Greg Schaffer: Hi, I’m Greg Schaffer. Welcome to the Virtual CISO Moment. Excited to have Logan Edmonds on today. He is an AI-driven cybersecurity leader who helps small and mid-sized businesses and startups protect their operations, simplify compliance, and scale efficiency—efficiently. Excuse me, can’t read my own cue cards—using smart technology and AI. He is the Chief AI Officer at ScaleSight, where he specializes in cutting through the AI hype and helping organizations build practical, results-driven AI strategies. He’s also the founder and Chief Security Officer of TTS Cyber, a firm that’s delivering cybersecurity services, managed IT operations, and long-term technology strategy for small and mid-sized businesses. All that is a mouthful. Logan, thank you so much for joining us today.
Logan Edmonds: Thanks for having me, Greg. And yes, it is. I’m a busy dude. What can I say?
Greg: Well, and that’s a good thing. And it’s a good thing to have to be busy because that means that we’re working. That also means A) that we’re helping folks, and B) that we’re making money. And those are both very good.
Logan: I like people ask me why I do what I do, and I said because I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. I love what I do. It has its ups and downs like anything, but it is a rodeo in the AI and cybersecurity space and I can see the needle moving every day in real people’s lives. That—that’s huge for me. So keeps me going.
Greg: I’m sure we’re going to dig into a little bit, especially on the AI side, because I already got something that’s triggered. But I want to start off by hearing about how you got to where you’re at today. What got you interested in this field? And just bring us through your career path to where you’re at right now.
Logan: Yeah, so I didn’t have a typical career path, I don’t think. So my background is actually in—I did a lot of work in education, in philosophy and Christian theology, and I was going to go and help people, right? And the way I saw that, I was going to go and do ministry and do things like that. But then I got married right out of college and I had to find a job. So the university I attended was hiring IT people. And I’ve always had a knack for computers. I had a knack for figuring things out. And I kicked my career off there and found out I really enjoy this field. I enjoy technology.
From there, I got more plugged in. I went up the university’s chain, did more advanced work, eventually expanded out. I had to leave because I had bills to pay and nonprofit paychecks were uncovered. I went and worked for small businesses. I worked for a guy who was a technology service provider, got a chance to roll up my sleeves and work with businesses ranging from, you know, ten to two hundred employees and different environments and in different industries. That was awesome.
I went and worked for an international payment processor after that. Half my team was in Romania. I was the Columbus office here in Columbus, Ohio, where I’m based out of. And I had team members in Georgia. And I got a sense to do infrastructure at scale, right? Like that was my first, wow, this is big infrastructure, right? Because we were doing payment processing, and it was just a good experience.
When that opportunity wound down—they downsized here in the United States—I’m from a family of entrepreneurs. I’ve always kind of had my own side hustle. And I got a severance check, and going through working with other people was great. But I said, I think I can do something here. I think I can help real people. And one of the things I wanted to help specifically was—I was focused on the individual, which naturally translated into the small businesses. I wanted to see small people, who technology could take them to the next level, succeed and really optimize that positioning. That was great.
I did that for a few years, and then COVID hit and cybersecurity blew up. So I was forced to roll up my sleeves and really get into the weeds in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and figure out how we help these clients. Because a really scary truth emerged to me: hey, they’re looking to me, whether I wanted them to or not, as their technology advisor, to protect them, to give them advice on how to protect themselves. Either I meet that trust or I bow out. Those are my options. So we decided to meet that trust and bone up. We’ve been doing cybersecurity managed services for five years.
And then about late—because we kept getting questions about AI and people were trying to figure out how this AI thing fit in the puzzle that is their individual businesses. I was working in businesses—I still do—ranging from five employees to five hundred. That’s usually our sweet spot. And we said, you know, we want to help people, but I’m also a big believer in the saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none.” So we spun up ScaleSight as a separate focus division specifically on AI, because I do think it’s important. But we didn’t want to dilute the focus and the efficiency of TTS Cyber.
Greg: You know, we share something in our history, and that is starting at a university level. I was in the University of Buffalo as a mechanical engineering student and started there working in their IT department—or it wasn’t even IT back then—but basically started there. It was better than working at Burger King and really was a good launch for the career.
