Security Unfiltered
Security Unfiltered
Balancing Business and Well-Being: Nathan Whitaker's Journey from IT to Ironman
What if balancing the demands of a thriving IT business with personal well-being was as simple as training for a triathlon? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Nathan Whittacre, co-founder of Stimulus Technologies, as he shares his transformative journey from a childhood obsession with video games on an Atari 800XL to launching a successful IT and cybersecurity firm. Nathan's story is a testament to the power of self-taught skills and the evolving landscape of technology; his insights offer a roadmap for aspiring tech entrepreneurs navigating their own paths.
Nathan opens up about the personal challenges of entrepreneurship, drawing parallels between the strategic planning required for endurance sports and business growth. He candidly recounts the early days of Stimulus Technologies, where neglecting self-care was a common pitfall, and shares practical strategies for maintaining mental well-being, like turning off work notifications and engaging in endurance sports. From the hilarious misstep of an illegal candy store to the gritty realities of juggling business decisions and personal health, Nathan's anecdotes provide both inspiration and cautionary tales for anyone building a business.
Listeners will gain valuable insights from Nathan's experiences, particularly in the balancing act of setting career goals alongside personal ambitions. He discusses the intricacies of training for an Ironman and how the calculated risks and strategic decisions made in sports mirror those in business. For those eager to connect with Nathan, he offers a unique opportunity: reach out to him on LinkedIn for a chance to receive a physical copy of his book, "The CEO's Digital Survival Guide." Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned professional, this episode promises a wealth of knowledge on navigating both the digital and entrepreneurial landscapes.
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How's it going, nathan? It's great to finally get you on the podcast. You know, I think we've been planning this thing since probably May at this point, and you know it's like perfect timing, right. Every single time that we were going to record something came up Incidents at work, kids getting sick. But I'm really glad to finally get you on. I think this will probably be my last episode of 2024.
Speaker 2:Well, it's great to be here, joe. I'm excited to have the conversation, so thanks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, nathan, you know I start everyone off with telling you know their background of how they got into IT or security overall, right, the reason why I start everyone there is because not only paints a good picture of you know you as a person and your journey. But you know there's a portion of my listeners that might be trying to get an IT or security for the very first time, right, and I remember when I was trying to make that jump hearing someone else's story that was that was you know closely like mine or, you know, had the same background as mine. It just opened up my mind to think, oh hey, this is possible, right, I'm not going down some rabbit hole that's never going to pay off or anything like that. This is possible for me, right? So what was your journey like into IT or security?
Speaker 2:Sure, I have always loved technology, ever since I was a little kid. So my story goes back to when I was four years old, over 40 years ago, that my parents bought us an Atari 800XL, which is similar to a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe it was just the Atari brand of a home computer and my brother and I who's a little older than me used to play on that machine. But we had to learn basic programming to do anything on that computer, because you just booted it up and it came up with a prompt for to start entering basic code, and so we wanted to play video games, like any kids do, and so, and we've had to figure out how to either write code or copy code off of magazines that we would get in the mail. We'd go. You know, there was no downloading, we'd buy some games and things like that, but it was. It was mostly because my brother and I wanted to play video games.
Speaker 2:When I got into PCs about 10 years later, same thing I wanted to play better video games, learned about graphics cards and how to put memory in the computer. You know it was, uh, these old dim chips. You had to add one at a time, and so I learned a lot about hardware just by experimenting around on my home computer, to the chagrin of my parents because I broke it a bunch of times. But you know, eventually I learned a lot more, went to work for a small computer store building computers, just helping repair and build computers, and I got my degree in computer science bachelor's and master's degree in computer science from University of Nevada, las Vegas. And while going to college my brother and I decided to start Stimulus Technologies to help friends and family build computers, work on their machines, fix problems, and it's grown from there. So 1995, we started Stimulus and now we're about 75 employees in five states and do all kinds of variety of IT work cybersecurity, internet voice across the country.
Speaker 1:So that's my journey, yeah, that's fascinating. My journey, yeah, that's fascinating. You know, there's kind of two parts of it that I want to like highlight. I guess, right, you know, in the beginning, when you're building the computers, when you're, you know, gaming on it, making them better, upgrading them, right, those computers are not like the computers that we interact with today.
Speaker 1:You know, back then it was like it's very rudimentary, you know, like if you wanted to use it and you know use like an audio driver, you had to like unpack it, install it, hardware level, where you are, you know, really intimate with the underworkings of how the computer is actually working, which is an interesting, it's an interesting background now, in 2024, right, like not very many people starting out today or getting started, you know, the last couple years would have that sort of experience, unless they decide to go into a linux os for some ungodly reason, right and, and start playing around in there.
