Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following is a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Understanding what my superpower is, and that is helping people
do what they're doing better than they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Organizations out there oftentimes don't feel they have their finger
on the pulse.
Speaker 4 (00:18):
I realized that international is so much more than just
the shipping.
Speaker 5 (00:23):
I'm Richard Dearhart.
Speaker 6 (00:24):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. You just heard some snippets from
our show. We had amazing people on listen for the
rest of it.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given
it heart, Now get it in gear. It's Passage to
Profit With Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
Speaker 7 (00:43):
I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service
intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Speaker 6 (00:50):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do
marketing for Gearhart Law.
Speaker 8 (00:54):
And I am the.
Speaker 6 (00:55):
Founder of Gear Media Studios, a content creation studio with
the focus on piping.
Speaker 7 (01:00):
Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to entrepreneurship, where
we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities about their business journeys. Well,
this week we're going to be showing how building a
brand takes just as much grit as playing in the
big leagues.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Our guest today is Chris.
Speaker 7 (01:17):
Denhurt, a serial entrepreneur and e commerce expert, founder of Dugout, Mugs,
Big Golf, and the Dunhart Media Group with over seventy
million in online sales.
Speaker 8 (01:28):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
And then we have something really exciting too. Alex Yancher
is the CEO of Passport. Do you want to sell
your stuff overseas? It's really kind of hard to get
over to Hump and know how to do it.
Speaker 8 (01:40):
He helps you do that.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
I love the international stuff I do too.
Speaker 6 (01:44):
And the name of this company's Passport. And then Jim
Ratschnik is a cybersecurity innovator, so we all need that.
Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how many times
I get this message we're resetting.
Speaker 8 (01:56):
Did you ask for a reset code on Facebook?
Speaker 9 (01:58):
I'm like no.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
But he's I'm redefining how organizations manage risk through his
Haylock Security Labs and Reasonable Risk groundbreaking platform.
Speaker 8 (02:06):
He's CEO of both of those.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
So exciting to hear how he's helping us stay as
safe as we can any.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
I can hardly wait.
Speaker 8 (02:13):
And later on we'll hear from our friend Alicia Morrissey,
a great jazz singer, and we've got secrets of the
entrepreneurial mind.
Speaker 7 (02:21):
But before we get to our distinguished guests, it's time
for your new business journey. Two and five Americans are
business owners or they're thinking about starting a business, And
so we want to ask our panel a question. What's
the one rookie mistake you made and that you would
make again because it got you here? So what mistake
(02:43):
did you make that you would make again because it
got you to where you're at today. And let's start
with Chris. Chris, welcome to the show. Tell us about
the rookie mistake you'd repeat.
Speaker 10 (02:53):
Be naive, just chasing after something and not knowing really
what the risks were because I wanted to.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
And I think authenticity, especially in a world we live
in today, it's very rare, and especially in business, and
I think being naive to the risks and the dangers
of business, just being dumb and happy and chasing after
something cool. You never know, maybe you'll shoot for the
whether they say shoot for the moon and catch a
star anyway, I'd make that mistake over and over again.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Alex, rookie mistake that you'd repeat.
Speaker 9 (03:24):
I'm in the startup world.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I'm in San Francisco here, and I grew up learning
that all you have to do is focus on the product,
build the best possible product, and they will come. Maybe
in some businesses that's true in like a social network
or some consumer businesses, but I'm in the B to
B world. We sell software and services, and that advice
(03:49):
couldn't be further from the truth. So I naively started
and just focused on the product.
Speaker 9 (03:54):
Really didn't hire. I mean it took us like five
years to hire a first marketer.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
At the end of the day, distribution in marketing and sales,
that's I'd say, we're a good, solid sixty five percent
of my time and effort goes now.
Speaker 9 (04:09):
But it's an interesting way you phrased the question.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
It's a mistake I would repeat again because at the
end of the day, it's the reason we have such
a great product is because I was fully focused on
that and not on the sales side.
Speaker 7 (04:18):
In the beginning, great comment, Jim, tell us, what was
the rookie mistake you made that you'd repeat.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
In my twenties, I started an online restaurant reservation system
with several partners. I had two partners. One of them
was a very talented professor. At the time, he was
a child prodigy, had never failed at anything. And what
we learned along the way is he was a very
bright individual, but he didn't have real life experience and
the business didn't work. And I learned that the partners
you choose are even more important than the business model itself.
(04:46):
I would do it again because it's to help me
learn the power of the right team.
Speaker 7 (04:51):
The takeaway from all this is that sometimes the mistakes
that we regret are the ones that teach us the most.
So I learned a lot from my experience, and I
think that's just made me a better attorney business person.
Now it's time for our interview with Chris Denner. He's
the guy who turned a baseball bat into a fifty
two million dollar mug, literally from dugout mugs to big
(05:14):
Golf and is continuing empires. Denhart has built businesses that
have been featured on Forbes, The Ink five thousand, and
National TV, all the while proving that you don't need
a fancy MBA to dominate e commerce. So welcome to
the show, Chris A, how did you get into the
business of making mugs out of baseball bats?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Understanding what my superpower is, and that is helping people
do what they're doing better than they're doing it. And
Randall Thompson a buddy of mine, He's actually the one
that men of the mug and he came to me
with the idea. So Dugout's my ninth company, and I've
had several different things along the way. But the reality
is I understand.
Speaker 10 (05:55):
How to communicate with people, and it's.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
In its purest sense, like what I do. I communicate
with people extremely.
Speaker 10 (06:01):
Well, and I am a master of networking, sales, marketing, branding.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So really, when anything comes to my desk, I put
it through a certain set of criteria and if it
meets these criteria, it's a project that I'll take on
a lot of times from a consulting standpoint, But all
the consulting really ever was and is, is an opportunity
to vet out projects. Do I like the under operator?
Is it fun? Can I play with my friends? Can
(06:29):
I leverage my network? Does it take time away from
my family? Would my kids be proud of me, you know,
like these are the criteria that I go through, and
it's never really ever revolves around money. You know. I
always say, chase the happy, not the money, and you'll
usually walk away with both, you know.
Speaker 10 (06:44):
I think that's kind of how I came to be
with dugout Mugs. Randall had a.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Cool idea, brought it to me seventy thousand in sales,
and you know, I say, hey, look man, you know,
let's take this thing for a ride. And that's what
we did, and double double, double doubled year every year.
We're the fastest growing licensee in Major League Baseball for
a couple decades, and at this point we're fifty five million.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
Dollars in sales.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
We're in every state, every stadium. Every mug behind me
is autographed by a person I've worked with, from Rod
Carew and Pete Rose and Nolan Ryan and Kngerffory Junior.
And it's pretty wild the things I get to do
and call it a job. And then I look for
synergy and Big Golf came along same opportunity. I took
sixty percent of the company just to be involved, and
(07:33):
I brought it under the same roof, as I have
with Dougout. I had a near death experience when my
daughter was born ten years ago, and when I came
out the other side of it, you know a few
commitments I made, and one of them is being unapologetically authentic.
So like what you get right here is you're gonna
see in the street, you're going to see on a stage,
or you're going to see a mastermind.
Speaker 10 (07:51):
I don't change really for anybody. It's very refreshing.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
The other is to operate in alignment with some of
those criteria of the goals that I was telling you
about there.
Speaker 10 (08:01):
So when things come across my path, it's either.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Who I am in which direction I'm going, or isn't
so I do you know, I have a company around
beer and baseball and golf and cigars and business and consulting.
Speaker 10 (08:12):
And again, I think everybody's success journey is unique. You
measure your success with somebody else's ruler, I don't think
that's smart. I think, you know, more reflection on what's
a success to you and then kind of build that
lifestyle by design. And I think that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
And again I chased the happy and the fun and
not the money. With dugout, and we ended up with
both and it prooves in the pudding.
Speaker 8 (08:34):
Yeah, I want to go back to a couple of
things you said.
Speaker 6 (08:37):
One, you licensed all of this copywriter and trademark material
from the Baseball League, right, So that's part of your
success because if.
Speaker 8 (08:46):
People try to just take that and steal it.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
Can I get Oh, that's that a good idea.
Speaker 7 (08:50):
Listeners, if you're thinking about trying to rip off Major
League Baseball.
Speaker 8 (08:54):
Football or anybody, don't do it.
Speaker 10 (08:56):
So that's licensing side. Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I mean I I have a a large intellectual property portfolio.
You know, we have patents on several of our products,
we have trademark, we actually have trade dress, so we're strong.
Speaker 10 (09:09):
But I mean, you know, you guys are in IP, right.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So what I always found and I had this conversation
early on with Randall, Now, intellectual property can I believe,
especially with like design patents and things like that, it's
only can go so far.
Speaker 10 (09:22):
People can work around and things.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
So I had the whole mentality of do we want
to play to win or do we want to play
to not lose? And I feel like a lot of
that is defense, whereas offense will beat defense in most cases.
Speaker 10 (09:35):
And that's what we decided to do. Like we went
hard in the pay we went an offense hard.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
And we hit the market and the speed the market principle,
and we just didn't let up for years.
Speaker 8 (09:47):
I'm hearing this more and more.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
I didn't hear this like a year ago, but with
all the authenticity and everything coming up now I hear
it all the time.
Speaker 11 (09:54):
Now.
Speaker 8 (09:55):
It's no your why, Why are you doing what you're doing?
Speaker 6 (09:58):
And that tied you through the bad times, it helps
you in the good times.
Speaker 8 (10:03):
And what is your core why? I think it's to
have fun and take care of your family.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
I think one of the biggest lies that people tell
themselves and everybody else is that they're doing it for
their family, when.
Speaker 10 (10:13):
The reality is if you ask your kids what they
really want, or your spouse what they really want, they
want you there. They don't want you traveling one hundred
and fifty days a year, missing the dances, missing the recitals,
missing the things right.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So, I have a pretty core belief that I don't
really believe in work life balance either. Sometimes you're working,
it's all life, you know. Sometimes you're working, sometimes you're not,
you know, And if you do it right, and which
is what I tried to focus on, is it's blurry
what I'd like to do and what I have to
do and what I get to do, or just kind
of all jumble together in this giant bucket that I
(10:49):
get to live in. Par supecifically, my why is to
live an experiential life because at the end of it,
that's all you really have, is the story that you build.
Speaker 7 (10:58):
Our guest today is Chris Hurt, a serial entrepreneur and
e commerce expert, founder of Dugout, Mugs, Big Golf, and
the dun Hart Media Group. So Chris, what part of
your identity do people most misunderstand about you?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I think the authenticity they assume it's probably a bits
of it are a facade, but I think that's because
it's so rare that somebody says what they think and
does what they say and shows up consistent every single time.
So again, I'm pretty good at breaking down walls with
people pretty quickly.
Speaker 10 (11:35):
But there's always going to be those.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Who have been jaded, who have been manipulated and things
like that, so they have a little bit more of
the reservations. But that's what consistency does. And that's the
water through the rock turns into a river. It just
w wear them out because I show the same way
every single time. I think that's probably one of the
things that people misunderstand or I'm very direct, because why
(12:01):
not be you know, just get to the point and
let's address it or not, you know, I'd want.
Speaker 6 (12:06):
To circle back to your business acumen a little bit.
This is obviously what you said is super important to
people that want to start a business. You though, have
been able to take e commerce and really blow it out.
Speaker 8 (12:18):
And if somebody wants to start an e commerce business,
what is the first thing you would tell them? Do
they need to know the business really well? Do they
need to know how e commerce works? Do they need
a coach?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Like?
Speaker 8 (12:27):
How would you start?
Speaker 10 (12:29):
And it's purest form. You're selling a thing to a person.
I don't think that needs coaching. You just need to
not have a crappy thing. You need to have some
passion behind what you're representing. You need to be authentic
and not worry about ruffling feathers. If so, if if
I stand, if I have this stance or that stance,
or you know, just go you're winning or learning. I
(12:50):
think that's probably the easiest way to put it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Like you're winning or learning. If something doesn't work, don't
do it again, keep trying. I think just the stubbornness
of I mean, you gotta be really you gotta have
thick skin and a short memory, you know, and just
keep rolling.
Speaker 10 (13:06):
And I always say don't fall in love with potential.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And I think that's important because a lot of people
come up with an idea or a product or a
thing and it's like it's kind of stupid. It's already done,
you know, it's it's not done as good as this one.
Speaker 10 (13:18):
This one, this one, it's saturated.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Like I think, having some kind of usp unique selling
proposition or model or something that's new and fresh. And
I also say make sure it's something that you're somewhat
passionate about. And because there are plenty of bad days
in business, not just e comm right in business, and
a bad day with even with good people, is still
(13:42):
a bad day. But a bad day with good.
Speaker 10 (13:43):
People can be a good day, you know what I mean.
Like I think, have surrounding and you touched on it.
You're surrounding yourself with the right people is crucial. And
and just being just stubborn. If you want to do it,
just shut up and do it.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
You know, don't overthink it to death. You're selling a
thing to a person. They buy it or they don't.
And if they don't buy it was too expensive, you
didn't convey the value, or they.
Speaker 10 (14:04):
Didn't like it.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
You fix one of those three things and try again,
and try again, and try again.
Speaker 9 (14:09):
You know.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I talk often on stage and one of the things
I absolutely love to say is it's not somebody else's.
Speaker 10 (14:15):
Job to remember you.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
It's your job to be unforgettable.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
So when you go from a marketing perspective, think like that,
like what can I do to be memorable? How do
I get them to not forget me and what we
discussed and what I'm offering?
Speaker 10 (14:29):
And I think that with consistency really helps solidify a brand.
Speaker 7 (14:34):
Well, we're here with Chris Denner Dinner Media Group and
also the golf dot com and dugout mugs dot com.
When did you know that dugout Mugs was going to
be a success.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
My previous venture was print on Demand APPERIL. There was
a company actually out there in San Francisco, is where
they were based.
Speaker 9 (14:51):
It was called t Spring.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Several years ago and you know, I had a bunch
of fan pages on Facebook, probably about seven million fans,
and we would just in print. We did over twenty
million dollars just T shirt sales. And when I looked
at a mug for the first time, you know how
we've hollowed out baseball bat barrel.
Speaker 10 (15:10):
This was just a blank canvas.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So to me, it's like, oh, okay, so I can
just put find what people resonate with, put it on
something cool, ask them if they want to buy it.
If they say no, ask them why, right, and so
so it was really simple. I simplify things. That's one
of the things I feel like I do best is
I just simplify things.
Speaker 10 (15:29):
And when I sat down and I spoke with Randall.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
About the company, I told him I was like, dude, like,
you're gonna have to quit your job like this week
and call me back and.
Speaker 10 (15:39):
We're gonna take this thing for a ride.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And we went from seventy thousand to one point one
to two point five to like seven to nine to
thirteen five.
Speaker 10 (15:47):
I mean, we just right up the right up the ladder.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
But I knew it from the beginning because it's something
I had done before, and I think that's a belief
and belief systems are an extremely important way, and it
comes to entrepreneurship and business. I believe that if you
don't believe you could achieve something, you can't.
Speaker 10 (16:06):
You know. Conversely, if you.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Do believe you can, you will, right, So I always
relate it to a balloon. Like a balloon's you know
about yay big, and you blow it up as big
as it can go, and you let it sit there
for a few minutes. You let it go, It'll never
go back to that original size.
Speaker 10 (16:19):
It's expanded. It's forever expanded.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
And and that's how I look at just the mentality
of entrepreneurship is like, once I knew I could do
a million dollars in sales in a day, I can't
unknow that, right. Once I knew I could do twenty
million dollars of T shirts and never carry a single
piece of inventory, you can never unkno that. So now
you take these beliefs and you multiply and you recreate it,
(16:42):
And I think that's really important. So being around others
who have achieved things that you can't wrap your head
around until you believe them, because then that's expansion. You'll
never go back to that original shrink back to that
original size.