From your experience—I know this is going back a ways—but I love asking people: I found that working in a university environment, it exposed me to such an eclectic mix of technology and users and user needs. What was your experience with that?
Logan: Well, that was doubly true for mine because the university at the time—I don’t think they do this anymore—but they opened up their help desk to any student having any kind of problem with their technology. So which obviously for business operation reasons and scaling reasons, that’s a bit of a nightmare. But it was what it was.
I got to deal with people who were brilliant, right? Like absolutely brilliant at what they did. And I got to deal with people who—I literally had a call once, it was funny, and this is back in my early IT days—where the guy goes, “Hey, I live in a swamp in the middle of Florida. Your recruiter convinced me to buy my first computer. Can you teach me how to use it?” And I’m like… buddy, I think your recruiter might have done you dirty here.
So that was awesome. And also just the problems. The university I was at was a small Midwestern university, but they were scaling pretty large at the time, trying to get their online presence off the ground. So I could deal with some really cool infrastructure projects that I don’t think otherwise I would have been exposed to at that point in my career. I really enjoyed that.
Also, it was a bit of a whimsical time. I still remember the pranks we would pull on each other being on a help desk team. There was one where I put a little—I made a little, not corrupted—what do you call it? I did a text file, I made a command scriptlet where among my coworkers, his CD drive would come out every five minutes and he couldn’t figure out what the script was. Every five minutes it would come out. For two days I remember laughing in the corner. He’s like, “Why does this keep doing this?”
Greg: Well, I—on that note, I have to admit, and I—you know, the statute of limitations has well gone past this now, but—and I was a kid back then—but, you know, when I was starting out, we had these X terminals, they called them—you know, they’re still out there—but there wasn’t much security on there. And there was a command on there that, like, if you were running off of a computer, you set your terminal—I don’t remember the X command for it—but that way, any streaming video or picture—I should say, we didn’t have video back then—would come to whatever machine that you said that you wanted it to come to.
Because there were no controls behind it, that basically meant that you could put screens on—put images on other people’s machines without them knowing it. If you knew like their IP address, you had to know a couple of other things. So randomly we would like start putting like, you know, porn up on like, you know, the network engineers’ machines just for the heck of it. And I’m not advocating doing that today, okay, but we were—you know, and it was funny at the time. You’re there in a meeting and all of a sudden it’s like—
Well, anyway, I digress.
Logan: I think the funniest thing I ever did—and it wasn’t a super complicated thing—and the guy is still there and I know he watches my LinkedIn, so hi Joe, sorry again. We signed up a guy—I was getting ready to leave the job, I was on my two weeks out—and I decided, you know, what the heck? We had a relationship office where the harder we pranked you, the more we showed we loved you, right? That was the attitude everybody had.
And so I got this guy’s picture on the university Rolodex. I put his personal email—because I gathered it all the time—his work email, his phone number. I created a FarmersOnly profile for him. And it actually kind of took off, which was really funny. So he kept getting these messages.
Greg: That was a dating site, right?
Logan: It was. It was for farmers. For farmers, yeah. “You don’t have to be lonely at FarmersOnly.com.” So for like a week I’m just hearing him mutter. He was too polite to curse me out loud, but he was like muttering under his breath and looking at me. Oh Joe, you were a good sport, man. I’m sorry.
Greg: As a disclaimer, we at the Virtual CISO—whatever the heck my podcast name is—we do not endorse this sort of behavior.
Logan: No, no. That was—I was twenty-three years old. I blame it on the youth.
Greg: Well, one thing—another thing we share is an affinity for helping small and mid-sized businesses. And so because you’re heavily involved in that, what’s—for SMBs—what’s one of the biggest misconceptions today that they have with regards to security? Because I know there’s a lot out there and it’s just sometimes it’s hard to chisel through them.
Logan: I talk to leadership a lot, and I still think it’s the drivers behind security on the SMB side of things, right? So there are multiple reasons you’d want to pursue security in an SMB space. Everything from business pressures to compliance to—you go, hey, I have new deals or partnerships that are requiring me to open myself up to a lot more exposure.
