Steph Charbonneau - Investing in Culture, & Securely Automating IT Processes

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Steph, the senior director of product strategy and data security at HelpSystems. And they discuss how HelpSystems allows you to securely automate many of your IT processes, how investing in your company culture pays dividends many times over, and why it's beneficial to keep organizational hierarchies as flat as possible. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Steph at 00:00:43) Funny story. I went through university. I went to Waterloo for computer science, and a lot of good minds have gone through that. And then, you know, Microsoft has scooped up a lot of them. A lot of my peers were actually part of the team that wrote NT back in the day, Windows NT. But I remember sitting in a crypto course way back then and just happy to get through it because I'll never see this again. This was never going to do anything to do with crypto. I just got through the exam. And the first job I got out of university went to do some consulting work with Microsoft and some other folks. And then I got into teaching PKI of all things, public key infrastructure, crypto to the world. So went out there, traveled the world, teaching how keys work and how do you encrypt things and got to some very complicated stuff very quickly. It's just funny as you go through and things trip on, you just never dismiss it because you never know where it's going to end up and what value you could bring with that because it's all part of the toolkit you bring with yourself as you get to your next gig or your next opportunity, working through that process. So it's been a fun journey for sure so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:45) Is that where you're at today? Is it automation, cybersecurity, keys?

(Steph at 00:01:51) It's kind of switched over. I started off with the crypto piece from an education perspective, teaching people that. But I got into consulting and, similar to maybe a little bit of your beginnings, got into consulting work with the government around Y2K, right? So they had to migrate a bunch of stuff from a Unix environment to Microsoft-based email system. And so we got into the process of writing some code to help migrate some technology, work through that process. And then from that learned a lot about security. I was always intrigued by security at the very beginning. You know, how do phone systems work? And, you know, from an ethical hacker perspective, what are possible things to do and just kind of play with that because it was fun. It's a game. It's a real life game. Do no harm, but just to learn through that process. But as I got really good at security, understanding and bringing that to the customers and helping them lock down their environments to understand what are the vulnerabilities, work through that process. And then I got into the PKI teachings, you know, how do I encrypt things, how do I protect things. Then I quickly went from what wasn't interesting for me was more the infrastructure piece, like routers and Cisco and those types of devices, but really around the data and people write files and they send emails and they get transmitted around. I always thought there was a lot of lack in that space. They had some crypto at the end. They had users who had to figure out when to apply that secret button to say, okay, go protect it now. They didn't understand when to apply that. So there's a lot of gaps in that technology. So I focused a lot on—we started a little consulting gig on creating a software that would just tell you what the sensitivity of the email was, and then have it slowly over time start building these security measures. So automatically apply encryption if you wanted to. Or if you're sending stuff outside of, and at that point, it would have been for government department, if you're sending out to the public, maybe you should warn them, hey. You're sending something on the outside. You sure you want to do that? And really try to bridge that gap between the user experience and getting into security. And then as I transitioned through that, what was interesting is that there's a lot of specialty software out there that just kind of solve the pieces of the puzzle for data security. I've got really good crypto, I've got DLP technology, I've got all these other things that help protect. But what was missing in all the frameworks, they started off with talking around, you need to know what the data is. Once you know what the data is, then you can start building the logic around that. So I spent a lot of time working on understanding how all these other technologies work, what were the gaps and how can I tie the data identity to all these different pieces of software? So how does DLP recognize, hey, this is something I need to block, warn, work with the user, and to do it in a way that's actually easy for the user to understand and work through the process. And we were very manual at the very beginning, Joel. So we started working through on forcing users to do all this stuff. But now with advancement of technology, we've gotten to the point where I can try to automate as much as possible. Right? So if I can, if I'm pretty sure the stuff you're sending looks like it's sensitive and it's going outside or today, you know, people worrying around privacy information, is there personal data in there? Is there an address? Beyond the simple credit cards—I figure people have figured out the credit card piece—the things around my personal identity, my address and other things that regulatory bodies are worried about today. How do I automatically trigger those things to help that user along? And, you know, one of the analogies I typically do around that is to explain spell checking. Now, you'll probably remember back in the early days, you'd create a document, you'd have to go through a whole process to spell check, and you'd start the process, you'd spend a couple hours fixing the grammar and working through that work. Today, nobody thinks about that. That just happens in the background. It kind of goes through. And so we're bringing that kind of experience back to the data identity to make that as easy as possible so that now we can get back to protecting data. So that's where I spend a lot of my time is trying to automate as much as possible and move us towards other data security solutions as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:52) So help me understand the difference between Titus and HelpSystems.

