February 5, 2026 – Fractional C-Suite Sara Daw and Second Son Rob Calvert

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:26 Jim Beach : hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, making some money, growing your business, or getting ready to get off the sofa and going out there and committing to starting a business. We have a fantastic show for you today, two great guests who have gotten off the sofa and built amazing businesses. I’m excited to share them with you. But before that, I wanted to comment on the Disney situation. You know, I believe that we need to continually, always study the big guys, the people who are no longer entrepreneurs anymore, to learn best practices from them, and just keep in touch with, you know, the business world. And so I think what Disney has done is very exciting or scary. Actually. Let me explain, for those of you who didn’t catch the news yesterday or today, depending on when you listen, Disney announced a new CEO the long time. CEO is retiring, and he’s retiring for the second time. This is the he actually retired once and came back, and now he is retiring, hopefully for good, and Josh d’amaro Is been selected to replace him. He is mid 50s, very tall and thin, and been with the company for 26 years. And therein, I think, lies the biggest problem. Disney has lost its way. I mean, there’s absolutely no way you could argue that, both in the movies and in the theme park division, there’s no doubt right now, I don’t think that anyone would argue that universal is upstaging Disney significantly in the theme park space and the Disney movies right now, they haven’t had a traditional movie success in Three or four years, I think all of their successes have been non traditional, more adult fare than a Disney product. And so in the theme parks have really gone downhill, and they’ve gotten to the point where they’re so expensive a family cannot go on a normal Disney vacation for under, like $1,400 a day or something like that, I think is about the minimum that you can get away with. And they’ve introduced so many new ways to grab your money, things that used to be free or are now charges. And so I think the general perception is we’re glad that the current administration is leaving, but they should take Josh with them. You know, he’s not part of the solution. They had four internal candidates and no external candidates. Now they say that they had external candidates, but they can’t name any of them, and they named very quickly, four internal candidates. So I think that the problem is they should just go ahead and get rid of all of them and start over at the top that is a company that needs a complete 100% reboot. They’ve lost their way, and the current people there are the problem. So we don’t need more of them. We need less of them. I have an amazing show for you today. Sarah DAW is with us from the UK. She has built the largest fractional business in the world. So fractional CFOs, fractional CMOS. She has some 1600 fractional workers in 18 countries around the world. Amazing success story. She’s the number one fractional person in the world. So excited to introduce her. After that, Rob Calvert is with us. He built an amazing tech business 16 employees called Second Son consulting. Bootstrapped it the whole way. And I’m excited for you to hear that story as well. It’s a great one. We will be right back to get started. Time

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5:07 Jim Beach : We are back in again. So very appreciative that you are with us today. Very excited to introduce my first guest. Her name is Sarah DAW. She is the CEO of the Liberty group and the CFO center group operating in one country, two countries, no, no, no. 18 countries. Damn it. Is the global number one provider, provider of fractional and part time C suite portfolio professionals. She has been doing this for quite a while, and has established an incredible reputation. She has published several books on the topic, and is currently finishing up her doctorate degree, and excited to welcome you to the show, Sarah, how you doing?

5:58 Sara Daw : I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It’s pleasure

6:01 Jim Beach : 18 countries. Is that right?

6:04 Sara Daw : It is, yeah, it is. We’ve been doing this a while, but yeah, for an 18 now across the globe, unbelievable.

6:12 Jim Beach : That is very impressive. Tell us how you got started. Go back in time and give us the birthing story, please.

6:18 Sara Daw : Okay, so for me, it was the mother of necessity, really, that got me into this. So I’d done an MBA. I was a qualified chartered accountant, and had various qualifications under my belt, and I was just starting to have, I got married, and I was just starting to have a family, and I needed to find a way forward where I could have a career and I could also be mum, because I had small children, and I just couldn’t see how I could do that in corporate. It was just too inflexible at the time, so I thought that perhaps I could offer my services on a part time basis to businesses, so perhaps I could work one day a week for a small, growing business that didn’t need me full time, didn’t want me full time, couldn’t afford me full time, but definitely needed my skills. And I looked around for others that were doing that, and bumped into the founder of the Liberty group, Colin Mills, and I joined up with him. There were just a few of us at the time, and that’s where, where it all started,

7:25 Sara Daw : and that that’s how we got going.

7:28 Jim Beach : All right, absolutely fascinating. Who are your target audiences? Who is the perfect client, the one who needs you one day a week? What does that firm look like?

7:37 Sara Daw : Yeah, so that firm looks like a business, and actually, it’s interesting, the business needs to be entrepreneurial. It needs to be growing. It doesn’t need to be fully formed. That’s what the fractional leaders will bring. Is that guidance and help to help professionalize and scale the business. It needs to have ambition, and it, you know, probably around about, I guess, a million revenue in dollars and pounds, that sort of thing and upwards, would work. But quite frankly, it’s more about the attitude of the entrepreneur. Are they open to help? Are they ambitious, and do they want to grow? And have they got a good idea? And then, I think that’s where it all starts, really. So it’s more around the mindset of the founder that’s

8:25 Jim Beach : driving that business. And are most of these businesses replications, copies of other existing businesses with some twists, maybe a restaurant, there’s restaurants for 1000s of years, or are they brand new ideas that they’re, you know, creating their own trail through the wild west of a new idea.