And the problem is diluting that kind of conversation, because it’s a very nuanced conversation, right? You’re talking about business pressures and pipeline opportunity and sales and also operational capacities—and into a way that a CEO can understand in thirty seconds or less. That’s still a bit of a tricky thing to do. And that’s one of the things we specialize in.
And even as recently as a few months ago, I was on the call with a rapidly growing startup. They’re doing great in the geospatial space. And the guy told me—and to give you context, and I won’t go too in the weeds because it’s a little confidential here—but they’re dealing with petabytes and petabytes of data, and then they’re dealing with huge amounts of government contracts and things that are really tight deadlines. And on the call the guy said, “I don’t know why anybody would do the cyber stuff if they weren’t legally required to do it.”
And I remember thinking to myself, I still have a ways to go in this education conversation. Because I understand where that maybe thought originated from. But in that case, that’s not the driving force to really look at security as a real investment for your business.
People just—I struggle still to this day of being accused of FUD. And I want to walk that line of, I need to drive it home why this is important without trying to make people feel like I’m trying to scare them to do something. And it’s a fine line to walk. Because it is—as you know, you deal with this, you’re on this podcast every week—it’s scary out there.
Greg: Yeah. And yet, if we do FUD—for the acronym challenge, fear, uncertainty, and doubt—if we do promote FUD more so, or promote saying no, or you can’t do that, that sort of thing, we are not matching the business. And we’re supposed to be business enablers. We’re not a revenue generator—never have been, never will be. But what we do do is we are a revenue protector, and we’re trying to protect future revenue. And so by phrasing it that way, we can help the business leaders understand that, no, it isn’t just because you have to do this. It’s not just a compliance thing.
And that’s one of my sticklers, because I would say that one of the reasons why you and I hear that sort of thing is because people are so stuck on security being something—we just need to be compliant with it. There are folks like us—not exactly like us—but folks out there that push compliance as that’s all you need to do. It’s just like, just do this. You can be CMMC compliant. We can talk about CMMC. That’s a great example.
Logan: Yeah, and there’s no way to do that. And yet you’ve got folks that are trying to sell those. And you’re not doing anything to really protect the information beyond basic stuff. And I don’t know. How do you flip that switch in people’s minds?
Well, first off, you hit the most important part of that: you can’t bully businesses. Especially when you’re an outside consultant and a partner. Partners don’t bully partners. And so if you’re going in there using the shame game or the scare game just to bully them into doing what you want, you’re not going to last long in this industry. It might work short term, but long term, no one’s going to trust you. And trust is paramount.
Greg: Or bullying them to buy your products, too.
Logan: Correct. Correct. Yeah. And it’s scary—it’s really easy if you don’t have real ethical guidelines set around this to fall down that hole.
CMMC is a great example of that. There is real risk for businesses who are in the government supply chain right now and not complying with CMMC. But what is that risk, right? Well first off, the stick: if you’re not compliant—if you fall under Level 1, because the bare thing—you don’t submit your self-assessment, you’re not allowed to bid on government contracts. Level 2 is even worse, right? They’re going to scrutinize you.
But that’s not the message I lead with when I go into CMMC most of the time. Like, that’s the reason why they’re usually picking up the phone and calling us if they’re a customer that hasn’t worked with us before. But the message I lead with is actually a real opportunity from a sales perspective.
So you said this before: we’re not going to make you money. That’s true. Businesses have three divisions—broadly speaking, you can find in every business: you’ve got sales, you’ve got operations (“how do we do the thing or make the thing that sales are selling”), and you’ve got admin, which IT and cybersecurity firmly fall into, which is how do we keep the business going so it can do the other two things, right?
So all of our conversations when it comes to, why would we invest in security—and CMMC is a great example of that—we’re tying it back to those other two divisions. Either we’re making the operations go smoother and more cost-efficient and all this other stuff, or we’re a sales enabler, right?
Yeah, you do in CMMC need to comply to get sales. But if you’re at the forefront—and I like this with this conversation—rob, you buckle down and get this done, there’s a real first-mover adoption edge right now in that market where you can get in and get some really lucrative contracts. And the sales time in eighteen months if we do this correctly—I’m not going to guarantee anything—but if you can flip that script, now they’re resonating with you because you’ve identified their needs, you’ve tied what you do and why it’s important to them, and they can see it, right? They have an understanding of it.
