Kevin Powderly: Building and Selling a Cybersecurity Empire | Episode 004 | 07-31-24

What does it take to leave a stable corporate job and dive headfirst into the uncertain world of entrepreneurship? Join us as Kevin Powderly shares his incredible journey from working under the legendary Jack Welch at GE to co-founding his own company, CyberCore.

Growing up in a big Irish family on Long Island, Kevin's competitive spirit was shaped by his early experiences and honed during his time at technology giants like Businessland and GE. Hear firsthand how these fueled his career dreams and led him to take the bold step of starting his own venture.

A spontaneous brainstorming session led Kevin and his brother John to mortgage a house and build CyberCore from scratch in August 2000. This episode is a testament to the power of family support, creativity, and the willingness to take calculated risks. Kevin recounts the hurdles they faced, from financial uncertainties to managing family dynamics while their business grew exponentially. Learn how a mission-critical mindset with complementary roles and teamwork became the backbone of their success, allowing them to attract and retain talented individuals even during their lean times with limited resources.

Kevin shares his -- good and bad-- experiences partnering with banking, private equity, managing liquidity, and good advisors. What were Kevin's emotional and strategic considerations that came with choosing the right partners and preparing for an exit? As Kevin is now transitioning to his new venture, InisCore Technologies, he reflects on his experience working with his son and wife. He believes family involvement and drive help build something meaningful. This episode is packed with valuable lessons on entrepreneurial innovation, family dynamics, and the keys to sustained business success.

Hello everybody, welcome to From the Ground Up. From the Ground Up, as you know, is a conversation with business owners and we talk about their successes and their challenges, what they've overcome, the decisions they've made and how they built their businesses from the ground up to the wonderful successes that they've had. And today I'm very excited about today's podcast. Today I have Kevin Powderly. Welcome Kevin, appreciate it, appreciate the opportunity. Absolutely. Kevin is a good friend. I've known Kevin a long time. I've watched him go through various stages of his career and his life and have always admired and observed the wonderful success Kevin has had.

Kevin comes to us by way of Long Island, grew up on Long Island, a big Irish family, kind of similar traits to what my background is. Coming out of New Jersey, he came down to Maryland We'll talk about that. He joined the big, steady, stable company and then one day, one day day, the entrepreneurial bug bites and his business career goes from there and that's when the story gets exciting. So, kevin, I'm looking forward to digging into everything. So, big Irish family from Long Island, how many, how big was that like? What a great way to grow up.

Yeah, great, great family opportunity. Eight kids, six boys, two girls, and seven of us are 15 months apart from each other. So we were all best friends and from sports to school, to everything. But we all went our separate way and I took off and came down to the University of Maryland and started my college career and really never left.

Yeah, so two things brought you to Maryland the University of Maryland and someone you met at the university.

Absolutely my my bride of 37 years, Emily, and two wonderful, amazing children, Patrick and who just got married and had a son two months ago, and I have a daughter that got married two weeks ago, so might be going back to work soon.

Fantastic. So you came down. Big Irish I I love that within 15 months of each other. I mean, that is the prototypical up in the New York, new Jersey area. So you came down. You played lacrosse here in Maryland. Yeah, so you played in high school big Long Island sport. Is that why you came to Maryland to play lacrosse?

No, actually I wanted to go to school at a big university with a big football program. I did play lacrosse, but when I got to Maryland I didn't play, I played club. I got hurt and then I was kind of just waffling around. My dad was like why don't you get serious with your academics and stop chasing a ball around? So I got focused on my school and what I wanted to do and took it from there and took it from there once I got there and then I met my wife at the university and graduated and off we went to New York for five years to start a technology business back then, which was 1985. So that's technology before the internet. Right, that was technology before the internet. That was raw. That was the Flintstone ages of technology.

So you went to New York and you started your career with.