Speaker 7 (16:55):
We're here with Ken Denhurt from dugout Mugs dot com
and also bigf dot com and also Denhurtmedia Group dot com.
We have to take a commercial break right now.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
Stay tuned.
Speaker 7 (17:07):
We have intellectual property news and secrets of the entrepreneurial
mind coming up. And don't forget to experience more of
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right after this.
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Speaker 1 (19:29):
Now back to Passage to Profit once again, Richard and
Elizabeth Gerhart.
Speaker 6 (19:34):
And our special guest Chris Dienner, who has built many
very successful companies and right now is.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
The CEO of Dugout Mugs.
Speaker 6 (19:45):
Well, he calls himself the cleanup hitter, but nobody really
believes that. And we've been talking about what's important to
him and what's important for success, and now we want
to get into something relief and we want to.
Speaker 8 (19:56):
Hear his stories. So Chris, tell us a really cool story.
Speaker 10 (20:00):
There's a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
I would start with probably one of the coolest collaborations
that we had an opportunity to do. It's right out
here over my shoulder, right there. So my buddy wrote
the movie The Sandlot, David Mickey Evans, and David and
I connected and we decided to collaborate not only on
a Legends Never Die mug, which is a full wrap
(20:22):
of all the boys on the sandlot, the famous photo.
Speaker 10 (20:25):
From the movie. And the day we spent with David
was pretty incredible.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Was at a beach bar, no shoes on, just hanging out,
having some cocktails and talking about the movie.
Speaker 10 (20:36):
And we brought in the audio visual team.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
To create some really cool content and our relationship just
developed from there. And we have a hat now, Legends
Never Die hat that has the photo printed underneath the bill,
and it's all exclusive to Dug out right. So we
get to do some cool projects like that. And you know,
I always enjoy going cool places and doing fun things
(20:59):
with awesome people, right, I think anybody could probably relate
to that.
Speaker 10 (21:03):
So our mugs are used all the time for corporate gifting.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Big companies, you know, Capital One and T Mobile and
hard Rock and Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser, they'll buy our mugs
and they gift them out as corporate gifting.
Speaker 9 (21:13):
Well.
Speaker 10 (21:14):
Also, we do a lot of charity stuff with our
Cheers to Charity program and Reggie Jackson Misster October, famous Yankee,
famous Oakland athletic, has us at all of his events
and this past year I remember my wife and I
were there and at one point it was me and
her and Dave Chappelle and Barry Bonds just standing here
(21:35):
hanging out watching Reggie Jackson in fifty cent and all
these people performing like, you know, ten feet away.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It was like, man, what a cool, fun night. And
then I go inside to eat and I'm sitting with
Ozzie Smith, Mike Schmidt, and Andre Dawson, three Hall of
famers sitting there. We're talking about it, and they were
arguing over who had a dugout mug first, which I
thought was interesting. And then the next morning I was golfing.
I get to golf from the event and I sat down.
(22:02):
It was just me and Emmett Smith at breakfast, and
then Tim Tebow walks over with Urban Meyer and they
asked if they can.
Speaker 10 (22:09):
Sit with us, and I'm like, yeah, mister Tebow, you can.
Speaker 9 (22:12):
Sit with us, no problem.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
And then Erban grabbed my mug and said, Tim, have
you seen these He's like, oh, yeah, that's Chris He's
from Florida.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
I was like, oh my god, what's going on.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And then John Smoltz is next to me, and then
Barry Bonds is on the other side, and I'm just
sitting here breakfast like just talk.
Speaker 10 (22:29):
I mean, it's things like that.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
You can't really you can't really buy your way into
some of these types of things. And you know, just
just to have those experiences and to have those conversations
and be in a room that I belong in, right,
And there's a lot of belief that comes with that.
I believe, I vividly believe that I belong in every
single room I'm in, in every conversation I'm in, I
(22:52):
belong there, you know, And when you carry yourself that way,
it's amazing how the the uh, the process of the
just manifestation and things that happens in my life, it's awesome.
A lot of blessings land on my lap because of it.
You know, the way I way I operate.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
Well, I'm I'm really in add that a famous person
knows who you are.
Speaker 8 (23:14):
What no famous person knows what I am.
Speaker 7 (23:17):
So you've got a certain sort of psychic boost from
being there. Anything else that you think helped you along?
Speaker 10 (23:24):
I mean, did you perspective? The mentality is everything? I mean,
the process of manifestation is. I mean, I believe in
it very much. And I think the way I operate
and I operate in alignment consistently.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
That's why I end up in the places I do.
You know, these aren't revelations I get while I'm out
of place. It's like, damn it, dude, you belong here too, right,
Like maybe that just the gratification of being included, not
because of who I pretended to be, but because who
I am, Because again, I'm not going to put up
a facade for anybody.
Speaker 10 (23:57):
I don't care who you are. And that that's what
I think the.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Most rewarding is that being authentic, authentically me got me
to where I am, and it's going to take continue
to take me further and put me in the places
that are a lot of fun to be. That I
think is the most rewarding.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
So if you are fortunate enough to meet other, you know,
famous people or sports stars, it is sort of a validation,
right and it does give you confidence right in in
the sense that if these people with these skills and
experiences are accepting you, then you must not be so bad, right,
(24:38):
so you know, and so I think that's a great thing.
Chris Denhurt a serial entrepreneur and e commerce expert, founder
of Dugout, Mugs, Big Golf, and The Denheart Media group.
Thank you very much for joining us on this segment. Chris,
it's been amazing. Where can people get in touch with you?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Dugout mugs dot com and big golf dot Com.
Speaker 10 (25:01):
One of the things I'm proudest of is.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
The sixty thousand five star reviews we have online. I
think that speaks volumes. We don't have to sell ourselves anymore.
Everybody's doing it for us.
Speaker 7 (25:10):
I feel like great passage to profit. With Richard and
Elizabeth Gerhart, we're adding.
Speaker 8 (25:15):
A news segment to the show.
Speaker 6 (25:17):
It's about AI because what we're finding is we of
course get really super smart people on the show every week,
and all of them are using AI in their businesses,
and a lot of people haven't really figured out good
ways to use and their business. So we're going to
ask everybody how they're doing it. So Chris will start
with you, how are you using AI in your business?
Speaker 2 (25:35):
With e commerce, it's a little more unique on how
to utilize AI. But what we've found to be successful
and scalable is leveraging it for customer service. I think
people are starting to come around to the idea that
they're being helped by a program. They just need help
and want help now. So the customer service side of
(25:56):
our business has really progressed with AI. In answers immediately
it through API, can communicate through Shopify and get tracking information,
make changes to orders, everything. And typically when we spike
around playoffs and World Series and Black Friday, Cyber Monday
and Christmas, you know, typical buying seasons, we would have
(26:16):
to add another second or even third customer service persons.
Now with AI, it's infinitely scalable. So not only is
it more efficient, more accurate, doesn't sleep. It accomplishes what
three people could do in our peak season.
Speaker 10 (26:33):
Which allows us to operate faster.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And when we're doing you know, one hundred thousand dollars
a day in revenue and we can last an extra
two or three days. That's significant, right. The other is design.
AI has really helped in a major way from a
design standpoint, because a lot of people want something, but
they don't know what they want. You know, our stuff
is so customizable. They're like, oh, I want.
Speaker 10 (26:57):
Something that's kind of like this and kind of like
this and kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Well you throw that into AI and it'll throw up
an image that's like, oh, that's almost exactly what I
was talking about, and then we just clean it up
a little bit, so it's really shortened the distance between
conception and something tangible. So those two areas, and I
mean it's probably saved us minimum seventy thousand dollars a
year just it's more efficient, more effective, and it's immediately
(27:23):
saved us you know, probably closer to like one hundred
thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 10 (27:26):
And that's just for now.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I know, the things with Google and with Facebook and
a few of the areas where we do paid traffic,
the split testing, the split testing and the creatives and
these types of things to lean into AI for that
type of work is probably the two point zero.
Speaker 10 (27:43):
But once that's dialed in, I mean, it's going to
be interesting to see.
Speaker 8 (27:47):
Great. Thank you. So, alex Yansher with Passport Global dot Com,
how are you using AI for your business?
Speaker 9 (27:54):
First all, I really like Chris's answer.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
We're also doing a lot with our agents, so let
me give you a little context.
Speaker 9 (28:02):
We have about two hundred and twenty people in the company.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
We do internationalization software, and we're vertically integrated with our
own logistics, so we also have three warehouses around the US.
So it's really a broad range of things and skills
and types of people that work at Passport, And we
made a big announcement actually a week ago that every
single call that we have, internal or external has to
(28:27):
have one of those recorders on to transcribe the call
and record the call. And people were a little bit
iffy about it because it feels like big brothers watching
you and all that.
Speaker 9 (28:38):
But we approached it.
Speaker 4 (28:39):
And communicated to the company that this is actually an
opportunity to level up ourselves, you know, ourselves as employees,
ourselves as teammates, managers and all that, and this is
one big stepping stone that we're taking as a company.
Speaker 9 (28:54):
So some of the benefits.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
One is sometimes even if you're trying to be in
in a call, you want to take notes. Nothing wrong
with that, I take notes, But when you take notes,
you're kind of going like that and the person feels
like you're not engaged and they can't see that you're
writing something down.
Speaker 9 (29:09):
It makes it look like maybe you're on your phone
or you're typing something. So I personally loved it. I
went to I went to CAW.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
We had we had this person that would sit by
the professor at the edge. It was called black lightning
notes and they would take notes, so you don't have
to take notes during class and you just buy those notes.
So it's kind of kind of reminded me of that,
So I thought, hey, why don't we just do this?
Speaker 9 (29:29):
This is now possible with AI.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
It's so fast and easy, essentially free on an incremental basis,
And after every call, you have a transcription of the
whole call.
Speaker 9 (29:39):
And you don't need to play that game like what
did she want again? What do we ask her to
do that?
Speaker 4 (29:43):
You know, and you also get to be present during
during that call, and then you get to do so
many other that's just like base level blocking and tackling
good call hygiene.
Speaker 9 (29:55):
You know that that becomes much easier with the call recorder.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
But the other thing that we're trying to do now
and I'll report back jury still out, but we're trying
to run those calls through AI to grade them. You know,
how did the salesperson do on this particular call based
on this criteria?
Speaker 9 (30:12):
Did this manager provide good, honest feedback to the worker?
Did they use blame me language? You know, like things
like that. You can run it through AI and you
could have and you can have an opportunity to really
level yourself up in a very.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
Objective and I would say a key to all this
unemotional way. Like it's one thing to get feedback from
your manager, even if you're somebody who feels like they
could hear feedback, even when it's negative, it's still a
little bit tinged with emotion. And then there's some people
who can't take feedback at all. You know, we've all
(30:47):
worked with those kind of people. But when you're getting
feedback from AI that's just objectively reading your transcript and
watching it and giving you the points, it's much easier
to hear it and not get emotionally attached and feel
attacked or something like that. So I'm really excited. This
is like one big step that we took in the company.
So like every single call now that we have it's mandated,
(31:09):
unless it's, like you know, we have exceptions. You want
to have sometimes a private conversation that's not memorialized, that's fine,
of course.
Speaker 9 (31:16):
You don't have to have that requorder on. But free
of those kinds of situations. Pretty much every single call,
internal and external is being transcribed at this point at Passport.
Speaker 8 (31:25):
Well, that's another creative way to use it. That's awesome.
Speaker 6 (31:29):
Jim Ratchnik, Reasonable Risk dot com, how are you using
AI in your company?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well, it's interesting, great feedback from Alex and Chris. You know,
both of our companies, Reasonable Risk of the software company
and Haylock the consulting company, are focused in cybersecurity and
AI is definitely one of the most powerful tools available
to companies today. But like any technology, it brings with
it powered but there are risks that need to be managed,
(31:55):
you know, risks such as security and privacy. You know,
AI often gets fed sensitive data that could be open
to companies, exposing private information.
Speaker 5 (32:05):
Right.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
The other thing that people don't really think much about
is reliability and data integrity. You know. AI can sometimes
make mistakes, and the companies that are making decisions off
of those mistakes are still responsible for those outcomes. I'm
going to tell you an actual story. I was on
vacation with my family. We're out of the country, and
my kids were so excited to show me how they
could take a photograph of a menu in Spanish and
(32:29):
immediately translated to English. And I was very excited too.
I did the same, and I quickly translated and I
started ordering food for my family, and the waiter looked
at me like, what are you talking about? I was
ordering something that he had no idea what I was
talking about. So just to regain footing, and I kind
of pride myself on thinking quickly on my feed activity,
and I went to a dollar amount. I said, I
will have this thing that costs you know, seven dollars
(32:51):
and forty three cents. He looked at me, he goes,
we don't have anything like that at all. At this point,
I started feeling like what is going on? And my
kids took a picture of the menu AI was feeding us.
Just I don't know where it was getting. The information
was completely wrong, and I see the correctness of AI
is something people often don't think about when we go
to Google. It is a matching algorithm and it's very
(33:11):
very good. People are beginning to use AI as an advisor.
But when you go to your let's think about the
human human behavioral science behind this. When you go to
someone to get advice, first you go to someone that
you trust in that area, and second use you ass
us their degree of confidence in that area. Right, we're
gonna ask Chris Denner know about e commerce and about sports. Well,
(33:33):
you might ask me about cybersecurity. When AI comes back,
do you know what degree confidence AI has that answer?
So one little trick, one little technique is you can
actually ask AI at the end of every single answer
to tell you the degree confidence and they'll just build
that into everything that responds when AI comes back, whether SHAD,
GPT or any other LOM and it says I'm sixty
(33:55):
five percent confident too that answer, Now you're going to
think about should I move forward without or SHAD it
gets more information. We just kind of assume that AI
is like Google.
Speaker 7 (34:03):
Elizabeth writing that down by the way, because he uses AILI.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
And it's super powerful.
Speaker 9 (34:09):
So let me keep going.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
How we're to answer your question how are we USINGI?
So because companies are still responsible for these outcomes, and
those outcomes could have risks related to security or data integrity.
What we've started to do is we offer services around
identifying where is AI being used in your company, all
instances of AI, how are people using AI, and allowing
(34:32):
you to monitor and control, putting in some guardrails of
acceptable use, acceptable within your organization values.
Speaker 10 (34:39):
Maybe you don't.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Want certain llms being used, but I think the key
here is that most people are focused on the reward
but not the risk. Will help companies balance the two
and let your employees use AI in a way that's
in line with your organizational values. And that's how we're
offering that as a service, and that's kind of how
we use AI of awesome really.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
Yeah, your heart lot.
Speaker 7 (35:02):
We have an AI company that is helping us implement
some processes.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
So far, I haven't been that impressed, and.
Speaker 7 (35:10):
Maybe part of it is there's a sometimes a reluctance
on the part of people to adopt these new technologies
because they're concerned that part of their job.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
May go away.
Speaker 7 (35:22):
But from our perspective, we're using AI to help manage
our docket meetings. So we have meetings on a weekly
basis where we go over cases and you know, discuss
what needs to be done. So the team communicates about
those and we make sure that everything is followed up on,
and we use the software to track those cases. And
(35:44):
we've been using AI to listen, you know, record the
meetings and then provide inputs that can be put back
into the database to help us stay on top of
assignments that you know, need to be completed in order
to make sure our work gets done in the right way.
The challenge has been that either the information is just
(36:06):
wrong number one or number two, it's not specific enough.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
To be that helpful.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
So as enthusiastic as we are to embrace AI for
our purposes, it's not there yet. On that one topic,
I think what Jim said is true. You have to
double check this stuff and make sure it's correct. So
while you might gain a little bit of time, you
still have to have somebody go over it, or a
(36:34):
couple of people go over it to make sure that
the data that's being put back in the system is correct.
So that's how we're using it. We're trying, but it's
not really where I want it to be yet.
