Hi everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of The Daily Grind. On today's episode, 550, we're joined by entrepreneur and author Nolan Garrett. Nolan is the founder and CEO of Intriniem, a firm dedicated to providing clients with comprehensive consulting and managed services and security solutions and information technology. Voted best place to work in land northwest for three consecutive years, Intriniem has distinguished itself as a leader in IT solutions and workplace culture.
Nolan is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and the Information Systems Security Association among other organizations. The CIO and CISO experience and a background that includes multi-million dollar cybersecurity transformations, Nolan provides specialized insight for businesses large and small in a variety of industries. You're absolutely going to love today's episode with Nolan. Be sure to always have a pen, piece of paper, sit back and enjoy today's interview with Nolan Garrett.
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Get three months free after your first payroll when you go to gusto.com forward slash grind. Well Nolan Garrett, welcome to the Daily Grind, my friend. How are we doing today? Pretty well.
How about yourself? I'm awesome, man. Nolan, for people listening and being first introduced to you and what you do, if you went mind, just giving a brief description as to who Nolan is and what does he do? Yeah.
My name is Nolan Garrett. I am the CEO of Intriniem. We are a cybersecurity consulting company based out of Spokane, Washington. Recently, I published a book that's about a lot of my experiences over the last 15 years of bootstrapping this business.
Very cool. How did you get into cybersecurity? I've been doing a little research on you. I started the company.
What made you want to jump into this industry? Yeah, absolutely. I knew at a young age I wanted to get a degree in computer science, but I think many, especially young males at that age, I thought I wanted to get into video game programming. That was very much the focus of the time.
I went to school, went to Eastern Washington University, took a bunch of game programming courses and realized there's a lot more math involved in that than I really thought that I would enjoy. At the same time, that school started an information warfare program. I took their first class in the information warfare series and just completely fell in love with the concept of cybersecurity, risk management, hacking and defense. This was all the time when hacking was really a thing where people would deface websites and do things for attention, but it wasn't the whole criminal organization that you see today in the news.
That got me started. From there, I took a job right out of college acting as a consultant for an organization out of the Seattle, Washington area. From there, I traveled all over the United States doing cybersecurity work and after about a year and a half, I thought I could start something on my own and I have a little more control over my schedule and my travel availability. For sure.
What year was that when you... Yeah, that was in 2007 when I found an internium. Got you. You've been doing some consulting.
You're working for yourself anyways. You're essentially going from job to job. It is, but I've scaled this business. When I first started, I really thought that my focus would be just me and maybe a partner doing consulting in the projects that we enjoyed.
There's a lot of demand for cybersecurity consulting. I started adding staff and adding staff. Now we're up to about 50 people providing services nationally for organizations, protecting them against cyber threats. Outside of people's education level, I'm assuming back when you started, outside of the bigger corporations, people weren't putting that much emphasis on cybersecurity at the time.
How has that changed over the years in your eyes, outside of just that? It's really, really grown in terms of the identification of it as its own separate field of practice. About 15, 20 years ago, cybersecurity was considered to be just a role within IT organizations. It was keep everything online and also manage a firewall or whatever.
That was important there. Now you're seeing entire organizations within enterprises that are focused just on cybersecurity and risk management. It's entire practice that's separate from ITV stays. It's really grown a lot.
It's a formality that's been added to just the concepts of how you manage cybersecurity. Obviously with the compliance requirements and those things you hear about like HIPAA and banking security and those things, it's really driven the need for strong frameworks and reliable ways of repeating cybersecurity resiliency. Interesting. With the business that you currently own and operate and started, what kind of companies, what kind of businesses, what kind of people do you typically help and work with?
Yeah. It's primarily regulated organizations. That is banking, financial services, healthcare and a lot of retail because retail deals with a lot of personal information and credit card information. We spend a lot of our time in that space.
Probably about half of it these days is actually in healthcare, just because healthcare is so massively under attack, you read about it almost every day in the news and they have a lot of complex systems that has taken them a very long time. A decade or more to start to get up to where they really should be in terms of security. At what point, like you started the business in 2007, at what point did you identify that this could be a business or will be a business that you're going to grow and you're going to scale and you're going to add people to it? Yeah.
