2225 - The Multi-Factor Authentication is Your First Line of Defense Against Cyber Threats with ReachOut's Rick Jordan

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1:05with us right now it is rick jordan rick you're a speaker you're a coach you're an ai and cyber security ceo your your company is reach out uh and that website is reach out it.com uh rick you're also a bit of a media uh celebrity uh your personal website is rickjordan.tv and you host the show All In with Rick Jordan. Rick, it's great to have you. Well, Jake and Josh, good to be here, my man. Thanks for having me. Yes, all the way from Chicago. My wife is originally from Chicagoland and congratulations on the Pope. I don't know if you have anything to do with his selection, but nonetheless, a point of pride for Chicago yet again.

1:48Not that level of influence as an influencer. Well, Rick, before we get going talking about the work you do, And I definitely want to talk about, you know, what's going on in particularly around AI security. What I would imagine someone like you probably has some some hobbies or some passions or things that you've been geeking out on lately. Man, it's been lately. I just picked it up again, I would say. And with my daughter, of all people, too, playing Call of Duty on Xbox. Yeah. Black Ops 3, I think, is what it is. And yeah, I heard stories like during the day she's playing by herself. You know, she's like, I got to get as good as that.

2:23I got to keep up with them. But it's a lot of fun. A good friend of mine, Clinton Sparks, he's a large music producer. He also heads up the Global Gaming League. And when he and I were on a show a couple weeks ago together, he was talking about how the percentage of gamers, like 48 % are female. I'm like, dude, that makes sense. I'm like, this is what I'm doing with my daughter these days. Yeah, especially when you take into account mobile gaming, games in totality. I've actually even heard that it's actually a larger percentage. The majority of gamers are female. You know, again, you know, take all platforms into account.

3:00You know, what a great, you know, opportunity for bonding. You know, my wife and I play Super Mario Party, and we play at least once a week. And it's just, you know, it's just so much more fun than, you know, maybe more passive activities, like watching shows and stuff, which is fine. We enjoy that as well. But, you know, it's like you get the competition going. There's so much to talk about or high five on each other. Listen, dads game with your kids. If you're not already doing that. No joke. I've always held this thing of about a proximity. When I talk about spending time with my kids, you know, cause my oldest to my daughter, who I'm talking about, she's one of a twin, a boy, girl, twin.

3:37They're 17 years old. And I've always talked about the word proximity. Cause even when they were first born, you know, it was like, even if I had to just go get some deodorant from the drugstore or something like that, I would grab a kid, man. when they were just two months old and just take one. It's like, all right, it's your turn. I didn't have to, but I just wanted to. And that's what they've grown up knowing. So now just being in the same room is quite relaxing with all of them. You're a Midwest guy. I don't know if you have memories of like, you know, my dad, he just like anytime there was a project, he just, I'd be, a lot of times I wouldn't be doing much.

4:07I'd just be sitting there watching him work on whatever, hand him the red handled screwdriver or whatever, you know, occasionally. but you know in in retrospect I'm so grateful for that I really am you know even if I was bored out of my mind at the time at least you know again proximity yeah for real yeah Rick hey let's talk about the work that you do and again I know you do a lot of education speaking around AI and cyber security and obviously that that kind of gets into the work you do with reach out do you mind just giving us a kind of an overview of your impact in the world today yeah for sure well right now, I mean, I took ReachOut public about 18 months ago, and we reverse merged.

4:46We actually just announced the name change of the public company at our frequency holdings this week, because it's a modern tech holding company to actually put together these symbiotic organizations underneath. ReachOut is most definitely the flagship right now as a cybersecurity and IT service provider to small and mid-sized businesses. But now we're also launching Trustless, which is a blockchain identity secure data exchange platform, quantum level encryption, two key system, proof for the transaction on both sides just to help secure everyone's data and retain ownership of the people that actually own the data so it doesn't go out the window.

5:20There's nothing that exists with it right now, but that's because things like the U.S. Treasury happened a couple of months ago. It's just insane how these things continue to happen. We're trying to plug those holes in a fragmented industry. That's what I keep calling it, is a fragmented industry, especially for SMBs. They call their IT guy, and they don't even know if their IT guy can truly help or they think they can. And for the most part, they're out of their league. So hopefully we can just plant our flag across the United States and just build up this nationwide brand, kind of like the T-Mobile of IT and cybersecurity for small midsize business.

