Pankaj Raval (00:05)
All right, everyone, welcome back to Letters of Intent. I am your co-host, Pankaj Ravel, and I’m here today with my co-host, Sahil Chaudry. Sahil, how are you doing today?

Sahil (00:16)
Yes, Pankaj I am very excited for today’s guest. I feel like we are increasingly living in a digital world and security and cybersecurity has become a very important part of our lives. So I’m very excited for us to welcome Rudy Ordaz, the CEO of DataWise Networks. I think we’re gonna learn a lot today.

Pankaj Raval (00:34)
I agree. is definitely, there’s a lot to be learned here in cybersecurity for me especially, deal with some issues regarding privacy and terms of use and things like that. But I think, you know, the world of cybersecurity could be said to be fairly fairly cryptic. I’m sure Rudy will be telling us a little bit more about that. So Rudy, without further ado, welcome to the podcast. We’re so glad you could join us today.

Rudy Ordaz (00:55)
Yeah, thank you Pankaj and Sahil. It’s great to be here. I’m excited. You know, I’m trying to do this more often and, you get better at being a guest. So I appreciate you guys having me on.

Pankaj Raval (01:06)
Yeah, a pleasure to have you. You and I really have met lunch a few times. We’ve chatted a few times in the past. I what you’ve done, your entrepreneurial journey in terms of cybersecurity and how that’s changed over the I want to us back to how you first got into cybersecurity and tell us a little bit about what got you into this field and maybe a little bit about how it’s changed where we are today.

Rudy Ordaz (01:28)
Yeah, definitely. started back in the late 90s. My first technical job was working at a help desk supporting a mainframe computer, like ancient history. was a lot of a buzz and there was a lot of excitement challenges of what we thought were going to be.

You know, banks were going to stop working. The lights were not going to be on anymore. that was boom tech jobs. And I happened to be working for a large company at the time I was doing you know, running a check sorter, which was more of a entry level or remedial job. But as I was there already a couple of years and I learned the system, how it worked as this need for more tech professionals came on.

Pankaj Raval (01:50)
Right.

Rudy Ordaz (02:11)
I was able to work at a help desk and then start my IT, if you will, ⁓ career from there. from there, I did work for a few corporate players. that was with a company called EDS, was a very big consulting company at the time. I worked for Northrop Grummond, Magellan GPS, and then a few…

consulting companies along the way. And I really got my entrepreneurial journey started 08 when the financial crash happened. You know, everybody was, a lot of people were getting laid off and I was part of that. I did get laid off, but it allowed me to then explore, working on my own. ended up working as a one man consultant and I was, you know, working with small businesses

helping them with their IT. was from simple tasks all the way to people were starting to go to the cloud and learning about cybersecurity. And so it was kind of a nice inflection and good timing for me to kind of start my entrepreneurial journey at that time.

Pankaj Raval (03:08)
Yeah,

absolutely.

Sahil (03:09)
I want to ask just about how you went from your initial job working with this computer mainframe to developing your skill set in tech. mean, at some point it feels like you were a self-starter. You decided you were going to learn and develop this expertise, which not everyone does they’re at their first job. So how did that click, that idea that, okay, this is the space I need to get into and this is what I need to learn?

Rudy Ordaz (03:35)
Yeah, that’s a good question Sahil I don’t do a lot of reading, but one book that, you know, kind taught how to like start a small business and kind of the, framework for that the E myth by Michael Gerber. learned this was after the fact, I learned that, you know, most small businesses are started by technicians, you know, whether you work on computers.

Pankaj Raval (03:47)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (03:57)
hair, you’re a plumber, you know, you have some kind of technical skill that you then wake up one day and say, you know what, I can do this better than whoever I’m working for, or I can do this better, you know, if I just go out on my own. so you, you take that leap. And I definitely had that entrepreneurial itch and said, you know, I’m going to, I want to start something on my own. think I can help individuals on my own, but then what ends up happening if you want to have small business.

