And now I found the owner.

My personal identity lets me put the best leadership into place.

Because I own the team now.

I don't have to play on the field.

So that whole process probably took me about two years to get to the point where I had that big crisis moment.

And then when was finally ready to slowly unwind, and it took me two years of active work.

It wasn't like I just sat around and then after two years, I'm like, peace out.

Nope.

It was going system by system, business process by business process, deciding what I wanted to do and what I could get rid of.

And it took me that long to just unravel those four or, you know, I'm sorry, those six or nine key business systems that you have to have someone else run for you.

So, yeah, trauma was my catalyst.

So talk to me about the measurable, the metrics, kind of before, while Adam was doing everything, then after, Adam spent two years trying to fix things and put systems and everything.

Did the company, and even you personally make more money once you kind of got out of the way?

Or was that not an issue?

You just needed to get your marriage back or talk to me about that?

So here's a no.

The company did not make more money.

Totally screwed up my story.

I know.

10 times more money.

I know.

But don't worry.

I'm going to tell you what I did wrong so everyone else can.

Okay, Operationally, the company worked much better, but I didn't have an answer to sales.

Everything else went flawlessly, but I was the only one who could do sales.

And I didn't know how to train someone to do what I did.

And so we went from a hunting organization to a farming organization where my people, my consultants, knew how to farm and keep getting deals out of our existing customers, but none of them knew how to go after net new customers.

And that was a blind spot that I didn't realize I didn't have.

And so when I turned it over at three and a half million in revenue about two, three years later, when I actually sold it, we were down to about 2.8 million in revenue.

And it was a slow decline as churn happened.

But I didn't have an answer for churn.

And also I had checked out.

And I give myself credit, I started this thing when I was 26 and I sold it before I was late 30s.

And so it, this was just a blind spot.

That's why I'm so heavy into sales right now is that if I can't answer the question of where are we getting more revenue from in a predictable way, then it's very, very risky for me to step away from the company.

But if I can do that and, and I also have the ability to do fulfillment on the behaviors of the salespeople, well, now I'm in the game.

So the think about when I did it.

I left the company, but I took one of the tires with me and so was like running on three wheels for a long time.

So an imperfect exit can still be an exit.

But to maximize the exit to whether it's for money or for time, whether you're firing yourself for freedom or firing yourself for freedom and cash, it's same, same process.

And so really figuring out how the vehicle works so that all of it is running.

That, that's the, that was my blind spot.

I didn't know enough about what I was doing to fully de risk my exit.

So the next couple companies I've done completely different story.

So what's different about the sales component?

You're.

You're not the main and only sales guy now.

And, and why is that?

What did you do differently?

Well, the sales is such a cool thing because sales is such a nuanced profession.

One of the mistakes I Made was, I thought sales was just me going and playing golf and then asking for business.

And that's a kind of sales.

It's hard to, hard to reproduce if you're a relationship based seller and you own all the relationships and then you leave.

You can't, you know, you can't just like side out, rotate and high five a buddy and say, all right, now you take over all these relationships.

No, people want to do business with people.

So with owner led sales is typically relationship based selling.

And those are really hard to transition.

So when you are transitioning your way out of being the head of sales, you actually have to create a whole new kind of sales thing that has nothing to do with your relationships.

Your relationships can be there to open doors, but now you have to go with value.

You have to go with all the other things you have to compete in the market.

And the great news is that when you build that, you actually can increase the velocity of net new sales because your relationship based selling typically doesn't have high velocity, though it may have high numbers.

Like I can close a $3 million deal with my relationship based selling versus my system based selling where maybe I'm closing 100 deals for the same amount.

I don't care.

There's no wrong answer.

It's just what are you trying to build?

And so now when I start a company, I don't start a company without a sales guy first because I know who I am.

I'm not a prospector.

I spend long time in bonding rapport, I suck at asking for money.

These are all things that are important right now.

I can, I could talk about my product.

I can guide you through the decision making process if it's with you or not.

But there's these different layers in sales that are different skill sets.

And so I, my, my current business partner is our second company we've started together and he is a cold calling monster.

This guy can prospect, this guy does the behaviors I don't do.

It's amazing.

And yeah, I don't start companies anymore without operational people or salespeople who know how to, to fulfill it.

So that, that's kind of my hard one lesson is start with the end in mind and start with better teams rather than doing it all yourself.

No, I get it, I get it.