That’s a lot of what we do, Greg. I try to tie it home to the business objectives, tie it home to why would I care about this, and also show people that we take the time to get to know them and what those outcomes look like for them. Because that’s another thing too: I’m not a huge believer in—I’ve got too many people who’ve complained that someone tried to shove me into this thing and it sucks. We—we don’t want to be known as those guys.
Greg: Well, and that’s a good point when it comes to like AI, because of course AI is like the big word thing now. And that’s a problem because I’ve seen it—I’m sure you have too—it’s just you have business leaders that are saying, “Well, you know, we need to enable AI.” And my first question is, “Why? What are you trying to solve?” Don’t manage to the technology; manage to the business, and then look to the technology for tools.
So how do you do that with regards to like—I guess you can call that a little bit AI hype versus… Because AI is not something that you can just drop in like a black box and all of a sudden you’re doing things eighty-five percent more efficient.
Logan: So first off, yeah, let’s talk—let’s break this conversation of what AI can do and what it can’t do, like what it is and what it isn’t. First off, AI will not fix your bad business process. I think there is a very real temptation in the small business and the midsize market to say, we know we can’t scale because of this process, and the work to fix business process—the larger you get—becomes harder and longer, right? Like that is a real thing.
I run a business. You run a business. Every time I have to go and say, “We have this problem,” and as we identify what the problem is, we’re like, oh, it’s a lack of process. We all groan internally because we know this is going to be a huge amount of work to get it done.
And so one of the temptations I see a lot of businesses do is instead of fixing their broken process, they just want to throw AI in there like some kind of magic superglue, right?
AI does not fix your broken processes. AI does not come in and—because for example, one of the things that I’ve seen go terribly wrong with AI is: “We have all this unorganized data and nobody can find anything anywhere. Let’s just have AI figure out where everything’s at. Right? Throw the AI in the unorganized data and it’ll do all the stuff.”
And I’m like… and then you end up creating an even bigger mess because your data is still unorganized, you can’t find anything, and the AI is just spitting out nonsense because nothing was categorized correctly, so it’s hallucinating all over the place. You’ve added injury to insult.
So AI is not going to fix your broken process.
What I’ve seen AI be successful in—and this is what I tell everyone—I use my business as an example because I can talk freely about my business. It’s micro-targeted solutions that fit neatly in your business process and optimize the way that makes unique sense to you.
For us, on our IT MSP side of things, it’s our dispatcher role. Dispatcher roles in the MSP space are notoriously famous for being—they’re annoying. No one wants to sit there forever. It’s a career ladder jump, right? Like that might be where you get started, but you want to get out of it as soon as possible. You don’t want to man the phones, you don’t want to categorize tickets, you don’t want to do any of that. Like, it’s grunt work.
And so when we came in, we’re like: how can we use AI? Well, we used to have a couple of people sitting in dispatch, and we have openings in our company further up the chain where we would love to promote these people into who can handle dispatch. Can AI handle some of that?
And over time, we developed a way where the AI can go in—because we’ve structured our data in a way where it can read it—it can categorize tickets, it can mark priority levels, it can gather initial information without being too annoying, and basically do about eighty percent of the dispatch job.
Now, did we just say, “We’re not going to hire the dispatch and let our guys…”? No, no, no. They don’t want the job. They want a different role in our company. Cool. Now we have this need met, we can move them up and invest in them. And so for us, that saves us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and our employees are happier. Like, that’s a win-win-win.
But that’s not something that’s just generic, cookie-cutter. I can throw that out in the market and everybody can do it. That’s thought out. We had to identify: what is it we wanted to fix? What is the outcome we want to desire? How can we structure ourselves in a way where we can set ourselves up for success?
That was every bit of twelve to eighteen months to get that thing off the ground. And I think a lot of businesses are looking for easy buttons.
Greg: Right. And you started with the need to address a business problem. How can we make dispatch more efficient? It wasn’t like, “How can AI make dispatch more efficient?” It’s “How can we make dispatch more efficient?” You have the business process, then you’re like, well, maybe if we tweak this part here then maybe that’ll help.