(Steph at 00:05:56) You bet. Titus, we started back in '95. We created a software company. Before that, it was a consulting company around security products and, you know, working with the government, military, and banks, whether it be crypto, just securing their environment or training them on security, a bit of a consulting firm there. And then Titus, we started a data classification software, again, talking to the government customer who wanted to label things very simply so that the downstream—in 2005, we created the software business at that point. And then we kept working on the data identity. So that's Titus. And then last year, so it's been a year now in June 2020, HelpSystems acquired data classification and Boldon James, two data classification solutions around the first stage of data security. So I want to be able to label, classify, and protect information. And then HelpSystems itself had started off around 35 years ago focusing on IBM automated-type security. But the last number of years, they focused on providing security products. And they saw the value of being able to identify the data to be able to then play in the DLP space or in file transfer technology, or even automating technology. Having a bigger player in cybersecurity to be able to provide data security suites to customers is something that was important to them. And the thing that really attracted us as we were looking for a home for the data classification bit was to understand what kind of company are they? How do they engage with customers? This is very important for us that, one, our employees are very happy with the process and they're very people-oriented type of organization, much more than some of the other strategics we might have looked at where it might have been a code grab for the technology. So it was very important for them for the people, but also what were they trying to solve. And they're trying to solve data security is very important for them. They're bringing a lot of good technologies together to solve that challenge without looking at just building feature sets, right? If you're looking at building a feature within an application, you just keep growing it. You have to keep evolving these new wings of what you're building, whereas HelpSystems has acquired a bunch of little companies. Now we're working at making these things play well together. And, you know, Titus was the starting of that journey of identifying, tagging information so that the rest of the environment understood what to do with it, whether it's file transfer, they just acquired DRM technology as well to play a bigger player within the data security space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:44) You were one of the founders of Titus. Correct?

(Steph at 00:08:47) I was. Yeah, I guess I've missed that piece. Yeah, I was one of the co-founders back in Titus. So we'd started off this process to build out software. What was interesting for me through the process is, because I did the security consulting before, I thought hard stuff is what we had to do and figure out, how does all this technology loop together. I had not, I had missed the opportunity at the beginning to realize that sometimes simple is better to get through and bring through the process. And, you know, I had these visions of very complicated technology coming together to solve these challenges, whereas the customer was, no, we just want something like a little label, that little drop-down, something to start, get me started on my journey. And we will iterate and build on that. And that's something I learned through starting that organization with the other co-founders as well and bringing it through the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) So who did you start that with?

(Steph at 00:09:42) Other founders were Tim Upton from Ottawa and Charlie Polfer. They've both since retired and are enjoying what they've done and kind of worked at it. A little bit older than I am and they're in a good place. I'm still part of the journey. I think the things we're trying to solve today still need to be done. So I'm not done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) What were their expertise?

(Steph at 00:10:05) Yeah, so Tim would have been kind of visionary energy. You would have felt from the guy, you'd walk into a room and just knew that there was something to solve, and you're just happy to be there and challenge the norm to get, go through that process, you know. You know, I call crap on that activity. I think we could do a better way. We need something simple and converting our basic principles around what we're trying to do. So that related to the business buyer. As an example, he would have done something like, hey, we're doing data classification. That's not very sexy. If you just talk about a technology, that sounds kind of lame. You're just labeling stuff, and then you hope the technology downstream works. He's no, no, no. It's we're like the driver in a car. So we're in the car with a Volvo. You like driving a Volvo, why? It's safe, it's protected. But then, you know, the car is going to beep at you and automation was coming in warning you around the policy, you're about to crash, brakes on for you. And so try to find a way to bring what we did from a very simple perspective to what people can relate to from a day-to-day perspective. And so that was kind of what he brought to the table. He had a business degree driving through that and trying to get that energy. Charlie Polfer, on the other side, he spent some time at Microsoft and he focused around marketing. So he was looking at, you know, I think we have a product here, here's how we package it, here's how we get together from making it palatable for customers, how do we move from a government-focused business to something that we can now scale at. Let's get to commercial. Let's get to finance. Let's get to these other things. With these tweaks, we can change the product to address there. So he was more on the marketing side. So then we get Tim on the business side, really driving the ideation. I was just there to help make sure the technology made sense and the things we spend our time on were going to help solve these two ideas coming from these folks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) I like that.

(Steph at 00:11:58) And we also had great programmers too, right? It's not just a three-person team, but we'd start off with a small team, but grew to just under 200 people by the time we got acquired last year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:09) I think you nailed it though, the way you described that. It's not just about the three people, but kind of is because those are the three foundational people to which everything else sort of stems from because the behavior within an organization is contagious. Right? So you being the foundation, and that's why I was really interested to understand what their strengths were and the three of you fitting together. It's, I mean, you have a visionary. You have somebody that can market it and do the communication of it, and then you have someone who can execute, which is you. You can execute and bring the vision to life, but they're all required. You have to have the vision, you have to have the marketing to get the customers to drive the dollars, and then you have to have the product to actually deliver it to the customers.