Speaker 1:I mean, of course, you know, if you're in this field, you probably have messed around with linux to some extent. I still have a linux vm, you know, installed on my desktop just to make it feel like I'm still, you know, in the weeds at times, right, but like it's interesting right how you started your background from there. Because, like you were starting it from like the ground up, with the industry as a whole, you know, like you were technically right like we're all still on the cutting edge of technology to some extent, but I mean like you were there at the foundation, you know yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean I, I you know when I talk about this. It brings back memories of like bill gates saying you know, we'll never need more than 640k ram you know, and it just you know, because it was my first pc, it was dos 5, 2.
Speaker 2:You know you just have to to play doom, which is, you know, something I wanted to play. You know the original I wanted to play. You know the original Doom game. I had to, you know, work with extending the memory after I added two megs of RAM to the machine. You know, figure out how to have this extended memory and move all the drivers to the right portion of memory. I mean it was always a lot of tinkering. Then I did get into Linux. My first kernel, I think, of Linux was 0.92. So I don't think you've lived until you've had to compile a Linux kernel from scratch. So I did a lot of that. You know Slackware was the first distro of Linux I used.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is all late 80s, early 90s and I was just a kid, you know, just honestly, just playing around trying to figure out how to Computers again, my parents, I'd drive them nuts because I'd run network cables, coax cables, across from room to room in the house. But yeah, it's definitely a journey, um, and I miss the experimentation. I don't get to do it as much as I used to. You know, now I do mostly management inside the company and talk high level. But um, you know it's definitely different times back then and I I miss it. It was simpler a little bit. You know you wanted a virus, you had to go out and look for it or get a floppy disk that included one.
Speaker 2:You know nowadays it just you know they're always attacking us, so it's a different certainly that you went straight into starting your own company, right?
Speaker 1:So did you always have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit? Were you always looking for ways to, you know, like, make, I guess, make an income. Right, I approach it from this way, right, and you know, I didn't even think about this for many years with myself. But when I was younger, like I was, I mean I was doing everything I could just to make money. Right, and that's not the same for every kid, right, like, most of my friends were cool with, you know, having no money, having nothing, and just you know, playing baseball or whatever it was Right, just you know playing baseball or whatever it was right. But for me it was always like, okay, well, I can, you know, mow my grandma's lawn, and then she'll refer me across the street to her friend and I'll, you know, mow their lawn and it'll snowball. Right.
Speaker 1:And even in high school, I was making friends with the vice principal and the principals to get me jobs that I had no business being in in the school. And you, jobs that I had no business being in in the school. And you know, I should have been fired 10 times the first week, right, like, that's just how I was as a kid right, I needed that like social. I needed that social opportunity to grow into the professional that I am today. But it's interesting because you just started right into it, you know, and you kind of jumped in. Were you thinking at the time like, hey, this is, this is a little bit crazy, or was it just like second nature for you?
Speaker 2:Probably a little bit crazy, but it was. It was in in our family blood. My dad had owned a couple of businesses service businesses back in the late seventies, early eighties, and so so, all surprisingly, all four of us kids eventually owned our own businesses. So my my oldest sister owns a piano studio. My other sister ran a construction company for 25 years. My brother and I obviously went into business together. We eventually split the company into one doing software and the other doing the IT services. So both of us ran businesses.
Speaker 2:But as a kid, you know, I learned from my parents, you know over the dinner table, of what it took to run a business, and I don't think it scared any of us away, which is surprising because it was certainly a struggle for them. But you know I, like you, I figured out ways to make money, even from a little kid. You know I I was selling candy. I had a little candy store in my house. From the profits of that I bought a dog and we bred the dog and so made the money off of that and, you know, just trying to always find ways to to make money.
Speaker 1:So very similar yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You bring up selling candy. Like I was selling candy in high school. I was selling candy in jordan's in high school. That was. That was very in Jordans in high school. That was very interesting. My best friend I couldn't even remember how we met and at my wedding I got married almost five years ago at this point and at my wedding he's giving the best man speech and he brings up how we met and I couldn't remember for the life of me of how we met and he's like, yeah, you know, back in high school, like you didn't go to Foot Locker for the latest Jordans, you went to Joe's Locker for the latest Jordans and Joe always had them and I I was like man, like that's, that's how we met, like that's, that's really uh, that's really funny. And I, I like remembered, you know, the pair of Jordans that he ordered from me that day and everything else like that. So it was uh, it was fast. I mean, like that alone I probably should have been like arrested for back then.
Speaker 2:Funny story I, I, actually I was shut down. My candy store was shut down because we weren't collecting sales tax and we didn't have a business license. So I got it big enough that some of the neighborhood moms complained that I was selling too much candy and the local tax department came and said you got to shut it down because you can't have a small business in a house in this area and you have to have a business license. So unless you open up a bigger store in a commercial area, you have to shut it down. So I was deviant deviant, obviously, you know. Yeah, running an illegal business out of my house selling candy and baseball cards that's, uh, that's fascinating, that's that's interesting, that I don't know.