And I’ll give you an example from my business, since I can speak for my business too. What I’m doing right now—I’ve talked about this a little bit on LinkedIn—is that I’m getting into this vibe coding stuff because I’m working on building an app. I won’t talk about what it is for security, but it’s something security related.
What vibe coding has done for me is it really accelerates my imagination. I can throw something up there, see what it looks like, see how things work, and then make adjustments. I work better that way. If I was coding in whatever language you’re talking about, I’d have to learn the code. I’d be spending too much of my brain cycles on the code itself.
I’m using it as a tool to help me on something that I’m already trying to do. I’m not asking it to build the app for me. I have discussions with ChatGPT back and forth about this.
But some of the tools that I’m using actually with the app performance itself also have their own AI built in. And here’s the problem that I came across. There’s like this one tool—I won’t say the name—but using it, it’s sort of like a shim between my platform and where it’s getting information from. It helps process it and massage it and all that.
And so I’m using it to try to import some information. And in such case, I’m trying to use tables that are stored in an S3 bucket. Well, they built the entire workflow for me. It’s like, “Do you want me to build you the workflow?” I’m like, well, I’m not going to say no. But then it builds the workflow—it’s not working completely the way I want it to. And plus I’m going to troubleshoot it anyway just to make sure.
And I’m looking through there—and this is the end of my long-winded story—they’re storing it in an S3 bucket, but they’re storing it… it was exposed. The piece of information I’m trying to transfer was exposed.
And so I asked this AI bot, “Why is it exposed?” And they’re like, “Well, we can secure it for you.” And that’s where I had the problem. It’s like, by default, you did not create something inherently secure.
And I think this is where there’s going to be a huge risk and a huge problem to businesses where they’re just going to think that they can have things built for them and not even try to understand the risk there.
How are businesses going to deal with this, that risk, and other risks associated with AI?
Logan: It’s one that’s not talked about enough. So—AI, when quality, you have to have consistency, right? So in my example with dispatching, I still have a human reviewing the AI’s dispatcher role. Whether it’s the individual technicians working or that—there’s not a huge risk to us in the short term if it misclassifies something or miscategorizes something because we’ve put in a necessary safety net without putting too much resources in there to catch it and manually correct it. Human oversight.
There’s a reason why industries like healthcare are very hesitant to put AI in broad scope there. Because consistency matters to them. You can’t just screw up a patient chart and say, “Oh, that was just a mistake, move on.” That kills people.
And what you’re talking about is similar. In the security space, consistency matters. AI is great for high-frequency, low-risk tasks. And it’s also great, in my opinion, for the stuff you’re describing about, which is like—so I’m a visualization guy. I don’t know about you—I love a whiteboard. So with Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT, that was like crack cocaine for me and my brain because I’m now able to add another layer of visualization—like a feedback sounding board—when I do my executive stuff and flesh out ideas. That’s not a lot of risk. It’s not putting that in prod. I’m in the idea stage still.
And I love that. That’s where AI shines.
You go into something where you’re like—that’s where I see all these companies really screwing up right now. They’re being told by the big dogs, “Hey, you just need to start cutting people, putting AI in, or you’re going to fall behind the pack.”
And I’m like, that is very disingenuous. You are setting them up to fail by doing that. AI is a very powerful tool. I do believe over time it’s going to fill some roles that previously humans filled by hand, and that’s just inevitable. But the transition is not as abrupt as it’s being sold in the market.
It is a thing that a business needs to look at and very carefully articulate. I tell people all the time—and when we go to ScaleSight conferences—I’m going to be totally candid with you: for real AI change, about two to three big projects over a thirty-six-month term. That’s about your theoretical max as an organization. You do not have the change management appetite to do anything else beyond that. Because there is a lot more work than people anticipate.
Again, back to my superglue comment—you can’t just throw AI in your stuff and expect it to magically work. That’s not how that works at all.