Speaker 6 (36:44):
I use it a lot for research, and I do
to Jim's point. I use chat GPT because that's one
most people use. I use Perplexity and Perplexity actually now
if you have the paid version, can go to a
bunch of different llms to find the best one to
answer your question. And then I started I was using Cloud,
but now Perplexity as Cloud.
Speaker 8 (37:02):
But then I also use Gemini, Google's Gemini.
Speaker 6 (37:06):
Because I feel like it's going to have the most
accurate answers about Google.
Speaker 8 (37:11):
But it wasn't that good.
Speaker 6 (37:13):
A year ago when I was using all four of them,
and now it's a lot better. But with Chat GPT five,
which has just come out last month in August of
twenty twenty five, supposed to be super duper. I tried
to have a design a brochure for me and it did.
It was kind of good, but it misspelled something and so.
Speaker 8 (37:31):
I got into a big fight with it that was like,
can you please?
Speaker 7 (37:35):
You're fighting with chat ChiPT doing this is probably not
going to win that one, but.
Speaker 8 (37:39):
Do you think? Over and over again, I'm like, how
can I stop you from doing this? And guess what?
It's spend more money, upgrades your.
Speaker 7 (37:47):
Account, upgrade your account. Oh you get to good spelling
if you pay more.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
Got it?
Speaker 9 (37:51):
So?
Speaker 8 (37:51):
Yeah, I think AI is a double edged story.
Speaker 12 (37:54):
Dight.
Speaker 5 (37:54):
Yeah, that's great. We have to take a commercial break now.
Stay tuned.
Speaker 7 (37:57):
We're going to have Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind and
also intellectual property news coming up right after this passage.
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Speaker 1 (40:05):
Passage to Profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
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Passage to Profit show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and on
the iHeart app. And now it's time for intellectual property news.
Speaker 6 (40:47):
Did you know that the ATMA system has its own
court of Appeals?
Speaker 5 (40:52):
Well I knew that. Did you know that?
Speaker 8 (40:54):
Well? I knew that because of a patent ago, but
I don't think a lot of people knew that. Oh,
and so is presiding over Baselam Right.
Speaker 7 (41:02):
Yeah, intellectual properties of federal law managed by the Federal
court system, and any case that's decided in the Federal
District Court can be appealed to the first Circuit Court
of Appeals.
Speaker 5 (41:14):
Right.
Speaker 7 (41:15):
So the idea behind this was to try to create
consistency among intellectual property decisions. Well, there's been a judge
there that's been there for quite a while, Pauline Newman.
She's brilliant jurist, but she's ninety eight years old and
she refuses to leave the court. So she's been fighting
(41:35):
to stay on while the chief judge of the Federal
Circuit has been trying to kick her off. And this
has been going on now for about five years. It's
kind of a shame that this is happening. I Mean,
we hear a lot of talk these days about the
judiciary and the qualification of judges, And unfortunately, this kind
of controversy grows a little shade I think on sort
(41:59):
of the institutional aspects of intellectual properties. So people want
to feel confident that their cases are getting decided by
coaching people. But when somebody's ninety eight years old, that
can throw that into question.
Speaker 5 (42:11):
Right.
Speaker 7 (42:13):
I don't know at the rate I'm going, I don't
know what I'll be like when I'm ninety eight, if
I make it that far.
Speaker 5 (42:18):
She took cognitive.
Speaker 7 (42:19):
Tests like in her mid nineties, and she came out okay.
I watched a couple of interviews with her, and I
was impressed. He's a lot smarter than I am, and
I thought that she could be a great judge. But
I understand that the chief judge of the Federal Circuit
doesn't like her for some reason.
Speaker 5 (42:37):
And this is.
Speaker 7 (42:38):
As much about her age as it is about other things.
But anyway, I think it's time now to get to
our presenters.
Speaker 8 (42:46):
We're going to go to.
Speaker 6 (42:46):
Alex Aanswer first with Passport Global dot com. He's also
on LinkedIn. He's the co founder of passport and he
has a lot of kudos of his own Before founding Passport,
he served as CEO at Pantry and held financialles at
face Spook A Morgan Stanley. So he also advises and
invest his startups, so he's no stranger to the entrepreneurial world.
(43:07):
And Alex tell us all about what you're doing now
with Passport.
Speaker 9 (43:10):
I started Passport about eight years ago.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
And before that, actually one of the companies is a
company called links Lynks.
Speaker 9 (43:18):
It's a play on words.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
It was a personal shopping service that helped people abroad
by products from the US.
Speaker 9 (43:24):
And people would take a link.
Speaker 4 (43:26):
That's the plan wherese people would take a hyperlink and
drop it into our universal shopping cart. They would buy
it from us, we would get the money. We would
go on the website it so on Amazon, Etsy Alberts
put in our credit card information in our address in Delaware.
Reason Delaware, it's a tax free state, so we would
ship everything sales tax free.
Speaker 9 (43:48):
And then I ran operations for that company, and it
was my job to figure.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Out how to ship products of any shape or size
because we weren't really in control of the link that
people would drop into the cart.
Speaker 9 (43:58):
So sometimes people would want to buy something really small
and expensive.
Speaker 4 (44:02):
Like a diamond ring, and then sometimes really big and
bulky like a surfboard. Yeah, and we had to figure
out how to ship all those products around the world.
And in running OPS in that company, I realized that
international is so much more than just a shipping You
have to have the regulatory compliance set. So every country
(44:24):
has their own version of FDA, like in Canada it's
called Health Canada, and they have their own rules and
regulations and duties and taxes is another big component to it.
Every country has their own tax regime.
Speaker 9 (44:37):
Right now.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
It's you know, we're in the news with our tariff
rates and all that, but guess what, every other country
also has tariffs, you know, and you have to know
all those rules and regulations. Don't get me started on
international returns. That's a whole other beast of.
Speaker 9 (44:50):
A problem solve.
Speaker 5 (44:50):
Holy chow. Yeah, that could be a big problem.
Speaker 9 (44:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
Can you imagine getting the stuff back almost impossible. So
my insight in running OPS or the previous company links
was a lot of these things.
Speaker 9 (45:04):
They're intertwined.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
So the company that's delivering the goods physically is also
the company that's helping clear customs in assessing the duties
and taxes that are owed by the consumer or by
the business for that shipment. Now, who's the company that's
calculating the duties and tax on the website itself, Well, it's.
Speaker 9 (45:27):
Usually not the shipping company, right.
Speaker 4 (45:28):
You don't really think of FedEx as like a software
company that you're using to calculate duties and taxes, and
it isn't FedEx, right, But FedEx could be the one
that delivers the goods.
Speaker 9 (45:38):
But there's this horrible disconnect that.
Speaker 4 (45:40):
Happens then because the amount that you ultimately get charged
does not always match the amount.
Speaker 9 (45:48):
That you, as an e commerce business, is charging the customer.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
Okay, And that's a really big problem because either a
customer is going to overpay or you're going to underpay,
and it's going to kill your margin.
Speaker 9 (45:59):
Right. The one insight that I had was that.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
These things should be all under one roof, and the
same company that clears customs for you, that does the
delivery should also be the same company that helps you
calculate the duties and taxes in your shopping cart. So
I start a passport to basically bring the software and
the physical logistics services together under one roof, under one
(46:24):
company to give e commerce merchants like Chris, Actually, you
know I'm going to pitch you after this, I'm going
to connect with you on LinkedIn, so watch out. And
we basically help merchants go global really really easily, in
a turnkey manner.
Speaker 7 (46:38):
Well, that sounds like a really complex business model because
all of the regulations that you've mentioned, all the different variables,
all the different ways something can be shipped. You know,
it could be ground transport from Canada, or it could
be airshipped, it could be ocean freighter. I mean, how
do you manage all of that and still stay sane?
Speaker 9 (46:59):
Who said anything about think sane?
Speaker 4 (47:01):
Uh So that's where value, I think in business is unlocked.
Speaker 9 (47:06):
It's when you can wrangle that complexity and make it
really easy for a customer. So from a customer's perspective,
it's magic.
Speaker 4 (47:17):
The amount that our software is telling them to charge
their customers in their shopping cart online shopping cart matches
the invoice, you know, and it's like, wow, I'm not
losing money.
Speaker 9 (47:27):
It's exactly how much you told me to charge. There's
nothing held up at customs.
Speaker 4 (47:32):
We also have a service where we help big brands
like Hexclad is a customer.
Speaker 9 (47:37):
Maybe you heard of them, the frying Pan Company.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
We help them set up local operations in country, and
that's a whole other set of challenges to set up
local operations versus shipping something cross border. And for us,
it was all about building things step by step. We
needn't launch like what we have today. The suite of
services that we have today is i want to say
(48:00):
ten x the suite of services that we had day one.
So I think it's just about focus and not biting
off more than you can chew, so that every step
of the way we're being the best version of ourselves
and able to provide a really high level of service
and not just sort of winging it for customers because
this is their livelihood at the end of the day.
(48:21):
Most e commerce businesses, they're not you know, venture funded
or anything like that.
Speaker 9 (48:25):
They're owner operated.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
And if there's a big loss on international, it's going
to distract away from the domestic business and it's going.
Speaker 9 (48:33):
To be that person's that owner's personal income. So we
take this very seriously.
Speaker 5 (48:39):
So Chris, you're not in your head in agreement.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
There's a real need, you know, like you said, who said,
you're not going crazy doing it.
Speaker 10 (48:45):
I mean, hard things shouldn't be easy.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Valuable things shouldn't be easy to do, right, And I
think what you're doing is providing a real service for
international because right now we're in seven countries with dugout
and the outside of US Canada, it's kind of complic
to deal with. So yeah, I'm glad we're going to connect.
I actually had that note down here myself because I
think there's some synergy.
Speaker 10 (49:06):
Not to mention with my colleagues, right, but yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
You providing a pretty cool, unique service that we're in
a global economy now, cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI.
Speaker 10 (49:16):
And being scared of any of it. It's just to
waste the time.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
You got to just learn how to adapt and how
to harness it because it's here, whether we like it
or not.
Speaker 8 (49:22):
I agree one hundred percent of that harness it. Don't
let it drag you along. We're talking to Alex Yankscher
with passport Global dot Com right now.
Speaker 6 (49:30):
Do you have any great stories where somebody came to
freaking out and you were able to help them through
their situation.
Speaker 4 (49:36):
Well, in a startup, everybody always freaking out, and we
try to hire people so that they're not coming to
me to solve the problem. But I'm giving them the
air cover to figure out themselves. But I think one
story that I can tell, I wouldn't say anybody was
necessarily freaking out in this particular story, but it was
just like a culture arms for us. So when we started,
(49:59):
we're very, very small. Obviously you're starting with one customer.
We're close to one thousand customers now, but the journey
of one thousand miles or a thousand customer because with
one step and one customer, right, and you have this
chicken and egg problem where we're trying to be like
the modern.
Speaker 9 (50:14):
Day version of DHL.
Speaker 4 (50:15):
We're trying to harness, you know, all of those complicated
pieces of the supply chain, but we don't have enough
volume to go open up a warehouse, hire a bunch
of warehouse workers and engage with, you know, the fairly
complicated supply chain of shipping a single parcel like this
big around the world.
Speaker 9 (50:34):
You need a first mile to warehouse.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
You need the warehouse. You need to go from from
the warehouse to the airport. From the airport, you know,
on an airplane to a country. From a country, you
need to plug into a last smile network.
Speaker 9 (50:47):
Right. All of that's very, very complicated. So a first thing.
Speaker 4 (50:51):
That we did was we white labeled a company that
was in this space and we had to deal with
the company. We said, Okay, we want to build our brand,
so we're going to basically tell customers that you are
us and we are you, and you're not going to
really surface your brand whatever a white.
Speaker 9 (51:10):
Label basically what a white label.
Speaker 4 (51:11):
Is, right, but we need to be in control of
the logistics in operations, and the relationship was really solid.
Speaker 9 (51:19):
And they were in the partner was a really good communicator.
But we're just one customer.
Speaker 4 (51:24):
They themselves have a thousand customers, so we're one out
of a thousand customers.
Speaker 9 (51:28):
And everything that we need in order to do.
Speaker 4 (51:30):
A good job and really reinvent international internationalization and international
shipping and create the kind of experience that we wanted
to create, it was just impossible. They just weren't really
set up to do things the way that we wanted
to do them. So we had a existential question for
us as a company because we knew we weren't going to.
Speaker 9 (51:50):
Make it if we were just basically a rapper, right.
Speaker 4 (51:53):
A white label around another logistics company that's only so
good and it's holding us back from reaching our potential.
So we had a question, do we build this internally
or do we buy a company basically like an acid
based company that gets us into what we need.
Speaker 9 (52:09):
And we went down both routes.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
Not so much couldn't decide, but both routes are very
risky in their own right. So we thought, let's push
along both routes and go with one when we see
one as working.
Speaker 9 (52:22):
Right. So what we ended up doing.
Speaker 4 (52:24):
Is acquiring a company called Access Worldwide based in Atlanta,
and the CEO of that company became the chief operating
officer of Passport and we got into the acid based
international shipping game that way, and I'm.
Speaker 9 (52:41):
So glad we did it because the build it our
self path. We were kind of blind leading the blind.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
I mean, we did hire some good people, but at
the end of the day, they had never built something
like this from scratch and speed running it as well
because we already had customers. So fast forward, you know,
four years. So the first four years was working with
the white label. In the last four years we've been
operating under our own network. You know, we're in three
warehouses here in the US, we have a warehouse in UK.
(53:12):
But I would say every step of the way from
well this deal go through to how do we transition
our customers off of the white label solution onto our
own proprietary network, that was you know, fraught with risk
and stress and all that.
Speaker 9 (53:26):
But at the end of the day it worked out, and.
Speaker 4 (53:28):
I'd say we're one of the biggest e commerce shippers
around the world at this point.
Speaker 7 (53:32):
We're with Alex theanser from Passport Global. Really interesting story
about actually writing two parallel paths to see which one
worked out. I'm just wondering, in terms of your business career,
what was the risk that you thought was most worth taking.
Speaker 4 (53:50):
Our very first non technical hire and the I think
it was the fourth hire in our company, was this
bright eyed young woman who was maybe two years into
her career, having no experience in the startup world or
in logistics, and became a associate at Passport choose I
(54:11):
want to say like twenty three, because she's been with
us for eight years now. Just this past week she
got promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Passport I know
I said that the CEO of Access Worldwide became the
chief operating officer actually misspoke. He became the Chief Commercial Officer,
the CEO because we specifically made a point, and this
is what I told him, because he said said, naturally,
(54:32):
I'm going to be the COO.
Speaker 9 (54:33):
That's my title. I said, no, you know, we're reserving
that slot. This is four years ago.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
We're reserving it slot for a rising star in our company.
Speaker 9 (54:42):
And I don't want to peak and I don't want
to peak.
Speaker 4 (54:45):
Her performance or you know, her opportunity by giving the title,
the chief operating title to you.
Speaker 9 (54:50):
So we're going to give you a different title. We're
going to give you the chief commercial title.
Speaker 4 (54:54):
And he owns you know, our network are pricing all
of that, so he owns a lot of the business.
But the daily operations was owned by somebody who is
incredibly talented. But you're always taking a risk on somebody
who's unproven.
Speaker 9 (55:08):
And that's a risk that I would say really paid off.
Speaker 13 (55:11):
You know.
Speaker 9 (55:12):
She became a core part of the leadership team.
Speaker 4 (55:16):
And every time our company hit a new growth mode
like we needed at some point. I'm sure everybody in
this call has this experience where where you don't start
off the company with an HR.
Speaker 9 (55:28):
Person that's not one of your key, you know, first
ten hires.