Speaker 1:I I just it's interesting that someone would like complain at just overall. You know, it's like it's a kid selling candy, like he's not. You know, I mean nowadays, right like that would be very highly suspicious, right like I'm sure a lot of people would be like, oh, he's selling drugs or something like that you know, and that's probably a likely scenario, but I just it would be shocking back then for that to be true.
Speaker 1:You know when, when you're, when you're on that journey of being an entrepreneur, starting a young company in an industry that's essentially at the very beginning of its kickoff, right? How do you manage your mental health? Right, because I would assume it's probably very easy to work 24 out of 24 hours a day. Right, like there's no end in the supply of work that you have to do, especially in that in that timeframe. Right? So how do you, how do you manage your mental health? How do you step away and do that self-care.
Speaker 2:Well, I did it for many years and so I'm glad you bring it up because for probably the first 15 years of the business I didn't take enough time. You know, I was going to school, you know, was married, had young kids trying to run the business. I remember a story that I left my cell phone in my office. At this point this is like 2005, 2006. I left my cell phone in my office and I was working in our server room trying to get some stuff done and I lost complete track of time. And at some point I walked out of the server room and I heard this banging on the front door and I walk out there and it was my wife wondering where I was, because it was three o'clock in the morning. She had been trying to call me to figure out where I was and I was just lost in work. And you know, she packed up the you know young kids in the car and came down to try to figure out. You know, hopefully nothing bad had happened to me and I realized at that point that I did need to take the time. You know there's always more to do and work. It will always be there, but we, we potentially might not be there.
Speaker 2:And it took, honestly, some deaths in the family of seeing people die too young because of stress or different reasons or you know, just mental and physical health, that I went, lost a lot of weight. I've lost 80 pounds and started doing a lot of endurance sports. So I'm now a marathoner, ironman, and I take the time every day for myself to make sure I'm physically well and mentally well. And it's important to take that time away, because it's so easy in this industry to say I just need to do that next ticket, or I need to solve that next problem, or I need to do that next research, and if we're not physically able to do it because we're sick or unhealthy or mentally not healthy, we're just not performing for our clients or our team or whoever it may be. We're just not performing well. So it's I had to learn that hard lesson about 14 years ago that and I I have to do this, I have to make this change.
Speaker 1:yeah yeah, that's, and it's interesting. You know, I've had on a lot of people I mean this is, I don't know, 225 episodes or something like that. Right, and most people take the effort. I've only had one person that tells me yeah, I don't do anything, I just deal with it.
Speaker 1:I'm like man, that's a terrible solution to this problem, right. But I have found that like I really need that time, you know. So I'll do sensory deprivation. Float tanks. I'll do, you know, one a month and that is like more than enough for me, or maybe it's the right amount, right, for me to kind of just shut off my brain for an hour, 90 minutes and just float right and kind of gather my thoughts and process everything that happened since the last session and whatnot. That, really, that really does help.
Speaker 1:And then I also take a very concerted effort when, when I take time off, even if it's a day off of work, you know in the middle of the week or whatever, like I'm turning off all work related notifications. You know in the middle of the week or whatever, like I'm turning off all work related notifications. You know like I'll, I'll use my cell phone and whatnot, but you know my boss knows if something bad goes on you need to call me, and it doesn't need to be through teams, like you need to call me directly and I'll get to it, right. But in that scenario it needs to be like hey, we're completely breached, like we need you to handle this. You could take your vacation next week, right, something like that.
Speaker 1:And I've also found that you know, really hard cardiovascular exercise really really helps, like significantly, which is it's frustrating, right, because I hate running, but I unfortunately like the results that I get after, and so I tend to try, and I try to fit it in when I can and I'm trying to change my schedule right now, really just mostly my sleep patterns so that I could do it in the morning before the kid gets up, so that I can get it in and then take her to daycare and start my day. But it's very beneficial to do to daycare and start my day, but it's very beneficial to do something hard like that, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's so many studies that show that a good cardiovascular workout, endurance workout and that's why I got into running and triathlon because it generates a lot of hormones, endorphorphins, and gets rid of the stress hormones. And study after study shows, you know, the longevity that produces in our lives but also the alertness in the work that we're doing. And you know we've got to show up at our best all the time, and if we're not showing up at work, at home for our kids, whatever it may be that we're trying to do, if we're not showing up at our best, we're not giving what we should to them. And so taking that time whether it's meditation or yoga or running or biking, hiking, whatever it may be that you really enjoy, I enjoy all of it. But I think it's important to take that time away and really disconnect from yeah and push the body physically. That gives so many benefits after the fact.
