Working with the government can be very rewarding yet challenging especially when you are under contract. Today, Bob Roark talks to Mike Crandall, the CEO of Digital Beachhead which is a company that seeks to build customer trust and corporate value by delivering Information Technology (IT) and Consulting Services Solutions in inventive economical ways. Mike describes what they do, who their target audiences are, and what they look forward to. He shares how it is working with the government and how they find people to fulfill their contracts. He also talks about cybersecurity including how they protect their clients in this field.
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It is nice to be here. Thanks, Bob.
Mike, thank you so much for taking the time. Tell us about your business and who you serve.
My company is Digital Beachhead. It's a term I coined on a performance report back when I was in the military and the commander asked me, “What is a digital beachhead. How dare you to say you can protect it, that you're in charge of it and then you're so good at it?” I explained that he has email and that's what I protected. Instead of a typical beachfront, you have the digital one, which was everywhere. His eyes lit up and he was like, “That digital beachhead is everywhere.” Years later, the Under Secretary of Defense used it in a speech, saying that the adversary had secured a digital beachhead on our network. They went from my performance report to a Wing Award on up. The Pentagon had heard the word and that got incorporated in a speech. I bought the name. We primarily focus on cybersecurity for the federal government, but I am branching out to provide cyber risk management for small and medium-sized businesses.
People don't understand the designations of many government contracting businesses and you have a specific designation.
I am a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business or SDVOSB.
Going back a little bit, you served in the Air Force and in the Middle East. Talk about a little bit of that experience and how that started to help you start this business.
Back in the day, before we had networks, during the First Gulf War, there were only a few PCs around. I had got in trouble for breaking into one of those PCs. The commander explained how much money they paid to protect them and they had software that was supposed to be secure. There was a two keystroke per entry to get to the DOS Prompt. He effectively destroyed my “I'm in trouble paperwork” and said, “You are in charge of small computer security for the Air Force.” I was one young kid who didn't know much. They sent me to school. I learned how to do some basic hacking and defensive work, as well as offensive work. In those days, you couldn't network in to break into a computer so we had to touch them. If the adversary had some computer systems that they needed information off of, we had to go physically to the machine, wherever it may be to gather the data. I got to work with some much more powerful and influential military people. The special forces people dragged me along as their computer boy. I trained with them but I wasn't raised as one. I tagged along for the ride.
I think about the progress we all take to develop our careers. You had the Air Force time and then you had the time in the field and at some point, you rotate out of the military. Maybe it would be useful for the people that are curious, how do you...