Speaker 4 (55:32):
We waited until we were fifty people before we hired
our first HR person. We had like a fractional company
that did you know, onboarding, off boarding and some other things,
but we didn't have an HR person because this person
who became our COO, she essentially functioned as that role,
and then she hired the first one and built out
(55:52):
the team, and then that team rolled off her, you know,
And she did that a couple of times in the company,
where basically learned what it takes to kickstart a new
function in the team.
Speaker 9 (56:03):
Got it wrong oftentimes in the beginning.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
But course corrected and just had such an incredible attitude
and ability to fix things that weren't working. And yeah,
every step of the way, I would say, can you
do this next level?
Speaker 9 (56:17):
Can you do this next level?
Speaker 4 (56:18):
Because usually the team that gets you to your first
call it one hundred customers, your first ten million, it's
really not the team that gets you to.
Speaker 9 (56:24):
One hundred million, and we're doing over one hundred million
in revenue at this point. It's usually a different team.
But we got lucky.
Speaker 4 (56:30):
We got lucky with this rising star who really at
the capacity to learn and adjust well that.
Speaker 8 (56:35):
Is a really great story. I don't think it was
all luck. How do people find you if they want
to get in touch with you?
Speaker 4 (56:41):
Yeah, the best way I would say to reach out
to me is my email.
Speaker 9 (56:45):
Alex Atpasperglobal dot com.
Speaker 4 (56:48):
I am fairly active on LinkedIn, especially nowadays with all
the global trade things happening around the world. So I'm
on LinkedIn is just my name Alex Ancher, and I'm
also on X again just my name Alex.
Speaker 9 (57:02):
He insure.
Speaker 8 (57:03):
Okay, great, thank you.
Speaker 5 (57:04):
Passage to profit with Richard Analyizabeth Pierhart.
Speaker 6 (57:07):
So now we are on to our next guest, Jim Rachnik.
He is an innovative business leader with over twenty five
years of technology and management consulting experience, founded and partnered
with multiple companies and now he is a CEO of
Haylock and of Reasonable Risk as cybersecurity experts.
Speaker 8 (57:25):
So he's going to tell us everything we need to.
Speaker 7 (57:27):
Now, how does stay secure with your technology?
Speaker 3 (57:33):
So, as was just mentioned on the ceo of two
exciting companies, I'd like to tell you a little bit
about both of them. Haylock is a cybersecurity consulting firm.
We provide professional services in cybersecurity and just cutting to
the chase.
Speaker 9 (57:45):
The one thing that we do.
Speaker 3 (57:46):
Better than anyone else is we help our clients to
manage the risk of harm from cybersecurity with the same
rigor that they manage the risk of harm from their
primary product or service they sell. So, Chris, you create
amazing products, mugs, all sorts of stuff, you pretty much
are dialed into the risk of harm of that mug
busting apart and earning someone you know the quality. But
(58:07):
yet organizations out there oftentimes don't feel they have their
finger on the pulse of the risk of harm of
the data that they are steward from. If that data
was breached, if that data was exposed, if that data
was changed. What's the risk of harm to your customers,
to your vendors. That's important because bad things happen in
good companies all the time. And if by allowing our
(58:30):
customers to really understand the risk of harm or allow
them to avoid a position of negligence, which helps them
avoid expensive litigation. As an example, we all have sidewalks,
and someone slips and falls on your sidewalk and hurts themselves.
God forbid, they could sue you. Now, if you have
a video camera looking outside your dining room window, and
(58:51):
that you can demonstrate that you're shoveling every two hours
when it snows. They can sue you, but you're not
negligent because you're doing what you should. They can still
sue you, they just won't be able to prove negligence
and you will be able to avoid a lot of problems.
Speaker 7 (59:04):
As a business owner, I always wonder about the trade
offs between speed and efficiency and cybersecurity, since we rely
so much on tech to run our businesses. One of
my favorite issues is like the two factor authentication. I
hate it just because it slows me down, and I
(59:24):
guess I've just become a master of memorizing these six
digit codes, right, But there's some value in that, right
because it's protecting the account. It seems to me like
there's always a trade off then, between efficiency and security.
Speaker 3 (59:38):
Is that your experience, You're absolutely right. You have to
balance the risk and the reward. In the example you
just mentioned, two factor authentication requires a second factor something
you'd have, something you are, something you know. So the
password is something you know. Second factor could be something
you have or something you are biometric or are Till now,
(01:00:00):
what you have to do is balance. Like you said,
if you are a surgeon and you are risking not
being able to log onto your laptop and save a patient,
in that case, maybe the cure or the two factor
authentication is worse than the disease. So that's what you're balancing.
You're balancing the burden of implementing that safeguard against the
(01:00:21):
benefits the safeguard provides. That's absolutely a big part of cybersecurity.
On the Haylock side, what we do is we help
customers understand and manage their risk of harm of their
cybersecurity processes in the same way and the same quality
they manage risk of harm from the main product or
service that they sell. Four years ago, we spun off
a separate company and I became the CEO of Reasonable Risk,
(01:00:42):
which is a next generation governance, risk and compliance platform
and it's become an industry disruptor and an industry innovator.
And a little bit about how Reasonable Risk came to
be In helping clients at Haylock over period of a
decade build their security programs, we realize that our cut
customers were struggling from three major needs in the marketplace.
(01:01:05):
One was legal defensibility. Our clients wanted to avoid legal
liability and they didn't know how to do it. And
finding out when you have a class action lawsuit that
you're now legally protected is not when you want to
find out. You want to do that upfront so that
it never gets there.
Speaker 9 (01:01:18):
Two.
Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Communication with executives. The inability of cybersecurity teams to effectively
communicate with their leadership did not allow them to get
the budgets to do the jobs they need to do,
so they needed to communicate effectively in three long expensive implementations.
People want solutions they can implement immediately, so we created
a software platform that gave them the ability to do
(01:01:39):
all three. And now our approach is being adopted by
regulators and attorney generals of forty nine states. We are
actually our approach is becoming a standard in law. Haylock
and Reasonable Risk are two separate companies. They're very complementary
to one another, and we're actively growing both.
Speaker 7 (01:01:55):
So how would you advise an entrepreneur or a start
with respect to cybersecurity. Are they okay with just like
buying off the shelf products or is there some other approach?
Speaker 9 (01:02:07):
It's a great question.
Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
I would say that the basics that I would suggest
that anyone do. The first step of entrepreneur buckling down
their cybersecurity would be to do two things that every
business today should be thinking about. The first is called
a penetration test. It is a test, it's an ethical
hacking test. It says, if you have an electronic commerce website,
(01:02:29):
if you have any digital presence, it could just be
a website. Hiring a company, it's not very expensive to
come in and see from the outside, what could they get?
What can they come in with your approval and try
to take That tells you all the holes in your game,
so to speak. It would be like hiring someone and
giving them two hours to run around your house and
see if they can walk in and what they can get.
(01:02:50):
They provide your report and you can then fix those gaps.
Just about every law and regulation, from payment car industry
to health records to financial industry requires business is to
do that. So that's the first thing, is a penetration test.
I think of that as almost like teeth cleaning. You
should be doing it on a regular basis. That's one.
The second is something called a risk assessment. Risk assessment
is analogous to a yearly physical. You know, we all
(01:03:12):
go to that yearly physical and is that change our world?
Sure it does because the physical changes. Yearly physical gives
you a report of everything, all the domains and says
here your your blood pressure or your weight, your oxygen levels.
There's some things you want to do and these these
are some areas where you're not okay. So those two things,
a penetration test and a risk assessment are things that
(01:03:33):
are a good thing for every entrepreneur to do. And
as Alex mentioned, just like you don't hire an HR
person your first ten employees, we didn't either. You may
not be doing these things your first five employees. But
as you get bigger, as your data steward responsibilities grow,
meaning if your data gets taken, exposed, modified, you have
(01:03:53):
a responsibility because you could harm people. You should be
doing a penetration test and a risk assessment. And there
are a lot of companies that can do that. We
can do that, but there are a lot of great
companies out there that can do that.
Speaker 6 (01:04:03):
Is there anything a company would do that would attract
a hacker? Like, are there things you can avoid doing
or are hackers just random?
Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
Hackers? Are both random as well as opportunistic hackers come
at companies for a variety of reasons. One of the
biggest reasons because they are opportunistic is the data they
can get. They have a lot of personally identifiable information
otherwise known as PII. You are a good target if
you have a lot of valuable information, you know, personally
identifiable information that they could sell on the black web
(01:04:34):
for a profit, or that they can get credit card numbers.
That might create a target if you are not patching
all of your systems, if you're not keeping your things updated,
they can perform an external scan and get a sense
of how well are you maintaining your system, so to speak.
So if you have valuable data coupled with you don't
seem to be doing your maintenance very well, that might
(01:04:54):
create an opportunity for someone to say, you know what,
let me invest a little bit of time and see
if I could monetize that opportunity.
Speaker 8 (01:05:00):
What is the safest way to take credit cards? If
you're selling something to somebody, do you have any ideas
on that.
Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
You should seek to work with an organization that has
demonstrated that they have certifications through PCI, which is the
payment card industry with. That's one certification, a credit certification.
Another thing that you should seek is to see what
kind of compliance certification. Do they have a SoC one,
do they have a SoC two, Do they have a
(01:05:27):
sock for cybersecurity, or do they have what's kind of
the black Belt of cybersecurity, which is an ISO twenty
seven thousand and one certification. If they've certified their systems,
then they've put themselves through a certain amount of rigor
the demonstrates that they're not just putting in place technical things,
but that their entire company and including senior leadership, that
the governance mechanism is working, which is what those certifications require.
(01:05:51):
That should give you a much greater sense of comfort
that the organization you're working with take cybersecurity seriously. We've
all gotten that postcard in the mail that says, hey, sorry,
we were breached, your information was exposed. Some of us are,
hopefully not many of you have experienced that all of
a sudden you're getting new credit cards or identity theft
(01:06:12):
and other things. So what you want to do is
work with companies that take cybersecurity seriously, and you can
usually get that from their website in the certifications that
they post.
Speaker 8 (01:06:22):
Well, that's brilliant helpful information. Thank you. So we'll come
to the end of our segment. But how do people
find you?
Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
Either on either one of the companies haylockha l ock
dot com or reasonable risk dot com. You can submit
a contact us form. I'm available on LinkedIn, or you
could email me at j M I r Occhnik at
haylockha l ock dot com.
Speaker 8 (01:06:49):
Great, thank you very much.
Speaker 6 (01:06:51):
It's time for us to go to break listeners, you
are listening to the Passage to Profit show. We're a
to entrepreneurship with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and our special
guest Chris Dinner who has dug out lets, and we
will be right back.
Speaker 13 (01:07:04):
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Eight hundred four nine two seven h one four, eight
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Speaker 11 (01:08:04):
It's Passage to Profit.
Speaker 7 (01:08:05):
Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at Passage to Profit
and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll
to the bottom of the Passage Profit Show dot com
website and check out her.
Speaker 6 (01:08:19):
Album Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
Speaker 8 (01:08:22):
And now it is time.
Speaker 6 (01:08:23):
For Secrets of the entrepreneurial mind, and we are going
to go first. Alex Yanscer with Passport Global dot Com.
What is a secret you can share with our audience?
Speaker 4 (01:08:33):
When I was fundraising for Passport, I got some good advice,
advice that I've heard a million times but sometimes it
really finally sticks.
Speaker 9 (01:08:39):
Keep it simple, stupid, Keep.
Speaker 6 (01:08:41):
It simple stupid. That's a good one. Thank you, Okay,
Jim Roschnik with Reasonablebrisk dot com and Haylock dot com.
What is a secret you can share?
Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
I often get asked what do I think about starting
this business for that business? And in answering those questions,
I started to realize that whether it's looking at someone
else's big business, are looking at kicking off a service
or department within our business, that there really are some commonalities.
There really are kind of lenses or filters that I
think we generally put things through, and I think it's
(01:09:11):
helpful for new entrepreneurs to think about that. And the
first lens is identify what problem or paying your business solves.
Perform an honest assessment on yourself to identify what perspective
are you entering the business from. Then think about moving forward,
but at least go through the rigor of considering all
those steps instead of just saying I'm good at this,
I should build a business around it. So that would
(01:09:33):
be kind of my guidance slash secret to new entrepreneurs.
Speaker 8 (01:09:37):
That is a really powerful secret. Okay, Chris Dinner, what
is your secret.
Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
I always tell people stop wasting time on things that
don't matter. And that's as blunt as I could be
about it, but that's exactly what I'll say to people
when you realize that time is out of your control.
You know, time, money, and all these things are just
an illusion for the most part. Anyway, putting it into
that perspective really will help you make some better decisions
and ask better questions.
Speaker 8 (01:10:03):
I agree one hundred percent.
Speaker 6 (01:10:04):
In fact, right till you hear my secret, which I
thought of my secret before the shows.
Speaker 8 (01:10:10):
So Richard, what is Shoe's secret?
Speaker 7 (01:10:12):
My secret is, from a business standpoint, set high goals.
You know, one of the things that one of my
business coaches once said to me is that one of
the hardest things he had to do with CEOs was
to get them to set goals that were big.
Speaker 5 (01:10:27):
Enough, and that was one of his challenges.
Speaker 7 (01:10:31):
And you know, this last couple of years at the firm,
we've set some pretty high goals and what has really
been amazing and delightful is to see how we've risen
to hit those goals. And I think before I didn't
really set challenging goals.
Speaker 5 (01:10:48):
But it seems like the team really.
Speaker 7 (01:10:50):
Likes having challenging goals and they're stepping up to it,
and it's really exciting to be a part of that,
to be a part of a team that's really engaged working.
Speaker 5 (01:11:01):
To something meaningful. So I would say, set high goals.
Speaker 6 (01:11:04):
My secret was going to be, and I'm thinking about
this yesterday, don't hang out with people that bring you down.
Speaker 8 (01:11:10):
A life is short, and you get to choose how
you live it for the most part.
Speaker 6 (01:11:14):
I mean, you don't get to choose everything, Like I
don't know, Chris, if you would have chosen almost die,
But don't be around people that you don't want to
be around if you can all avoid it. And the
kind of people I like are the people that have
a really positive attitude and that are moving forward in
their lives, and those are the kind of people I
want to be around. So I'm really doing as much
(01:11:34):
as I can right now just to focus on that
and to always focus on positive things. Course bad things happen,
but I try to keep my attitude positive all the
time because I'm a happier.
Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
Person, and I'm a happier person that way too.
Speaker 7 (01:11:46):
Well, that's it for us. Passage to profit is a
nationally syndicated radio show, appearing in thirty eight markets across
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P two P team, our producer Noah Fleischman and our
(01:12:08):
program coordinator Alisha Morrissey, our studio assistant Risicatpusari, and our
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(01:12:28):
while the information on this program is believed to be correct,
never take a legal step without checking with your legal
professional first. Gearheart Law is here for your patent, trademark
and copyright needs. You can find us at gearheartlaw dot
com and contact us for free consultation. Take care everybody,
thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
The proceeding was a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.
The following is a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Understanding what my superpower is, and that is helping people
do what they're doing better than they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Organizations out there oftentimes don't feel they have their finger
on the pulse.
Speaker 4 (00:18):
I realized that international is so much more than just
the shipping.
Speaker 5 (00:23):
I'm Richard Dearhart.
Speaker 6 (00:24):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. You just heard some snippets from
our show. We had amazing people on listen for the
rest of it.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given
it heart, Now get it in gear. It's Passage to
Profit With Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
Speaker 7 (00:43):
I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service
intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Speaker 6 (00:50):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do
marketing for Gearhart Law.
Speaker 8 (00:54):
And I am the.
Speaker 6 (00:55):
Founder of Gear Media Studios, a content creation studio with
the focus on piping.
Speaker 7 (01:00):
Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to entrepreneurship, where
we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities about their business journeys. Well,
this week we're going to be showing how building a
brand takes just as much grit as playing in the
big leagues.
Speaker 5 (01:15):
Our guest today is Chris.
