DaMon Ross: My Low Point

My name is DaMon Ross, I'm the founder of Cyber Defense International. Um, What we are is we're a boutique cybersecurity consulting firm. I never ran a business before, just really trying to understand, although I've been in cyber for over 27 years, the business aspect was completely new. So really just jumping in. I know I spent way more money than I should have on advice from different consultants and stuff like that. I think the lowest point was when, once I, got some office space and set up my operations center. We spent a lot of time and effort getting that building and that space right. And getting everything set up. And I wasn't able to get a business permit for my location because apparently the person that had rented me the space, never got the space inspected by the County and all the cold stuff. So I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. Like we just spent two months building, painting, installing hardware. And I can't even get a building permit, we went down to the County and they were like, yeah, technically this space doesn't exist, that you rented. So we had to, we had a choice. We either say, you know what, screw it, forget it. Or you're like, you know, find another space. So just the way my mind worked, I immediately just, you know, I thought, okay, here's the problem. What's the solution? I need to find another space. We were fortunate to find another space and move all that equipment and go through all that again. So there's another two months and that sucked. 

That was like that low point where you just got to just keep, just keep going, but once we got the second location, which is to say where we are now up and going and just starting to network and let people know what we were doing, what our services were. I ended up meeting people that, you know, had different relationships here in the Atlanta area. And I was able to connect with a couple companies that, were on the smaller side, small to medium size. So, you know, all those cup companies in that market typically don't really have a lot to spend on something like cyber is as a SunTrust or Bank of America would. So I was able to help them out with some ideas based on our experiences as to how they, you know, have a, a really mature cyber program without spending millions and millions of dollars that transitioned into, you know, my first Paying client, So when they wanted me to help them, you know, help mature their program. My next client experienced a cyber attack and somebody just called me out of the blue was like, Hey, can you help? So I ended up jumping on that and the company was really impressed with how we handled it. So they signed up and became a client of ours.  

I have nothing strategic. I can tell you that I did. It was just opportunities presented themselves. And I was in the right place to respond to them. And it just kind of went from there. I wish I had a, a formula of some type or some type of Harvard business review type thing to say, but I don't, I really don't. I've just been doing the same thing I've been doing it for 20 years and just, yeah, took a big leap of faith.