(Steph at 00:12:53) Absolutely. I think it's been a great journey. I had a lot of great fun and we had a lot of cool experiences with the company going through and bringing those ideas to life. It's just, it's humbling, right? So you kind of go through, you start the process as an idea and, you know, do you take the chance? I could have been an employee somewhere else, you know, Tim, that's a lot of great thinking. But, you know, why should I take a chance? I got a family who's just about to start. What's different about us that another company can't already do? And just stepping out of your comfort zone to be able to push yourselves and then have employees that get excited by that, see that and believe in that idea. And then being smart about how you grow that—not super fast. One thing we never did is we never took outside investment, with the exception that near the end, in the last four or five years, we started looking to how do we scale this organization to be something a lot bigger than what it started out to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:53) Yes. Yes. Well, I mean, you took it when it was right. Right? You know, the business changes and grows and evolves and it needs different things as an infant versus a toddler versus a teenager. Right?

(Steph at 00:14:06) Yeah. And as you're building it, the one thing I've also learned is, you know, you look at what the technology is out there and it all comes back to what I talked about, simplifying our expectations of what the technology should do and not always go for the most complicated thing and try to figure out because the simple things might actually win the day. And, as I look at certain pivot points along our journey, I look at at what point could we have crashed, you could have gone and started a business and then made a wrong move at the beginning. And then you might as well start with a new idea and try something different and move on. So what are your pivot points to go through that? And there's two pieces to that. One is understanding what the customers are really emotional about, what you're trying to solve. Do they have to solve that today?

(Steph at 00:14:53) Then can I do that very simple way and then try to think of where they need to be in the next few years? It's going to take you some time to get there. And if you can see a path between what I can solve today and then understand where that can evolve to, but always talk to your customer in between these stages because you might need to pivot and end up somewhere slightly different than you saw it. And unless you've got some really trusted, close customers to kind of work with you through that process, it's really a guessing game. And it can be a little unnerving as you start a business to make sure you like lots of little mini pivots that you make along the way.

(Steph at 00:15:24) But having, talking to customers, keep that, do whatever you need to do to get that customer happy, kind of work with them, solve the problems that need to be solving today. And typically, they're very understanding that, you know, it may not be perfect at first, but you can still evolve that solution to something they need tomorrow, kind of work through that, and they get involved and they get emotional, part of the process as well, kind of those early adopter customers through the process. And then, you know, now we're at the point where we're doing a lot more enterprise type customers, and they've got slightly different things. So you may have to have your A game on by the time you start hitting large American banks. And then, you know, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of seats and people working with different demands.

(Steph at 00:16:06) And to scale it to that is slightly different than as you start off a brand new organization when you're looking at customers, maybe two, three hundred seats to start off with to get things right. But those foundations really helped us kind of evolve to something that we could solve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) Was this your first business that you founded?

(Steph at 00:16:25) It was. It is. And you can call me a lifer through this process. Right? So we switched over from consulting into getting well founded in technologies. I had a really good breadth into different technologies around the security space.

(Steph at 00:16:42) And I picked the one thing that was hard around data. No one likes, there's two things people don't like. People have a hard time working with data and how do I make sure it stays relevant? Or if I encrypt it, how do I make sure all my downstream technologies work with it? Right? So if I encrypt it, does it become garbage now unless you're talking to the right vendor to unlock that and it becomes harder to work with. And the other area was working with the users. No one likes, very few people like to write endpoint software because you've got the Mac, you've got all these different platforms you need to write for. And that seems to be evolving over time. So now you can do Java stuff, you can do kind of more web-based technology to cover off.

(Steph at 00:17:21) But trying to simplify that and cover where the customers need to be is something we spent, I spent a lot of time trying to solve. So those two areas have been very kind of focal from my perspective. But yeah, it's just the one that we founded, spent all their time and energy on, and kind of got us where we are, where we ended up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) Can you walk me through, like, I have no understanding of your business. Walk me through an actual use case of how someone would use the technology, like a real legitimate example.

(Steph at 00:17:52) Alright. Joel, so, you know, you're going to send me a message or you can send, there's someone else within Modern CTO. One of your, you talked about your producers, your team, you have different staff hanging around. So I'm going to start, you're going to start sending some information. And you're going to put some credit card information. Hey, I got this great gig coming up, and send some information, and you fill out an email.

(Steph at 00:18:13) Email is very helpful, right? Because it'll go through and it says, oh, you sent this stuff before. Let me autofill that for you. And it's going to go off to some other stuff that's either someone on the outside or myself to a different organization. And so we can actually walk through it, and it sees a credit card or sees an attachment you put on, and maybe it's a resume, maybe it's something else that should be protected.