Speaker 1:Right. So how do you, how do you find the time to train for something like an Ironman?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, everybody has 24 hours in the day, so it's all about scheduling, you know. So I get up early in the morning, like you were just saying, so I drive my kids to school and I have to get up before they have to be to school. So I get an hour to an hour and a half in the morning, and as I approach the date of the Ironman, I have to increase the time that I'm doing. Four days, four to five days a week, I'm training an hour, hour and a half in the morning, hour, hour and a half in the evening, and then on Saturdays it's usually four or five hours in the morning and I try to do it before everybody else is up, you know, and so I'm.
Speaker 2:You know I'm around when other, when everybody wants to do something else. So, and luckily, my wife and I are both training for the same races, so she's also a runner and triathletee, so we get to do a lot of it together, which is great, but it's it's just about eliminating something else in our schedule. So, you know, maybe eliminating. I don't play video games anymore. I I just don't, you know, watch tv or play video games as something I just eliminated.
Speaker 1:um, and I just focus on the physical time, and so that's what I do when everybody else is sleeping usually yeah, do you have certain days of the week that you'll train certain you know parts of the iron man, because the iron man is running, biking and swimming, not in that order, that's the wrong order, but I, you know, when I've, when I've trained for something, it's typically, you know, like a race right, like a marathon or something like that which I haven't done a marathon yet, because I keep on getting injured right at 15 mile mark in my training, which is pretty frustrating for me. But you know, when I was training for that, I mean every day was running right. So I assume in your training for the Ironman maybe you're touching all three each day, or maybe you're having select days or select training sessions for different areas that maybe you're stronger at. You know what does that look like, because I've never. I've never done it and I've never looked into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's, there's. I think I have a mug that says I'm a triathlete, I make things three times harder than they should be. And there's another one that I have that says I'm not good at running, biking or swimming, I just do all three or something. I can't remember exactly what it says, but triathletes are a little different type of crazy, so I do alternate. Usually it's three to four days a week of running or times training times of running, three to four times of biking and usually two swimming, and then I get two strength and or stretching times in there. So like Monday, monday, wednesday and then Friday and Saturday are usually running, and the length of and the type of exercise varies depending on what I'm trying to do. And so those dual workouts sometimes I'm doing a run in the morning, a bike in the afternoon or vice versa, or I'm doing a run and then a bike and a short run right in a row. So I spend most of my time on the bike and the run, because those are the longest parts of the event.
Speaker 2:Swim I'm usually doing like two one, the bike and the run, because those are the longest parts of the event. Swim I'm usually doing like two, one hour workouts a week because it's it's the shortest part of the Ironman. I just got to get through it. I'm I'm a decent swimmer. I'm not a great swimmer and it would just take a lot of focus for me to get faster at swimming. So I get through it.
Speaker 2:I I have, you know I have fun doing all of them, but uh, but uh, but yeah, you have to vary it and that's the tough part is figuring out how to schedule it all in. And then I travel periodically. So when I'm traveling it's I can't take my bike with me, or I could, but it's a pain in the butt. So you know it's the weeks or times that I travel that those are my running days, because it's easy to throw a pair of tennis shoes, running shoes, in my bag. That's the nice thing about running is you can just go down to the gym and the hotel and run on the treadmill most of the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting, my wife's cousin, I think. She's currently even training for a triathlon and a year or two ago she attempted her first one. And she was talking to me and I was like, are you confident in your swim? Because I know you're good on the run and the bike, but are you confident in the swim? And she's like, oh, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I was like, if you're not confident on the swim, like you shouldn't get in the water because, like you know, a mile, two miles, is no joke in the water, like that's a really long way and you're in the water, like you could have a massive issue, right, and and and she, she kind of was like, okay, well, I don't have any more time to train, so I'm just going to do it and see you know what, what happens? And you know, half a mile in, and she's needing to be rescued by the, by the paddle boarders or whatever it was right, pull her out of the water. And that kind of takes me back to you know, after I donated my kidney in college, the doctor told me it's like, yeah, six weeks, you know, don't really do anything. You know you're not going to be the same for six weeks, right, Like you literally need to take six weeks. I know you're going to think three, four weeks, you're going to feel great and you will feel great at that point. Right, this is like week four of my recovery, week four, five of my recovery. I'm feeling great and I'm a strong swimmer. Like I swim very well, I can swim. For a very long time I didn't like do it as a sport or anything like that, but like I'm very comfortable in the water even to this day. Right, so we get in the water and they have a great idea of swimming around the lake, just doing an entire loop, and I'm like that's fine, that's not that difficult, right, we were just going to start where we were, swim straight across the lake, the center of the lake, and then go right around and come back.
Speaker 1:Right, I get to the middle of this lake and in Germany, you know, there's no like, there's no like ease off into know a deeper end, right, so you're literally going from two feet to 10 feet to to. You can't see the bottom at all, you know, and hopefully it, you know, evens out again, right, and it's very, it's a very short amount of time, like it's, it's uh, it's pretty crazy how it just drops off like that and there's no signs or anything like that. I'm in the middle of the lake and you know, I'm very aware of, like, my, my, my physicality status or my physical status, you know, and I'm like if I, if I go any farther, I'm gonna drown, like I'm not, I'm actually not gonna make it to the other end, you know, and I'm, I'm literally in the middle of 40 feet. You know, no one's out this far. I'm alone.