Is you have to learn to be also a manager. So, you know, paperwork and running a business and then you have to also be an entrepreneur. And so entrepreneur, manager and a technician. I believe those are the three components that I learned from reading that book and that, and I kind of still, you know, hold to that. As far as like technical skills, there’s so many in IT, you know, there’s,

There’s networking, there’s cloud, there’s cybersecurity. There’s so many different things that IT and cybersecurity professionals need to be good at to be good at their I think it’s like in a lot of different industries, but I definitely had to learn to have that both mindsets. a technician or I’m an engineer one day and then…

I want to start a business and now how do I grow the business? How do I keep employees? How do I eventually buy another company? How do I sell that company? So there’s different, there’s definitely two sides of the brain when you’re business and, you’re also delivering service and, know, staying on top of the industry and trying to make sure you, you know, the trends and then, know, a little bit enough of everything to stay dangerous. But again,

then you gotta assemble the right team, right? Like you have to have the right partners in place and you have to the right employees that you’re hiring at the right time. So a little winded with my answer, but I think that’s mentally kind of put that together as far as skills that have helped me run a company.

Pankaj Raval (05:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s great. Yeah. And I definitely want a little bit deeper into that. I mean, I think just kind of backing up also a little bit, I just realized like we haven’t really understood what cybersecurity is. So I’d to like have you give us a little bit of overview of cybersecurity, because I feel term is thrown around all the time, but it probably, it sounds like it’s comprised of a lot of different skill sets.

Rudy Ordaz (06:12)
It is, and know, cybersecurity and AI, you know, they’re hot industry, like, you know, Wall Street loves them because there’s a lot of money being invested into them. there’s been, big companies that have come out of those spaces and cybersecurity has existed and is, has been part of securing data for many years. It just wasn’t coined, but

When I talk to business owners and they say, well, am I doing cybersecurity? Do I have it? Like, you know, people don’t, don’t realize like it’s not, yeah, am I secure yet? Like I still get these emails that look threatening or like they say I should do this and that. And so, I try to boil it down to like five key points of what a business is doing or an IT partner is doing. one, do you have multifactor authentication?

Pankaj Raval (06:39)
Yeah. Am I secure? Yeah.

Sahil (06:42)
Yeah.

Pankaj Raval (06:48)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (06:59)
is, you know, are your logins being challenged? Two, do you have backups in place? Is there some way for you to recover if a bad actor got a hold of your data or took control of your data? Are your devices being managed? Can you recover a cell phone or a computer that an employee might lose or have stolen or they decide to go on vacation and they don’t want to get a hold of for two months?

Do you know where that device is? Your permissions, who has access to what? And then some kind of security awareness training, at least on a basic level, can people bad actor or an email that’s trying to disguise itself at something else? I think those five points really are the cybersecurity that somebody needs to employ if you have a…

a small or medium sized business and even larger ones, you know, that come into, mid-sized companies that don’t have everything deployed across the entire enterprise. And sometimes it’s because of resources or timing or, they just went through an ⁓ situation. And so they have disjointed networks and, and system. it can be a lot of different factors that not all of those things are.

are deployed correctly and across the board, but we try to work with partners to make sure that on at least a quarterly basis we’re able to check in with their leadership and say, look, here’s where you stand on your hygiene, and here are some of the challenges that we’re still working through for you guys.

Pankaj Raval (08:31)
Yeah.

you know, as a law firm owner, I’m super paranoid about security risks. get, we get a scam email more than once a day, you know, say open up this PDF. they’re getting very sophisticated, right? They’re making it sound like, yeah, maybe this is an invoice I need to open or something like that. you know, what are, like, what do you think is the best prevention for some of these, issues, or is it just like,

Rudy Ordaz (08:39)
Yeah.

Right.

Pankaj Raval (08:53)
you making sure you’re aware of it? Or is it like, know there’s like a UB key. I don’t know if you could explain what that is. how paranoid should you be as a business owner?

Rudy Ordaz (09:00)
So as a business owner, you should be paranoid to the point where you’re able to check how secure you are. we test our systems for how secure they are? Now, it’s kind of vague and it’s kind of like not anything you can really grab, but you usually think of it is security is not a project. Like you can’t say like, sign me up for this one product and then I’m secure.