That was probably about 2009, 2010 was a time frame. I'd been running two, two and a half years with a partner and we'd been doing some jobs in the side along with some IT work because at that time it was all one thing. I started to realize that we had a set of clients that were starting to ask us only for focus on risk management. As I was looking out into at least the regional landscape in the northwest part of the US here, I came to the realization that there wasn't very many people doing this and the ones that were, they were saying things like, well, our version of cybersecurity is we installed antivirus, so now you're secure.
Things have changed so much over that time frame. I realized there's a need for a specialization here. Interesting. How was that transition for you?
Obviously you've kind of like anything else, you start your business, your boots on the ground, you've got your hands in pretty much everything you're doing. But now you're starting to add people to the team, which ultimately reduces your role in the day to day, more focus on a leader. How was that transition from you getting out of the day to day and becoming more of a leader yourself? Definitely painful.
Definitely, definitely painful. I mentioned that I started when I was pretty young and also I was technical. So I was spending my time doing technical work. About this time I decided to start adding people to the business.
I'm 25 years old. I haven't really worked at any real job quote unquote. I started this thing really, right? So I didn't really have that experience.
So I made mistakes. I started hiring the people I knew around me, regardless of whether or not they were necessarily a fit for what I needed. They were people I knew and was comfortable with. I talked about this a fair bit in my book actually of I spent a lot of time trying to understand what my role was as a leader and trying to come to terms with the fact that I had to hold people accountable and that maybe hiring all of my friends wasn't the best way to hold those people accountable without damaging relationships.
And I wore all the hats for quite some time. On day one I was both the accountant and the CFO and the bookkeeper and the deliver of services and the person to figure out when our next sale was going to close out all those things. So I've had to hand over pieces of that over time. And as you can imagine, it's not always perfect because there's other people involved too.
So they don't always catch things exactly the way you want to hand them off. Maybe you haven't communicated well enough so they're not really ready to understand what the expectations are that you have. I've had that squiggly line journey so to speak of figuring out how to lead people and how to hold them accountable but also help them grow. What do you feel like are some of the biggest mistakes that kind of like young, there's a lot of people listening who have that business or maybe they have a side hustle that they're hoping to turn into a business.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you feel like a lot of people are making early on in their company as they're starting to grow and as they're starting to hire and become a leader themselves? Absolutely. I've made this one several times and I see it over and over again. The very first one is being under capitalized.
And I don't mean that you have to go in with piles and piles of cash but bootstrapping is very, very difficult. I started this business with $1,500. It's very, very hard to add clients, be able to make any amount of profit where you could pay your own bills but food on the table and still invest in being able to grow that business. The first thing that I always talk to startup entrepreneurs about, they might have a really good idea, they might think that you just create a website and money will start rolling in.
There's always expenses beyond that that you need to manage for. When you see businesses collapse in the early years, it's almost always because they just ran out of money before they were able to actually achieve their goals. That's my first one for sure. I think in addition to that, I mentioned hiring friends, people hire people who are close to them a lot.
When they get started, they find people who they feel comfortable with. My strong suggestion after years of making this mistake is write down what that avatar is, what that picture is of the person is, what their skillsets are they need to be and go find that person. And if it happens to be someone that you're acquainted with, a friend, what have you, you have more of a hill to overcome in the way that you communicate about what those expectations are, then if you just go out and hire in the market. Was there a point in time like you as a leader started to realize that, you know, because people start businesses and we don't get trained on how to become leaders, we don't get trained on how to become a CEO.
It just kind of falls in our lap. Was there things you did to start educating yourself whether it would be having someone close by as a mentor or things you read or things you did? Absolutely. So I'm huge on a lot of the self-development resources.
I'm a huge there and hardy fan. So I refer to him a lot for guidance and lessons on leadership. But I also have hired a business coach and I've worked with that. So she helped me for many years actually over some of the complexities of a relationship I got into with a partner in the business.