Speaker 1:Right, my friends left me and, uh, I, I immediately had to, you know, come back and thankfully, you know I'm good with like rescue swims and you know rescue floating and whatnot, right. And so I did a lot of that all the way back, because I literally reached the middle and it was like my, my, my fitness level was, it just fell off a cliff out of nowhere. You know, that's what my doctor said. He's like you're gonna do something, you're gonna feel completely fine in the beginning and then it's going to evaporate like nothing was ever even there and you're going to be left, you know, with nothing.
Speaker 1:And I I had never experienced that before, but in the water that's like the worst time to do it. So I, when I asked you about your training, I'm also thinking to myself from an athlete perspective. I would over-train, right, I would over-prepare for the water side of it, or the running and or the running and or the biking, right. But you saying you're doing just enough to ensure that you can make that distance right makes it makes a lot of sense, because you kind of have to figure out where you're going to spend more of your time training yeah, I just have enough experience to know what it will take to finish that leg in the amount of time that I want to.
Speaker 2:So I'm glad you had the wherewithal, though, to head back to the shore, because that could be one scary, because a panic attack can set in. So I remember on my first ever triathlon that I did, my wetsuit was a little too small for me. So every race I've done has been wetsuit legal. So I'm able to, which helps with buoyancy and speed and stuff, but I couldn't stretch my arms out. It was my only my second time using this wetsuit.
Speaker 2:I did one practice swim and then went out and I had a little bit of a panic attack about it in the water and luckily I was able to finish. I gathered myself, uh, together, one of the paddle boarders came over and just checked on me and like no, I'm okay, I just calmed down, I made it through. But yeah, that could be a real, real issue and it can happen at any time. My wife's done a lot more triathlons than I have and she's recently had some issues in the water with panic attacks and it's a scary, scary thing to to and it's hard to get over that mentally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's um, yeah, certainly, and I'll tell you that triathlons and especially iron man, the swim is not always nice calm water, like I just did this race up in in california. The water was 58 degrees, it was in a river, which sounds great. You're swimming down river, but the river has a lot of current and there's debris and it was cold and kind of choppy and it wasn't a fun swim. By any means done swims with, uh, like 10 degrees or 10 foot swells in in an ocean. It's man, like I said, I I swim enough in the pool and I do some open water swimming to practice for it and I do enough to be confident that I can finish. But I know that to get a big 20% reduction in time I'd need to spend 100% more time swimming. I'd rather focus on other areas to make improvements.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really challenging swimming against current. Yeah, that is that's really challenging swimming against current. That's probably the number one reason why, whenever I get the you know poor idea of training for a triathlon, you know, as soon as I think of that, I was like I don't want to do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think every time I sign up for a race or right, and then I go you know the day or two before the race, I'm like what the heck was I thinking when I signed up for this thing? So it's stupid, yeah, but then at the end you cross the finish line like that's amazing, I'll do that again. Then you pay for another race. You're like why did I do that?
Speaker 2:it's like yeah, it's a vicious cycle, but it I don't know. I I like I'm very goal oriented and I like to have a goal to work towards, and that's what inspires me to take the time to train and do the things that I need to do to stay physically fit. So I don't know what I would do if I couldn't race anymore. It'd be hard to motivate myself to spend as much time on my physical fitness.
Speaker 2:I think for me it's some lessons in business too. We need to focus in business on the things that generate the best outcomes. You know we need to focus in business on the things that generate the best outcomes. You know, a lot of times we, you know we want to do tasks and get things accomplished, but maybe those tasks don't lead us down the goals that we want. And so, you know, focusing on the most important things that will lead us to the best productivity and best outcomes, I think is an essential part of any career and or business that you can do, because there's always going to be things coming at you, whether it's, you know, random emails, or, you know, browsing social media or thing. You know things that might be interesting or good, but if we focus too much time on those. It certainly can detract us from doing the or distract us, I guess, from doing the things that we really should be doing, or distract us, I guess, from doing the things that we really should be doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, when I was maybe at the beginning of, like, my real, you know, entrepreneurial journey, right, let's just say, with this podcast, right, because I started it from scratch, did it all myself, basically. And you know, when you see a little bit of success, you want to not just double down but you want to increase it, right, well, I could do more content, I can put out more videos, it could be more helpful in this way. Right, and in the content generation world, it's very common for your favorite content creator to post five videos a week, you know, and there's a reason behind it. Right, they want their audience to be engaged as often as possible throughout the day, because that boosts them in the algorithm and everything that of which I really hate. And there's things that I do that do not benefit the algorithm at all in any way, and that's you know, why my podcast has grown at the rate that it has grown. Right, like it's steady growth, but it's not insane growth that you see from some of these other platforms that you know kind of came from nowhere and now they're doing 50,000 views a month, or whatever it might be. Right, I know those people and a lot of those people paid for a lot of those views, yeah, and I haven't done any of that, right.
