Ep 49: From Navy Firefighter to Cybersecurity Founder

Larry Aldrich: 00:00:06

Welcome to Aqua Talks where marketing meets bold game changing ideas.

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Larry Aldrich: 00:00:43

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Aqua Talks sponsored by Brents's Technology LLC and Zinique. We're here live at vets 26.

We're going to be doing some episodes with veterans, veteran owned businesses and the federal government all working to do outreach to the veteran and all veteran focused here at this conference.

We're going to be talking to some really exciting companies and some consultants who are doing some great things in the federal government and for the veterans. Stay tuned. We got a lot of information coming up. We're going to be speaking with a lot of great people. Thanks for joining back in with Aqua Talks.

We're live at Vets 26 in New Orleans.Today I'm sitting with Cordell Rolle.

Cordell, tell us a little bit about yourself, your company and let's just hear what you got going on.

Cordell Rolle: 00:01:28

Absolutely. Thank you, Larry. Yep. Cordell Rolle. Rolle it, rolle it. CyberSecurity. We're about seven years old here.

We do a lot of work with federal government VA primarily.

We do some B2B work too, supporting all the defense industrial based type companies, making sure that they can get up to speed with cmmc which is the new regulations has come down for all of us. I'll tell you that's it's been a great part of our business been growing out so far.

Larry Aldrich: 00:01:53

You said you're coming up on, on six. Tell me where you started, how you started.

Cordell Rolle: 00:01:56

Oh yeah, get into the meat of it. So this is a dream come true, Roll. It evolved out of just not being able to get promoted. Right.

Not being able to get to the level that you want to get at a company.

Larry Aldrich: 00:02:10

Yes.

Cordell Rolle: 00:02:11

You know, you throw in a couple layoffs. Exactly right. So you know you're doing great work. You're seeing where it's going.

I remember specifically I was still going to school one time and I was working at this insurance company. I was a developer for them and I went to my boss and I asked her for a raise and she told me it's not her job to give me a raise or do my future.

It's her job to make sure I do my job. And that's it? That sunk right to my heart. Right to my heart. I went home, I told my mom, I can't do this, I can't work here anymore.

It just, I can't have this. About a week later, talking to a buddy, I used to work at a non profit, and he's like, hey, I'm working for a startup. You need to come here.

You know, we'll take you right away. And I went over there. The day I went in, they met me at the front with a scooter, right?

He came rolling in a scooter and comes off, he's like, hey man, my name's Mark, I'm the VP here. He's like, check it out, you know, let me know what you think. I'll meet you in my office in 15 minutes. And I was like, what?

This is a company, you could do that. So I, you know, seeing from going working from an insurance company to that startup really had me excited.

And I spent a year and a half there learning from everyone. Everything was so new. Every challenge was like the first time that it just boiled something to me. I was like, you know what? I can do this.

Yeah, I can do this.

Larry Aldrich: 00:03:29

I started out extremely similar to what you're saying. And it's always a friend that gives you that little nudge.

Cordell Rolle: 00:03:36

Yeah.

Larry Aldrich: 00:03:36

And you know, I got, I got, I did some great things for a company I was working with. Didn't get the promotion, didn't get the bonus. And more than anything, I wanted that promotion. Friend of mine said, promote yourself.

And I was like, oh, okay, yes. I mean, that's all it took. Promote yourself. And that's what I did.

Cordell Rolle: 00:03:56

Oh, absolutely. And then the money doesn't even like money matters.

You're going to take your family, but it doesn't matter in the sense of that first year, I was just focused on getting our name out there, getting people to trust me. I was working with nonprofits, saying, let me do your it. I'll do it completely for free. I just want to show you that I can do this, you know?

And one thing I don't think people realize, when you work with nonprofits, you know who's on their boards, nothing but executives, nothing but leaders throughout your community are on there and not even trying it. Taking my work from doing all this free work to them. Started getting us customers saying, hey, you want to do that for our company?

You want to do that for our company? And next thing you know, just, just trying to do the good work, not trying to make the money. Ended up first getting Our first paid customer. Right.

And then getting another paid customer. And we spent our first couple of years there, you know, really doing a lot of nonprofit work. That was where. Well, a lot of money.

But nonprofits have so much pii. They have so much security risk. We are working with nonprofits every that did women's shelters, children's shelters.

So there's a lot of compliance that needs to be there that they can't even afford, you know, so we started doing that work. I got to mix that back in with that first startup company I talked about, Liberty it.

They gave me my first, you know, kind of government contract, said, hey, we know you do great work. Come here and do it back for us again under your own company's name. And I mean, it just kind of grew and grew from there. And I'll take the first.

It was seven years old. The first five years of the company were like. Yeah. I mean, we went from just me to a couple people to.