Greg: Well, and it does first of all come down to leading with the business needs first and not listening, as you said, to the big folks that are saying you need to put AI in otherwise you’re behind the curve. That’s, you know, fear of missing out. And they’re not raising their hand when they’re hiring all those people back—they’re like, “AI’s going to replace your jobs,” and then like, “Oh, we actually need to hire like sixty percent of these people back because it turns out it doesn’t work.” Big, big, big oops.
But I think people are scared of the idea—it’s just like, well, this technology is going to replace all the jobs.
So while you were saying that—while you were talking there—I thought about two things from my past. Being older than dirt—some people may not even know what I’m talking about—but two pieces of technology that were replaced by more advanced technology that, if you spooled back to when I was starting my career, I wouldn’t have thought—actually three things now that I think of it—I never thought would have gone away.
Okay, the first one is the newspaper.
The second one is Blockbuster and other video stores.
And the third one are little FotoMat stands that you’d see in almost every single parking lot—you’d drop off your film, you get your pictures received like a week later or whatever.
All three of those things offered services. One was newspapers—information. One was providing entertainment in video form. One was providing images back. All three of those were replaced by technology.
Now, did we lose the ability to do anything? No. Did we lose jobs because of that? It’s like, okay, you don’t have a paperboy anymore, but I’m sure they’re learning how to code. Things have been—technology may end up replacing old jobs but creating new jobs when all is said and done.
Logan: Let’s take the hype people out of the equation, because I’m all about cutting through the hype. And that’s negative and positive here.
So one of the things that I think people misunderstand—why is everyone so excited about AI? It is not because we want, for most businesses, to get rid of people and replace their jobs. What we get excited about as business owners: AI—one of the things we struggle with is trying to match our revenue scales without over-hiring people.
Because for me, I’m a small business. I have a handful of employees. I can’t tell the future, I don’t have a magic ball. But when I hire someone, I want to be reasonably confident that, you know, this isn’t going to be something I have to reverse in a month or two, right? I want people to have that. Especially in the small business—that’s a very recurring thing.
And so the bigger I can grow my revenues without having the higher operational constraints, the more buffer I have against that risk. Right? I can take a down month or three or five and not have to let my team go. And I like my team. I don’t want to let go of Steve in the corner. And I like Steve. He does great work. I don’t want to let go of Steve. How can I reduce that risk? Well, the answer is: make more money.
How can I make more money without burning out my existing team? Well, AI offers a potential avenue for that.
And that’s the attitude we want to see our customers have when they go at this. Don’t worry, Steve. I think you’re safe. We like Steve. He’s nice. He brings coffee. We like Steve.
Greg: We like Steve.
But still—I mean, there is a lot of stress in our industry with change. That’s kind of like a good thing and bad thing. One of the things that I’ve always been energized about—doing this now for, I guess I’m finishing my mumble—is that it’s constantly changing. Constantly changing. I find that exciting, but I also find that stressful. And sometimes anything in security can be stressful because you want to be as right as often as possible.
As a side note, I absolutely hate the saying, “Well, you know, the bad guys only need to be right once; we need to be right a hundred percent of the time.” It’s like: can we just drop that? It’s one of those truths—I’m not right a hundred percent of the time. I have mistakes galore over here. And no, that’s not true. And the bad guys aren’t right just once.
I mean, they’re pounding on the door. I get what people are trying to say, but it’s one of those tropes in security that just makes very little sense.
So sometimes I get overstressed about stuff like that. What’s one of the things you do to deal with the stresses in security that’s healthy and not necessarily…
Logan: Yeah, I’ve got—I’ve got two hobbies. So I’ve got two hobbies right now that aren’t business related. I put security and business—I run a cybersecurity company—kind of in that same column. And if I let it, it’ll eat my life. Because I’m a natural grinder. It’s what I do.
So I’ve got two hobbies. One: I’m really into analog and automatic watches. I don’t know why, but the engineer part of my brain thinks that watches that are—especially automatic watches—they’re springs and gears. Like, they are a marvel of human engineering. And I absolutely—it’s great to be able to turn my brain off, as best as you can. It’s fine work on your hands. And I’ll disassemble and I’ll clean them. I don’t have as much time for that as I used to. I have kids now, so that’s a little bit—so that’s gone away. But it’s still something I love to do when I’m like, I just need to disconnect. I need to reset. I need to kind of get my head on my shoulders. Let’s do this.