Speaker 1:But when you're in that mode, you know, it's very easy for your brain to say, oh okay, I'll post another episode, right. And then what happens to me? I get burned out, right, like last year. I posted two episodes a week for almost the entire year and by the time October came around, I was like, yeah, I don't want to do this anymore, like, like, like, I'm going to post like one episode a month, you know, or whatever. It is just just to recover, you know, and it's it's really important to kind of be mindful of that. And I feel like it's very difficult to be mindful of it when you're going into it, right, because you don't know what you don't know and you know, if you don't know your limits with it, you know you'll run into that brick wall and you have to find a way to dial it back and then recover properly, I think.
Speaker 2:You know, whether it's sports or in professional careers, there's always a fine balance between pushing yourself enough for growth and pushing yourself too hard for injury. You mentioned, you know, the injuries at mile 15. And that's often what we do in life in general is either we just don't do enough, you, we don't focus right, or you know we go on the opposite side, that we're, oh, I could do this, and you push yourself so hard and then you eventually fail because you push you, you've gone beyond the limit, the breaking point limit. You don't see it right away, but you see it over time. And there's always this fine balance. You know it's whether you're, you know, weightlifter or an endurance athlete, or you know, whatever it may be, you have to push yourself to a little bit of pain for growth, but not too much, and it's always a very fine balance. My wife and I talk about that all the time, you know, because we're training together and kind of coming up with our training plans. It's like, you know, do I do? I do this workout which I know is going to benefit me, but I have this little bit of nagging injury. Is it going to cause me more problems or is that? Can I work successfully through that and I think it relates on, you know honestly, to a career.
Speaker 2:You know some decisions. You know I've thought about I again, I'm very busy with a lot of different things running the business, and I wanted to get a new certification, a couple of new certifications, and I thought to myself, what's the gain on that? You know, is that pushing myself too hard right now or is that the right thing to do? And I chose to do one rather than two at the time and I was really grateful that I was able to get some additional learning. But I think that we have to make those balanced decisions all the time. You know, if you're running your business, it business, it's always. You know, there's always a question of how far to push it, how hard to push your team, how far to push the company, and sometimes you can push too hard and and there's some, always some consequences with it. So you know, everything in life relates. That's what, again, that's why I like the endurance sports, because it does relate to what I do every day in work too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so talking about you, know your company, what, what services or what domain of IT do you guys specialize in?
Speaker 2:So our focus is small to midsize businesses, mostly professional services. So we focus on companies that are 10 to 50 employees, that that kind of lower middle market or small business market, and we help companies with all aspects of IT, from help desk, server deployment, cloud management, cybersecurity. We have our own voice over IP soft switch and we operate broadband networks too, so everything and we're our own network provider, so everything related to the technology for those businesses. And we focused on the smaller companies because those are, once you get about eight to 10 employees, there's a lot higher need for technology support. You're often buying maybe a line of business application or subscribing to some line of business software.
Speaker 2:You want to implement some new technologies. You know whether it's an ERP system or AI or whatever it may be, and there's just more integration that has to happen. And then you're obviously dealing with, maybe, some compliance. You know having to implement cybersecurity policies and procedures, implement new tools to protect the company. So that's where we in and and take a comprehensive approach of how to how to go after. Um, you know the solutions for growth inside those companies. So I love the. The companies that we work with that, you know, start small. You know a couple of people and then they've grown over the years three, four hundred people across multiple states, and going through that journey with them it's it is one of the greatest things that I do in my business is seeing a company grow from an idea to a great success and using technology to get them there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really fascinating, you know, because I'm trying to figure out the best way to word it. You know, I feel like when you're not starting a company, when you're not doing consulting maybe even when you're younger on in your career you always think, I mean, even right now, right, like I still think, oh, I need more knowledge, I need more skill before I do that, or whatever it might be. But when you go out and you talk to other companies, other potential customers and whatnot, especially in the small business area or the medium business area and you find out, wait a minute, they need this thing, and I know that very well, I've done that many times before and it kind of unlocks your mind to an extent of where it's like, oh okay, if I could do that, then maybe I could do this right, and it kind of snowballs. For me that was the case, and now I'm doing a bit more consulting than I've ever done before, specifically on cloud security. So more to come on that for sure in 2025. But I am doing a lot more on that side now.