(Steph at 00:18:33) And so our client software will sit there and just say, hey, you're sending it to the wrong person. You sure you meant to do that? And, you know, there's so much, you know, heavier, but to kind of situations where the return on investment on having that one executive blocks that one email going to the wrong person on the outside where that could be very costly for an organization. That's the simplest use case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) Well, that's pretty neat.

(Steph at 00:18:56) Yeah. We call that protect, you know, protect from stupid sometimes. Right? So people make mistakes, not because they're stupid. We don't give them a hard time, but more around the idea that people are busy, people are pushed really hard.

(Steph at 00:19:09) And we just want to be that kind of security buddy on your shoulder as you're working, helping you, watching what you're doing and helping if you're doing something that's obviously not the right thing. Kind of work through that daily task that you're working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) Yeah. Because in the email protocol, there's no confirmation concept. Right? And in the actual email underlying protocols. So you can be a layer on top of that. That's pretty neat.

(Steph at 00:19:37) Yep. Now you're part of the process. Right? So you think about, I came back to the driving Volvo scenario where you've got alerts happening as you're driving, you're about to hit someone. Right? And it just automatically stops. So now we should look at DLP. Some of that stuff is there as well, but that's typically after it's left you. Right? So it's gone to the network burner. You're sending an email through, and you're hoping something down the road is going to pick this up. And then if it's bad and if it's able to figure it out without the help of the user, it'll send it back to you. Right? But if it didn't, it'll go off, and then off it goes, and we can't call it back. But if I can save that step of sending it to something else and just do it as I hit send right now, solve the problem before it actually becomes a problem. And that's helpful, right, in real time.

(Steph at 00:20:21) And that's kind of what we focus on, the real time. Now we also do other stuff from after the fact, your data at rest, your repository, you got stuff that's being stored in your servers, whether it be cloud or on-prem, that has consequences to organizations. We can help there as well. But I think the most powerful one is the stuff that's happening live to the CEO. Because they, again, it comes back to the emotion factor to that person who says you just saved a breach right now. What's happening real time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) Now do you guys get into, I had this friend that I met, and he had, it was like a Mac type tray application where you could take screenshots and send them over. And he ended up, I think one of the lines of business that his company grew into was preventing data from leaving the organization, I think. But through screenshots. So if I took a screenshot of something and it had my customer's Social Security number in it, or it could scan through your Amazon storage, and it could help you basically not leak personal identification information. Do you guys get into that type of world?

(Steph at 00:21:33) We definitely get into that world. We get into, you know, if it's just in the email body, you can go scan that and take a look at that. And we actually use machine learning to kind of look at stuff that's beyond just a number. Right? So is it a credit card with other things that help support the strength of that?

(Steph at 00:21:49) So you're reducing the false positives through that. The screen capture one is, again, it comes back to our security, my security background. Right? So can we go through and block screen sharing? Well, you might have some digital rights management software that helps prevent that at the OS layer to be able to protect that. So from our policy pieces, if we see that information and then we can tell the OS to stop blocking that piece.

(Steph at 00:22:13) Now within HelpSystems, they've acquired DRM solutions, so we could automatically encrypt that thing using that technology from HelpSystems. Vera is the tech product they acquired to that. So they can go through and protect data itself, whether it's an attachment or whether it's email. But from a scanning environment for stuff that's at risk, right? So if I'm a bank environment, or if I'm just a regular business, and I have a bunch of PCI credit card information or personal information sitting in my network storage, I need to know about that because the auditor can come check for that and there could be fines, kind of go through that. So we will help scan and look for that information.

(Steph at 00:22:52) Now the data loss prevention, keeping that go out there. So we have technologies that can play in that space as well, but you can also educate those other technologies, what is the value of the asset that's coming through, the data coming through there. So if I can look for a label on it, it says this has PCI information. This has sensitive information. This is internal use only. This is intended for project ABC. And it's going to someone who's not part of project ABC. So either we're at the data processing stage, or if you have something downstream that's going to move that later, it can know that just by understanding the asset, the tags that are under the identity of the data, that it doesn't have to guess at the value of that asset. So that's what we're focusing on. And HelpSystems is going to help round off the rest of that piece of the puzzle.

(Steph at 00:23:47) But not only from HelpSystems, whether or not, you know, your friend's got some technology there, if they can look at our tags, then they can already benefit from that, working with user, bring that part in, or automatically applying that and then telling that downstream technology to do something with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) When you wake up and go to work, do you feel like you're going to work at Titus or HelpSystems?