You know, you really have to think of it like it’s an ongoing thing. It’s an ongoing process that yeah, it’s a practice. A great word. Yeah, that’s a great way to put it Pankaj. It’s a, it’s a practice that comes down from leadership, you know? So if you own then it comes from the leaders, the, partners and saying, look, this is how it was part of our culture. This is the way we do things. You bake it into your processes.

Pankaj Raval (09:24)
done.

It’s a practice, it’s a practice, not a project. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

Rudy Ordaz (09:50)
when new employees get set up or a contractor gets set up, we know processes are put in place. So it’s an ongoing practice you really want have it as part of your strategy and part of your business. It should be another business system you use.

Pankaj Raval (10:07)
I love it.

Sahil (10:08)
I have a question about something I experienced recently. So I’m coming back from an international flight and my eyes get scanned and the customs agent doesn’t even need my passport anymore. So I have to imagine that biometrics, you mentioned AI, but I feel like biometrics AI tech is now playing this larger role in security where we are integrating into the security systems. I’m just curious if that has touched.

Rudy Ordaz (10:20)
Mm-hmm.

Sahil (10:33)
the small to mid-sized business level yet. And if you have any experience dealing with the requirements of governments now.

Rudy Ordaz (10:39)
So yeah, I mean, that’s, difficult, not difficult, but it’s, you know, there’s a lot of systems in play when you’re talking about, biometrics and how are those being managed? Right? So you have giant databases with data that are being sifted through and compared and there’s controls in place to make sure the right people are being, you know, led in to the country or

Sahil (10:46)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (11:03)
on a flight, things like that. We can make it more simple. computers now have some kind of biometric that are running, right? So it’s being built in to not only to protect an airplane or to protect a country, but it’s being built in, you know, your face recognition to unlock your phone, to fingerprint, to unlock your computer nowadays, right? is…

Pankaj Raval (11:03)
All right.

Sahil (11:09)
That’s right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (11:26)
no longer like a science fiction or it’s not like so out of the ordinary. It’s just, you’re starting to use it and you’ll see the importance of you’re going about your day. And you’re like, wow, like they’re not going to let me onto this flight. You know, if I look sick or I, know, maybe I got a different haircut or something, but yeah, there’s, these are technologies that have existed now for years and are constantly being.

Sahil (11:42)
Right, Yeah.

Pankaj Raval (11:42)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (11:51)
honed in and like you’re saying, is making a big push into help these decisions get made faster. And that’s really seeing more of like, this has AI and that has AI and it’s really, I don’t like to over simplify things, but because I do talk to a lot of business owners and people that run companies, I try to make

Pankaj Raval (11:58)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (12:13)
Correlate it with something more simple or some something that that you can relate to in your everyday life

Pankaj Raval (12:19)
Absolutely. Do you believe we still have privacy?

Rudy Ordaz (12:22)
Without getting political, you know, that’s there there’s, I don’t have a military background. So it’s, I think of it like layers, right? Like there’s there’s information about you that you probably don’t know that’s out there or you wouldn’t want it to be out there, but it, does exist. you know, we are very, we are very trusting in our technology and that’s on purpose.

Pankaj Raval (12:25)
Yeah

Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (12:47)
Right? So there’s a lot of companies that are making a lot of money off of our data and off of what, how we interact with the internet, social media, our own devices, you know, so privacy is one of those things that think about it also this way. When you’re an IT, you get the keys to the kingdom. Right? So.

Pankaj Raval (13:06)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (13:07)
I’ve always been in a situation where I get access to pretty much everything that I need to support. Or if we need to engineer something, we get access to it as far as like at a company level. But then when you’re talking about the public in general, you’re, you’re now looking at a much bigger, pool of, you know, advertisers, government for security for nationals security. So there’s layers of privacy at every,

I would say at each layer of those so that’s how I’ll answer that that everyone has access to most of our information it’s just You know, you’re a system that has their controls in place, right?

Pankaj Raval (13:45)
Yeah, gotta follow

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, for better or for worse, I don’t know. Knowing what you know though, knowing what you know as see the sausage being made it comes to cybersecurity, you know what goes in the sausage. there something that you specifically do that maybe a lot of other people don’t when it comes to protecting your own privacy, protecting your own security? Cybersecurity.