5:54Yeah. And I see that ReachOut's growth has been driven by a lot of acquisitions. Do you mind me sharing a little bit about your growth trajectory with ReachOut? Yeah, absolutely. It was a few years ago when I started learning about acquisition growth or growth by acquisition M &A. And taking a look at how we were growing, it was great. We were pushing through. But I got to the point to where it's like, you know what? I don't want incremental growth anymore because I have a vision that's beyond what incremental growth can provide when it comes to speed. There's no way I don't think that you can incrementally grow, at least in a service-based industry, even over a span of, let's say, two decades, and cover all of North America.

6:36I think it's kind of impossible to actually make the kind of impact that I want. So when I took a look at the acquisition models, like this is the way to go. We plant our flag across the U.S. We inject our scalability, our profitability, our SOPs, our operational maturity levels, and rebrand. And now we have that T-Mobile of IT and cybersecurity. So acquisition-wise, I will say that there's been some hard knocks around M &A. We acquired several large firms at first, the same size and one that was even a little bigger than us. It was very difficult to integrate the larger firms that were really around relatively the same size as us.

7:16And really, it came down to the people side because it was culture. And keeping on the sellers, that was a little difficult because they still had their idea about how things should run. They were selling to take some chips off the table, wanted to be part of something because they stagnated and just couldn't figure out the next step to grow their business past a certain point. But then when they came in, I mean, you hit seller's remorse because you go from being like the man or the woman to now I'm a man or a woman within a larger organization. It's a little bit of an ego hit, even though most of them I think meant well.

7:49It just didn't translate into actual application. So that, of course, when you inherit all those employees as well, that used to be theirs, now they're yours. That still has a reverberating effect across the board if you have a fight of culture. So now our target is to get some fast-moving, smaller managed service providers across the country. Rather than$5 million in revenue, which is big in this industry, maybe$500K to$1 million. plant our flag and then we can inject the organic revenue growth vehicle into those markets and two to five x them is the intention with each of those markets within the next two years and you know instead of two or three acquisitions a year large ones maybe we could do five or ten or 15 or 20 as we keep on scaling up yeah well rick let's share some wisdom if you can uh you know here we are getting close to, you know, halfway through 2025.

8:41What do you find yourself talking most commonly to business leaders out there regarding the things that they should be most concerned about in and around security, particularly as it pertains to AI? Yeah, AI, the biggest thing that we're facing when it comes to AI is AI fraud. Yeah, and that hopefully trustless can resolve some of that. But AI, I mean, the playbook hasn't changed, man. You know, when I speak specifically on cybersecurity, I'll usually post a photo of a family from Sri Lanka, you know, because it looks like just a benign family that's across the world. And then I say, but this is who's hacking you.

9:22It's not somebody that's in this black hood in a dark room. This is who it is. If you think about Pablo Escobar, you know, and running the cocaine empire that he had, he was a family guy. It's always a great reference back to that. These These are regular people and to them it's just business. It's not actually to them harming another human or humanity to even go that far. So when they try to do these things, I mean, it's still the same stuff. It's phishing emails. That's the biggest, social engineering. Things that come across from Chick-fil-A saying that, hey, this is our new strawberry lemonade, but when you click on it to get the offer, it wants you to log into Google or it wants you to log into Microsoft to get the offer.

9:59That's a fake page because Chick-fil-A doesn't do that. they just want to grab your username and your password, which is probably used across the board with a lot of different sites that you work with. So the method hasn't changed, but what AI has done, just like it's done in legitimate businesses, is it's allowed that to be scalable. Now instead of being able to send out 100 ,000 emails a day from this family in Sri Lanka, this family hacking business, now it could be a million emails a day. The copy is getting better because you used to be able to pick things out. Yeah, right. Like misspellings, you know, grammatical, you know, just nuances and like this just doesn't read right, you know, and you'd be able to pick that up.

10:43AI has allowed those holes to be plugged. You know, so AI has really injected a lot of scalability into the same old playbook. Yeah. Rick, how do you like when so obviously you're speaking, You're a great educator on this topic. What is the actual work that you do with either reach out or are you advising, consulting? Yeah, definitely advising and consulting is the primary. And it depends on the specific needs of the customer. You know, for example, if it's a law firm, you know, a law firm that I actually have a meeting with a little later today. I mean, as a CEO, my lane is capital, clients, and stages.

11:21You know, that's my lane as the CEO of a public company. talking with them because they have external clients that require security assessments, you know, in order for these external customers, because they might be bound by regulatory bodies like HIPAA, right? If it's a medical organization, or it might be the Department of Justice. So they have things that they have to abide by for the government in order to comply and actually do business with these outside firms, law firms specifically, in this case. So what we'll do is we'll advise and then we'll say here's what you need to do and then we'll also execute on the back end so as soon as they say thumbs up we will go right in there and we will take over everything for them you know implementing all the control measures they need and being there when the hits the fan too yeah um so let's i feel like we should give we should share a tip or some sort of an action item that leaders today might consider.