(Steph at 00:24:05) It's a good question. I look at the journey from understanding data to then security. I've always been data security focused. So whether, and I understand the digital rights management, you know, Microsoft has got some rights management software they've had from way back, and I've been there since the very beginning, and we helped create their own training software to understand that. I explained that only because from when I start, I think about how do we protect people's data.

(Steph at 00:24:33) And so we started that journey with Titus. And then we started venturing into that whole DRM technology, whether we cooperate, partner, or build that process. And then it came to realization, listen, I can't solve this journey on our own. We need to work with someone else. This is why we went through the process of trying to be part of a bigger solution set. So when I wake up in the morning, I'm stuck in case still about data, but now it's part of the bigger puzzle. And my role is as a product strategist within the data security portfolio.

(Steph at 00:25:07) So how does all this stuff come together? So I've transitioned over to being part of a bigger solution because I think there's more value in that, and then understanding how these things come together. Now, when I started off this journey, it was always I was hoping to get the attention of these other vendors. Hey, we've got these tags, you got the stuff you can use. We want to work with your technology, makes a lot of sense. And we played with the McAfee's and Symantecs and all these other big players, and we've worked really well together.

(Steph at 00:25:32) But you don't have a lot of influence on what their, you know, roadmap may look like. Now we can actually build something very exciting. Now we've got a range of these different products. We can come together and build something better than the old, you know, one plus one equals three adage. So that's what I kind of switched over.

(Steph at 00:25:51) Still very close to, you know, people that we came through this journey from a Titus perspective, but building something bigger and better is important for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:00) When HelpSystems started buying these other products and bringing these teams together, did they make sure that these other companies had similar culture so it was a smooth transition?

(Steph at 00:26:10) Yeah. They're very much people oriented. So one of the things they look at is who's there. They've got a really good layer as far as, you know, working from a strategy perspective. How do these things roughly fit together without solving the entire problem?

(Steph at 00:26:24) Because we want the people that are coming, part of the organization, to help get to the finishing line. Right? Because each of these products have a journey. They've had roadmaps. They have certain reasons they ended up where they are, and they need to be part of that discussion on how to move forward. Otherwise, you're blocked. Otherwise, you're just told you're buying technology for the sake of buying technology. That's not always the best thing. So yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) Tell me about the culture on your, at least I know HelpSystems. I mean, I looked at the notes. You guys have, you know, 700, 800 employees. I don't know if that's the official number that you produce, but that's what I think we got from LinkedIn. That's a lot of people. Right? And so you can't have a personal relationship with all of them. But how would you describe the culture within your teams or the people that you interact with? What's the single biggest culture item that you guys discuss around the office?

(Steph at 00:27:15) I'm super surprised and happy about the fact that they're very people oriented. For them, it's very important to recognize, celebrate wins. And they'll have a full company meetings. And it's over 1,200 people now. So the numbers, you know, 750 were before some of these acquisitions. So they're a little over 1,250 or something like that, give or take, 10, 20, 50, whatever the number is.

(Steph at 00:27:38) But they take the time to recognize, and CEO will actually call in through an acquisition, you know, make sure, go call each of the employees. Normally, they'd all come together, walk the room, spend 10 minutes talking to people. But now acquisitions through this time is a little bit different, so they're doing stuff through Teams meeting or Zoom meetings or whatever, just to make sure their voices are heard. But they like to reach out to talk to each of the employees as well. Something that's very important for them, which is surprising for some of the other strategics that we were looking at. Definitely different vibes, and which is why we really like this organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) How long do you think it'll be before you would use the word we instead of they? You think it's a couple years or, I'm curious about that.

(Steph at 00:28:30) I think it takes time. Right? And, you know, I had a couple of people call that out as well. They say, hey, Steph, you don't always use we. And it's, we try to do this we culture. And you should start using we more often. And it's, I think what's missing is because we're so separate, I'm in an environment that's no different than what I would have been pre-acquisition. And we haven't had that move of sitting into something that says HelpSystems. I think there's some visual clues that are throwing me off and not making my pivot. Plus it's 15 years worth of working every day pushing Titus piece.

(Steph at 00:29:05) Then, yes, I totally see what we need to be doing from a HelpSystems perspective. I think there's a lot more value. And for me to say we, and I hadn't been checking on my words up to this point, but it's something that's been pointed out. I think it just takes time to work through. And I think working with the rest of the teams to be part of, as we're talking to the other, you know, DRM technology or DLP technologies there at HelpSystems, as we start building these really tight couplings of the products, then that becomes easier for me to start thinking, okay, we as a product have something that we can offer to customers, as I've been focused right now on taking what we've built before and making it part of the family.