8:48 Sara Daw : It’s all of that.

8:49 Sara Daw : So there are

8:52 Sara Daw : businesses all, and the first

8:54 Sara Daw : one, so it will be, we’re sector agnostic. We can work with any business, and we can work with, you know, any idea, really. And it could be an idea that’s an improvement on an existing business, just doing something better in a more purpose driven way, or perhaps there’s a better business model behind it, which means that it’s got less overheads, that sort of thing. Or it could be, and as we are seeing right now in the world, it can be completely new technology that’s being adopted and developed and is funded by a venture capitalist to get them going. So it’s really any of the things, both of the two categories that you that you brought forward there,

9:37 Jim Beach : all right, how many different people are working in your bullpen. That’s the word bullpen.

9:47 Sara Daw : Okay, so across the world, we have around about 1500 C suite leaders across finance, so CFOs marketing, which are C. CMOS, Chief Marketing Officers. Then we have revenue officers, chief revenue officers in sales, and we have Chief People officers around the HR function. So across those marketing people, sales and finance, we have all of those individuals. The finance function is our biggest business, our biggest brand globally. And that’s probably a function of the fact that we started with that one that because, you know, that’s who I was and who Colin was, Chartered Accountants. And so it was a function of the fact that we got going quicker and earlier with with that brand, because it takes a while to educate the market that this is a way that businesses can scale right,

10:48 Jim Beach : but never in a CEO fractional, just the secondary positions.

10:54 Sara Daw : That’s very interesting,

10:56 Sara Daw : because I am beginning to see in the marketplace some fractional CEOs. I am also beginning to see job sharing in some very large organizations at the CEO

11:07 Sara Daw : level. For instance,

11:11 Sara Daw : Oracle has done it. I think Spotify is doing it. So actually, quite a lot of the technology businesses that are out there today. So I am beginning to see businesses adopt a different way of sharing leadership roles. I don’t see too many people doing the CEO piece in the SME community at the moment, mainly because it’s the founder that’s had the idea and is wanting to scale that. But it doesn’t mean as the organization gets larger that you can’t do job sharing and have fractionalization across all the roles, I would have thought, right?

11:48 Jim Beach : Well, it just seems like the secondary roles, especially finance, would be, yeah, absolutely perfect for this, you know, because, yeah, I can’t imagine you’re going to need full time CFO for a million dollars. Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. How do you know if someone’s going to be a good fractional employee? How do you hire and choose those 1600

8:16 Jim Beach : All right, so how do you find the deals?

12:16 Sara Daw : yeah, that’s, I

12:17 Sara Daw : mean, that really is the million dollar question, because there’s a lot of people out there that think that they can do this because they’re a good CFO in a large corporate and they’re really, really good at their function. And that is that is absolutely necessary. You do absolutely have to be good at your functional expertise and have be a good leader. Have non Finance Board experience as well, because the social skills and the people skills are very important around mobilizing large and mobilizing people, etc. But actually the biggest piece that I see that’s really important for people to make a go of working with SMEs on a fractional basis, is around really being able to understand and get on the same page as the entrepreneur and be really, really good at the skills for relationship building, active listening, self awareness, and to be able to put The business owner and the business first and themselves second. So that it’s all about, how can I help this business scale and these people be successful? It is not about fees or money, to me, it’s about the impact that I can have in those organizations and entrepreneurs. I love them. I think they’re remarkable individuals, yet they they can be tricky, and the businesses are often not that well formed in those early stages. So shocks can have a big impact. So it’s really important that these people are flexible and agile and can really, really be commercially savvy and see their way through the difficulties. And that’s not for everyone. And then you layer on top of that, the fact there’s not just one business that they’re working with in that place they could be working with three or four. So how do you manage different relationships of within businesses at different stages, with different personalities in different sectors, then it starts to get complicated. That’s a real skill. And we train our people up once we think we’ve identified those with the right attitude and skill set to do that. So we don’t just buy people in and let them go. We train them on how to do this because it is a real skill.

14:43 Jim Beach : Yes, I think it must. What happens if they disagree with the boss, the CEO, and then you get a call from your client, the CEO, and says, I don’t like this person. You said, he wants to change everything. That’s right, you know, because entrepreneurs don’t like it when you change the model. That’s working. You know, does that ever happen when you have conflict with the CEO? Yes.