But, but you know, when you look at like that one thing and it's, it's bringing in money, it's bringing in revenue.

So I think that in some ways that is the hardest thing to give up as, as the owner, as, as the founder.

But I think that if you, if you can figure out that system.

But, and I'm, I'm wondering like, did your product become better once people were not buying Atom, they were actually buying the actual product?

Does that make, does that question make sense?

Yeah, it.

So remember, we're consulting, so it kind of did because the pro.

So there was a blessing and a curse here when I stepped away from accountant management and being the primary consultant.

So we were doing a lot of consultative based, relationship based selling.

So when I pulled back from that, I had four or five other consultants begin to rise up and they begin to develop their own voice.

And what happened is I was no longer the bottleneck of information.

So customer satisfaction went up outside of my personal relationships.

Speed to delivery went up, quality of delivery went up.

Because now that I was no longer the center of everything, the nodes could have conversations very, very quickly.

The people and all of a sudden the quality and the speed of what we did, super, super high, super increased.

That was great.

The bad thing was because I didn't have a CRM, because I didn't have project management, I felt completely out of the loop because I wasn't in the middle of those conversations.

And so one of the mistakes I made was I ripped myself out without having any kind of ability to get new data.

Right.

So if you're the, still the owner of the company, you want to know what's going on.

And I didn't have any of that set up.

So, you know, the, that's, that's one of my other core mandates now is, hey, look, it doesn't have to be a lot of work, but you got to have some kind of feedback loop for management with the people who are on the front line.

And so yeah, now when I'm doing things, the, the product's always better, speed's always better.

It's just, you don't, you don't need to have a complicated sales system.

You just need to have basically a list of check marks.

Did you do and let me know?

But yeah.

So back to your question.

For my consulting practice.

The product was superior, the customer satisfaction went through the roof.

And I felt lonely because no one was calling me.

No.

And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, and I think you touched on it, your identity is in the business.

And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, their identity is not only in the business, in the fact that their sense of importance and their self worth is like, in how busy they are.

Like, I can't take a vacation because people need to call Me and talk to me.

They'll only talk to me.

Well, I don't know, maybe you could just tell them I'm not the person that handles this specific question in my company, but I'll transfer you to Sally, who actually knows the answer and call her with this question next time.

Time, you know.

Yeah, but when I start companies now, I tell the, the founding employees like, look, what we're going to do right now is called superhero work.

Where, you know, if you work to 3am to make sure that that code got out or you worked and you did, you want all the things that you do above and beyond.

We're gonna celebrate that.

It's going to be great.

But eventually the company is becoming, going to be at a certain point where instead of those being signs of success and worthy of honor, that means that what we've built doesn't work, and that's why you have to do it.

So eventually we're going to move from superhero behaviors being the reward to if you can leave before 5 because the company's running so well.

That's now our metric for success.

And most of you are not going to make that transition very well because you're going to be wildly excited and work a whole bunch of hours and then I'm going to need you to follow systems and processes.

And I did, you know, so I give everyone permission after about three years to let me know that it's no longer fit.

And they're not gonna, I'm not gonna have my feelings hurt if they leave.

But you do move from the number of hours I log equal how important I am to the number of hours I have free, meaning how well I'm doing.

And, and I think, you know, the trading hours for money needs to go away.

As far as your mindset, it needs to be trading value.

And, and I like that, you know, and the more valuable you are, you know, you can make a lot more money in a lot less hours.

And like you said, you had gotten to the point where you were basically not working and, and, and, but you'd still built a company that's providing value to the customers.

So I mean, that's just a, just a beautiful thing that you can.

You know, as entrepreneurs, we take so many risks and there are times where working 80 hours, 90 hours is just inevitable.

Like, you just literally have to do it, but you also can reap some of the rewards and eat the fruits of your labor at, at times, so.

Well, tell me about your books that you've written, because you've written a Couple of them and one of them.

So I.

When I get curious about a thing, I write a book about it.

It's.

It's my way of researching and going through it.

So there's three books that are pertinent to my life right now, and then there's one other that's my favorite, and I'll tell you about that one.

That's my wife's.

It's not nice to me, but it's good.

So first one is Fire Yourself, the Entrepreneurial End Game.

And it's basically my second edition of what I went through to remove myself from my company and how I wish I would have done it better.

And now how do I go about building companies today?

And the punchline is, there's certain business systems that you just need to look at, and over time, just get these things underneath the roles and responsibility for somebody else.