(Steph at 00:29:44) So I still see us as this kind of transition process to get the teams in, which is probably what's holding me back a little bit. But the visual clues, just there's nothing's really changed around me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) Yeah. Because we're all work from home now. Right? And

(Steph at 00:29:59) That's it. Yeah. And I've been pleasantly surprised how the teams have transitioned through that. We'd had some people who had started off by saying, "Oh, I can't wait to get back in the office." Right?

(Steph at 00:30:12) So you're two months in, three months in. No one knew how long this was going to go. It's like, "Oh, we got to get back. We got to sit by the water cooler." We just had a survey and it appears about three-quarters of people are happy working from home now. "I can get so much done. I don't have to commute. I don't have to worry about that. I can roll out of bed," and you're assuming that I'm not in my PJs right now. I've got a shirt on, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:35) I hope you are. Yeah.

(Steph at 00:30:38) We're getting stuff done, and I can meet customers from all corners of the world, just time permitting as far as the daytime. But I can have 20 different meetings across North America without jumping in a plane right now and have a meaningful conversation in an hour with a customer and then switch over, and right away I'm talking to someone else and giving some input, and then collaborating with people in the UK or Australia. This is all happening real time. Now, not to say that not getting in front of the customer is not important, because I'm looking forward to the day that I can actually get out there and talk to them, because that's where you get the real gist of what's happening. The one-hour meetings are still fairly formal and chatting, but it's when you're having, you know, after you get out of the work scenario and have a chat with people, I think you get to the real "What are people trying to solve? Tell me about your pain points, not just about what the board has told you, but what is really happening and how can we help you move that process?" And it just takes time. And so I look forward to the days that we can still do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:35) What do you think about, or have you gotten to see in the news-type articles about the different communications that they're doing? Like, they're building these phone booths where you could almost see a 3D replica of the person. They've got all these different technologies to try to make the bandwidth and the conversation and the interaction higher. Have you seen any of these?

(Steph at 00:31:57) I've seen a few things, and even the headsets, right? So you're going to go through and do the VR and kind of get into a virtual room where we're now virtual images of each other talking to each other. Haven't really—I don't see that progressing enough to make that change yet. But the one thing we do need to figure out is how do we collaborate in a way that's meaningful and still be remote? We're an international organization. No matter if we open our offices again tomorrow, we still have people who are working over in the UK and Australia, different parts of the world, and they need to be part of it as if they're sitting here together and collaborating. And as you know, as inventors, kind of working through problem sets as teams of engineers, there's so much value in sitting there in front of a whiteboard and just taking a little sticky notes and going through scrums and trying to figure out all the different ideas. And still looking for that technology that allows us to do that, make us feel closer and actually be part of that process, that creativity process.

(Steph at 00:32:58) I think we need to—I don't know if technology can help there, or it's going to be a mixture. I think we'll have core groups in certain organizations, in a certain location, and then maybe a few people on the outside joining. Maybe those TV—separate TV for each person to make it feel like they're an individual or be part of it. Maybe that'll happen, but not seeing too much of it yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:19) I don't think it'll catch on with the VR goggles. I just don't like them. Yeah. That's how I go off of stuff. I'll go to a trade show or convention, you know, and put on the next gen whatever, and it's like the field of view is small. It doesn't really seem that useful. It's not as impressive as I thought. But then the other day, I saw that they're using these lasers to create these legitimate holograms. Like, you can see them from 360. So they take one laser and they trap a piece of dust in the air, like a small piece of dust, and they can control its positioning with a beam.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) And then they take another laser and actually illuminate it. And they made these little, um, like lightsabers and stuff that you can—it's like a legitimate lightsaber. You don't need any sort of—there's no screen. There's no goggles. There's nothing. Because it's actually there, you know? And I was blown away by it. They're only doing it on really, really, really small scales right now, these little holographic displays. But it's even hard because marketing teams over the course of the past two decades, they've butchered every word. So there's no good word. If I say holographic display, everyone thinks, like, whatever the holograph—like, you know, with the little screen that they have or a reflection in a piece of glass or something. There's nothing. There's just the laser illuminating the particles in front of you. It's fantastic.

(Steph at 00:34:42) That reminds you of Star Wars, like the little creatures playing video games-type things. That'd be—that's interesting. I have not—I haven't been to a trade show in quite some time, Joel. I know. I know. So it's having to go see that, walk the floor and see what's out there. That sounds kind of interesting. How do you get the sticky notes on the wall? That's what I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) This is step one. This is the drop down, right? This is the visionary, like, let's just make it so we can have some element. And then I think we're just—I think the underlying technologies need to develop better. I don't think it's going to be with headsets because they're so uncomfortable to wear.