15:07 Sara Daw : I mean, it does happen because, I mean, firstly,

15:10 Sara Daw : what I say to CEOs and entrepreneurs thinking of doing this is to make sure that, firstly, they hire and bring someone in who has the skills, but not necessarily the direct, the most direct fit. I would rather trade that for a cultural match. So I you need these entrepreneurs. Need to be able to get on with these fractional leaders and be able to spend a lot of time with them and trust them and build a relationship. So always go for cultural match first. But if it doesn’t work out, if it doesn’t, if it isn’t right and and sometimes it isn’t, and you don’t really know until you’ve had a go. The beauty about fractional leadership is that you can make that change. And if you work with an organization like mine, or there are others out there like mine that are that have other fractional leaders that these people can work with. We in our organization have a an oversight role for client relationship to make sure that we are delivering value and the match is right, and so if it isn’t right, we can make the changes, and we’re very happy to do that, because we’re all human right, and we need to have someone alongside us that we get along with

16:24 Jim Beach : walk me through the process. Oh, I call you and say, Hey, I need some fractional help. What happens then, and what’s the process look like?

16:35 Sara Daw : So first up, we would take initial brief and just check that we feel from that over the phone, that where we can help. If we

16:47 Jim Beach : do, you have someone whose particular job is that function,

16:50 Sara Daw : yeah, okay, yeah, we do. And we we then would arrange an appointment to go and meet with the founder, the entrepreneur that’s that phoned up, and we would go through their business, and we would identify their needs and whether we can help, and then would introduce them to the best fit person, the fractional leader in our organization, that we think could work with them. And they meet that individual, and then we get started if, if it all goes to plan, a lot there, if they don’t think the individual we’ve put forward is right for them, we would introduce some someone else, and we would get going. And we put together a work plan. So we do a strategic review to start with, to really understand their needs and what the entrepreneur wants. But then we also do a health check to make sure they’re not missing something, and then we feed that back. And then we jointly put together a plan with impact and return of what can be delivered. And then we continuously update that over time. And we have someone called a Regional Director who oversees all our relationships in a particular area, with our businesses, with the factional leaders. So we’ve always got somewhere else to go and another point of view around each relationship.

18:10 Jim Beach : Very interesting. I love this model. Sara, you’ve done an amazing job building it so big, it’s very impressive. What about marketing and bringing in new businesses into the system. How does that happen? How does the word get out?

18:27 Sara Daw : Yeah, so it’s really interesting. We we build a lot of relationships, so we are a global business, but we also have a local relationships, because it’s the communities often where it really matters for organizations the communities in which they sit. So we have our fractional leaders all around the globe in their communities, and together, we build relationships with our regional directors as well. We build relationships with organizations that sit in those communities. So all the organizations that businesses need to grow, we will know them as well. So we would know the banks, the accounts, the lawyers, the funders, the VC houses, the marketing specialists, all that, all those businesses, and we make sure that we’re well connected. So we get a lot of referrals, and we we would also work with those organizations, if we know like and trust them to do, to introduce them to our to our clients to make sure that they deliver good work, and then we also do events. We have a lot of digital presence. So we have a lot of SEO, you know, Google Pay Per Click, use LinkedIn, so a lot of digital presence, saying and showcasing what we do and hopefully triggering organizations and entrepreneurs to give us a call, because, quite frankly, you know, there’s a lot of startups out there in the world, and we want to help them be the ones that are successful, and then once, once they’ve got through that first brick wall and they’ve got a business model of sorts that’s working, we want to be the people that can help them scale and. And they can’t afford full time versions of us, it’s just not possible. But quite frankly, they don’t need it either. So it’s these crucial skills that are going to get those startups to scale up. And that’s where we really contribute to economies, and that’s where it’s really important in the world that ask, you know that people and organizations do use

20:21 Jim Beach : our services. Are most of these engagements project based or continual based? You’re just here to build the systems and create continuity and or is it, you know, we have this one problem we need it solved.

20:40 Sara Daw : Well, obviously

20:41 Sara Daw : it’s we want to have impact, and we must be delivering impact for an organization to continue with them. What we find is that once we solve one problem really well, we’ll see others in the organization, other opportunities and problems in the organization that can be solved again and again and become that CFO or CMO of that business, because there’s no reason why that business doesn’t need a CFO or a CMO or CHRO, just like a big business, they just don’t need them all the time. So engagements tend to be long running engagements, as long as we’re delivering value and enjoying the ride, and so is the entrepreneur long term. I mean, we have some in our organization that are as long as 18 years old, but obviously some organizations want to exit. They want to sell out. So obviously that might be a turning point, a crystallization event might happen, in which case we would not necessarily take them forward once they’ve been acquired by someone else. Sometimes they might take on investment for future growth, and sometimes they might need a full they might grow to the place size and complexity where they do need a full time version.

21:54 Sara Daw : And then do they steal your employee?