Speaker 1:But was that mentality present for you? Potentially starting out, you know, was well, who's going to buy a service for me? Who's going to do this? Who's going to give me money for this thing? Right? I mean, I remember when I started, when I was starting the podcast, you know, I've kind of like what I call a focused group of friends, right, all of them have different opinions. All of them have different, you know, political, religion, cultural beliefs. All of them have different backgrounds. And there, you know, there's one subsect of that focus group that literally had all of those questions for me. Well, who's going to actually listen? How are you going to market it? How are you even going to find guests to come on? Right, and 225 episodes later, here we are, right. So, did you have that same sort of, you know, kind of internal battle going on then?
Speaker 2:I did. It was very interesting. So, if you remember, when you were 17, 18 years old, you knew everything. Teenagers know everything, and so my brother and I knew everything, but we knew nothing and I was humbled. Very quickly we got a contract to set up a small office. I think it was about 10 to 15 computers, to wire up the network and set up all the computers and nothing worked.
Speaker 2:Like I had done this a few times before, I had done it in my high school and my job at the at Image Computers, where I had worked for about a year and a half. I'd done it before but I always had somebody I could ask if there was a problem, I always had the computer teacher or I had my boss that I could ask, but there was nobody I could ask. And this was before you know internet forums or Reddit or you know whatever it may be. There was nothing, there was nobody to ask and my brother and I sat there until you know early in the morning just trying different things and it was humbled, like really humbled, that no, nathan, you don't know everything. And amazingly we figured out what it was. It ended up being a hardware problem the network cards that we were trying to use were incompatible with the network switch or hub at that time. Weird issue, just the brands didn't like each other and so we swapped out the network adapters and all the computers and everything worked just fine. But it was a humbling experience of just realizing, you know, there's so much more to learn and it's just going to take time.
Speaker 2:I think it took me on the journey of lifelong learning of saying, you know, I will never know everything and there will always be people smarter than me that I can learn from. So that's led me to look I can work in my domain, I can do this well, and I want to gather more knowledge, I want to do more well, and so it's, you know, this goal of lifelong learning. But I think you have to take a little bit of leap. You can't just always learn and never do. That experience also taught me the biggest and best lessons that I can learn is while failing, and when you fail and you and you overcome that failure, that's when you learn the biggest lesson. So without ever trying, you will never fail. And if you never fail, you never really learn.
Speaker 2:And so taking those opportunities to learn and grow through failure, through success, and finding people that will help you along the way. So I've gotten coaches, business coaches that have helped me a lot, listening to a lot of speakers, reading a lot of books. There's just a lot of people along the way that have helped me on my journey from, you know, being a technician, being, you know, the tech guy, to being a business owner. And that's a very hard transition, I think, for a lot of us in this industry, because we love what we do, we love working on the tech. But really running a business is about managing people, whether it's our clients or employees, and that's a very hard lesson to learn. I mean, it takes a different skill set that comes with time too. So just finding those people to help you along the way, along the journey, is, I think, essential.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is something that in 2025, I probably need to do a better job of right, because I am at the point where now it's like I have other experts in the field doing the work on my, on my team, under my you know company name and everything right. I mean, like that's for me at least, that's a ginormous milestone, you know, to think that I have a network that's willing to work with me on a project that may be potentially even rudimentary for him. I mean, I got one guy that you know used to be a cyber warfare officer for the us military. This guy, you know, built target packages and ransomware and all everything that you could think of. This guy built it from scratch, you know an edr system.
Speaker 1:He built a sim system from scratch. He built right and it's in terms of, like, business. You know, progression right, I don't have my m, I'm getting my PhD in something highly technical, you know, but it's turning into. You know, now I'm thinking about having an operations arm right Now I'm thinking about having a governance and compliance arm that does the consulting, and I have cloud security and pen testing and all these other things.
Speaker 1:And now I'm in a position where it's like like, well, I can't do all of that and run the business. Like I have to do one or the other right and I, if I choose one, I can't do all of that. I still have to have other people right. So who's going to run the business? So it's an interesting. It's an interesting problem, right. And now I'm kind of like contemplating do I want to go down this route? Because if I go down this route, I know, I think I know where it will end and just knowing me right, like I, I have like a never quit mentality right, like no matter what happens, I'm not going to be quitting, but I have a young family right. So I have to like kind of gauge the risk and manage it properly and then go from there. It's an interesting. It's an interesting predicament, I guess yeah it's a tough one.
Speaker 2:I go to these industry conferences and when the speaker that's the runs the conferences often says in our industry there's a lot of people that are tech with helpers and transitioning from a business that is tech with helpers to a real business that the CEO is really a CEO and a business manager, that's one of the hardest transitions ever. One of the hardest hires you may ever do is hiring an accounting person or a salesperson or an account manager. We're really good at talking to a technician and talking to a tech person and really knowing if they know what they do. But hiring somebody in a domain that we're not familiar with hiring somebody to do accounting and hr is much harder for us than hiring somebody that's going to do cyber security work or compliance work right, and it's harder to manage that person because they'll come to you and say things like oh you know, this is our profit and loss statement, a balance sheet, cash flow statement, let's review those, and you're like I've never read one of those before. What does?