(Steph at 00:35:19) So one thing, Joel, I'll say that this world has allowed us to, I think, reach out to talent that doesn't have to be in your city either, right? So one of the good things that's happened over the last year, where there's always a hesitancy, "Oh, you can't be local, I'm looking for a local person to kind of fit the team"—that's gone away. So now I can get an expert that's sitting in Singapore to be part of the team and kind of working through and ideating if they can really push the boundaries. I think that's pretty interesting. That's kind of opened up our horizon as to where do we look for talent and kind of make them part of the team and grow the team. So I think that's very interesting. There's one thing we're doing in late June, we're having a little data security conference. I thought I'd at least talk about that. So we've got four or five days, June 21st to 25th, we're going to get a bunch of customers, prospects, partners together to kind of talk about data security in general. You know, data security has been part of my upbringing and it's, you know, part of my DNA. And as we're going into HelpSystems, you know, HelpSystems is really trying to drive that messaging around data security being important.

(Steph at 00:36:23) And they are a serious player in that space based on the acquisitions and stuff, and the type of people they're bringing into the portfolio. So this virtual conference—I'm not sure they're going to have the laser kind of PR-type capabilities at this point—but at least have a conversation around, you know, what is HelpSystems doing for them to help them kind of round off their data security strategies, whether just a small piece of what we're doing or the bigger suite as well. So that's coming at the end of the month. I thought I'd at least mention that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) Yeah, man. Let's plug it. That's what we're here to do. Alright. So we'll put links in the show notes too. So what's the topic and what are the dates again?

(Steph at 00:37:01) So it's June 21st to 25th, 2021. So it will be a virtual conference and it's Data Security Week, basically. Just from HelpSystems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:10) Excellent. So people can go register for that. We'll put the links in the show notes. They can come check it out.

(Steph at 00:37:15) You got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) Any—what are the top speakers or what are the top topics?

(Steph at 00:37:20) Well, we're looking from a pragmatic approach to getting to data security, right? So people have not started down this path or they're customers of HelpSystems and they've gone into automation and tried to, you know, other pieces of the solution that may exist within their environment. So how do I start the journey of identifying or protecting information and DLP? We've got a bunch of tools, but if I didn't use those tools before, I don't know where to start. So it'll be sessions just talking about that or how does it work with regulations coming down, whether it's CCPA out of North America, California Consumer Protection Act, or GDPR if you're international and got some Europeans. How do I start that journey and help protect that information and then just through its lifecycle? So all kinds of great sessions just to get educated on how HelpSystems works, but we also tie into any stuff that already exists. We just help them make it better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:13) Excellent. What other call to action do we have for this? Like, people want to learn more about your company and possibly they could use the product that you have. How would they do that?

(Steph at 00:38:25) So we have a great website for people to go to, helpsystems.com, and then, you know, look at the different portfolio products that we have from a data security perspective. There's lots of great—you can get into trials, take a look at some of the software. You know, happy to reach out and have conversations with people on what their needs are. I spend my day talking to the engineering team, trying to figure out what our way forward is from a technology perspective. But that, you know, has to be married with talking to customers and prospects and understanding what's in their head, what's real and what are the bad assumptions I've made about what we're building, right? The faster I can get to solving and understanding what bad assumptions I've made, the faster we get to providing value to the customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) I like your style.

(Steph at 00:39:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) I got some leadership questions as we wrap up. We have a few more minutes left. Is that okay?

(Steph at 00:39:14) Sure, alright, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:16) So I was just curious throughout the process, you said 15 years of growing this company, what were the different times that, you know, you bought leadership training? Or did you do it? Or did learning and development do it? How did that happen for you and your team?

(Steph at 00:39:29) That's a really good question. So as you're evolving a company from small—like, we start off with a handful of people, you're four or five people starting a company, you don't have time for some of this training piece. You just get down, get dirty, roll up your sleeves and get a solution that people can start with and understand. Once we start getting into 25, 50 people, you start getting a threshold. I need to get processes. So I start pulling in external people, whether it's a part-time CFO, make sure the finance is there, start building out the sales team. If you don't have a good sales team out there, you're not getting new customers. You're not understanding where they are, what markets you need to get into. So we start to have to hire that talent in, and then you can still control the culture at that point. 50 people is not bad. When you get to 100, now you have to start setting cultures.