Speaker 7 (01:17):
Denhurt, a serial entrepreneur and e commerce expert, founder of Dugout, Mugs,
Big Golf, and the Dunhart Media Group with over seventy
million in online sales.
Speaker 8 (01:28):
Wow.
Speaker 6 (01:28):
And then we have something really exciting too. Alex Yancher
is the CEO of Passport. Do you want to sell
your stuff overseas? It's really kind of hard to get
over to Hump and know how to do it.
Speaker 8 (01:40):
He helps you do that.
Speaker 5 (01:41):
I love the international stuff I do too.
Speaker 6 (01:44):
And the name of this company's Passport. And then Jim
Ratschnik is a cybersecurity innovator, so we all need that.
Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how many times
I get this message we're resetting.
Speaker 8 (01:56):
Did you ask for a reset code on Facebook?
Speaker 9 (01:58):
I'm like no.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
But he's I'm redefining how organizations manage risk through his
Haylock Security Labs and Reasonable Risk groundbreaking platform.
Speaker 8 (02:06):
He's CEO of both of those.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
So exciting to hear how he's helping us stay as
safe as we can any.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
I can hardly wait.
Speaker 8 (02:13):
And later on we'll hear from our friend Alicia Morrissey,
a great jazz singer, and we've got secrets of the
entrepreneurial mind.
Speaker 7 (02:21):
But before we get to our distinguished guests, it's time
for your new business journey. Two and five Americans are
business owners or they're thinking about starting a business, And
so we want to ask our panel a question. What's
the one rookie mistake you made and that you would
make again because it got you here? So what mistake
(02:43):
did you make that you would make again because it
got you to where you're at today. And let's start
with Chris. Chris, welcome to the show. Tell us about
the rookie mistake you'd repeat.
Speaker 10 (02:53):
Be naive, just chasing after something and not knowing really
what the risks were because I wanted to.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
And I think authenticity, especially in a world we live
in today, it's very rare, and especially in business, and
I think being naive to the risks and the dangers
of business, just being dumb and happy and chasing after
something cool. You never know, maybe you'll shoot for the
whether they say shoot for the moon and catch a
star anyway, I'd make that mistake over and over again.
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Alex, rookie mistake that you'd repeat.
Speaker 9 (03:24):
I'm in the startup world.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I'm in San Francisco here, and I grew up learning
that all you have to do is focus on the product,
build the best possible product, and they will come. Maybe
in some businesses that's true in like a social network
or some consumer businesses, but I'm in the B to
B world. We sell software and services, and that advice
(03:49):
couldn't be further from the truth. So I naively started
and just focused on the product.
Speaker 9 (03:54):
Really didn't hire. I mean it took us like five
years to hire a first marketer.
Speaker 4 (03:59):
At the end of the day, distribution in marketing and sales,
that's I'd say, we're a good, solid sixty five percent
of my time and effort goes now.
Speaker 9 (04:09):
But it's an interesting way you phrased the question.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
It's a mistake I would repeat again because at the
end of the day, it's the reason we have such
a great product is because I was fully focused on
that and not on the sales side.
Speaker 7 (04:18):
In the beginning, great comment, Jim, tell us, what was
the rookie mistake you made that you'd repeat.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
In my twenties, I started an online restaurant reservation system
with several partners. I had two partners. One of them
was a very talented professor. At the time, he was
a child prodigy, had never failed at anything. And what
we learned along the way is he was a very
bright individual, but he didn't have real life experience and
the business didn't work. And I learned that the partners
you choose are even more important than the business model itself.
(04:46):
I would do it again because it's to help me
learn the power of the right team.
Speaker 7 (04:51):
The takeaway from all this is that sometimes the mistakes
that we regret are the ones that teach us the most.
So I learned a lot from my experience, and I
think that's just made me a better attorney business person.
Now it's time for our interview with Chris Denner. He's
the guy who turned a baseball bat into a fifty
two million dollar mug, literally from dugout mugs to big
(05:14):
Golf and is continuing empires. Denhart has built businesses that
have been featured on Forbes, The Ink five thousand, and
National TV, all the while proving that you don't need
a fancy MBA to dominate e commerce. So welcome to
the show, Chris A, how did you get into the
business of making mugs out of baseball bats?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Understanding what my superpower is, and that is helping people
do what they're doing better than they're doing it. And
Randall Thompson a buddy of mine, He's actually the one
that men of the mug and he came to me
with the idea. So Dugout's my ninth company, and I've
had several different things along the way. But the reality
is I understand.
Speaker 10 (05:55):
How to communicate with people, and it's.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
In its purest sense, like what I do. I communicate
with people extremely.
Speaker 10 (06:01):
Well, and I am a master of networking, sales, marketing, branding.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
So really, when anything comes to my desk, I put
it through a certain set of criteria and if it
meets these criteria, it's a project that I'll take on
a lot of times from a consulting standpoint, But all
the consulting really ever was and is, is an opportunity
to vet out projects. Do I like the under operator?
Is it fun? Can I play with my friends? Can
(06:29):
I leverage my network? Does it take time away from
my family? Would my kids be proud of me, you know,
like these are the criteria that I go through, and
it's never really ever revolves around money. You know. I
always say, chase the happy, not the money, and you'll
usually walk away with both, you know.
Speaker 10 (06:44):
I think that's kind of how I came to be
with dugout Mugs. Randall had a.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Cool idea, brought it to me seventy thousand in sales,
and you know, I say, hey, look man, you know,
let's take this thing for a ride. And that's what
we did, and double double, double doubled year every year.
We're the fastest growing licensee in Major League Baseball for
a couple decades, and at this point we're fifty five million.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
Dollars in sales.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
We're in every state, every stadium. Every mug behind me
is autographed by a person I've worked with, from Rod
Carew and Pete Rose and Nolan Ryan and Kngerffory Junior.
And it's pretty wild the things I get to do
and call it a job. And then I look for
synergy and Big Golf came along same opportunity. I took
sixty percent of the company just to be involved, and
(07:33):
I brought it under the same roof, as I have
with Dougout. I had a near death experience when my
daughter was born ten years ago, and when I came
out the other side of it, you know a few
commitments I made, and one of them is being unapologetically authentic.
So like what you get right here is you're gonna
see in the street, you're going to see on a stage,
or you're going to see a mastermind.
Speaker 10 (07:51):
I don't change really for anybody. It's very refreshing.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
The other is to operate in alignment with some of
those criteria of the goals that I was telling you
about there.
Speaker 10 (08:01):
So when things come across my path, it's either.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Who I am in which direction I'm going, or isn't
so I do you know, I have a company around
beer and baseball and golf and cigars and business and consulting.
Speaker 10 (08:12):
And again, I think everybody's success journey is unique. You
measure your success with somebody else's ruler, I don't think
that's smart. I think, you know, more reflection on what's
a success to you and then kind of build that
lifestyle by design. And I think that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
And again I chased the happy and the fun and
not the money. With dugout, and we ended up with
both and it prooves in the pudding.
Speaker 8 (08:34):
Yeah, I want to go back to a couple of
things you said.
Speaker 6 (08:37):
One, you licensed all of this copywriter and trademark material
from the Baseball League, right, So that's part of your
success because if.
Speaker 8 (08:46):
People try to just take that and steal it.
Speaker 5 (08:48):
Can I get Oh, that's that a good idea.
Speaker 7 (08:50):
Listeners, if you're thinking about trying to rip off Major
League Baseball.
Speaker 8 (08:54):
Football or anybody, don't do it.
Speaker 10 (08:56):
So that's licensing side. Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I mean I I have a a large intellectual property portfolio.
You know, we have patents on several of our products,
we have trademark, we actually have trade dress, so we're strong.
Speaker 10 (09:09):
But I mean, you know, you guys are in IP, right.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So what I always found and I had this conversation
early on with Randall, Now, intellectual property can I believe,
especially with like design patents and things like that, it's
only can go so far.
Speaker 10 (09:22):
People can work around and things.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
So I had the whole mentality of do we want
to play to win or do we want to play
to not lose? And I feel like a lot of
that is defense, whereas offense will beat defense in most cases.
Speaker 10 (09:35):
And that's what we decided to do. Like we went
hard in the pay we went an offense hard.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
And we hit the market and the speed the market principle,
and we just didn't let up for years.
Speaker 8 (09:47):
I'm hearing this more and more.
Speaker 6 (09:48):
I didn't hear this like a year ago, but with
all the authenticity and everything coming up now I hear
it all the time.
Speaker 11 (09:54):
Now.
Speaker 8 (09:55):
It's no your why, Why are you doing what you're doing?
Speaker 6 (09:58):
And that tied you through the bad times, it helps
you in the good times.
Speaker 8 (10:03):
And what is your core why? I think it's to
have fun and take care of your family.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
I think one of the biggest lies that people tell
themselves and everybody else is that they're doing it for
their family, when.
Speaker 10 (10:13):
The reality is if you ask your kids what they
really want, or your spouse what they really want, they
want you there. They don't want you traveling one hundred
and fifty days a year, missing the dances, missing the recitals,
missing the things right.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So, I have a pretty core belief that I don't
really believe in work life balance either. Sometimes you're working,
it's all life, you know. Sometimes you're working, sometimes you're not,
you know, And if you do it right, and which
is what I tried to focus on, is it's blurry
what I'd like to do and what I have to
do and what I get to do, or just kind
of all jumble together in this giant bucket that I
(10:49):
get to live in. Par supecifically, my why is to
live an experiential life because at the end of it,
that's all you really have, is the story that you build.
Speaker 7 (10:58):
Our guest today is Chris Hurt, a serial entrepreneur and
e commerce expert, founder of Dugout, Mugs, Big Golf, and
the dun Hart Media Group. So Chris, what part of
your identity do people most misunderstand about you?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I think the authenticity they assume it's probably a bits
of it are a facade, but I think that's because
it's so rare that somebody says what they think and
does what they say and shows up consistent every single time.
So again, I'm pretty good at breaking down walls with
people pretty quickly.
Speaker 10 (11:35):
But there's always going to be those.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Who have been jaded, who have been manipulated and things
like that, so they have a little bit more of
the reservations. But that's what consistency does. And that's the
water through the rock turns into a river. It just
w wear them out because I show the same way
every single time. I think that's probably one of the
things that people misunderstand or I'm very direct, because why
(12:01):
not be you know, just get to the point and
let's address it or not, you know, I'd want.
Speaker 6 (12:06):
To circle back to your business acumen a little bit.
This is obviously what you said is super important to
people that want to start a business. You though, have
been able to take e commerce and really blow it out.
Speaker 8 (12:18):
And if somebody wants to start an e commerce business,
what is the first thing you would tell them? Do
they need to know the business really well? Do they
need to know how e commerce works? Do they need
a coach?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Like?
Speaker 8 (12:27):
How would you start?
Speaker 10 (12:29):
And it's purest form. You're selling a thing to a person.
I don't think that needs coaching. You just need to
not have a crappy thing. You need to have some
passion behind what you're representing. You need to be authentic
and not worry about ruffling feathers. If so, if if
I stand, if I have this stance or that stance,
or you know, just go you're winning or learning. I
(12:50):
think that's probably the easiest way to put it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Like you're winning or learning. If something doesn't work, don't
do it again, keep trying. I think just the stubbornness
of I mean, you gotta be really you gotta have
thick skin and a short memory, you know, and just
keep rolling.
Speaker 10 (13:06):
And I always say don't fall in love with potential.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And I think that's important because a lot of people
come up with an idea or a product or a
thing and it's like it's kind of stupid. It's already done,
you know, it's it's not done as good as this one.
Speaker 10 (13:18):
This one, this one, it's saturated.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Like I think, having some kind of usp unique selling
proposition or model or something that's new and fresh. And
I also say make sure it's something that you're somewhat
passionate about. And because there are plenty of bad days
in business, not just e comm right in business, and
a bad day with even with good people, is still
(13:42):
a bad day. But a bad day with good.
Speaker 10 (13:43):
People can be a good day, you know what I mean.
Like I think, have surrounding and you touched on it.
You're surrounding yourself with the right people is crucial. And
and just being just stubborn. If you want to do it,
just shut up and do it.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
You know, don't overthink it to death. You're selling a
thing to a person. They buy it or they don't.
And if they don't buy it was too expensive, you
didn't convey the value, or they.
Speaker 10 (14:04):
Didn't like it.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
You fix one of those three things and try again,
and try again, and try again.
Speaker 9 (14:09):
You know.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I talk often on stage and one of the things
I absolutely love to say is it's not somebody else's.
Speaker 10 (14:15):
Job to remember you.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
It's your job to be unforgettable.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
So when you go from a marketing perspective, think like that,
like what can I do to be memorable? How do
I get them to not forget me and what we
discussed and what I'm offering?
Speaker 10 (14:29):
And I think that with consistency really helps solidify a brand.
Speaker 7 (14:34):
Well, we're here with Chris Denner Dinner Media Group and
also the golf dot com and dugout mugs dot com.
When did you know that dugout Mugs was going to
be a success.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
My previous venture was print on Demand APPERIL. There was
a company actually out there in San Francisco, is where
they were based.
Speaker 9 (14:51):
It was called t Spring.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Several years ago and you know, I had a bunch
of fan pages on Facebook, probably about seven million fans,
and we would just in print. We did over twenty
million dollars just T shirt sales. And when I looked
at a mug for the first time, you know how
we've hollowed out baseball bat barrel.
Speaker 10 (15:10):
This was just a blank canvas.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
So to me, it's like, oh, okay, so I can
just put find what people resonate with, put it on
something cool, ask them if they want to buy it.
If they say no, ask them why, right, and so
so it was really simple. I simplify things. That's one
of the things I feel like I do best is
I just simplify things.
Speaker 10 (15:29):
And when I sat down and I spoke with Randall.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
About the company, I told him I was like, dude, like,
you're gonna have to quit your job like this week
and call me back and.
Speaker 10 (15:39):
We're gonna take this thing for a ride.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
And we went from seventy thousand to one point one
to two point five to like seven to nine to
thirteen five.
Speaker 10 (15:47):
I mean, we just right up the right up the ladder.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
But I knew it from the beginning because it's something
I had done before, and I think that's a belief
and belief systems are an extremely important way, and it
comes to entrepreneurship and business. I believe that if you
don't believe you could achieve something, you can't.
Speaker 10 (16:06):
You know. Conversely, if you.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Do believe you can, you will, right, So I always
relate it to a balloon. Like a balloon's you know
about yay big, and you blow it up as big
as it can go, and you let it sit there
for a few minutes. You let it go, It'll never
go back to that original size.
Speaker 10 (16:19):
It's expanded. It's forever expanded.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
And and that's how I look at just the mentality
of entrepreneurship is like, once I knew I could do
a million dollars in sales in a day, I can't
unknow that, right. Once I knew I could do twenty
million dollars of T shirts and never carry a single
piece of inventory, you can never unkno that. So now
you take these beliefs and you multiply and you recreate it,
(16:42):
And I think that's really important. So being around others
who have achieved things that you can't wrap your head
around until you believe them, because then that's expansion. You'll
never go back to that original shrink back to that
original size.
Speaker 7 (16:55):
We're here with Ken Denhurt from dugout Mugs dot com
and also bigf dot com and also Denhurtmedia Group dot com.
We have to take a commercial break right now.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
Stay tuned.
Speaker 7 (17:07):
We have intellectual property news and secrets of the entrepreneurial
mind coming up. And don't forget to experience more of
Passage to Profit by subscribing to us on Facebook, Instagram,
X and YouTube, or by subscribing to our podcast anywhere
you get your podcasts. Just look for the Passage to
Profit show on any of these platforms. We'll be back
(17:28):
right after this.
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Speaker 1 (19:29):
Now back to Passage to Profit once again, Richard and
Elizabeth Gerhart.
Speaker 6 (19:34):
And our special guest Chris Dienner, who has built many
very successful companies and right now is.