Sahil (13:47)
We’re trusting Alex Karp and Palantir.

Rudy Ordaz (13:52)
Yeah.

Maybe what I personally do that I don’t see a ton of people is I don’t I don’t trust devices and technology like at face value so I don’t just unpack a device and just like let me plug it in put it on my network and boom I’m ready to go like I I go through I read what are the settings what are the privacy settings what what network do I want to connect this to

You know, like I said, at end of the day, most of our consumer devices are listening our data for advertising purposes. I like to just, you know, try to be as secure as possible. I didn’t introduce devices to my grade school level. I don’t use like Alexa and Google on purpose in my house because just to try to limit

Pankaj Raval (14:53)
Interesting.

Rudy Ordaz (14:54)
the amount of devices that I use. But I know that they’re around me. I know my phone has data that if you and I go to have sushi together, eventually, when we are in proximity of each other, we’ll probably be have sushi again. So our Wi-Fi is used for advertising in our devices that we don’t leave home without them.

Pankaj Raval (15:01)
listening.

Which is crazy, yeah, which is crazy, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sahil (15:11)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (15:21)
and there’s a term, there’s a term called shadow IT that we’ve been using for years. And you know, now people are using shadow AI, like are your employees using AI services that maybe you’re not aware of, and you want to discover them and you want to make sure you have a company policy that determines how and when and what information you’re putting into these services.

These are concepts that most IT or technical people have had for years or used for years. It’s just getting out more and more as technology just becomes so prevalent and so much part of our daily lives.

Sahil (15:59)
So who are the biggest perpetrators of these kinds of security breaches and which industries are the most vulnerable?

Rudy Ordaz (16:07)
So anyone who is moving money or has the ability to move money is a target. So that’s almost every business, right? You have something that is vulnerable to or susceptible to an attack. And who are doing this? There’s so many. I mean, we hear terms now like hacker as a service or, you know,

⁓ phishing as a service where you don’t even have to be the person that’s doing this. You can pay somebody. Pool those resources together. And if your job gets picked up and somebody pays some Bitcoin, Hey, you just made money. And you know, it’s a whole industry that works on, trying to, to extract money from every business.

Sahil (16:32)
Wow.

Pankaj Raval (16:35)
Wow.

Wow.

Sahil (16:49)
Wow.

Rudy Ordaz (16:57)
whether they’re small, whether they’re large. I mean, I can’t tell you how many networking events I’ve gone to, whether it’s local or national level. And people will pull me aside and say, you know, we’ve we’ve had a cyber incident or we’ve been hacked. And, you know, it’s it’s your lawyer, it’s your accountant, it’s your CPA, like people that have very sensitive information.

Pankaj Raval (17:00)
Thank

Yeah. Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (17:22)
So

it’s not limited to anybody and also the bad actors are, can’t really pinpoint who they are because they could be anybody who’s looking to just make money and anyone who has the skill to run these types of against businesses.

Pankaj Raval (17:37)
Wow. Yeah, that’s crazy. It’s a little scary too, right? I mean, to think what’s really out there and lurking, because yeah, just takes one email being opened, right? Or document being opened to potentially expose your system. Then also people may be hacked and not even about it, right? Like they could have been hacked and data extracted and then they never know.

Sahil (17:54)
Right.

Pankaj Raval (17:58)
So what’s one piece of advice you’d give like a growing company? Let’s say someone’s found some product market fit and now they’re growing. What should they be looking out for? What should they be doing? Should they be contacting DataWise? At what point should they be reaching out to you guys to make sure that they have proper security systems in place?

Rudy Ordaz (18:14)
Yeah, I’ll, I’ll say another point, Pankaj that I think you can, that people can remember is that, you know, most breaches and most, cyber incidences that happen, you know, they’re usually not caused by some genius hacker in a hoodie in a dark room, right? happen by, you know, people exposing themselves through maybe not having the correct

multi-factor authentication implemented. They’re sharing passwords employees and they don’t have a good password policy. So you set a password three years ago on a system that you just forget about and you kind of just mundane and routine. you have old equipment or you’re using, you’re trusting your employees to use their home computers to access company data. So

Let’s think of it of like, you know, what defenses can you put in place? And, know, I gave a list of MFA, multi-factor authentication, backing up your data, you’re managing your devices correctly. You have your permissions set for your network and your users. And then some kind of training, some kind of security awareness training to where you send, you know, a fake email to your employees, you know, like

⁓ Susie clicked on it again. We better get her, make sure she does a little course on, know, what is, phishing and why she needs to be aware of it and why if, you know, you get a message, whether it’s text or email, it says, send me, you know, an invoice to so-and-so you’re asking questions. So another part to that, is have some checks in place for anyone in your finance team that.