He helped me clean up some of that relationship and really keep me accountable to who I needed to be for leading that organization. And now let me get tied up in, it's emotional, right? It becomes your baby. You invest all of your energy and your time and your thoughts into it.
And so it's easy to get so close and mired into it that you can't stand back and figure out who you need to be or how you need to approach it to really take that next level. So I strongly recommend a coach. The one I worked with was a Ted over an action coach. But that is the number one thing I would recommend if you're looking for an ability to grow yourself as a leader.
What do you look for? Like, you know, you say business coaches, a lot of business coaches out there, right? Like there's a lot of people that identify themselves as, you know, the things in their LinkedIn profile. They're business coaches.
They're CEO. How do you choose the right person? Because there's so many people calling themselves that. How do you choose the right person for you?
Absolutely. That's a great question. I did go through a couple of different coaches until I found the right one. What I learned was, you know, references are key, but it's not just references in history.
It's, have they coached other organizations that are around the scale that you are today, either in revenue or people or what have you, and have they coached them through periods of trying to accomplish the same kinds of things you're trying to accomplish. So whether that's scale or trying to step out of the business and have more of a lifestyle business, right? Whatever those things are, you know, have they done those specific actions and how they worked with companies to have done those things and how has that worked out? So I strongly recommend references.
But at the end of the day, you're going to have to work with them, sit down with them, understand whether or not you mesh, and you might find, you know, it might take you one, two, three or four attempts until you find that person who's really the right fit to coach you. What's a relationship like that look like for you? Like are you meeting once a week? Are you meeting monthly quarterly?
Like how does something like that work for you? A little bit of all that. So in this system, I usually meet at least quarterly to do business and personal goal planning, and then there will be a weekly or a bi-weekly depending upon my schedule, meeting to check in to see, you know, how I'm doing with that? How's my emotional stay?
Am I working too hard? Do I need to take some time off? Do I need to, you know, am I procrastinating and ignoring some of the goals that I need to get to? So you know, you go through a few hour planning session once a quarter and then these regular check-ins.
And for me, it's not just your goals for what you want to do in the business, not just a revenue goal or I want to, you know, build this widget or whatever. I'm also working on, you know, some of those personal goals. Like I want to make sure I'm also home spending time with my family. I want to make sure that, you know, I'm also enjoying life, you know, enjoying summer, and not just being stuck in the office, you know, tied up in that because ultimately the purpose of doing all these things is to find happiness, right?
Is to find some level of balance and joy. And so I really search for a coach who's looking to help balance that for me. And that's why we meet on a regular cadence is to check in on that. Would you say based on your experience, because I'm a believer in building a business around the lifestyle you want, right?
Like, obviously you want to live life. That's why you work. That's why we make money is to do things that are fun for us. Is there a certain thing that you believe too, though early on where a lot of sacrifices do have to be made in order to build a business to get to that point?
Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, you know, I would even say that I perceived it when I was younger and I'm not sure I disagree with it now today, even though I might do things different, it's an identity, right? And you have to look at it from that perspective, you know, especially when you're bootstrapping and especially when you're in those early years. When you're doing everything that's running the business, it consumes all of your time, all of the time, right?
Your normal daytime schedule is really spent with the clients or with a couple of employees you have. The evenings are spent on the finances, on the strategy, on the things that went wrong that you didn't get to yet, right? And so I absolutely think that there is a massive time investment up, right? And you have to recognize you're making a trade, right?
I decided to make that trade and I've been satisfied with it in that I did invest a ton of time over, you know, many of those early years. I do now have flexibility to do a lot of things I want to do today. I can travel, I can take time off, I can spend time coaching other startups and spending time with other entrepreneurs. Those are things I just didn't have to end with for in my schedule when I was trying to get to, you know, kind of this place that I am today.
Yeah, it's super, I think a lot of people fight with it because like your identity is associated with the work you do and oftentimes if you're not succeeding at the work you're doing, you feel like a failure personally and then you bring that stuff home, you bring that stuff in your friendships and relationships, but it's a difficult balance in order to be able to separate the two. Absolutely. It is and it's, you know, like I said, I kind of that squiggly line journey, right? You see on LinkedIn people make those, it's not a straight line.