12:20It's like over the next week or two weeks or three weeks or whatever. Here's a couple of things I want you to do regarding your internal systems. Anything come to mind that you give some homework on? The very basics, right, which a lot still do not do, is multi-factor authentication or 2FA. It's been around forever, right? You log into your bank account, it sends you a text message. It's that simple. 2FA, multi-factor, or two-factor is a combination of something you know, like a password, right? And then something you have on your person, like a phone. And you need those two combined in order to gain access.

12:55Implementing that across your organization is absolutely essential because it verifies that that person trying to log in is the right person that matches that user. And, of course, gains access to everything that that person should have access to. Now, after that, security awareness training. We talked about the Chick-fil-A emails. This is actually becoming standardized and required for even having general liability insurance for any kind of business. They'll go through and they'll have a checkbox saying, do you have these controls in place? Because a lot of what we talked about, like with that family in Sri Lanka, there's no technical controls that can prevent that one person.

13:37and I always call them Bob, right, that can prevent Bob in the cubicle from clicking on the bad stuff. There's always a Bob in every organization, and the only way to combat that is with education. So security awareness training is actually required, and it's even part of the government cybersecurity framework now, which now trickles down. And the third for individuals is quite simple, man. Freeze your credit reports. It's very simple. There's three bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. You can download the apps for all three. So if you need to go purchase a car, apply for a credit card, whatever you want to do, it's a simple tap to unlock it.

14:15You apply and you tap it again just to relock it. It's that simple. And that prevents any unauthorized accounts being opened up in your name. Completely kills identity theft. yeah awful awful but this is just the reality of the world don't blame the messenger it just is where we are and um you know it's it's not a question of if uh you're going to have some sort of an issue it's it is a question of when because it's just becoming easier and easier and easier passwords alone and i'm coming at it from the consumer education standpoint that's kind of my media brand, like passwords, passwords that are old technology and really, really easy to get around today.

14:58Yeah, you got it. Yeah. I mean, anyone can just add two characters to the end of it. And it takes a brute force attack another several decades to try to get through it. Make them longer. Make them longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Hey, Rick, tell me about, you know, folks that follow you. Do you dispense wisdom like this on a regular basis? If so, what is that? Maybe talk about your resources or your media properties, just kind of the content and education that you do. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, generally speaking, I speak to the entrepreneurial crowd, you know, how to grow, how to scale, how to make your life what you want it to be.

15:33For me, it's like cybersecurity is just the vehicle that got me to where I'm at. And I like telling the story, you know, it was about 2017, 2018. I grew up as an engineer, man, but I also grew up as a communicator, musician as well. So I had the whole right brain, left brain thing going on. I got so bored with this business back in 2017, that I'm like, I need to do something to make this interesting to me again, or I need to sell and get into something completely different. So then I pursued being a public figure. Then I pursued being a communicator and helping people grow in life and business and their relationships.

16:08all of that typically has a foundation in business. If you look at a lot of the individuals that do speak on stages to help people with whatever challenges they have in their life, they always have this business that they've developed first. So it's like you've had the hard knocks, you've been through those things, and then you can relate to everybody else. But then it grew into obviously a media personality. It speaks to communication skills. and there is nothing no matter what business you are so anybody in your audience right no matter what business you're in communication is still the most important skill set because when i go on fox on bloomberg on news nation whatever it is you know i even talked on bloomberg and cbs money talk about the elon musk purchase of twitter you know just to break that down and that's literally what i was asked like rick can you come on and break this down for america generally say yes You got it.

17:02Exactly. By the way, when that when that question comes in, many famous stories in my background just came from the can you talk about car doors falling off a Ford, whatever, with some recall? I'm like, yes, I will. Do I know anything about it? Absolutely not. Right. Remember the drones and the UFOs? Exactly. Like, would you talk about UFOs? Yeah, I'll talk about UFOs. and then rick uh you know certainly for folks that that might benefit from engaging you or your brands or your company do you mind sharing maybe next steps for that audience absolutely i mean i'm always in my dms you know if you want to get to know me and want to just push through in life and break through at mr rick jordan on instagram you want to connect in business linkedin same scenario mr rick jordan yeah i've got all of the links by the way to your website, including your personal website, rickjordan.tv.

17:59We didn't mention your book, Situational Ethics, which again, that's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The links we have all set up, we've got links to everything. Give it a read. Rick Jordan, it's been great having you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh. Yeah, appreciate you.

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