21:58 Sara Daw : Occasionally, people might join the organization that they’ve grown up with normally. That’s the right thing to happen at that time, because the fractional leader is enjoying it like that and is spending more and more and more time with that one particular business, and the business knows and trusts that individual. So it sort of makes sense. But what we often find is that in the fractional leaders who’ve chosen this way, like a diversified portfolio, they like to be working with five businesses, not one business. They’ve chosen to come away from that corporate world. They’ve been disillusioned with it, perhaps for varying reasons, perhaps hides the corporate agenda, politics, that sort of thing, and this gives them a very, very different way of living and working, which they enjoy, and therefore they want to continue doing this, rather than going back to where they came from.

22:58 Jim Beach : That makes sense. That makes sense, Sara, I heard that you were willing to play our game the quick 10. Yes, let’s do that. All right, do you want to accept the standard wager? Oh, what’s that? It’s the bet that everyone else made.

23:16 Sara Daw : Okay, yes, you accept?

23:19 Jim Beach : Yeah, there you go. Number one, your favorite creativity, hack,

23:25 Sara Daw : steal from real life, listen obsessively to customers and redesign what annoys them.

23:31 Jim Beach : Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick,

23:35 Sara Daw : make sure you have a positive working capital cycle. Get the money in before you pay for the build

23:41 Sara Daw : or delivery. Number three, name your top passions, learning, building businesses, financial clarity, freedom of choice, great conversations.

23:54 Jim Beach : Number four, the first three steps in starting a business are,

23:59 Sara Daw : find the real problem, test it fast. Price it confidently.

24:06 Sara Daw : Number five, the best way to get your first real customer is solve the

24:11 Sara Daw : problem for one person so well they introduce

24:14 Sara Daw : you to the next. Number

24:15 Jim Beach : six, dreamiest technology is

24:19 Sara Daw : ones that give humans leverage rather than replacing the human.

24:25 Jim Beach : Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice,

24:29 Sara Daw : learn to sacrifice so that you focus on only

24:33 Sara Daw : what you can do. Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake, waiting too long when I knew what to do.

24:43 Jim Beach : Number nine favorite entrepreneur and why?

24:47 Sara Daw : Taylor Swift? Why? Oh, why, gosh. I mean, she’s a billion dollar person that’s made. It big and

25:01 Jim Beach : number 10, your favorite superhero.

25:04 Sara Daw : I put Wonder Woman strong strategic values led

25:09 Jim Beach : excellent answers while we calculate the score, Sarah and find out the winner of the wager. How do we find out more about you and maybe get involved with some fractional help.

25:20 Sara Daw : Okay, so I’m on LinkedIn. Sarah DAW, F, A R, A D, a W, the CFO center is the WW, dot CFO center.com, Liberty group, WW, dot Liberty the Liberty group.com, please come and look us up and yeah, just give us a call. Love to have conversations with anyone interested in business and scaling them.

25:46 Jim Beach : And what’s your personal goal? Sara, do you hope to sell the business at this point you would be a great asset for like, struggles. Or what’s the name of the HR companies out there? The Billion Dollar HR company? Yeah.

26:02 Sara Daw : Well, interestingly, we’re not that aligned to the recruitment agency world, because we’re about long term relationships. We’re more of a long term relationship consulting business, not a transactional fee recruitment business, even though, because our business is a new breed of organization, people like to pigeonhole us somewhere, and that one seems convenient, but it’s not us, and our goal is to create succession in the business and keep keep growing it and adding value and doing great work for businesses.

26:34 Jim Beach : That’s a great answer. I love it. That makes sense to that they’re not aligned. You’re not aligned with ADP or somebody like that. So no, oh, Sarah, oh, I just got your score. Oh, I’m so sorry. You got a 94 which is an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win the wager. We had a French judge today, and the French judge dinged you. I don’t know what that is. That’s like 500 year old history right there, Tesla. We always play for a Tesla, so I’ll look forward to you sending me that,

27:09 Sara Daw : of course, sounds great to me, yes.

27:11 Jim Beach : Thank you for your willing to accept your loss so gallantly.

27:16 Sara Daw : And I’ve enjoyed doing it. It’s been fun,

27:21 Jim Beach : all right, most important question, Team William or team Harry?

27:27 Sara Daw : Oh, gosh, probably William, you still like Harry at all. Yes, I still like Harry.

27:41 Sara Daw : Still like Harry. Why?

27:43 Jim Beach : Yeah, see him now here in America, they’re just, we want them to go back.

27:47 Sara Daw : Well, I tell you what, I actually went, and I was one of the people that got up really early and watched their wedding at Windsor. I don’t live far from there, and I was right by when they went by. And it was such an amazing day, I’m still holding on to the fact that there could be some reconciliation you never know,

28:10 Jim Beach : not with that damn American. Got to get rid of that damn American. Sorry. Thank you so much for being with us. You were fantastic. Love to talk to you again. Thanks for being with us.

28:23 Sara Daw : Thank you very much, Jim. Pleasure, and we

28:25 Jim Beach : will be right back.

28:40 Intro 2 : Well, that’s a wonderful question. Oh my gosh, I’d love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim,

28:46 Intro 2 : wow, that’s, that’s, that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question. And, and I don’t have a great answer,

28:53 Intro 2 : that’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question. School for startups, radio.