Well, that's absolutely it, right? And it's easy when you've got your when your identity is tied up in it. Like I said, it's your baby. It's your child can be the way that you end up thinking about it.
It's really easy to let those failures kind of a lot deeper than they necessarily should. You know, it can make you feel like, Oh, this is irrecoverable or Oh, I'm just so tied up in it. You know, you can have that emotional reaction where when you step back, you can say, Ah, you know, so I made a mistake. I'll just fix it, right?
It's not really the end of the world. I'm just going to keep plotting ahead, but you can get really emotionally tied up in it and it can be a challenge to manage. And for a lot of people, at least my experience, a lot of people like me are very type A, they're very much like, there's a problem, I must fix it. And really as you begin to scale the business, you begin to learn sometimes you have to just ignore the problem that the problem set, go take some time off and let someone else deal with the problem.
Not everything is an all hands on deck. It needs the founder working on it right now situation. 100%. And I mean, you mentioned your book a couple of times now.
It's a new one called Fuck Me Running, a business. First of all, love the title. I think people need to be more candid and what actually happens in it as you start out. What for you, you know, for you obviously build a business, you've been very successful at it.
You've been able to grow and scale and build a team around that. What was the inspiration behind wanting to write a book for yourself? Yeah, that's a good question. So I had joined a number of masterminds in the last handful of years and a handful of like startup coaching organizations.
And one of the things I kept repeating a lot of the same stories, but you know, I hadn't written them down. So I was trying to communicate these lessons learned and I was struggling. I'm not one of those people who's very good just kind of off the cuff, just delivering entire story with a moral point through it. You know what I mean?
Like I have to think about it. And so as I kept getting these same questions over and over again and trying to describe my experience, I said, you know, I'm just going to write it down. I'm going to put it in a place where someone else can consume it easily, list some resources that I use to get through some of these challenging times. And like you said, be candid because I think that there's not enough of that.
You know, a lot of founders or successful people like to sugar cook the past or at least look back at the past with the rose colored glasses and not necessarily speak. You know, I was in pain for whole periods of this journey, right? Like this was difficult. There was conflict between myself and either friends I'd hired or partners I brought on, right?
And a lot of people deal with that. But then they get to the success part and they don't tell the other entrepreneurs who aren't there yet. Yeah, there's some parts that are really going to suck. And I wanted to put that out there and make it clear that, hey, if you're going through it, it's OK.
Just keep going. It's going to be OK. Who'd you write it for? Like obviously you started out just kind of putting down thoughts and trying to articulate stories.
When you kind of realize, well, I could really turn this into a book, this is what I'm going to do. Who did you ultimately write the book for? Like, was there a specific person or target audience in mind? Yeah, it's really for the aspiring entrepreneur or the aspiring leader.
Maybe they just stepped into a leadership position in their organization. You know, someone who has come from maybe a technical, a wrench turner, a doer kind of role. And now they're being asked to lead people or they must lead people because of the goals that they've set for themselves. And how do you do that?
And so I was really focused on people like me, the 23-year-old who had no idea what he was doing and thought, I'm going to start a business because I like technology. I wish I would have read the lessons in this book around that time. I could have shaved years off of my journey with that knowledge. Give us a little teaser.
When you talk about some of those lessons, what are some of those big lessons that you feel like if you went back, you kind of changed? Yeah, absolutely. One of the ones that really stands out to me about a whole chapter on it is a few years into the journey I acquired another organization and I brought on a partner, a 50-50 partner with that acquisition. And I'll be honest, I did part of that acquisition out of fear.
I felt like we needed to scale more quickly because in our regional space, a lot of my competition was starting to scale. And so I made a decision from a point of fear to scale and I made a poor decision about the partner that I brought on. And that partner ultimately cost us. We had a straight up 100% year-over-year growth trajectory and after bringing on that organization, that partner, we started losing money year-over-year.