Speaker 1:that mean.
Speaker 2:So how do I do payroll and you know, handle HR compliance and you know that kind of stuff. So I mean those, those are, you know, good problems to have as a growing company. But they're definitely different and you know each one of us have has to decide, like you know, if we're starting a business, is that what we want to get into or are we starting a lifestyle business that we're comfortable with? You know, being a tech with helper and helpers and managing a small team that's doing great work. But it's definitely that transition from, you know, four or five people in a company to 10 or 20 people is is a huge transition, it's difficult yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating when you I'm just trying to, I guess I need to do a bit more research, right, like because when you're growing to 10 to 20 people, right, like still even doing the math or trying to figure out, like, how much money I need to have coming in to pay that person, right, and you always, you always hear, oh, you only need to worry about you know, two weeks, right, two weeks at a time, or one paycheck at a time. You need to be able to cover that one and then figure it out for the next one. For me, I like to build in cushion, you know. So I like to build in, you know, six, 12 months of cushion. Maybe I'll project out 12 months, but I'll have, you know, a quarter of cushion, right?
Speaker 1:It's a weird dynamic that I'm trying to figure out now of how to negotiate that. And you know, figure out something that that works, right, because I don't want to bring. The last thing that I would ever want to do is bring people on and then close doors, you know, a quarter later saying, oh, it didn't work. Now we all got to find new jobs right Like that's.
Speaker 1:That's terrible. You know, I would not want that for anyone.
Speaker 2:Well, the nice thing about our industry is, for the most part, the work that we do is recurring revenue. If you, you know, you could do the project, so to say. But really, it and cybersecurity and compliance are all reoccurring work it never ends is? You know, we can business plan a lot easier in our industry? You know managed IT, cybersecurity, managed security services better than you know a construction company that always has to look for that next job. Or you know, whatever, whatever type of business it is, it's always looking for that next job.
Speaker 2:And so, I mean professionals recommend, you know, having three months of cushion. I think that's a great recommendation. But what's great about you know what we do is, honestly, if we set it up as recurring services, as managed services or managed security services, it gives, you know, a nice revenue stream that allows better forecasting and easier forecasting, and it's the right service that companies want to buy. They'd rather, you know, buy an ongoing service than just like one project to say, oh, you're good and you're you're never good Right. And in our industry it's always. There's always the next thing, next threat. You know you got to stay up on. You know audits and penetration tests and you know help desk work. Whatever it may be, there's always something more to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I think that that was when I when I kind of hit that reality, you know, because I guess the biggest thing when you're starting a new business right is how do I find customers right, how do I find people that are interested in giving me money to provide a service, even though I do it really well, right, Like that's like the hardest thing.
Speaker 2:Don't you just throw up a website and everybody just comes to you suddenly, right? Or maybe like you know a bunch of ad space or something.
Speaker 1:You know, it's a, it's an interesting problem, but I feel like it's getting solved in other ways, and this being this being one of them. Right, this platform, like once I start talking about it more, I think more people will be willing to reach out and whatnot. But it's a, it's an interesting predicament. You know, not everyone goes down this path, right like and rightly so right like there's there's a lot of like sleepless nights that go into running and starting a business and whatnot, and and there's a lot of like anxiety built in around it because you're not given the solution to everything. You really have to think about it, figure it out and, you know, execute on it. I think that's the biggest thing is the execution.
Speaker 2:It is. It is hard. I mean, when you look at the statistics of businesses that last more than five years, it's honestly pretty disheartening. You know, I think it's somewhere around 80% that go out of business within the first, you know, year or two and 90% go out of business within five years and most businesses it's like 99% of businesses never make it past a million dollars in annual revenue.
Speaker 1:You know, no-transcript time here. Time really flew by and unfortunately or maybe fortunately, you know, however you look at it. But you know I really enjoyed our, our conversation. I'd love to have you back on some time in 2025 and, you know, continue the talk. Yeah, happy to. It was a great conversation.
Speaker 2:Appreciate it, Joe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely Well, before I let you go, you know how about? You tell my audience where they could find you if they wanted to connect with you and where they could find your company if they wanted to learn more. Sure.
Speaker 2:So I'm on LinkedIn. I post a lot there, so you can find me, nathan Whitaker, and it's spelled a little different W-H-I-T-T-A-C-R-E. So feel free to connect with me there and, if you, I'll give you an offer. If you message me, send me a direct message and connect with me, I'll send you a copy of my book, the CEO's Digital Survival Guide, so a physical copy of it, not just a digital copy. And then my company is Stimulus Technologies and we are based in Las Vegas, nevada, but we cover most of the western United States, so you can find us on StimulusTechcom. It's our company website.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thanks everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Have a great holiday everyone.