Pankaj Raval (19:43)
Right.

Rudy Ordaz (19:50)
it’s not just one person’s job or one, you know, only one process. It gets checked and there’s a second check to if we’re going to send out an invoice, you know, there’s more than one person looking at it because we’re putting in very sophisticated, security products. but at the end of the day, you know, employees and the human are who are the weakest link in this whole, this whole chain. So.

That’s inevitably where it breaks down. Somebody that falls for social engineering, email, or a phone call, or a text message, and that’s the human element of it.

Sahil (20:19)
So.

Pankaj Raval (20:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Sahil (20:28)
So in

the age of AI, what is the biggest enhanced risk in terms of cybersecurity to, let’s say, some of our clients, like small to mid-sized businesses?

Rudy Ordaz (20:38)
So you’re asking about what are AI risks?

Sahil (20:40)
Like,

well, AI risks or does AI, does the fact that people who are trying to penetrate your security systems, the fact that they have AI as a tool, does that, how does that increase the risk dramatically or does it? Is it not such a substantial difference?

Rudy Ordaz (20:56)
AI is now another avenue that we want to be aware of and we want to lower the risk. So one of the things we say when to our clients and our partners, when, you know, they say, well, why should we work with you versus working with another technology consulting company? you know, we, we, tell them our job is to lower your risk. So we come in with the eyes and the lens of.

How do I lower your risk on how you do your business using technology and your technology investment? So if you came to me and you said, have a small law firm and we want to implement AI, well, what’s the business problem we want to solve? Are we trying to get your attorneys to not have to use an assistant and they can use AI? Or maybe they don’t have to read?

you know, some of those case files that are pages and pages and they can get a very good synopsis of it and then they can make decisions and see where to go from there. So we definitely want to look at the business case and AI is really, you know, it’s going to make us do things faster and help us make decisions. And some of the things that that when I sit down with our clients and they asked me about, about AI,

We let them know, you know, you’re not going to, people are not going to lose their jobs because of AI. You’re going to lose your job to somebody that knows how to use AI and they’re doing the job better than an employee. And really that’s where we see the opportunity. So we want to lower risks. There are definitely bad websites and bad actors out there that might try to trick you into putting your information or have you log into a tool that, you know,

Pankaj Raval (22:19)
So true.

Rudy Ordaz (22:39)
could have some adware or spyware or you know, it’s the same concept from the past. You know, you wouldn’t just go log into a new website not knowing what it is, but a lot of people still do, you know. So ideally, your employees, you have some kind of policy in place that if you’re doing task A, you use this service. That’s the approved one.

for our company. You know, that’s why Microsoft says it’s you know, it’s your co-pilot, you know, it’s supposed to be there to work with you versus, you know, it’s not, it’s not taking over your it’s going to help you, lowering the risk is by knowing what our employees are logging into and just minimizing, know, we shouldn’t be like the wild west and just going into any website or any

Service and just putting all your your company information, especially if it’s proprietary. We don’t want to be doing that

Pankaj Raval (23:33)
Yes, very good advice, anyone listening out So we are law deal makers and risk takers. We talk a lot about mergers, acquisitions this I think you had gone through an acquisition yourself, is that correct? Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (23:49)
I have, yeah. Yeah,

I’ve bought, you know, a company before and I also have sold a IT company to another company and worked there for a few years.

Pankaj Raval (23:59)
Okay, yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit more about that process for you and any guidance you may have to people for someone looking to maybe acquire a business, you know, to start. What was one thing that led you to believe that, okay, yeah, now is the right time to acquire another business? And how did you go about positioning yourself to make that acquisition from financing the deal points?