And now in the world of AI, some of these things are now being handled by AI agents for me.

But at the end of the day, somebody else has to own the system.

So it's not a matter of who's doing the work, it's who's owning the results of the system.

And as long as you own the results, you are not free.

So that's.

That's.

The whole book is how do I transfer ownership of a system over to somebody else.

The next two books are all around my.

My goals here with Cyber security and Helping make the World a Safer Place by salespeople being able to sell the thing the right way.

So the first.

The.

The first is a cyber security sales mastery, which is, hey, this is a real job.

Why don't we look at how do you sell cyber security from a.

I'm here to help you understand cyber security rather than I'm here to scare the crap out of you and have you actually emotionally buy.

We call that security theater, by the way, when I sell and scare you enough that you buy what makes you feel safe, but not what makes you actually safe as comp.

Security theater.

So.

And to support that book, I wrote another one called Cybersecurity by the Numbers.

Now, the reason why that's important is that most people don't know how to understand cyber risk very well.

I do a lot of tabletop exercise where I get a bunch of C Suite folks around the table, and I run them through scenarios, and we practice what happens if their company gets breached so that when they actually happens, they're trained for it.

And one of the things I saw was that the nerds, the cyber guys would say, Risk, and they meant bits and bytes and what could happen to the network.

But the CFO and the budget holder was saying risk, and they meant dollars and cents and they weren't translating each other.

So the whole purpose of that last book is how do you translate cyber risk into financial risk?

Through a process called cyber breach, financial impact analysis.

And it is a really, really cool, elegant way to just say, hey, this is how bad the breach could be.

This is if insurance is going to cover it, and this is how you should spend your money.

And if you can keep it that short, you have a chance to have that conversation.

So for a Main street business, let's say there's somebody in our town with 5, 10, 15, 20 employees.

Maybe they have, you know, 5, 10, 15 computers.

Like, what is an example of a breach and maybe something that could have been done to prevent that breach?

Yeah, so I like, I like law firms.

Law firms are good examples for this because usually you have one or two lawyers and you have some paralegals and, you know, so about what you described, about 10 to 15 employees and they've got a bunch of laptops and they've got some stuff hosted.

And the, the typical thing that's going to happen to these Main street businesses are ransomware attacks where they've clicked on something they shouldn't.

Actually, let me, let me stop there.

There's a difference between the type of breach and the type of attack.

So the way that Main street businesses are going to get breached is social manipulation of their employees.

It's no longer a brute force thing where some kid in the basement is breaking through your firewalls.

Most of your security is pretty good.

What they're going to do is try to scam you.

Everyone's gotten emails that look real, but they aren't, or text message that look real, or phone calls.

The idea is break through your security more.

So I'm going to trick you to give me the keys to the kingdom.

Apparently I went through some toll booths and didn't, didn't pay.

And I keep getting text messages.

I know.

That's the new one, right?

Yeah.

And the great news is they follow up, you still haven't paid.

It's like, cool, buddy.

I've already blocked this number, so that's how they get you.

Now, I have to tell you, I've written a lot of books and I'm also the proud owner of a Nissan Altima that I bought on Craigslist that didn't exist.

Oh, there you go.

I spent fifteen hundred dollars to get this thing.

And I, if I had, if I was on my game, I would have known, but I wasn't.

And I was just trying to buy this for a foster daughter.

I wanted to get this onto the way.

This was the least important thing I was doing that day.

And I got scammed.

Anyone can get scammed, no matter who you are or what you do.

And the reason is because eventually you get tired, you get sick, you get distracted.

Something happen, happens when you're not on your game and this stuff is never ending coming at you, which is why training is super important, which is why awareness is super important, and why we gotta move from resistant to cyber crime to resilient.

So even if I do get breached, how do I not get damaged?

Right?

And so that's the other part of your question.

So the bad guys are going to get to you because they're tricking you to click on something or tricking you to give them some kind of information or some kind of social manipulation.

And once they're in the way, they're going to attack Main street is they're going to lock everything.

So it used to be the bad guys cared if you had important data they can sell on the Dark Web.

Now they don't care about that now.

What they care about is can I disrupt the machine that makes you money?

So that way you are going to now pay me to unlock that disruption so they're not after anything other than to lock you down and hold you hostage until you pay them.

That is, that's the thing that faces the main street.