29:04 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great guest. Please welcome Rob Calvert to the show. He is the founder of second son consulting, an IT consultancy that he has built over the last 22 years. He started off in his den. We love those kind of stories. He has a really interesting idea, too. He thinks the technology should maybe even be a cost, production cost, not cost revenue center, that we should be able to make money from it, that it shouldn’t be part of the problem, and that we have to change our culture to make that work. He’s been very successful working with Apple. He was one of the top Apple consultant that works in the world. Pretty impressive. Rob, welcome to the show. How you doing? I’m great. Jim, thanks for having me. So let’s dive into this your philosophy that I stumbled horribly through. True if we do it better, do we have the opportunity to make our IT department actually part of the business that produces instead of being a huge cost center? Walk me through the philosophy differences that you have here, how culture fits in.

30:18 Rob Calvert : So we see a lot of time with founders and companies coming to us where they started out with DIY, do it yourself. It making scrappy decisions as the company was growing, and making things in the moment that made a lot of sense. The end result, however, is that the platforms that they’re building, the tools and decisions, become very personalized because they make a quick decision of, hey, we’ve got a new person starting Monday. They’re great. Run out to Best Buy, pick up the next computer that they’re going to use and bring it back and have them

30:50 Jim Beach : set it up. Interrupt. I always made them do that themselves. Your first job is to get by your desk and computer. Good luck.

30:56 Rob Calvert : Yep, exactly, exactly. And you know when you’re just getting started and you’re focused on how you’re trying to scale your business and squeeze every penny out of productivity you can. You make those decisions, and there’s nothing wrong with them. You know, especially with Apple devices, they want to be personalized. They encourage the user to make that device their experience so they can do what they do best, whether it be creative, be thoughtful, making products, etc, etc. The challenge is, is that in a company setting that has to be counter balanced with standards. Otherwise you don’t get freedom. You get inconsistency, and when you have inconsistency, that becomes very costly for leadership. So we are really encouraging businesses to stop and take a look and realize that your true potential emerges when your IT ecosystem, your culture and your workflows are actually tied together. When they work together, you get far better lift off because you’re reducing complexity, you are preventing the need for future decisions to be rehashed. So instead of scrappy decisions leading to personal ownership and cultural drift, that creates scale friction and that creates security risk. So making decisions early on creating standards and having the discipline to stick to those standards frees up a lot of time and energy for leadership and creativity in other directions as the company scales. So if you tie these things together, you get freedom of moving the business in other ways, early standards, like security baselines, device ownership rules, app access data, location and backups, set them early, lock them in, and have the discipline to stick to them and occasionally

32:35 Jim Beach : pass through something really important. I think sure that list of things that we have to have our employees do you just did it? Yep, let’s go through that a lot slower, please. Absolutely security baselines. So okay, let’s start there. That means I have to have one of the products. Which one are you recommending?

32:54 Rob Calvert : Well, you can use any number of products that work. We use a platform called Sophos for both endpoint security and email security. But the key here is it’s not just third party security tools. It’s the decisions about how the device is set up. Every time you build a computer and you add a user to it, whether it’s Mac or PC, you’re making a decision of how much control that user has over that device. So a critical security standard early on is, do they have administrative rights on that computer, or are they a standard user at Arvo? 100% of the time they need to be a standard user. They should not have full control over that device. Any current cyber security insurance policy that you’re trying to get for your business fully expects that your users do not have administrative rights on those devices. They can inadvertently make decisions that create massive cracks in your security, and sometimes they can purposefully do that. So if you prevent that, it makes a it makes a huge difference.

33:54 Jim Beach : So that’s the question, is it safe to download this product and add it to your machine Exactly? Get that question, because correct, okay, correct.

34:06 Rob Calvert : It also means that if you happen to load an infected website, it’s less likely to actually have the access it needs into your device. Those are the inadvertent things you never know. Your browser is where you meet the world. You don’t know what you’re touching, so you want tools that are paying attention to where you’re going, preventing you from going TO to known bad sites, fake version of Amazon, fake version of American Express, etc. But then also, there are websites and exploits that are simply the website got hacked, and the person hosting the website doesn’t know that it’s been hacked. And if you point a browser at that compromised website, and you have administrative rights on your computer, you’ve got a security problem, whereas, if it’s a standard user, it dramatically reduces the security vulnerability.

34:52 Jim Beach : Okay, number one, cyber security. What was your second point?