Rudy Ordaz (24:19)
So get a lot of other IT owners and other tech consulting owners that that’s very interesting to them because they might have been in this business for a while and you know sales are hard and sales are hard for everybody but how do you grow, how do you grow a tech company and acquisitions and

any M&A whether it’s a merger or an acquisition, a good way to get talent, whether it’s like a key employee that you’re looking for, or you want a book of business. You’re gonna increase of business by whatever “x” whether it’s 10 clients or 100 clients, all of a sudden you’ve grown because of this M&A deal that happened. So, what I usually say is,

Start with what’s your goal, right? So if your goal is to build a large company, that’s much different than, if you want to have a six figure income and you don’t want the headaches of regulation to, know, and you don’t want to have a whole HR department and you’re like, I want to have a nice, you know, a couple million dollar shop if you will. And, and I want to be able to go on vacation and

Pankaj Raval (25:27)
Hmm

Rudy Ordaz (25:29)
And I don’t want the troubles of having managers and a bunch of employees, two totally different goals. Right. So when I started the business that I sold, I came into it knowing that I wanted to grow the business. I wanted it to grow to, you know, multimillion dollars versus one or $2 million. Interesting fact, most technology companies are small in America. They are right around that.

couple of million dollars. So, a lot of companies exist at the small scale. And so what I decided was, okay, I want to grow and make sure I have a good sales process so I can grow organically. And then when I saw the opportunity where somebody was looking, they put their hand up. I’m part of quite a, you know, Pankaj, I know you through networking. So I know a lot of other IT people through

And I believe it was like on a Facebook group for IT owners and somebody said, you know, I’m looking for a possible partner. I love to take the meetings. That’s one of my philosophies is I’ll take the meeting and see if I can help. Whether it’s partnering or just giving advice on things that I’ve been through a IT company owner. But I will take the call and that call happened to be

from a company in Denver that was looking to sell their managed services clients. And we ended up structuring a deal where it was more of an earn out and it didn’t cost me like financing out of pocket se. You know, it was more of we settled on, you’ll get X amount upfront and then you’ll get, you as that book of business grows, then you’ll make money this way. So.

Pankaj Raval (27:02)
Right.

Rudy Ordaz (27:06)
That’s another part of the M&A that I like to advise is that it doesn’t have to be one way. You know, it’s great if you have several million in the bank or you already got yourself a loan and you’re just out shopping. Like, you know, like you would be, at a mall, but there’s also other ways to, acquire business. if you provide a service to another business and then eventually you figure out there’s a synergy there, a lot of times you can hire that owner to work with you and.

Pankaj Raval (27:20)
Right.

Rudy Ordaz (27:33)
they get something for their book of business or they get an earn out or a rev share that could in, ⁓ in acquiring a book of business. And so I was able to do that. And then grew my company, you know, probably by 30 % and one, you know, by one stroke of the pen. And so again, my advice is just what’s your goal. If your goal is to grow, you know, M&A is great.

But if your goal is to have a simple, smaller business that doesn’t give you headaches, then I don’t think it makes that much sense to invest too much in the M&A journey.

Pankaj Raval (28:08)
Yeah, I love that. And I think also, I think it’s a great insight and I think something that people need to hear because sometimes we just think, oh, we want to grow for growing sake, you know, that’s what you got to do. But I think, yeah, think also understanding your why is so important for entrepreneurs and business owners. Like, why do you want to grow? know, like, what is that going to do for you? How is that going to change your life? How is that going to help others? You know, like, what does that mean? So yeah, great insight.

Rudy Ordaz (28:18)
Right.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. Is it part of

Sahil (28:31)
What?

Rudy Ordaz (28:32)
your vision? Is it part of

what you’re, you know, why you set out to be a start a business or to be an entrepreneur?

Sahil (28:37)
When you sold your business, what turned out to be the most valuable assets? Was it IP? Was it contracts? Was it your relationships, your goodwill, your brand name? What was the most valuable part of that sale?

Rudy Ordaz (28:50)
when you sell a business, I have found that different buyers value different things. So, you know, it’s like your baby, right? Or like, like when you’re selling your house, right? You, you’re like, my God, my house is so beautiful and it, works great for me and my family. And then a buyer comes in and is like, I’ll change it all if I buy this house. And you’re like, what’s like, I’ve set this up perfectly.