We broke our revenue growth cycles. We really struggled. And one of the things that I learned through that is that myself and that partner had very differing opinions about what we want out of business. I want to scale and make it a lot larger, go to hundreds of people and multiple millions of dollars.
His focus was, well, I don't want it to make any noise. I want there to be a check in my checking account once a month. And I just want a lifestyle business. And so if I would have had the intelligence, the foresight to know how to pick that apart and have had those conversations earlier on, I would have structured things a lot differently and not spent what I jokingly referred to as five years in the wilderness wondering, trying to figure out how do we get this thing back on track.
That's interesting because probably in the moment, like I know you said you were basing that off of fear, but in the moment you probably felt like that was a really good decision for you to be making. Absolutely. I was able to at least, in hindsight, you write things how you want. So in hindsight, I was able to justify it.
I was able to say, well, this took me from 20 to 40 people basically overnight. And in consulting, people are your product. That's how you're delivering your service. And so those things looked really good on paper.
I just didn't realize the impact on the culture that has when you have a startup that has a certain kind of startup culture and you blend another one that's almost the same size into it, how hard it is to maintain any coherency at all between either of those cultures. Those things I just wasn't ready for. Interesting. Did you two operate as co-CEOs in a sense when the acquisition happened?
Yeah, we did. So we worked for a period of time. I worked as CEO and he worked as CFO. And then for some period of time, the business started to get some traction down in California.
And so I began to travel to California almost full time for the last year and a half of that five years that I mentioned. So this is more the 2015, 16, 17 period. And so at that point, I promoted him into a co-CEO position to run a lot of our operations up here. And I spent my time down in California really growing those operations.
And I would tell you this, there's no such thing as two CEOs. There's no such thing. I've never did it again. Two captains of a ship is a sinking ship.
Again, another lesson. For sure. As you go through, there's going to be people in general, you enter into partnerships, right? And there's a lot of things that you can do early on to protect yourself in a sense of kind of those questions you ask, just making sure you're on the same page, making sure you have the same vision, same work ethics.
Is there certain things you can do within a contract in order to kind of protect yourself in those situations as well? Because ultimately, you don't know who that person is until you start to get in it with them. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I would definitely do if I were to repeat that scenario again, it's two things.
I think you got to get really honest about who the final decision makers are if you have to get to that point, right? When you're stuck in a situation with two 50-50 shareholders, you know, no one is a final decider and that just makes things poisonous for everyone. So I think that's a big one. Don't put yourself contractually in a place to where no one can decide.
That doesn't win. The second thing that I would have done was I would have developed more of a touchstone kind of document. It wouldn't have had to have been something very long. Think of it kind of like the core values for an organization.
I would have developed something like that for myself and for this partner to have both agreed on. This is how we make decisions. This is what's important to us, right? When we're met with whatever it is, we're making our decisions based on we're trying to scale or we're trying to have a lifestyle business or whatever those things are.
I think it would have passed out a lot of those conflicts early on and then we could have been navigating the conflicts instead of trying to understand why neither of us were on the same page at any point. Yeah. Those are two great pieces of advice. Outside of like a personal like you go and you're entering into a partnership, 50-50, what kind of partnerships can be beneficial for entrepreneurs when they're starting?
Like what kinds of partnerships are valuable and should people be looking for? Absolutely. I don't intend to say that partnerships aren't valuable. It's when you get in the situations where you can't make it a situation.
But for sure, I've had a lot of success with partnerships where they were arranged, especially in like a mentor kind of scenario where you have the person who has the idea, right? The one who really has the vision. They know what it is. They want to build.
They can see it. But maybe they don't have the experience getting there. Those scenarios were having a partner who can act as a mentor who is built out manufacturing processes or built out work flow systems before and can help you understand how to build that into your startup. Super, super helpful, super useful.
I also think the other kind of partners that you want to focus on are the ones that are financially focused. At least for me starting a startup at a young age, I don't understand anything about how you run the financial organization. I think about taxation and equity and all that stuff, right? And so having a partner who can have a CFO level kind of capability who can help you understand how to build systems that scale for the organization as your organization moves up financially, I think those are absolutely key.