Now if you're a Main street in the defense supply chain, that's a little different, right?

If you are in a complicated supply chain where you're supplying Lockheed Martin, like four people later, they're going to be doing a little bit more sophisticated things to come at you because their real target is Lockheed.

And they think that they can breach you, they can sneak through all of the trusted connections, but for nine times out of 10, you're going to get socially manipulated, you're going to get scammed.

And if they can get access to your computers, they're going to lock you down until you are able to release it or they're going to blackmail you.

One of the things that is super disturbing.

I didn't know we're going to get this scary, okay?

Turning on cameras to record things that are happening.

And if you have teenage sons, for example, if you have things, if they can, if they can get through to your personal network and start recording your families, they will send you Videos, they will blackmail you, they will go after you.

So it's no longer hey, can I steal your HR info?

It's how do I get access to your life and wow.

And mess with it?

And you can do this now because of a AI, right?

A lot of the stuff you used to be safe from because it was a high effort, intensive, now we just write scripts and code and AI goes after you instead.

I mean, the world is so different than it was years and years ago and it's changing very, very quickly.

AI, I think, is a beautiful thing and it holds so many different potentials for us.

But like anything else, with good comes bad.

And AI can be a dangerous, dangerous thing thing as well, man.

It's just a tool, right?

You know, I, I love the whole dynamite metaphor or analogy.

Right.

Dynamite was not designed to blow people up.

It was a design to help dig tunnels and create minds.

And when, when you use a powerful tool in a weird kind of way or unresponsible or unethical way, it's, it's, it's tough and, but you know, I'm bullish on, on humanity.

I think that once we become aware of a scam and it becomes normal, the vast majority of us become inoculated to it.

However, there's always going to be the bottom 20%, either the elderly or people who are having a bad day.

10.5 trillion in damages is what cybercrime is doing this year.

That oil and gas is 6 trillion.

Yeah, yeah, but I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, but bad people will always figure out ways to do bad things.

And it's been like that for all of human history.

I think we just have scale to do bad things now, you know, with you could, you know, send out millions of these told text messages.

And if 0.0001% of people clicks and pays or gives information, that's a lot of money.

Where in the past you couldn't really commit a crime on that scale.

But it's just, it's just what it is.

We just have to, have to be looking out for it.

So let's, let's circle back.

So that seems pretty obvious that cyber crime is a problem, right?

Based on what we just said, nobody who I talk to say, say, well, I don't think it's going to happen to me.

But now if we talk about that Main street business and instead we say, how much do you think you should spend on cyber security to keep you safe?

All of a sudden they shut down.

The reason why they shut down is because they don't understand the problem well enough to have an educated opinion about it, and they don't have the tools to think about it in the right way.

And this is why, especially in cyber security sales, your job isn't to show up and throw products at people.

Your job is to help them understand that gap.

And when you are a sales professional who doesn't quite understand how to help someone, think about it, because we think it's the big number, but it's not the big number.

And what I mean by that.

I was talking to a CEO of a large manufacturing company out of Rhode island and we finished my tabletop.

I scared the crap out of everybody.

It was great.

And then the guy's like, yeah, well, we're probably not going to do anything different.

I said, what do you mean, 48 million?

And he's like, yeah, that's a really big problem.

But I don't think it's very likely to happen.

So businesses buy cybersecurity based off of how likely they think the risk is and how likely they think they can actually defeat that risk.

So if Main street business knows for a fact they're going to get breached and they know for a fact it's going to be big.

And they also in their heart know for a fact there's nothing they can do about it.

They would rather not think about the problem and just move on.

And that's the problem that we, we find ourselves in constantly with cybersecurity is even if we can guide someone to spend money on cybersecurity, they never know if it's enough.

And it's very emotionally draining for someone to try to protect themselves.

I would imagine.

It's kind of a scenario where you don't know what you don't know.

So it's easier just to not think about it and say, I hope it doesn't happen and if it does, we'll deal with it then.

But that's pro.

That's never a good strateg strategy in anywhere of life.

Yeah, it's understandable.

And also we need to do better, right?

So tell me who might be listening to this show that you would like to contact you and what would you talk about and how would they find you?

Because you're honestly a pretty interesting dude and we've talked about just some general business building topics that I think any business owner can learn a lot from.

But in your specific business, what kind of person do you want to speak with?

Well, I tell you what, why don't we run through the good stuff.