And it’s like, yeah, well, it was set up perfect for you. And so people value different things. And, to answer your question, it was the contracts and the book of business was what was valued at the end of the day. ⁓ the most that that’s what carried the most weight. So when other MSPs, managed service providers asked me like, ⁓ what, should I focus on? You know, it, it’s a little bit of everything because.

Sahil (29:26)
Interesting.

Rudy Ordaz (29:39)
You don’t know what the buyer is going to have, but the market a lot of times dictates that it is your book of business. That’s really the, that’s where the value is in a service based industry that, it’s built on recurring revenue, right? So we’re selling contracts that are paid every month based on the services that we’re going to provide. And as, as they’re more and more valuable, you know, a lot of times it has more expertise.

Different services are included in they’re not based on time on time and materials is like you hang, sign up and say, we’re open, you know, customers call me when you need me, as opposed to the more proactive managed services industry that we that we’re in. we’re selling you a service that we’re going to be ahead of this. We’re monitoring your devices, your cloud environment.

We’re monitoring your cybersecurity. technicians are getting alerts to when, you know, something happens, whether it’s a security incident, someone’s trying to log in from overseas and nobody’s traveling. Someone needs to see that. we’re, we’re selling a proactive service versus a reactive service. And I think it’s, it’s, I’m glad you up that point, Sahil cause sometimes people think, I have a hundred clients. It’s like, yeah, but they’re not.

in any kind of contract or they’re not getting any kind of service on a regular basis that I would find them valuable. If you leave, they might say, well, I’m going to go, don’t know Rudy. I don’t know if he’s going to be the same as the last guy that I worked with. So it is difficult to know what that specific buyer wants to buy your business for.

Sahil (30:55)
Right.

Rudy Ordaz (31:17)
Through the process, you learn what’s more valuable. And a lot ⁓ of times, the industry dictates its contracts and that ongoing recurring revenue.

Sahil (31:26)
So Letters of Intent audience, contracts, contracts, contracts. That’s where the value is. Don’t sleep on your contracts.

Pankaj Raval (31:29)
Absolutely. ⁓

Rudy Ordaz (31:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, that MSA has saved us quite a few times, for sure.

Sahil (31:36)
Yeah.

Pankaj Raval (31:39)
Absolutely.

So we’re to jump into the lightning round now.

I want to just, know, quick answers ideally, you know, just of, you know, a few just questions that I think come up a lot is one is, you know, what’s one cybersecurity myth that you wish every business owner would forget today? Like what’s one thing people get wrong a lot about cybersecurity?

Rudy Ordaz (32:00)
that it’s a ongoing process, it’s not a project.

Pankaj Raval (32:03)
Yes, okay, so forget that it’s a project and recognize it as a process, it is a practice that you have to kind of look into every day, every week. And because yeah, you’re right, the goalpost is always changing too, right? Like things are always changing, threats don’t go away. So absolutely, it’s kind of like the practice of law, I think. It’s like you never become, you never perfect it, right? So. ⁓

Rudy Ordaz (32:12)
Yes, it’s

Sahil (32:20)
Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (32:23)
Yeah. And laws change, you know, especially

compliance. know we haven’t talked very much about compliance, but you know, we have a lot of clients that rely on us to stay up to date with, as compliance changes and, especially from the government, you know, if, ⁓ somebody wants to work with the government or they’re working with any large institutions, they, they have compliance requirements that do change. so it, it becomes an ongoing.

Pankaj Raval (32:29)
Right.

Rudy Ordaz (32:49)
process to stay secure.

Pankaj Raval (32:51)
One thing I was going to ask, I forgot to mention, was like, do you recommend businesses use something like one password or password manager to make sure that their passwords are secure?

Rudy Ordaz (33:00)
Yeah, yeah, it can be definitely part of your stack that you incorporate.

Pankaj Raval (33:01)
Yeah.

Sahil (33:05)
question

two, lightning round. What’s the biggest red flag you spot in an IT environment within the first 10 minutes?