34:55 Rob Calvert : Device ownership rules, okay, one of the explain and I. Personally owned computer versus corporate owned computer. One of the biggest security threats that we see is when you’ve got a mix of some of your devices are owned by the organization and some are personally owned by the people. I don’t need to buy Mary a new computer. She’s got a great one. It’s only six months old. I’m going to let her use her own computer. Well, you don’t know how Mary’s maintaining that computer. You don’t know if her 16 year old kid is using it for gaming. You have no idea how that device is being maintained. Letting that device onto your network, into all of your cloud application systems, that’s a that’s a huge risk footprint. You’re exposing so much more in that particular case, not to mention intellectual property. If you let your intellectual property onto a device that you don’t own on a regular basis, what’s happening with it? Not only could it be taken because that device got compromised, but that user might be running their own backup system, and now your intellectual property is being scraped into their backup system. And now, if you’ve signed NDAs to your investors, or you’re producing work for your clients, and you’ve signed NDAs for your clients, you’ve just now inadvertently violated your NDAs and you hadn’t even noticed. So devices and devices have to be owned by the organization. It’s the only way you’ve got the controls that you need.

36:19 Jim Beach : All right, Rob, let’s back up a second. We’re a six person company right now, and I can’t afford it. That’s just not going to happen. We can’t afford to double down and buy everyone a second machine right now. You know, one of the reasons we’re operating is because everyone’s using their home machine. We need that advantage right now. We need that cost saving.

36:40 Rob Calvert : Rob So I would invite you to start either a at a bare minimum, baking into your budget, to start acquiring a device per user on whatever cadence you can afford, whether it be quarterly or semi annually. To start baking this in immediately, you need to look at all of your cloud applications and who has access to which data, and make sure that they have the least amount of access possible to the data to get their job done. Don’t just let everybody have access to everything. That’s a much larger security problem. Three, ask your team to understand that you need to do a basic inspection of their devices. Encourage them to have good hygiene and ownership over their own devices. Make sure they’re running active antivirus tools. Make sure that they are actively installing security patches when they’re released by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, whomever, especially on browsers. So tighten up that ship as much as you possibly can and start moving towards the goal that you need to achieve, which is full device ownership.

37:44 Sara Daw : All right, back to your list.

37:47 Rob Calvert : Application access. Make sure that you know where your data is going. We run into founders all the time. We onboard a client and find out that the founder says, Oh, we do everything in Google, or we do everything in 365 we inspect the computers and find out that the users have quietly been doing shadow IT and bringing in all kinds of other cloud services to just help them get their job done. So now the founders have no idea that some of their data is sitting in Dropbox or Box, or we transfer or the user’s personal G Drive account because it was easier to get it to the vendor that they’re using for some particular project. And now that data lingers and it’s outside your control and it’s outside your visibility, so make sure that you provide the right tools for them to get their job done. Make sure you educate the users that those are the only tools that can contain your data, and make sure that you understand who has access to the data and

38:44 Rob Calvert : to those applications. All right, any more of these?

38:49 Rob Calvert : One more is data, location and backups. We run into founders all the time who don’t think about the fact that, yes, your data is in Google servers or Microsoft’s or box, they back up the data well enough so that if their infrastructure fails, they can put your data back. They do not back it up well enough so that that angry intern that you let go six months before you said you were going to goes in and deletes data on the way out the door, and you don’t figure it out for two weeks, they’re not going to be able to restore your data. It’s just like an apartment versus all of your possessions in the apartment, you are responsible for protecting the data inside the infrastructure. They are responsible for protecting the infrastructure. So don’t trust that your data is always going to be there. If you really need that data back it up, you need a SaaS tool that will back up your data somewhere else. And again, cyber security insurance typically wants to see it be a third party service. So if you use Microsoft or Google, you have to use a tool like something like drop suite or some other tool such as that or cloud ally is another good one that can move that data out to a different location with restrict. Permissions, so that if the source data gets deleted or corrupted, you can put it back quickly and easily and get right back to your your job.

40:09 Jim Beach : Great advice, Rob, we need to change the topic a little bit. Paying attention to the time you mentioned, I think, off air that you have an older brother that picked on you. Right? What’s the second son title is that literally referring to the fact that you have an older brother? Yeah.

40:25 Rob Calvert : So when I founded the company, I was trying to find a URL and a company name that was kind of unique and available as a domain name. And I’m the second son of a second son, and more specifically, I was the second son in my family to open a computer consulting firm. My older brother was a software developer, so that’s where the name came from. Interesting.

40:47 Jim Beach : Do you believe in all of the theories of second Olis having certain characteristics compared to the younger and older kids? Does any of that work out in your family?

40:59 Rob Calvert : It definitely worked out in my family, and it’s certainly proving true with my own kids as well. For sure,

41:05 Jim Beach : really, I was a second born boy, but my elder brother passed away, and so I’ve had some of those tests done, and the results are just confounding, because genetically, and I think the genes know that I was the second born, but I grew up as the first born because the older brother was dead. You know, you understand what I mean?

41:32 Rob Calvert : Yeah, I do. And funny connection, my older brother passed away about 10 years ago, myself. And yeah, it’s ALS is a nasty disease. Yeah, and it’s, it’s been odd because raising my boys, I have four kids, and raising my boys and trying to tell them, you know, what it was like for my older brother and everything, it’s weird to try and relate those stories to them when they’ve never met him and, you know, just thinking about life later on and things that happened when we were younger, I just see very similar traits between my older and my younger boy and how they’re growing up. So, yeah, it’s interesting those studies and what comes through.