Love it. And we've kind of we've tried a lot. And obviously as you're growing a business, you're dealing with people. And I think that's a tough thing that businesses have trouble with is not only finding great people, but how do you retain those great people as well?
And culture is one of those big words that a lot of people use, but it's probably one of the most important things I would assume and what's happened with you. How have you been able to or how can people be able to start to cultivate that positive culture where people want to show up to work? They want to put an extra time. What they're doing the work they're doing.
Absolutely. You know, it can be very difficult to initially at least get that culture going because everyone brings in their own experience, culture from other organizations, their own expectations about how they want things to be. So for me, what I learned, I kind of had to reset the culture after going through this period of trying to mash two cultures together and not working at all and me being down in California. I came back to, it wasn't a culture.
It was just a pile of things that were happening. And so as I thought through how do I approach this culture, I think it really, really starts with the vision, right? And so I think that can be cliche. People say, ah, people are visionary blah blah blah.
What I really mean is, you know, a written one or two sentences on where we're going and why it matters, right? And I think you have to start there. And then you break that down for us into pillars or values is what you hear other people refer to them as. You know, what are the supporting things that will make sure that that happens?
And so like one of the supporting pillars in Trinium is integrity, right? One of the reasons for that is we work in cybersecurity. We see a lot of sensitive data. We have opportunities because of the technical pieces of our work to make mistakes and not tell the client, right?
You can do those kinds of things. But that doesn't do well if you're trying to scale long term. And that certainly isn't who you want to present yourself to as a client. For sure.
And so I think you have to focus on building values that both help everyone else in that organization understand how their actions when they make decisions, you know, how that flows towards that ultimate vision. And as people begin to practice it, in my experience, they find, oh, we're part of a team. We're part of a tribe. We support each other using these common ways in which we make decisions, which then gives you a strong culture.
Ultimately, you end up winning things like best place to work and you start scaling faster and your team raises their hands when there's challenges, you know, to tackle them instead of turning off their phones at 4.30 because they're done, right? Culture is everything in my opinion. I love that. Well, I mean, for people listening, obviously, you can tell you bring a wealth of experience, wealth of knowledge, you've been through the shit.
You're helping people out with this new book now. How can people grab a copy for themselves? Like their entrepreneurs, how do people grab a copy of this? Absolutely.
You can get it via link on my website, nolangarit.co. You can go straight to Amazon and search for fucking running. You'll find it up there. And you can also find me on LinkedIn.
You'll be able to use LinkedIn to get to my book as well. Amazing. I'll share all those links. Last question for you is because I'm curious.
What made you come up with the title? Why fucking running? So funny story. You know, I was not a writer, I'm an engineer.
So I sit down, I start trying to write out what I think the chapter should be. And I'm like, oh, fuck me, this is too difficult. And I'm like, oh, that's what I should call the book just in its working format because I have to put something at the top of the white page. So I type that in.
And as I end up talking to my editor and my publicist later, they're like, oh, that's the book title. You can't change it away from this. And so that's what it became from all time. Stars a joke to myself.
There you go. That's how some of the best things happen, right? Awesome. And then social media wise, people want to kind of follow along on your journey.
Where are you most active? Where should people follow along? I'm very active on LinkedIn. I'm, I've had a pretty weak following.
I'm fairly active on Twitter. I'm not on Facebook at all anymore. So LinkedIn is the place to find me for sure. Awesome.
I'll share that link as well. And Nolan, I can't thank you enough for taking time out of your schedule and sharing your wisdom and story with us here on the podcast today. Thank you so much, Don. Appreciate it.
Cheers. And that is it, everyone, for today's interview with Nolan Garrett. Really hope you enjoyed today's conversation. If you did, hit that subscribe button, share this out with a friend or colleague who you feel like will be truly impacted by today's episode.
Be sure to grab a copy of Nolan's book. I'm telling you, I'm going to write after this interview. Check it out. You're going to love it.
Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. Keep grinding.