Rudy Ordaz (33:11)
Probably any kind of shared password or, or, you know, written down account or, you know, any, anything where it’s easy to get logged into a system that that for me is a big red flag. Cause a lot of times if there’s one, there’s probably multiples because somebody has deemed it okay in this organization.

Pankaj Raval (33:24)
Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. I’m not gonna say we are not guilty of that early on in our, anyway, when we first started, but we have fixed our processes since then, talking to people like what’s one technology investment that gives companies the best ROI?

Rudy Ordaz (33:46)
I think finding the right type of partner, whether it’s you know, they hired, you know, an IT director or an IT manager, or they’re working with a IT consulting company or cybersecurity consulting company, putting your money into a partner that understands your business and that knows how to help you with your technology budget and your technology investment is the best use of your money.

Pankaj Raval (34:14)
yeah, Datawise networks. Exactly, exactly, Datawise networks. you know, I want to just kind of close there with, know, Rudy, I know you have probably lot, we could talk for a lot longer about cybersecurity and just entrepreneurship in general. Is there anything else you’d like to leave listeners with in terms of as they kind of build their businesses, how should they think about

Sahil (34:14)
So data-wise networks. Yeah, that’s the answer. That’s the best ROI. Yeah.

Rudy Ordaz (34:17)
Yeah, I’d like to think so.

Pankaj Raval (34:37)
cybersecurity, how should they think about the future given AI is very much changing the game in every different industry? Any kind of parting wisdom that you want to share?

Rudy Ordaz (34:47)
⁓ yeah, I think, we’ve brought up quite a bit already and maybe we’re like, you know, not trying to knock everyone over with this, but you know, cyber security is something that is, is a process that the leadership of your company should own, you know, whether it’s an owner or it’s your board and you know, everyone should be held accountable, from the top down organization.

AI is, is, you know, a very hot topic. There’s a lot of investment going into it and we’re seeing, you know, a lot of questions and a lot of confusion onto how it’s going to impact every industry. And it’s, it’s definitely not, a doom and gloom thing. I think it’s also not a, you know, a magic bullet that’s going to solve all of our, problems in business.

But it is going to be something that helps us, that is going to be able to leverage, know, your best employees are going to become even better. You know, we’re going to be able to use less, maybe overhead with less employees, but at the same time, you’re going to get more out of your staff and out of your best players. So I do want to, you know, let people know that

to iterate how AI can help your business and just know it’s not going to be like, oh, let me buy this and implement it. And I should see this many X ROI. It’s going to help us all do our jobs better, including ourselves. the other side to the coin is, you know, let’s make sure we’re using the right tools. We’re secure.

And then we’re just not implementing willy-nilly. Everybody gets an account for this. Everybody gets an account for that because now you’re spending money. You could have data leaks. And if there are any breaches, you could be held liable for putting your data into unsupported platform that is not approved by the business.

Pankaj Raval (36:36)
Absolutely. Rudy, where can people find you if they want to get in touch?

Rudy Ordaz (36:39)
best place is, you know, datawisenetworks.com. That’s our website and there are links there to our LinkedIn, which you can find me there. I love going to networking events. And so, you can find me at some of the local networking events in Los Angeles. And, you know, you can always email me, through, through our website is, is the best place.

Pankaj Raval (36:59)
Wonderful. So the takeaway for today is if you missed it, you weren’t listening, but cybersecurity is not a project, it’s a process. And we want to thank you, Rudy, joining us today, sharing your knowledge on cybersecurity and the importance of it. Oftentimes, it’s something that people don’t kind of overlook. They recognize that, ⁓ they want to focus on sales, marketing, other things, but really it is one of the backbones for building a strong business. I think like legal cybersecurity is there.

Rudy Ordaz (37:07)
Yes.

Yeah.

Pankaj Raval (37:27)
make sure that you don’t expose yourself in ways you didn’t expect. So with that said, thank you again for joining us as a wonderful conversation. And until next time, this is the Letters of Intent. Thank you. Yes, yes, thank you.

Rudy Ordaz (37:37)
Thanks, Pankaj. Thanks, Sahil It’s great to meet you guys and Pankaj to see you again. All right. See

you soon.