Speaker 8 (19:41):
The CEO of Dugout Mugs.
Speaker 6 (19:45):
Well, he calls himself the cleanup hitter, but nobody really
believes that. And we've been talking about what's important to
him and what's important for success, and now we want
to get into something relief and we want to.
Speaker 8 (19:56):
Hear his stories. So Chris, tell us a really cool story.
Speaker 10 (20:00):
There's a lot of them.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
I would start with probably one of the coolest collaborations
that we had an opportunity to do. It's right out
here over my shoulder, right there. So my buddy wrote
the movie The Sandlot, David Mickey Evans, and David and
I connected and we decided to collaborate not only on
a Legends Never Die mug, which is a full wrap
(20:22):
of all the boys on the sandlot, the famous photo.
Speaker 10 (20:25):
From the movie. And the day we spent with David
was pretty incredible.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
Was at a beach bar, no shoes on, just hanging out,
having some cocktails and talking about the movie.
Speaker 10 (20:36):
And we brought in the audio visual team.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
To create some really cool content and our relationship just
developed from there. And we have a hat now, Legends
Never Die hat that has the photo printed underneath the bill,
and it's all exclusive to Dug out right. So we
get to do some cool projects like that. And you know,
I always enjoy going cool places and doing fun things
(20:59):
with awesome people, right, I think anybody could probably relate
to that.
Speaker 10 (21:03):
So our mugs are used all the time for corporate gifting.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Big companies, you know, Capital One and T Mobile and
hard Rock and Coke, Pepsi, Budweiser, they'll buy our mugs
and they gift them out as corporate gifting.
Speaker 9 (21:13):
Well.
Speaker 10 (21:14):
Also, we do a lot of charity stuff with our
Cheers to Charity program and Reggie Jackson Misster October, famous Yankee,
famous Oakland athletic, has us at all of his events
and this past year I remember my wife and I
were there and at one point it was me and
her and Dave Chappelle and Barry Bonds just standing here
(21:35):
hanging out watching Reggie Jackson in fifty cent and all
these people performing like, you know, ten feet away.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
It was like, man, what a cool, fun night. And
then I go inside to eat and I'm sitting with
Ozzie Smith, Mike Schmidt, and Andre Dawson, three Hall of
famers sitting there. We're talking about it, and they were
arguing over who had a dugout mug first, which I
thought was interesting. And then the next morning I was golfing.
I get to golf from the event and I sat down.
(22:02):
It was just me and Emmett Smith at breakfast, and
then Tim Tebow walks over with Urban Meyer and they
asked if they can.
Speaker 10 (22:09):
Sit with us, and I'm like, yeah, mister Tebow, you can.
Speaker 9 (22:12):
Sit with us, no problem.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
And then Erban grabbed my mug and said, Tim, have
you seen these He's like, oh, yeah, that's Chris He's
from Florida.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
I was like, oh my god, what's going on.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And then John Smoltz is next to me, and then
Barry Bonds is on the other side, and I'm just
sitting here breakfast like just talk.
Speaker 10 (22:29):
I mean, it's things like that.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
You can't really you can't really buy your way into
some of these types of things. And you know, just
just to have those experiences and to have those conversations
and be in a room that I belong in, right,
And there's a lot of belief that comes with that.
I believe, I vividly believe that I belong in every
single room I'm in, in every conversation I'm in, I
(22:52):
belong there, you know, And when you carry yourself that way,
it's amazing how the the uh, the process of the
just manifestation and things that happens in my life, it's awesome.
A lot of blessings land on my lap because of it.
You know, the way I way I operate.
Speaker 6 (23:08):
Well, I'm I'm really in add that a famous person
knows who you are.
Speaker 8 (23:14):
What no famous person knows what I am.
Speaker 7 (23:17):
So you've got a certain sort of psychic boost from
being there. Anything else that you think helped you along?
Speaker 10 (23:24):
I mean, did you perspective? The mentality is everything? I mean,
the process of manifestation is. I mean, I believe in
it very much. And I think the way I operate
and I operate in alignment consistently.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
That's why I end up in the places I do.
You know, these aren't revelations I get while I'm out
of place. It's like, damn it, dude, you belong here too, right,
Like maybe that just the gratification of being included, not
because of who I pretended to be, but because who
I am, Because again, I'm not going to put up
a facade for anybody.
Speaker 10 (23:57):
I don't care who you are. And that that's what
I think the.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Most rewarding is that being authentic, authentically me got me
to where I am, and it's going to take continue
to take me further and put me in the places
that are a lot of fun to be. That I
think is the most rewarding.
Speaker 7 (24:16):
So if you are fortunate enough to meet other, you know,
famous people or sports stars, it is sort of a validation,
right and it does give you confidence right in in
the sense that if these people with these skills and
experiences are accepting you, then you must not be so bad, right,
(24:38):
so you know, and so I think that's a great thing.
Chris Denhurt a serial entrepreneur and e commerce expert, founder
of Dugout, Mugs, Big Golf, and The Denheart Media group.
Thank you very much for joining us on this segment. Chris,
it's been amazing. Where can people get in touch with you?
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Dugout mugs dot com and big golf dot Com.
Speaker 10 (25:01):
One of the things I'm proudest of is.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
The sixty thousand five star reviews we have online. I
think that speaks volumes. We don't have to sell ourselves anymore.
Everybody's doing it for us.
Speaker 7 (25:10):
I feel like great passage to profit. With Richard and
Elizabeth Gerhart, we're adding.
Speaker 8 (25:15):
A news segment to the show.
Speaker 6 (25:17):
It's about AI because what we're finding is we of
course get really super smart people on the show every week,
and all of them are using AI in their businesses,
and a lot of people haven't really figured out good
ways to use and their business. So we're going to
ask everybody how they're doing it. So Chris will start
with you, how are you using AI in your business?
Speaker 2 (25:35):
With e commerce, it's a little more unique on how
to utilize AI. But what we've found to be successful
and scalable is leveraging it for customer service. I think
people are starting to come around to the idea that
they're being helped by a program. They just need help
and want help now. So the customer service side of
(25:56):
our business has really progressed with AI. In answers immediately
it through API, can communicate through Shopify and get tracking information,
make changes to orders, everything. And typically when we spike
around playoffs and World Series and Black Friday, Cyber Monday
and Christmas, you know, typical buying seasons, we would have
(26:16):
to add another second or even third customer service persons.
Now with AI, it's infinitely scalable. So not only is
it more efficient, more accurate, doesn't sleep. It accomplishes what
three people could do in our peak season.
Speaker 10 (26:33):
Which allows us to operate faster.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
And when we're doing you know, one hundred thousand dollars
a day in revenue and we can last an extra
two or three days. That's significant, right. The other is design.
AI has really helped in a major way from a
design standpoint, because a lot of people want something, but
they don't know what they want. You know, our stuff
is so customizable. They're like, oh, I want.
Speaker 10 (26:57):
Something that's kind of like this and kind of like
this and kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Well you throw that into AI and it'll throw up
an image that's like, oh, that's almost exactly what I
was talking about, and then we just clean it up
a little bit, so it's really shortened the distance between
conception and something tangible. So those two areas, and I
mean it's probably saved us minimum seventy thousand dollars a
year just it's more efficient, more effective, and it's immediately
(27:23):
saved us you know, probably closer to like one hundred
thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 10 (27:26):
And that's just for now.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
I know, the things with Google and with Facebook and
a few of the areas where we do paid traffic,
the split testing, the split testing and the creatives and
these types of things to lean into AI for that
type of work is probably the two point zero.
Speaker 10 (27:43):
But once that's dialed in, I mean, it's going to
be interesting to see.
Speaker 8 (27:47):
Great. Thank you. So, alex Yansher with Passport Global dot Com,
how are you using AI for your business?
Speaker 9 (27:54):
First all, I really like Chris's answer.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
We're also doing a lot with our agents, so let
me give you a little context.
Speaker 9 (28:02):
We have about two hundred and twenty people in the company.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
We do internationalization software, and we're vertically integrated with our
own logistics, so we also have three warehouses around the US.
So it's really a broad range of things and skills
and types of people that work at Passport, And we
made a big announcement actually a week ago that every
single call that we have, internal or external has to
(28:27):
have one of those recorders on to transcribe the call
and record the call. And people were a little bit
iffy about it because it feels like big brothers watching
you and all that.
Speaker 9 (28:38):
But we approached it.
Speaker 4 (28:39):
And communicated to the company that this is actually an
opportunity to level up ourselves, you know, ourselves as employees,
ourselves as teammates, managers and all that, and this is
one big stepping stone that we're taking as a company.
Speaker 9 (28:54):
So some of the benefits.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
One is sometimes even if you're trying to be in
in a call, you want to take notes. Nothing wrong
with that, I take notes, But when you take notes,
you're kind of going like that and the person feels
like you're not engaged and they can't see that you're
writing something down.
Speaker 9 (29:09):
It makes it look like maybe you're on your phone
or you're typing something. So I personally loved it. I
went to I went to CAW.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
We had we had this person that would sit by
the professor at the edge. It was called black lightning
notes and they would take notes, so you don't have
to take notes during class and you just buy those notes.
So it's kind of kind of reminded me of that,
So I thought, hey, why don't we just do this?
Speaker 9 (29:29):
This is now possible with AI.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
It's so fast and easy, essentially free on an incremental basis,
And after every call, you have a transcription of the
whole call.
Speaker 9 (29:39):
And you don't need to play that game like what
did she want again? What do we ask her to
do that?
Speaker 4 (29:43):
You know, and you also get to be present during
during that call, and then you get to do so
many other that's just like base level blocking and tackling
good call hygiene.
Speaker 9 (29:55):
You know that that becomes much easier with the call recorder.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
But the other thing that we're trying to do now
and I'll report back jury still out, but we're trying
to run those calls through AI to grade them. You know,
how did the salesperson do on this particular call based
on this criteria?
Speaker 9 (30:12):
Did this manager provide good, honest feedback to the worker?
Did they use blame me language? You know, like things
like that. You can run it through AI and you
could have and you can have an opportunity to really
level yourself up in a very.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
Objective and I would say a key to all this
unemotional way. Like it's one thing to get feedback from
your manager, even if you're somebody who feels like they
could hear feedback, even when it's negative, it's still a
little bit tinged with emotion. And then there's some people
who can't take feedback at all. You know, we've all
(30:47):
worked with those kind of people. But when you're getting
feedback from AI that's just objectively reading your transcript and
watching it and giving you the points, it's much easier
to hear it and not get emotionally attached and feel
attacked or something like that. So I'm really excited. This
is like one big step that we took in the company.
So like every single call now that we have it's mandated,
(31:09):
unless it's, like you know, we have exceptions. You want
to have sometimes a private conversation that's not memorialized, that's fine,
of course.
Speaker 9 (31:16):
You don't have to have that requorder on. But free
of those kinds of situations. Pretty much every single call,
internal and external is being transcribed at this point at Passport.
Speaker 8 (31:25):
Well, that's another creative way to use it. That's awesome.
Speaker 6 (31:29):
Jim Ratchnik, Reasonable Risk dot com, how are you using
AI in your company?
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well, it's interesting, great feedback from Alex and Chris. You know,
both of our companies, Reasonable Risk of the software company
and Haylock the consulting company, are focused in cybersecurity and
AI is definitely one of the most powerful tools available
to companies today. But like any technology, it brings with
it powered but there are risks that need to be managed,
(31:55):
you know, risks such as security and privacy. You know,
AI often gets fed sensitive data that could be open
to companies, exposing private information.
Speaker 5 (32:05):
Right.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
The other thing that people don't really think much about
is reliability and data integrity. You know. AI can sometimes
make mistakes, and the companies that are making decisions off
of those mistakes are still responsible for those outcomes. I'm
going to tell you an actual story. I was on
vacation with my family. We're out of the country, and
my kids were so excited to show me how they
could take a photograph of a menu in Spanish and
(32:29):
immediately translated to English. And I was very excited too.
I did the same, and I quickly translated and I
started ordering food for my family, and the waiter looked
at me like, what are you talking about? I was
ordering something that he had no idea what I was
talking about. So just to regain footing, and I kind
of pride myself on thinking quickly on my feed activity,
and I went to a dollar amount. I said, I
will have this thing that costs you know, seven dollars
(32:51):
and forty three cents. He looked at me, he goes,
we don't have anything like that at all. At this point,
I started feeling like what is going on? And my
kids took a picture of the menu AI was feeding us.
Just I don't know where it was getting. The information
was completely wrong, and I see the correctness of AI
is something people often don't think about when we go
to Google. It is a matching algorithm and it's very
(33:11):
very good. People are beginning to use AI as an advisor.
But when you go to your let's think about the
human human behavioral science behind this. When you go to
someone to get advice, first you go to someone that
you trust in that area, and second use you ass
us their degree of confidence in that area. Right, we're
gonna ask Chris Denner know about e commerce and about sports. Well,
(33:33):
you might ask me about cybersecurity. When AI comes back,
do you know what degree confidence AI has that answer?
So one little trick, one little technique is you can
actually ask AI at the end of every single answer
to tell you the degree confidence and they'll just build
that into everything that responds when AI comes back, whether SHAD,
GPT or any other LOM and it says I'm sixty
(33:55):
five percent confident too that answer, Now you're going to
think about should I move forward without or SHAD it
gets more information. We just kind of assume that AI
is like Google.
Speaker 7 (34:03):
Elizabeth writing that down by the way, because he uses AILI.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
And it's super powerful.
Speaker 9 (34:09):
So let me keep going.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
How we're to answer your question how are we USINGI?
So because companies are still responsible for these outcomes, and
those outcomes could have risks related to security or data integrity.
What we've started to do is we offer services around
identifying where is AI being used in your company, all
instances of AI, how are people using AI, and allowing
(34:32):
you to monitor and control, putting in some guardrails of
acceptable use, acceptable within your organization values.
Speaker 10 (34:39):
Maybe you don't.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
Want certain llms being used, but I think the key
here is that most people are focused on the reward
but not the risk. Will help companies balance the two
and let your employees use AI in a way that's
in line with your organizational values. And that's how we're
offering that as a service, and that's kind of how
we use AI of awesome really.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
Yeah, your heart lot.
Speaker 7 (35:02):
We have an AI company that is helping us implement
some processes.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
So far, I haven't been that impressed, and.
Speaker 7 (35:10):
Maybe part of it is there's a sometimes a reluctance
on the part of people to adopt these new technologies
because they're concerned that part of their job.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
May go away.
Speaker 7 (35:22):
But from our perspective, we're using AI to help manage
our docket meetings. So we have meetings on a weekly
basis where we go over cases and you know, discuss
what needs to be done. So the team communicates about
those and we make sure that everything is followed up on,
and we use the software to track those cases. And
(35:44):
we've been using AI to listen, you know, record the
meetings and then provide inputs that can be put back
into the database to help us stay on top of
assignments that you know, need to be completed in order
to make sure our work gets done in the right way.
The challenge has been that either the information is just
(36:06):
wrong number one or number two, it's not specific enough.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
To be that helpful.
Speaker 7 (36:13):
So as enthusiastic as we are to embrace AI for
our purposes, it's not there yet. On that one topic,
I think what Jim said is true. You have to
double check this stuff and make sure it's correct. So
while you might gain a little bit of time, you
still have to have somebody go over it, or a
(36:34):
couple of people go over it to make sure that
the data that's being put back in the system is correct.
So that's how we're using it. We're trying, but it's
not really where I want it to be yet.
Speaker 6 (36:44):
I use it a lot for research, and I do
to Jim's point. I use chat GPT because that's one
most people use. I use Perplexity and Perplexity actually now
if you have the paid version, can go to a
bunch of different llms to find the best one to
answer your question. And then I started I was using Cloud,
but now Perplexity as Cloud.
Speaker 8 (37:02):
But then I also use Gemini, Google's Gemini.