The other thing I love: I’ve always been an avid reader, but I can only read so many self-help books and business books and security books. My brain’s going, ahh! So I am a pleasure sci-fi reader. I love Kindle Unlimited—finding these people who are actually pretty talented, trying to get their books out there, and writing cool sci-fi novels. That’s one of my favorite things to do—taking an hour and just… I’ll get a cup of tea or a beer or whatever and sit down, and I’ll just read through a nice book or two over a couple nights. That’s a huge way for me to relax.
Greg: Yeah, I remember when I was about eight years old, I was curious as to how this stopwatch that I had gotten somehow or another—actually I think I found it, which is weird. It was a working stopwatch. It was pretty decent. So I opened up the back, and I was never able to put that thing back together. laughs
Logan: laughs So many YouTube videos. So many YouTube videos of “What does this gear do? Oh no, I popped it out, how do I get it back in? I can’t get it back in!”
Greg: It was at that point in time, it’s like, you know, I still have my entire life in front of me. What am I going to do with it? Well, being a watchmaker was not going to be one of them. I found it fascinating, I love it, but it’s just like, I don’t have the patience for that. That would be more stressful for me—for the little gears and all that.
Logan: I have yet to fully disassemble and reassemble. That is a level of skill I don’t think I’ll ever get. I do mild repairs or I’ll pull things apart and see how they work because it’s like an old junk automatic that I bought off a garage sale or something like that. That’s fun for me. I want to get there. I really do. I don’t know if I have the patience and I don’t know if I have the dexterity.
Like, I don’t know if you’ve—if you’ve got the back—you know what I’m talking about: tweezers and little picks. I got the kit, my hand’s not steady enough for some of that kind of stuff. It makes like pulling out a splinter with tweezers—that’s like the finest work I can ever do. But this stuff is like a hundred times finer than that. And you have to wear like a little monocle or something to be able to see what you’re doing.
Greg: I mean, it makes…
Logan: They give you finger gloves. They give you little sterile finger gloves. Not—you can’t wear full gloves because you need dexterity. Like little caps on your fingers so you can put your hands in there. I got a kit that came with that and I’m like, “What’s this thing for?” And I’m like, “Oh, that’s because there’s literally no other way to get these things than shoving your finger in there and trying to twist it.” So they give you the finger caps so you don’t get your oils on it. It’s a whole world.
Greg: Or you could draw little faces on it—make little finger puppets, you know.
Logan: Final note: if you decide watches are your hobby—no, the community is not a very broad community, but the rabbit hole runs deep. You can spend a lot more time than you want to in the watch community.
Greg: Well, outside of possibly learning how to actually assemble a de-assembled watch at some point in time, what are future plans you’ve got for yourself or your companies?
Logan: Yeah, so we’re all about operations. I believe operations are the key to the foundation of good security and good AI. It’s funny how they both draw from that, right? We talked about business processes. I think you can be more secure as a company by developing good business processes and thinking through the workflows and tools. Even in our industry, shiny tool syndrome is a thing, right? We are big believers—we don’t start with tools. We start with business process. Hey, how can we fix that?
So we’re scaling upwards and expanding outwards. We are hoping to go ahead and bring on new—well, we have a few companies under our banner, but we want to bring on a new partner in 2026 to expand our market reach. And also, we’re getting deeper in the CMMC space. I am based out of Columbus, Ohio—go Buckeyes. Wright-Patt Air Force Base is about a stone’s throw away and people in our community have a lot of questions about the CMMC thing. So we’re going full tilt on that and helping businesses figure out and navigate those waters.
Greg: Excellent. Well, Logan, I appreciate you spending the time—no pun intended when we were just talking about watches. I appreciate you spending the time talking to us this morning. A fascinating discussion. And as I figured before we started, we were going to be focusing more on the AI side, and I’m glad that we did. Great discussion. Might end up having you back to dig a little bit deeper into that subject.
Logan: I would love to talk about AI or security. We could be here all day, man. But thank you for having me. It was awesome.
Greg: And everybody, stay secure.