42:14 Jim Beach : Very interesting. All right, how’d you get the business started? Give us an entrepreneurial birthing story. How’d you have the idea? What did you do first? How’d you spend your first money? How’d you get your first customer? Just sort of ramble through those first year or so for us, sure.

42:30 Rob Calvert : So I started my career in print production, ended up working for an IT firm that I met through one of those jobs, running operations, and one day, they ran into some problems with a lot of clients going out of business at the same time. And so the company was was dramatically shrinking, and laid off a ton of people. And so I went out on my own trying to figure out what I was going to do, and several of the clients found out that I went out on my own and asked me to come take care of their it. So I was working out of my den for the first year, and 14 months later, I had to hire my first employee. So it was kind of just happenstance. I decided that taking a full time gig, doing it in one environment, was going to be too boring for me. I wasn’t going to last. I needed more variety and diversity than that, so I just started trying it. When people came knocking on my door that already knew me for four years as an operations person. And I said, Sure, you know, I know your environment, I know your people. I know what systems we put in place for you. And I started working on them, and now we’re 16 people in 22 and a half years later, and some of those companies are actually still with us, and it’s been over 25 years I’ve

43:38 Jim Beach : been working with them. Wow. Fantastic. Very impressive. And what services are you offering? You say it? Is it just keeping the machines up and running, or more than that,

43:48 Rob Calvert : we will do as little or as much as anyone wants, with the exception of actually selling the equipment. So we have companies that come to us larger enterprise environments that have a department of, say, 200 Mac users and a larger Microsoft Enterprise. And so they hire us for projects on a regular basis to augment their internal IT team. And then we have the polar opposite of that. We’ve got environments that are 50 to 100 Mac users, and we are 90 to 98% of their it. They outsource everything to us when it comes to user support, infrastructure, management, security, SaaS, applications, consulting about growth options and life cycle needs of maintaining everything. And then we’ve got a lot of clients that are in between, where we help them out with some of their stuff, but not everything, because they might have one or two internal people that handle basic day to day user support, but then they outsource the management and the larger security perspectives to us. Okay?

44:47 Jim Beach : And how big Have you gotten? What are what metric do you use to measure yourself?

44:53 Rob Calvert : So we are 16 people, and we have been growing a lot in the last three or four years. We. Least a couple of open source tools for the Mac admins community. Since we are Apple specialists, and that really opened up our world, we’ve been a member of the Mac admins community, which is a nonprofit organization that we support, and there’s about 70,000 Mac administrators around the globe in a very large slack instance. And we all help each other out. It’s a very share and help community. And so by growing we’ve been picking up a lot of clients. Now, before covid, all of our clients were in Los Angeles, where we’re based. Now, 40% of our clients are not even in Los Angeles, and 26% I believe it is these days, of the users we support are not in Pacific Time Zone. We now have international clients. So we’ve got clients that are headquartered in London and Australia, but we support the US divisions for those companies, and so we coordinate with those larger leadership teams in the other countries. So as we’re growing, we’re expanding across the country.

45:55 Jim Beach : Very impressive,

45:57 Jim Beach : 16 people. Congratulations. Have you thought about leaving LA? Has it been bad enough there for you to think about moving? You know, there’s so many stories about how LA is not rebuilding after the fires and the new taxes and everything. What are your thoughts on La?

46:14 Rob Calvert : It’s a mixed bag for sure. My wife and I are both originally from the East Coast. I grew up just outside the DC area, and she’s from the New York, New Jersey area, and so we’ve talked about it, but we’ve got a lot of her family out here now, and I’ve been out here so long. I’m very, very used to the fact that the beach is a mile and a half away. I can go to them, and we love the beach, and I can hit the mountains in an hour and a half to take the kids sledding during the winter. There’s lakes two hours away, just the mix of everything in this environment is pretty incredible. And so you know, the tragedies of the fires last year were horrendous. We had some friends lose their homes. We had some clients lose their homes. Some of them lost their businesses as well. That was terrible. And of course, all the mudslides that happen out here are crazy. So it’s a little bit of take the good with the bad. And I’ve been out here now a little bit more than 50% of my life, so I’m kind of kind of really connected to California, but it is a tough choice. As we get older, we think about leaving and as the company expands, I do think about moving back to the east coast and and living there and supporting the growth of our team there as well. So we’ll see what the next three or four years brings,

47:26 Jim Beach : just so much cheaper everywhere else. Rob My God, on an acre with a pool with a creek and a ravine, 20 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from downtown. We bought it for 360 you know, yeah, California, people hear that and they just start coughing because they our product would be 3.6 for them, yep, you know. And so I don’t understand how companies afford to pay their employees to live there, you know. I mean, the cost of living is just so much higher. You could, you know, save a lot of money by moving to Texas or Florida or Tennessee, all of the hot states.