Speaker 6 (37:06):
Because I feel like it's going to have the most
accurate answers about Google.
Speaker 8 (37:11):
But it wasn't that good.
Speaker 6 (37:13):
A year ago when I was using all four of them,
and now it's a lot better. But with Chat GPT five,
which has just come out last month in August of
twenty twenty five, supposed to be super duper. I tried
to have a design a brochure for me and it did.
It was kind of good, but it misspelled something and so.
Speaker 8 (37:31):
I got into a big fight with it that was like,
can you please?
Speaker 7 (37:35):
You're fighting with chat ChiPT doing this is probably not
going to win that one, but.
Speaker 8 (37:39):
Do you think? Over and over again, I'm like, how
can I stop you from doing this? And guess what?
It's spend more money, upgrades your.
Speaker 7 (37:47):
Account, upgrade your account. Oh you get to good spelling
if you pay more.
Speaker 5 (37:50):
Got it?
Speaker 9 (37:51):
So?
Speaker 8 (37:51):
Yeah, I think AI is a double edged story.
Speaker 12 (37:54):
Dight.
Speaker 5 (37:54):
Yeah, that's great. We have to take a commercial break now.
Stay tuned.
Speaker 7 (37:57):
We're going to have Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind and
also intellectual property news coming up right after this passage.
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Speaker 1 (40:05):
Passage to Profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
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Passage to Profit show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and on
the iHeart app. And now it's time for intellectual property news.
Speaker 6 (40:47):
Did you know that the ATMA system has its own
court of Appeals?
Speaker 5 (40:52):
Well I knew that. Did you know that?
Speaker 8 (40:54):
Well? I knew that because of a patent ago, but
I don't think a lot of people knew that. Oh,
and so is presiding over Baselam Right.
Speaker 7 (41:02):
Yeah, intellectual properties of federal law managed by the Federal
court system, and any case that's decided in the Federal
District Court can be appealed to the first Circuit Court
of Appeals.
Speaker 5 (41:14):
Right.
Speaker 7 (41:15):
So the idea behind this was to try to create
consistency among intellectual property decisions. Well, there's been a judge
there that's been there for quite a while, Pauline Newman.
She's brilliant jurist, but she's ninety eight years old and
she refuses to leave the court. So she's been fighting
(41:35):
to stay on while the chief judge of the Federal
Circuit has been trying to kick her off. And this
has been going on now for about five years. It's
kind of a shame that this is happening. I Mean,
we hear a lot of talk these days about the
judiciary and the qualification of judges, And unfortunately, this kind
of controversy grows a little shade I think on sort
(41:59):
of the institutional aspects of intellectual properties. So people want
to feel confident that their cases are getting decided by
coaching people. But when somebody's ninety eight years old, that
can throw that into question.
Speaker 5 (42:11):
Right.
Speaker 7 (42:13):
I don't know at the rate I'm going, I don't
know what I'll be like when I'm ninety eight, if
I make it that far.
Speaker 5 (42:18):
She took cognitive.
Speaker 7 (42:19):
Tests like in her mid nineties, and she came out okay.
I watched a couple of interviews with her, and I
was impressed. He's a lot smarter than I am, and
I thought that she could be a great judge. But
I understand that the chief judge of the Federal Circuit
doesn't like her for some reason.
Speaker 5 (42:37):
And this is.
Speaker 7 (42:38):
As much about her age as it is about other things.
But anyway, I think it's time now to get to
our presenters.
Speaker 8 (42:46):
We're going to go to.
Speaker 6 (42:46):
Alex Aanswer first with Passport Global dot com. He's also
on LinkedIn. He's the co founder of passport and he
has a lot of kudos of his own Before founding Passport,
he served as CEO at Pantry and held financialles at
face Spook A Morgan Stanley. So he also advises and
invest his startups, so he's no stranger to the entrepreneurial world.
(43:07):
And Alex tell us all about what you're doing now
with Passport.
Speaker 9 (43:10):
I started Passport about eight years ago.
Speaker 4 (43:14):
And before that, actually one of the companies is a
company called links Lynks.
Speaker 9 (43:18):
It's a play on words.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
It was a personal shopping service that helped people abroad
by products from the US.
Speaker 9 (43:24):
And people would take a link.
Speaker 4 (43:26):
That's the plan wherese people would take a hyperlink and
drop it into our universal shopping cart. They would buy
it from us, we would get the money. We would
go on the website it so on Amazon, Etsy Alberts
put in our credit card information in our address in Delaware.
Reason Delaware, it's a tax free state, so we would
ship everything sales tax free.
Speaker 9 (43:48):
And then I ran operations for that company, and it
was my job to figure.
Speaker 4 (43:52):
Out how to ship products of any shape or size
because we weren't really in control of the link that
people would drop into the cart.
Speaker 9 (43:58):
So sometimes people would want to buy something really small
and expensive.
Speaker 4 (44:02):
Like a diamond ring, and then sometimes really big and
bulky like a surfboard. Yeah, and we had to figure
out how to ship all those products around the world.
And in running OPS in that company, I realized that
international is so much more than just a shipping You
have to have the regulatory compliance set. So every country
(44:24):
has their own version of FDA, like in Canada it's
called Health Canada, and they have their own rules and
regulations and duties and taxes is another big component to it.
Every country has their own tax regime.
Speaker 9 (44:37):
Right now.
Speaker 4 (44:37):
It's you know, we're in the news with our tariff
rates and all that, but guess what, every other country
also has tariffs, you know, and you have to know
all those rules and regulations. Don't get me started on
international returns. That's a whole other beast of.
Speaker 9 (44:50):
A problem solve.
Speaker 5 (44:50):
Holy chow. Yeah, that could be a big problem.
Speaker 9 (44:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:53):
Can you imagine getting the stuff back almost impossible. So
my insight in running OPS or the previous company links
was a lot of these things.
Speaker 9 (45:04):
They're intertwined.
Speaker 4 (45:05):
So the company that's delivering the goods physically is also
the company that's helping clear customs in assessing the duties
and taxes that are owed by the consumer or by
the business for that shipment. Now, who's the company that's
calculating the duties and tax on the website itself, Well, it's.
Speaker 9 (45:27):
Usually not the shipping company, right.
Speaker 4 (45:28):
You don't really think of FedEx as like a software
company that you're using to calculate duties and taxes, and
it isn't FedEx, right, But FedEx could be the one
that delivers the goods.
Speaker 9 (45:38):
But there's this horrible disconnect that.
Speaker 4 (45:40):
Happens then because the amount that you ultimately get charged
does not always match the amount.
Speaker 9 (45:48):
That you, as an e commerce business, is charging the customer.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
Okay, And that's a really big problem because either a
customer is going to overpay or you're going to underpay,
and it's going to kill your margin.
Speaker 9 (45:59):
Right. The one insight that I had was that.
Speaker 4 (46:02):
These things should be all under one roof, and the
same company that clears customs for you, that does the
delivery should also be the same company that helps you
calculate the duties and taxes in your shopping cart. So
I start a passport to basically bring the software and
the physical logistics services together under one roof, under one
(46:24):
company to give e commerce merchants like Chris, Actually, you
know I'm going to pitch you after this, I'm going
to connect with you on LinkedIn, so watch out. And
we basically help merchants go global really really easily, in
a turnkey manner.
Speaker 7 (46:38):
Well, that sounds like a really complex business model because
all of the regulations that you've mentioned, all the different variables,
all the different ways something can be shipped. You know,
it could be ground transport from Canada, or it could
be airshipped, it could be ocean freighter. I mean, how
do you manage all of that and still stay sane?
Speaker 9 (46:59):
Who said anything about think sane?
Speaker 4 (47:01):
Uh So that's where value, I think in business is unlocked.
Speaker 9 (47:06):
It's when you can wrangle that complexity and make it
really easy for a customer. So from a customer's perspective,
it's magic.
Speaker 4 (47:17):
The amount that our software is telling them to charge
their customers in their shopping cart online shopping cart matches
the invoice, you know, and it's like, wow, I'm not
losing money.
Speaker 9 (47:27):
It's exactly how much you told me to charge. There's
nothing held up at customs.
Speaker 4 (47:32):
We also have a service where we help big brands
like Hexclad is a customer.
Speaker 9 (47:37):
Maybe you heard of them, the frying Pan Company.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
We help them set up local operations in country, and
that's a whole other set of challenges to set up
local operations versus shipping something cross border. And for us,
it was all about building things step by step. We
needn't launch like what we have today. The suite of
services that we have today is i want to say
(48:00):
ten x the suite of services that we had day one.
So I think it's just about focus and not biting
off more than you can chew, so that every step
of the way we're being the best version of ourselves
and able to provide a really high level of service
and not just sort of winging it for customers because
this is their livelihood at the end of the day.
(48:21):
Most e commerce businesses, they're not you know, venture funded
or anything like that.
Speaker 9 (48:25):
They're owner operated.
Speaker 4 (48:27):
And if there's a big loss on international, it's going
to distract away from the domestic business and it's going.
Speaker 9 (48:33):
To be that person's that owner's personal income. So we
take this very seriously.
Speaker 5 (48:39):
So Chris, you're not in your head in agreement.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
There's a real need, you know, like you said, who said,
you're not going crazy doing it.
Speaker 10 (48:45):
I mean, hard things shouldn't be easy.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Valuable things shouldn't be easy to do, right, And I
think what you're doing is providing a real service for
international because right now we're in seven countries with dugout
and the outside of US Canada, it's kind of complic
to deal with. So yeah, I'm glad we're going to connect.
I actually had that note down here myself because I
think there's some synergy.
Speaker 10 (49:06):
Not to mention with my colleagues, right, but yeah, I think.
Speaker 2 (49:09):
You providing a pretty cool, unique service that we're in
a global economy now, cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI.
Speaker 10 (49:16):
And being scared of any of it. It's just to
waste the time.
Speaker 2 (49:18):
You got to just learn how to adapt and how
to harness it because it's here, whether we like it
or not.
Speaker 8 (49:22):
I agree one hundred percent of that harness it. Don't
let it drag you along. We're talking to Alex Yankscher
with passport Global dot Com right now.
Speaker 6 (49:30):
Do you have any great stories where somebody came to
freaking out and you were able to help them through
their situation.
Speaker 4 (49:36):
Well, in a startup, everybody always freaking out, and we
try to hire people so that they're not coming to
me to solve the problem. But I'm giving them the
air cover to figure out themselves. But I think one
story that I can tell, I wouldn't say anybody was
necessarily freaking out in this particular story, but it was
just like a culture arms for us. So when we started,
(49:59):
we're very, very small. Obviously you're starting with one customer.
We're close to one thousand customers now, but the journey
of one thousand miles or a thousand customer because with
one step and one customer, right, and you have this
chicken and egg problem where we're trying to be like
the modern.
Speaker 9 (50:14):
Day version of DHL.
Speaker 4 (50:15):
We're trying to harness, you know, all of those complicated
pieces of the supply chain, but we don't have enough
volume to go open up a warehouse, hire a bunch
of warehouse workers and engage with, you know, the fairly
complicated supply chain of shipping a single parcel like this
big around the world.
Speaker 9 (50:34):
You need a first mile to warehouse.
Speaker 4 (50:36):
You need the warehouse. You need to go from from
the warehouse to the airport. From the airport, you know,
on an airplane to a country. From a country, you
need to plug into a last smile network.
Speaker 9 (50:47):
Right. All of that's very, very complicated. So a first thing.
Speaker 4 (50:51):
That we did was we white labeled a company that
was in this space and we had to deal with
the company. We said, Okay, we want to build our brand,
so we're going to basically tell customers that you are
us and we are you, and you're not going to
really surface your brand whatever a white.
Speaker 9 (51:10):
Label basically what a white label.
Speaker 4 (51:11):
Is, right, but we need to be in control of
the logistics in operations, and the relationship was really solid.
Speaker 9 (51:19):
And they were in the partner was a really good communicator.
But we're just one customer.
Speaker 4 (51:24):
They themselves have a thousand customers, so we're one out
of a thousand customers.
Speaker 9 (51:28):
And everything that we need in order to do.
Speaker 4 (51:30):
A good job and really reinvent international internationalization and international
shipping and create the kind of experience that we wanted
to create, it was just impossible. They just weren't really
set up to do things the way that we wanted
to do them. So we had a existential question for
us as a company because we knew we weren't going to.
Speaker 9 (51:50):
Make it if we were just basically a rapper, right.
Speaker 4 (51:53):
A white label around another logistics company that's only so
good and it's holding us back from reaching our potential.
So we had a question, do we build this internally
or do we buy a company basically like an acid
based company that gets us into what we need.
Speaker 9 (52:09):
And we went down both routes.
Speaker 4 (52:11):
Not so much couldn't decide, but both routes are very
risky in their own right. So we thought, let's push
along both routes and go with one when we see
one as working.
Speaker 9 (52:22):
Right. So what we ended up doing.
Speaker 4 (52:24):
Is acquiring a company called Access Worldwide based in Atlanta,
and the CEO of that company became the chief operating
officer of Passport and we got into the acid based
international shipping game that way, and I'm.
Speaker 9 (52:41):
So glad we did it because the build it our
self path. We were kind of blind leading the blind.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
I mean, we did hire some good people, but at
the end of the day, they had never built something
like this from scratch and speed running it as well
because we already had customers. So fast forward, you know,
four years. So the first four years was working with
the white label. In the last four years we've been
operating under our own network. You know, we're in three
warehouses here in the US, we have a warehouse in UK.
(53:12):
But I would say every step of the way from
well this deal go through to how do we transition
our customers off of the white label solution onto our
own proprietary network, that was you know, fraught with risk
and stress and all that.
Speaker 9 (53:26):
But at the end of the day it worked out, and.
Speaker 4 (53:28):
I'd say we're one of the biggest e commerce shippers
around the world at this point.
Speaker 7 (53:32):
We're with Alex theanser from Passport Global. Really interesting story
about actually writing two parallel paths to see which one
worked out. I'm just wondering, in terms of your business career,
what was the risk that you thought was most worth taking.
Speaker 4 (53:50):
Our very first non technical hire and the I think
it was the fourth hire in our company, was this
bright eyed young woman who was maybe two years into
her career, having no experience in the startup world or
in logistics, and became a associate at Passport choose I
(54:11):
want to say like twenty three, because she's been with
us for eight years now. Just this past week she
got promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Passport I know
I said that the CEO of Access Worldwide became the
chief operating officer actually misspoke. He became the Chief Commercial Officer,
the CEO because we specifically made a point, and this
is what I told him, because he said said, naturally,
(54:32):
I'm going to be the COO.
Speaker 9 (54:33):
That's my title. I said, no, you know, we're reserving
that slot. This is four years ago.
Speaker 4 (54:38):
We're reserving it slot for a rising star in our company.
Speaker 9 (54:42):
And I don't want to peak and I don't want
to peak.
Speaker 4 (54:45):
Her performance or you know, her opportunity by giving the title,
the chief operating title to you.
Speaker 9 (54:50):
So we're going to give you a different title. We're
going to give you the chief commercial title.
Speaker 4 (54:54):
And he owns you know, our network are pricing all
of that, so he owns a lot of the business.
But the daily operations was owned by somebody who is
incredibly talented. But you're always taking a risk on somebody
who's unproven.
Speaker 9 (55:08):
And that's a risk that I would say really paid off.
Speaker 13 (55:11):
You know.
Speaker 9 (55:12):
She became a core part of the leadership team.
Speaker 4 (55:16):
And every time our company hit a new growth mode
like we needed at some point. I'm sure everybody in
this call has this experience where where you don't start
off the company with an HR.
Speaker 9 (55:28):
Person that's not one of your key, you know, first
ten hires.