We were 35 last year, you know, right before we. Doge. Yeah, Doge was rough for us, you know, like many folks. But you know what we've learned over these years, especially those first few years?

You can be resilient. It's not about money. It's about doing the work. And people are going to see that.

Larry Aldrich: 00:05:46

And you diversify again. We are. You're with. With one of our brands, Aqua. We're tourism and destination. We work with a lot of airports here.

We're at a veterans conference and we're with representing Brancis. We're introducing Zinique, but along the lines of our tourism and destination, we do marketing, communications with airports.

So talk a little bit about what.

Cordell Rolle: 00:06:09

You're doing with airport. Yeah, absolutely.

I was sharing earlier, you know, when I first talked to you guys, I was so intrigued to know that you were working with airport authorities.

Larry Aldrich: 00:06:17

Yes.

Cordell Rolle: 00:06:17

It's an industry that, you know, I didn't really understand until a couple years ago when we just randomly was like, all right, let's bid for this local airport. Let's see what we can do. And I mean, what a world. What a world. What a world of compliance. What a world of professionalism.

What a world of non stop coming in from every angle. We've got the airlines themselves, there's ground crews that you're working with. There's TSA rules, there's border patrol rules.

It is such an underserved world that when we got into it, we're like, we're prime for this type of work.

Larry Aldrich: 00:06:47

What do you do at the airport?

Cordell Rolle: 00:06:48

So we do a lot of cyber security for them. We do their IT operations for them. We interface with the various vendors that each one of them have that need to come in and get access.

So when it comes to access control, we are leaving that for the airport. We're doing all their training systems. We control those. So people come in, they need to get badging systems. We're running those for them as well.

Any of the common use computers that are used by, again, all those various vendors that are coming into the airports. On any given day, you could have, you know, 50, 60 different vendors in the airport operating. Right.

Doing some welding over here, changing out the fire systems, working on the conveyor belts. So it's a lot to track.

And we tried to build an IT system that makes it easy for everyone, all the key stakeholders, to understand what's happening in their facility.

Larry Aldrich: 00:07:36

Is this your first vets conference?

Cordell Rolle: 00:07:39

No, actually, this is our fourth one. Fourth or fifth one. I think the only one I missed since we started was the COVID year. Okay, Right. I think it was maybe year two.

We didn't do it for Covid, but it's been a great conference for us. Yeah, it is.

Larry Aldrich: 00:07:53

This is the first year of New Orleans. The past few years been in Orlando,.

Cordell Rolle: 00:07:56

Which we've been spoiled because we're in Florida. Yeah, I like.

Larry Aldrich: 00:07:59

I like New Orleans, though.

Then again, we do do a lot of business and travel and tourism, so hitting all these different locations, it's also travel and tourism for us, but that's a different brand. Brent says we focus on federal, state, enterprise and working with veterans, so we do a lot of outreach to veterans.

So I love coming to talk to the veterans. And were you veteran?

Cordell Rolle: 00:08:20

Yes, sir. Served in the US Navy.

Larry Aldrich: 00:08:23

Okay.

Cordell Rolle: 00:08:23

Yes.

Larry Aldrich: 00:08:24

What did you do in the Navy?

Cordell Rolle: 00:08:25

Oh, yeah. I was funny enough. I'll tell you how I got into tech, because no one ever. I was a firefighter in the Navy. I was a damage controlman.

I got out as an E5, DC2.

But what happened was right before I was getting out, this company sold some software to the ship, and it was an item space management system so they could track where some of the firefighting equipment was, where the chem warfare equipment was around the space, and they couldn't install it. So I installed it as a work center supervisor, read through the book, set up their access database that they had at the time.

And when that company came, they were like, holy smokes, you did this? And I was like, yeah, yeah, I'm doing it.

They're like, oh, my gosh, And I was like, well, I'm getting out in two weeks, so I won't actually get to use it. And they're like, you gotta work for us. And that's what happened.

The day I got out of the Navy, I went from being the firefighter to them hiring me as an IT specialist. And then they spent the next five years teaching me things.

And I got to travel around the world, going to all those different ships, doing that same installation I did on my own ship. I went through Korea, I went through Japan, I went through the Middle East.

Just ship to ship to ship, doing this install over and over for them just because I was impatient. One day at work. That's how things happen. Yeah.

Larry Aldrich: 00:09:35

Put yourself in a certain situation and watch opportunity open doors.

Cordell Rolle: 00:09:39

Absolutely. And you can tell the other story at the start of the company. I'm gonna do it. I want to do it right.

I can't sit still, you know, leave well enough alone is not me. Right. We can make it better. We can. We can improve this. You know, And a lot of times I was talking to Steph, it's better to be lazy sometimes.