(Steph at 00:40:15) And our training has been mostly focused in two areas. One is around, let's say, from a sales perspective, what are methodologies to help them with the messaging, marketing, kind of building out that piece of it. And then there is some culture training to help people better themselves and kind of move them in their own culture. Like, call it blue thinking as well. So strategies of understanding what challenges are in my thinking—we have color coded. Am I thinking green, angry, competitive, or am I trying to solve something and I'm open-minded and looking for a challenge to myself? So just trying to get through that kind of training to really help cement your culture as you grow up. And then the one thing we did as founders going through it is understanding when to pull back. Because, you know, we're really good at being foundational to get started, putting ideas in people's heads. I don't write code anymore, right? You know, I may have looked at code before. I understand the object models, but need to be able to step back and bring the right people to kind of bring it to the next layer because they'll help you grow that company and you can still keep the ideation going. And I think that's really critical, understanding when to pivot on some of those things and then still keep the right creativity in line so it doesn't change and deviate too much. But that would be something I think would be important for your listeners as well to kind of walk through that. And I assume others have gone through the same kind of learning experiences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:43) Yeah. That's why I was curious because typically we'll share some leadership insights or something like that. But I was curious to better understand exactly how these companies grow. And it's, you know, not all the time that somebody's been there since day one, right, to get to talk with them. So when I do have the opportunity to talk to somebody like you, I am curious how it evolved. Now, when—so you hit 100 people, and that's when culture training becomes important, right? And you have time for it because you can't, you know, spend time with everybody. They can't rub the culture off of you by being in the same room with you because you just can't be in the room with 100 people at the same time. But who led that initiative? Was leadership training originally purchased by the CEO, or was it something where they brought in a leadership consultant who eventually came on full time, similar to a CFO, how that would be fractional but then come on full time as the company grew? How did that roll out?

(Steph at 00:42:35) So the rollout would have started with our executive team, which would have been the CEO, CTO, which is my role, and Charlie from a marketing perspective, and just understanding that things just didn't work as smoothly as they did. And understood there's an opportunity here and that we need to grow the organization. And we just didn't have the skill set at that point in time to kind of leap it to that organization. These are, you know, first time we've created an organization, created a company. So we actually reached out to training organizations. We had started hiring some more senior salespeople, and they knew of other methodologies. So it's word of mouth, figured out doing a little bit of research, get some motivational speakers to come in. We'd have, you know, and hire the CFO piece and kind of work through that and work through senior people. One thing that was really critical for us is to make sure that we kept these AGMs, annual general meetings, where it's fun. You'd be at someone's house the first couple of years, and then we started renting places. And then we just made them really cool and exciting. And it was a show. We spent more time on doing internal marketing to ourselves to make sure that we were all having a good time because the return on that is just incredible, right? So you can get everybody motivated together on one train of thought. And we'd have the management team, the executive team doing skits and dances and show tune stuff up on the stage in front of people and having a good time, having a good laugh, or at least it looked like they're laughing and having fun, and maybe they're laughing at us, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:02) A little bit of both. But...

(Steph at 00:44:02) Everybody still talked about it. A little bit of both. But no, they all had a lot of fun, and we made sure people's families were included in these extra times outside of the workplace. We'd have these special events, we'd give back to the community. And then all these internal initiatives, we'd make sure we help grow those initiatives that people thought a certain cause was important. We put that front and center. It's like, that's a great cause. How can we help out with this company and kind of grow that?

(Steph at 00:44:28) And that actually worked. That culture actually flowed really well into HelpSystems because in health systems, their initiatives into the community is very, very strong. It's very important for them as well. And they don't just say that. They actually get into doing some activities, and Habitat for Humanity, something that's very near and dear to what I believe in as well. Giving people homes as an opportunity to kind of grow is something that they have as part of their own culture as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) Has the training, does that roll up into HelpSystems now that you're acquired? Are they handling that?

(Steph at 00:45:03) Yeah, so all that corporate stuff now happens at HelpSystems. And I understand that, right. At HelpSystems, we have to figure out what that culture is so we can cement it, so everyone's talking the same way. And the fact they put customers first, right, I don't care what your strategy is and going through, but as long as it solves a customer problem, and whatever we do, we put customer first, that has to be rolled into a HelpSystems-wide initiative. You can't stay in your own little business unit and hope that you can keep your culture within one little area. It needs to flow across. Otherwise, it's longer before we start using the word "we" as opposed to "they."

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:45) What's the most impactful leadership lesson that you've learned in your career?

(Steph at 00:45:49) Most impactful leadership skill: I don't have to solve everything, right? So I think it's to give everyone an opportunity to have a voice, and you don't have to overpower them. Rank doesn't need to be the most important thing that's happening in your meeting or conversations. Like, a junior programmer comes in, we have a co-op student comes in, I'll sit down with them and, hey, what's going on? What turned you on? What's the type of things you'd like to work on? I don't want you here photocopying stuff for your co-op job. I've been through that process, and it sucks. So I want you to be started on an interesting career. So I think hierarchies, keeping as flat as possible. Now, you have to have title just because it's easier to talk to an enterprise customer or whatever. So just put whatever role you need to be. But as you're working with people, check that in at the door and kind of walk in and make it real. I think that's probably the best impactful thing from a leadership skill that's worked for me and I think is very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:48) I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:50) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.