Speaker 4 (55:32):
We waited until we were fifty people before we hired
our first HR person. We had like a fractional company
that did you know, onboarding, off boarding and some other things,
but we didn't have an HR person because this person
who became our COO, she essentially functioned as that role,
and then she hired the first one and built out
(55:52):
the team, and then that team rolled off her, you know,
And she did that a couple of times in the company,
where basically learned what it takes to kickstart a new
function in the team.
Speaker 9 (56:03):
Got it wrong oftentimes in the beginning.
Speaker 4 (56:05):
But course corrected and just had such an incredible attitude
and ability to fix things that weren't working. And yeah,
every step of the way, I would say, can you
do this next level?
Speaker 9 (56:17):
Can you do this next level?
Speaker 4 (56:18):
Because usually the team that gets you to your first
call it one hundred customers, your first ten million, it's
really not the team that gets you to.
Speaker 9 (56:24):
One hundred million, and we're doing over one hundred million
in revenue at this point. It's usually a different team.
But we got lucky.
Speaker 4 (56:30):
We got lucky with this rising star who really at
the capacity to learn and adjust well that.
Speaker 8 (56:35):
Is a really great story. I don't think it was
all luck. How do people find you if they want
to get in touch with you?
Speaker 4 (56:41):
Yeah, the best way I would say to reach out
to me is my email.
Speaker 9 (56:45):
Alex Atpasperglobal dot com.
Speaker 4 (56:48):
I am fairly active on LinkedIn, especially nowadays with all
the global trade things happening around the world. So I'm
on LinkedIn is just my name Alex Ancher, and I'm
also on X again just my name Alex.
Speaker 9 (57:02):
He insure.
Speaker 8 (57:03):
Okay, great, thank you.
Speaker 5 (57:04):
Passage to profit with Richard Analyizabeth Pierhart.
Speaker 6 (57:07):
So now we are on to our next guest, Jim Rachnik.
He is an innovative business leader with over twenty five
years of technology and management consulting experience, founded and partnered
with multiple companies and now he is a CEO of
Haylock and of Reasonable Risk as cybersecurity experts.
Speaker 8 (57:25):
So he's going to tell us everything we need to.
Speaker 7 (57:27):
Now, how does stay secure with your technology?
Speaker 3 (57:33):
So, as was just mentioned on the ceo of two
exciting companies, I'd like to tell you a little bit
about both of them. Haylock is a cybersecurity consulting firm.
We provide professional services in cybersecurity and just cutting to
the chase.
Speaker 9 (57:45):
The one thing that we do.
Speaker 3 (57:46):
Better than anyone else is we help our clients to
manage the risk of harm from cybersecurity with the same
rigor that they manage the risk of harm from their
primary product or service they sell. So, Chris, you create
amazing products, mugs, all sorts of stuff, you pretty much
are dialed into the risk of harm of that mug
busting apart and earning someone you know the quality. But
(58:07):
yet organizations out there oftentimes don't feel they have their
finger on the pulse of the risk of harm of
the data that they are steward from. If that data
was breached, if that data was exposed, if that data
was changed. What's the risk of harm to your customers,
to your vendors. That's important because bad things happen in
good companies all the time. And if by allowing our
(58:30):
customers to really understand the risk of harm or allow
them to avoid a position of negligence, which helps them
avoid expensive litigation. As an example, we all have sidewalks,
and someone slips and falls on your sidewalk and hurts themselves.
God forbid, they could sue you. Now, if you have
a video camera looking outside your dining room window, and
(58:51):
that you can demonstrate that you're shoveling every two hours
when it snows. They can sue you, but you're not
negligent because you're doing what you should. They can still
sue you, they just won't be able to prove negligence
and you will be able to avoid a lot of problems.
Speaker 7 (59:04):
As a business owner, I always wonder about the trade
offs between speed and efficiency and cybersecurity, since we rely
so much on tech to run our businesses. One of
my favorite issues is like the two factor authentication. I
hate it just because it slows me down, and I
(59:24):
guess I've just become a master of memorizing these six
digit codes, right, But there's some value in that, right
because it's protecting the account. It seems to me like
there's always a trade off then, between efficiency and security.
Speaker 3 (59:38):
Is that your experience, You're absolutely right. You have to
balance the risk and the reward. In the example you
just mentioned, two factor authentication requires a second factor something
you'd have, something you are, something you know. So the
password is something you know. Second factor could be something
you have or something you are biometric or are Till now,
(01:00:00):
what you have to do is balance. Like you said,
if you are a surgeon and you are risking not
being able to log onto your laptop and save a patient,
in that case, maybe the cure or the two factor
authentication is worse than the disease. So that's what you're balancing.
You're balancing the burden of implementing that safeguard against the
(01:00:21):
benefits the safeguard provides. That's absolutely a big part of cybersecurity.
On the Haylock side, what we do is we help
customers understand and manage their risk of harm of their
cybersecurity processes in the same way and the same quality
they manage risk of harm from the main product or
service that they sell. Four years ago, we spun off
a separate company and I became the CEO of Reasonable Risk,
(01:00:42):
which is a next generation governance, risk and compliance platform
and it's become an industry disruptor and an industry innovator.
And a little bit about how Reasonable Risk came to
be In helping clients at Haylock over period of a
decade build their security programs, we realize that our cut
customers were struggling from three major needs in the marketplace.
(01:01:05):
One was legal defensibility. Our clients wanted to avoid legal
liability and they didn't know how to do it. And
finding out when you have a class action lawsuit that
you're now legally protected is not when you want to
find out. You want to do that upfront so that
it never gets there.
Speaker 9 (01:01:18):
Two.
Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
Communication with executives. The inability of cybersecurity teams to effectively
communicate with their leadership did not allow them to get
the budgets to do the jobs they need to do,
so they needed to communicate effectively in three long expensive implementations.
People want solutions they can implement immediately, so we created
a software platform that gave them the ability to do
(01:01:39):
all three. And now our approach is being adopted by
regulators and attorney generals of forty nine states. We are
actually our approach is becoming a standard in law. Haylock
and Reasonable Risk are two separate companies. They're very complementary
to one another, and we're actively growing both.
Speaker 7 (01:01:55):
So how would you advise an entrepreneur or a start
with respect to cybersecurity. Are they okay with just like
buying off the shelf products or is there some other approach?
Speaker 9 (01:02:07):
It's a great question.
Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
I would say that the basics that I would suggest
that anyone do. The first step of entrepreneur buckling down
their cybersecurity would be to do two things that every
business today should be thinking about. The first is called
a penetration test. It is a test, it's an ethical
hacking test. It says, if you have an electronic commerce website,
(01:02:29):
if you have any digital presence, it could just be
a website. Hiring a company, it's not very expensive to
come in and see from the outside, what could they get?
What can they come in with your approval and try
to take That tells you all the holes in your game,
so to speak. It would be like hiring someone and
giving them two hours to run around your house and
see if they can walk in and what they can get.
(01:02:50):
They provide your report and you can then fix those gaps.
Just about every law and regulation, from payment car industry
to health records to financial industry requires business is to
do that. So that's the first thing, is a penetration test.
I think of that as almost like teeth cleaning. You
should be doing it on a regular basis. That's one.
The second is something called a risk assessment. Risk assessment
is analogous to a yearly physical. You know, we all
(01:03:12):
go to that yearly physical and is that change our world?
Sure it does because the physical changes. Yearly physical gives
you a report of everything, all the domains and says
here your your blood pressure or your weight, your oxygen levels.
There's some things you want to do and these these
are some areas where you're not okay. So those two things,
a penetration test and a risk assessment are things that
(01:03:33):
are a good thing for every entrepreneur to do. And
as Alex mentioned, just like you don't hire an HR
person your first ten employees, we didn't either. You may
not be doing these things your first five employees. But
as you get bigger, as your data steward responsibilities grow,
meaning if your data gets taken, exposed, modified, you have
(01:03:53):
a responsibility because you could harm people. You should be
doing a penetration test and a risk assessment. And there
are a lot of companies that can do that. We
can do that, but there are a lot of great
companies out there that can do that.
Speaker 6 (01:04:03):
Is there anything a company would do that would attract
a hacker? Like, are there things you can avoid doing
or are hackers just random?
Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
Hackers? Are both random as well as opportunistic hackers come
at companies for a variety of reasons. One of the
biggest reasons because they are opportunistic is the data they
can get. They have a lot of personally identifiable information
otherwise known as PII. You are a good target if
you have a lot of valuable information, you know, personally
identifiable information that they could sell on the black web
(01:04:34):
for a profit, or that they can get credit card numbers.
That might create a target if you are not patching
all of your systems, if you're not keeping your things updated,
they can perform an external scan and get a sense
of how well are you maintaining your system, so to speak.
So if you have valuable data coupled with you don't
seem to be doing your maintenance very well, that might
(01:04:54):
create an opportunity for someone to say, you know what,
let me invest a little bit of time and see
if I could monetize that opportunity.
Speaker 8 (01:05:00):
What is the safest way to take credit cards? If
you're selling something to somebody, do you have any ideas
on that.
Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
You should seek to work with an organization that has
demonstrated that they have certifications through PCI, which is the
payment card industry with. That's one certification, a credit certification.
Another thing that you should seek is to see what
kind of compliance certification. Do they have a SoC one,
do they have a SoC two, Do they have a
(01:05:27):
sock for cybersecurity, or do they have what's kind of
the black Belt of cybersecurity, which is an ISO twenty
seven thousand and one certification. If they've certified their systems,
then they've put themselves through a certain amount of rigor
the demonstrates that they're not just putting in place technical things,
but that their entire company and including senior leadership, that
the governance mechanism is working, which is what those certifications require.
(01:05:51):
That should give you a much greater sense of comfort
that the organization you're working with take cybersecurity seriously. We've
all gotten that postcard in the mail that says, hey, sorry,
we were breached, your information was exposed. Some of us are,
hopefully not many of you have experienced that all of
a sudden you're getting new credit cards or identity theft
(01:06:12):
and other things. So what you want to do is
work with companies that take cybersecurity seriously, and you can
usually get that from their website in the certifications that
they post.
Speaker 8 (01:06:22):
Well, that's brilliant helpful information. Thank you. So we'll come
to the end of our segment. But how do people
find you?
Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
Either on either one of the companies haylockha l ock
dot com or reasonable risk dot com. You can submit
a contact us form. I'm available on LinkedIn, or you
could email me at j M I r Occhnik at
haylockha l ock dot com.
Speaker 8 (01:06:49):
Great, thank you very much.
Speaker 6 (01:06:51):
It's time for us to go to break listeners, you
are listening to the Passage to Profit show. We're a
to entrepreneurship with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart and our special
guest Chris Dinner who has dug out lets, and we
will be right back.
Speaker 13 (01:07:04):
I am a non attorney spokesperson representing.
Speaker 14 (01:07:06):
A team of lawyers who help people that have been
injured or wronged. If you've been involved in a serious car, truck,
or motorcycle accident, or injured at work, you have rights
and you may be entitled to.
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Money for your suffering. Don't accept an offer you get
from an insurance company until you talk to a lawyer,
and we represent some of the best personal injury lawyers
you can find. Tough lawyers that will fight to win
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Call the legal helpline right now.
Speaker 12 (01:07:49):
Eight hundred four nine two seven h one four, eight
hundred four nine two seven oh one four eight hundred
four nine two seven oh one four. That's eight hundred
four nine two seventy fourteen.
Speaker 11 (01:08:04):
It's Passage to Profit.
Speaker 7 (01:08:05):
Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at Passage to Profit
and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll
to the bottom of the Passage Profit Show dot com
website and check out her.
Speaker 6 (01:08:19):
Album Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
Speaker 8 (01:08:22):
And now it is time.
Speaker 6 (01:08:23):
For Secrets of the entrepreneurial mind, and we are going
to go first. Alex Yanscer with Passport Global dot Com.
What is a secret you can share with our audience?
Speaker 4 (01:08:33):
When I was fundraising for Passport, I got some good advice,
advice that I've heard a million times but sometimes it
really finally sticks.
Speaker 9 (01:08:39):
Keep it simple, stupid, Keep.
Speaker 6 (01:08:41):
It simple stupid. That's a good one. Thank you, Okay,
Jim Roschnik with Reasonablebrisk dot com and Haylock dot com.
What is a secret you can share?
Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
I often get asked what do I think about starting
this business for that business? And in answering those questions,
I started to realize that whether it's looking at someone
else's big business, are looking at kicking off a service
or department within our business, that there really are some commonalities.
There really are kind of lenses or filters that I
think we generally put things through, and I think it's
(01:09:11):
helpful for new entrepreneurs to think about that. And the
first lens is identify what problem or paying your business solves.
Perform an honest assessment on yourself to identify what perspective
are you entering the business from. Then think about moving forward,
but at least go through the rigor of considering all
those steps instead of just saying I'm good at this,
I should build a business around it. So that would
(01:09:33):
be kind of my guidance slash secret to new entrepreneurs.
Speaker 8 (01:09:37):
That is a really powerful secret. Okay, Chris Dinner, what
is your secret.
Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
I always tell people stop wasting time on things that
don't matter. And that's as blunt as I could be
about it, but that's exactly what I'll say to people
when you realize that time is out of your control.
You know, time, money, and all these things are just
an illusion for the most part. Anyway, putting it into
that perspective really will help you make some better decisions
and ask better questions.
Speaker 8 (01:10:03):
I agree one hundred percent.
Speaker 6 (01:10:04):
In fact, right till you hear my secret, which I
thought of my secret before the shows.
Speaker 8 (01:10:10):
So Richard, what is Shoe's secret?
Speaker 7 (01:10:12):
My secret is, from a business standpoint, set high goals.
You know, one of the things that one of my
business coaches once said to me is that one of
the hardest things he had to do with CEOs was
to get them to set goals that were big.
Speaker 5 (01:10:27):
Enough, and that was one of his challenges.
Speaker 7 (01:10:31):
And you know, this last couple of years at the firm,
we've set some pretty high goals and what has really
been amazing and delightful is to see how we've risen
to hit those goals. And I think before I didn't
really set challenging goals.
Speaker 5 (01:10:48):
But it seems like the team really.
Speaker 7 (01:10:50):
Likes having challenging goals and they're stepping up to it,
and it's really exciting to be a part of that,
to be a part of a team that's really engaged working.
Speaker 5 (01:11:01):
To something meaningful. So I would say, set high goals.
Speaker 6 (01:11:04):
My secret was going to be, and I'm thinking about
this yesterday, don't hang out with people that bring you down.
Speaker 8 (01:11:10):
A life is short, and you get to choose how
you live it for the most part.
Speaker 6 (01:11:14):
I mean, you don't get to choose everything, Like I
don't know, Chris, if you would have chosen almost die,
But don't be around people that you don't want to
be around if you can all avoid it. And the
kind of people I like are the people that have
a really positive attitude and that are moving forward in
their lives, and those are the kind of people I
want to be around. So I'm really doing as much
(01:11:34):
as I can right now just to focus on that
and to always focus on positive things. Course bad things happen,
but I try to keep my attitude positive all the
time because I'm a happier.
Speaker 5 (01:11:43):
Person, and I'm a happier person that way too.
Speaker 7 (01:11:46):
Well, that's it for us. Passage to profit is a
nationally syndicated radio show, appearing in thirty eight markets across
the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also
been recently selected by feed spot podcast Asters database as
a top ten entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the
P two P team, our producer Noah Fleischman and our
(01:12:08):
program coordinator Alisha Morrissey, our studio assistant Risicatpusari, and our
social media powerhouse Carolina Tabarees. Look for our podcast tomorrow
anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in
the top three percent globally. You can also find us
on Facebook, Instagram, x and on our YouTube channel. And remember,
(01:12:28):
while the information on this program is believed to be correct,
never take a legal step without checking with your legal
professional first. Gearheart Law is here for your patent, trademark
and copyright needs. You can find us at gearheartlaw dot
com and contact us for free consultation. Take care everybody,
thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Speaker 1 (01:12:49):
The proceeding was a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.