If you are fascinated by Space Whiskey and you also would like see, when I do cyber, it's about fear.

When I do space, it's about hope.

So I go true, right?

So space is my hope.

So if you would like to learn more about Space Whiskey, if you would like to to to figure out how do we build this thing?

I'm trying to make this launched out of Greenville, South Carolina.

Just ping me on LinkedIn.

I'm at Adam Anderson, CEO is my thing.

You'll see a little rocket in front of my name.

So you know, if I'm the right guy absolutely willing to talk about it, the way that is going to pay for Space Whiskey is for my company to be successful.

And what I want is for salespeople to reach out to me who sell cyber security.

And they resonated with the problem I kind of outlined there because my company has developed tools to help help be that universal translator between the salesperson who is trying to guide the CISO or the security professional into talking to the budget holder.

And you can get to me by going to threatcaptain.com or you can hang out with me on my, my new podcast.

I'm going to.

So when.

When David's like, dude, you want to be on my podcast?

I'm like, bro, that sounds cool.

I should have one too.

And so we're going to be creating a community just for salespeople, particularly salespeople of managed service providers.

So owners, if you own a managed service provider and you want to get out of owner led sales or you have a sales team that you want me to nurture.

Yeah.

Go to threatcaptain.com or find me on LinkedIn and we'll have a conversation.

Cool stuff, man.

That's, that's, that's definitely broad.

I've never had any.

Anybody offer Space Whiskey on the.

On the podcast.

But who knows?

I might, might have to get in on that.

That so well.

So I do want to say one last thing about the space whiskey, because it's cool.

The way I'm aging the whiskey in space is using sound waves because in zero G, the alcohol doesn't interact with the wood chips.

So you have to shake it and you have to shake it like a paint mixer.

You hit it with sound waves.

Well, if I'm using sound waves, that means I can sell the soundtrack.

So I'm selling the soundtrack to rock bands.

And so we have our first $25,000 investment on the soundtrack.

So one track equals $25,000.

And so I'm going through all of the names you would know and rock and getting them to put 25k in to actually put one of their songs on the soundtrack.

So if you know any musicians who are wanting to pay a little money to have the first ever whiskey in human history aged by their music, I'd love to talk to them too.

Hey, well, hopefully we have some big, big names, big names listening and then I can also manage their money if they are, you know, if they meet my minimum standards, you know.

That's right.

Yeah.

80s hair bands will be listening.

So cool.

Oh, can you imagine?

That'd be great.

That would be living on a prayer, right, with space whiskey.

So awesome.

All right, so one more question, and this is one we didn't talk about.

We are the weekly wealth podcast, and we talk about the mindsets, the tactics, and the strategies that can help you to build and maintain wealth.

So.

So, Mr.

Adam Anderson, what is your definition of wealth?

What does wealth mean to you and your family and all the people in your life that you love and care about?

Wealth to me, is the fuel to do what I want, how I want, with.

With who I want.

So when I am without wealth, meaning enough capital, particularly, then that means I'm under resourcing myself for my hobbies, how I want to be a father, how I want to be a brother, how I want to be a son, all of roles I want, I never want to compromise on them, on how I want to show up, which means I need a minimum level of financial wealth and a minimum level of time wealth.

And so for me, my Venn diagram is pretty, pretty simple.

I want a.

An appropriate amount of money with an appropriate amount of free time, where I have the freedom to build the life that I want to build.

You're a smart dude, I got to say that.

I mean, you don't look that bright.

But, you know, now that I don't.

Smell that br either, you don't smell.

That bright, but that was a pretty insightful answer and I've learned a lot on this podcast.

So this was pretty cool and I'm, I'm glad we, glad we've gotten together.

So make sure that you check out www.threatcaptain.com and then also just we'll put it in the show notes.

But, but look up Adam Anderson on, on, on, on LinkedIn and look for the one that has the rocket.

So, you know, when your last name is Anderson, you know, there may be, there may be one or two more.

That's one of the benefits of having my last name.

You don't.

You don't get it mistaken for other people very often.

So awesome, man.

Well, good stuff.

I'm looking forward to catching up with you in person next month and really enjoyed your insight, your sense of humor, and actually, you do have the coolest zoom background graphics that I've seen.

So make sure that you check this video out on YouTube when it comes out as well.

Well, good deal.

We'll talk to you next time.

And until next episode, I wish everybody a blessed week.

Thanks, Adam.

Thank you.

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