48:07 Rob Calvert : It is certainly challenging. The business opportunities would be quite different as well, right? So the the percentage of Mac users, I mean, when I started in this business 20 years ago, Macs were the primary choice for creative teams, whether it be print publishing or graphic design, movie industry, etc. It’s no longer that bifurcated, right? We see Macs everywhere. We’ve got clients in 17 different industries, nonprofit real estate, professional services, outsourced accounting and HR firms that are based on Macs, RIAs, Registered Investment advising firms that are based on Macs. So it’s no longer so cut and dry. That being said, there’s a tremendous amount of business in certain parts of the country based on industry concentration for Apple clients. So I have colleagues across the country, and we talk about this all the time, and there are definite hot spots in concentration. So you know, there are choices and considerations to make from that perspective as well. And to be honest, I love FaceTime with clients. I love getting to see people, and not just living on Zoom and on the phone. So me being, you know, hundreds or 1000s of miles away from a concentration of clients would would have its impact long term and short term. But it’s we do think about it. We certainly think about it, 360 I know. I know.

49:26 Jim Beach : What about marketing? How are you building the coming you know, getting new clients,

49:32 Rob Calvert : primarily, we work referrals, and we work through basically just trying to help people get educated and learn. So over the years, I’ve spoken at macro Conference and Expo I’ve spoken at business groups around town. I’ve spoken in front of chambers of commerce. Back when the apple brick and mortar stores were first really breaking ground all over the place and growing, we did a lot of presentations at the local stores with businesses. We meet with the. Apple teams and some of their clientele when they come in for questions to help teach them about things. We’ve partnered with a lot of windows centric MSPs who are not Apple specialists, just like we are not Microsoft specialists. And we trade referrals, you know, we get brought into environments where they’ve got 20, 3040, Max, and it’s just gotten beyond their skill set. So they outsource the needs to us, and we do the same. If we’ve got clients that have very deep Microsoft needs. We have a couple of key firms that we really love working with and sharing clients with, and we will refer to them or bring them into a project. So we very much believe in paying it forward. We also try to connect our clients with each other. If one client can offer a service to another one. I get permission from both of them, and then I introduce them to each other. And it really comes back around in spades. So paying it forward and helping people

50:50 Jim Beach : to be on a radio show that you know of, absolutely

50:55 Jim Beach : that’s how we get guests. Yep,

50:59 Jim Beach : and it sounds like you were able to bootstrap that you own 100% still correct? Yeah, I started that makes you a billionaire too

51:09 Rob Calvert : well, one would hope eventually, but starting the company out of my den and keeping the overhead low for the first few years

51:15 Rob Calvert : really paid off.

51:17 Jim Beach : Yes, what were some of the tricks that you had to do to make that possible?

51:23 Rob Calvert : Well, I had to have an understanding family. I had to dedicate a room, and then my den, and then, you know, every time I sat on my couch and tried to relax at 11 o’clock at night, I could see my desk out of the corner of my eye, and I fought with myself if I needed to go back and do something. Then I moved to building a small addition on the back of the garage to give myself some more room. When I started growing, we were at four people so that people could come to the house and do things, but not necessarily be walking through my living room or my kitchen at the same time. And then about two years after that, we got our first office space, and so we just kept layering it on. And as I was growing being in the service industry, one of the advantages I had was I got to know lots of other Apple specialists around town that I trusted and liked and became very good friends with. And so as I had more work than my staff could handle, we would contract people. And when I was contracting people to a point where I was almost at the cost of another full time employee. I would make the switch, and then I would take a leap of faith, and I’d add another full time member and slow down or stop the contracting altogether. And so I kept building up through part time contracting work and then hiring the next person, and then building it back up again, step by step.

52:38 Jim Beach : Excellent advice. Absolutely excellent advice.

52:42 Jim Beach : Well, Rob

52:43 Jim Beach : A plus is you’ve done it all very, very well, and you are a model to copy, and so we appreciate you being on the show and sharing so much information and a great business to hire. I will spread the word of the second son. I like the title too. So thanks so much. I appreciate the opportunity. How do we find out more? Follow you online, all that stuff, please.

53:04 Rob Calvert : Typical stuff you can check out our website. We’re about to release a series of blog posts on some of the security stuff I mentioned today and some decision making that founders can reference. I try to be very active on LinkedIn. And if anyone listening is in the Mac admins community at all. They can find me in the slack instance, with 70,000 other folks around the globe, I spend a lot of time in there offering advice and ideas as well. Fantastic.

53:29 Jim Beach : Thank you so much for being with us, Rob, and we would love to have you back and send us some of your clients.

53:34 Rob Calvert : Thanks so much. I really appreciate the opportunity. Jim,

53:38 Jim Beach : well, thank you so much for being with us. We are out of time, but you know what we do? That’s right? We come back tomorrow, be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye. Now you.