Like, I want to do this so I don't have to do it again. You know, I want to automate this. I wanted the alerts to come to me so I don't have to walk down and check the gauge 30 times a night, you know?

Larry Aldrich: 00:10:05

Yeah.

Cordell Rolle: 00:10:05

So those kind of things, especially the name. You're crawling up and down these shafts to literally check a gauge and you're tapping.

It would be great if that darn signal came up to the engineering room so you could just watch it.

Larry Aldrich: 00:10:17

Where do you want to see? Roll it. Go. What's your little bit of your vision?

Cordell Rolle: 00:10:22

Oh, wow.

Larry Aldrich: 00:10:22

Let us. Let us in a little bit, you know, to give us all the blueprint. Let us in a little bit.

Cordell Rolle: 00:10:27

You know, it's evolved as. As I've evolved. You know where we are now? When I started this, I didn't even think we could be here.

Larry Aldrich: 00:10:36

Yeah.

Cordell Rolle: 00:10:36

You know, thinking about making a million dollars seems so daunting. Yeah, so daunting. And now, you know, to. To see money come in and out so quickly. It's just like, you got to grow with.

Larry Aldrich: 00:10:49

It goes out fast.

Cordell Rolle: 00:10:50

Absolutely. Oh, it goes fast. The second it comes, I tell you. A quick sidebar, right? Maturity of the company. Learning how to work with finance companies, right?

Larry Aldrich: 00:11:00

Yes.

Cordell Rolle: 00:11:00

Because one of the things for us to grow, and this is a great segue, is I might get a huge order. Right. I just got to order for half A million dollars. Right. Which is great. Huge win for you. How do I buy that?

You know, I got a lot of payroll and stuff to run through. Like, how do I just come up with 500,000 right away? So continuing to grow the company so that we can get bigger is a big foothold for me. Right.

And it's not necessarily get bigger in the sense of we have to hire a huge staff, because I think that was always a goal in the past was like, everything was based on how many FTEs you had.

Larry Aldrich: 00:11:34

Yes.

Cordell Rolle: 00:11:34

Now it's, you know, how much output can we have with what we have? You know, bring in better people so that we can expand. We haven't really talked AI yet, but, you know, we're.

We're just as in deep with AI as everyone else. We don't typically sell it as AI. It's just utilized in house with how we use it.

So for us, we want to be that company that all the airports can go to when they think of their security operations. Right. We understand what they do, we understand how to deliver it to them. We understand the importance of it.

You know, it's not just as simple as, like, oh, that door doesn't work like that door. Not working for X amount of hours is a huge security risk for everybody. All right, so we want to continue to do that.

I'd like to do some more work directly with the airlines. Right. We do a lot of really cool software that we write. I said we're a cyber security company. What's funny.

But we write this software ourselves, so kind of a lot like you is. Right. You used your technology of what you could build to go do other things. Yeah, Right. So you're a marketing company.

You know, you're a connection, a logistics company. But, you know, we're really tech companies that are going out there trying to solve these problems.

Larry Aldrich: 00:12:38

Yeah, absolutely. And we think we came up with a big solution with Zinique.

Cordell Rolle: 00:12:43

Yes.

Larry Aldrich: 00:12:43

And we're introducing it here at the vets conference, vets 26 in New Orleans.

We're about to really start pushing it out to our federal partners, our DMO partners, our enterprise partners out there and see where we can go and, and.

And talking to you with a cyber security organization, definitely like to partner and see where we can have those synergies to continue to work together.

And, and, and we work with a lot of airports and, you know, definitely some things that you could probably talk to some of our airport partners about that can maybe help them out.

Cordell Rolle: 00:13:17

Absolutely. I love the technology stack that you brought here, understanding it, seeing how you focus, need this information. Let's grab the correct API.

Let's put this into a UX that makes sense for our business, makes sense for the people who are going to utilize it so we can grow. I absolutely love that. Right. And then talking to your engineer. Right. It's not bolted on AI, it's integrated from the jump street.

Larry Aldrich: 00:13:41

Yeah.

Cordell Rolle: 00:13:42

So that you know what, it's working. It's code and AI that are seamless together.

Larry Aldrich: 00:13:45

Yeah. Well, let's find some more time to work together.

Have another conversation, have a good conversation with our lead architect and let's see what we can do. Definitely, like talk more with you.

Cordell Rolle: 00:13:56

Absolutely.

Larry Aldrich: 00:13:56

Thanks for being with us on Aquatox.

Cordell Rolle: 00:13:58

Hey, thank you.

Larry Aldrich: 00:13:59

Enjoy the rest of your show.

Cordell Rolle: 00:14:00

Have a great trip, everybody. Enjoy the show.

Narrator: 00:14:06

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