By Ian Richardson, Managing Partner, Richardson & Richardson Consulting
Podcast Season 1, Episode 3 Guest: Matt Lee, Sr Director of Security & Compliance, Pax8
Matt Lee has dedicated the last 10 years to raising the security tide in the SMB market. His efforts have served in every capacity in a growing MSP that grew to support 20,000 endpoints. His leadership around technology direction and security/compliance protected and elevated over 17,000 people in Small to midsize businesses in five states. Matt now is the Sr Director of Security and Compliance at Pax8, and lives to ensure his children maintain the same quality of life we do around technology. I spoke with Matt a while back and had a few great takeaways from our conversation around personal branding, nimbleness, and how products don’t fix problems. I wanted to share those with you here.
Personal Branding:
One of the interesting conversation tracks Matt and I had on W.I.N. was around the need to honor your personal “brand” – that representation of your professional self. Too often we will tie our brand to our employer / company when often, our current employer will not be our final employer. Creating a brand around your own person that can follow you from organization to organization creates a marketability around “Matt Lee” versus “Matt Lee from Pax8”.
Nimbleness:
There is a very real opportunity for organizations to regain some nimbleness through a technological strategy of embracing cloud technology. The ability to have disposable devices for your team (laptops you can literally throw away if they break), combined with the ability to work anywhere, at any time, with full access to all applications and data, gives an organization a competitive edge. You can respond faster to requests, challenges, and opportunities because you are not tied to a physical location. Combined with a healthy remote workforce, there is massive opportunity to displace competitors who are tied to legacy systems, processes, and locations.
Products don’t fix problems:
There is a common trend in I.T. services, and small business in general, to believe that a product can solve problems for an organization. While products (and I’m mainly referring to software here) can help an organization arrive at a solution to a problem in their business, they can’t raise the maturity level of the organization in question. Just because you install a security product doesn’t inherently make your organization more secure – you will have to create processes, policies, and procedures to support that product. A documentation management system doesn’t inherently make your company more organized – you have to utilize the system and adhere to the best practices put in place to gain the impact needed.
I gain so much value from meeting with fellow entrepreneurs and leaders. Each and every person I speak with brings their own experiences, knowledge, and viewpoints to the table, and without fail, I walk away with a head full of ideas and motivation to do better in my own business. I so greatly appreciate Matt’s willingness to come onto W.I.N. and share his story.
If you’re interested in joining me on an episode of W.I.N., it would be my privilege to host you. You can book your spot by visiting https://randr.consulting/connect and selecting the Podcast Booking option from the services menu. You can find previous episodes of W.I.N. on our website and subscribe to it on whatever your platform of choice is.
Always Forward,
Ian
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