I worked with a firm up there called Businessland. They were really out of San Jose, california, had a huge operation in New York. They had about 200 offices. They were probably one of the fastest growing system integrators and worked for them for five years, relocated to the Maryland area and then GE came in and acquired them and stayed with GE for about another 12 years and had a great career there and really enjoyed it, but always had that entrepreneur spirit in me and I knew at some point I was launching out and every year it was the next year and all of a sudden I looked up and I was 35 and it was time to go. Yeah, there it is.

There it is. It's a theme we talk about a lot on from the ground up, the entrepreneurs and GE, ge specifically. I mean I've known a lot of executives come out of GE. A lot of them came from a company who was acquired by GE, and for better or for worse. Anytime you look back in hindsight people can be critical. But the reality is in the 80s and 90s, right in Jack Welch days and developing the managerial guidelines and the Six Sigma management style, that was such a great training ground to build your business acumen to become that entrepreneur.

You know, as I say to people, I have no formal MBAs, that entrepreneur. You know, as I say to people, I have no formal MBAs. I have an undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland. But I've got five MBAs from GE which the training ground was phenomenal. And I knew it probably in my mid thirties, early thirties, that I needed probably another year or two under my belt at GE to learn a little bit more on the finance side of the business and how I was going to launch it and get it to take off. But the training was phenomenal and Jack Welch at that point was, you know, the leader in the industry.

We were either number one or number two and we were out of that market. So we were doing pretty well. But I also had that spirit where I was like, okay, it's time for me to kind of move on. And they were trying to promote me and relocate me to another city out of Baltimore and I had just gotten here a couple of years and I had little kids and I wasn't up for the next move as they would move It'd be two years if they could yeah that's what they like to do.

Right GE likes to move around, and the other thing they like to do is really promote a competitive right. The low man on the pole is out and the high guy moves on and everybody else is still fighting. And the high guy moves on and everybody else is still is fighting. Did that did? Building that competitive spirit? How did that translate into what you did in business after you left and started your business which, by the way, the name of that business, CyberCore? We're going to talk about that, but how did that come? How'd that translate?

So GE clearly was survival of the fittest. If you didn't, if you didn't excel and and and really shine inside the organization and beat your quota and always be an overachiever, you were out. You know, it didn't take long to see who the bottom of the barrel was. They were leaving, you knew it. They knew it and they probably would try and get out before they got taken out. But when I started CyberCore I had that instinct. My father was a 20-year military person, airborne ranger, ran the house extremely strict, very competitive. All eight of us were extremely sports-oriented, academic-oriented, but he drove a tight ship. And when I got in the company I knew the only way I could launch a company and to take some of those skill sets from GE was to be very organized and very competitive. Either we were going to be number one or two in our market or we probably weren't going to survive. It didn't matter that I wanted to be in or out of the market, we would be out.

Yeah, I mean that is such fertile training ground. So many of the great entrepreneurs that we talk to we have as clients a lot of GE background, Absolutely A lot of GE background, especially in the 80s and 90s, which you know. It's interesting, back then that's the old Wall Street, greed is good time period, right, Absolutely. When Gordon Gekko said greed is good. It's so different now it's interesting to think about how would GE translate in today's world. And what's interesting about it is, you know, there's this tendency to look back at the Jack Welch days and say, man, that was harsh and that was tough. But business is hard, right, being an entrepreneur is hard being successful. There's no soft landings. It's do, or?

die. Yeah, survival is the key and, as you know, starting a company is, you know, the rate of failure is so high, so high, so high. So you have to be so streamlined in your process, you have to be very focused on what your mission is and what you do and what you do well. And we had a lot of people that came along in the early days of CyberCore. CyberCore launched and the dot-com business came along, Everybody was saying, and my brother, john and I, hey, you guys have got to get in this. And I said to John and John would say to me every day stay focused, stick to your knitting, don't move from our market and what we do.

So let's talk about that transition. So your brother was with you at GE at the time, right, that's right. And John Powderly who? And so the two of you are thinking, okay, for whatever reason, it's time. Yeah, Right, You've gotten to the place, you're ready and you start CyberCore. Yeah, Tell me, share with us what drove that. Where was your head at the beginning? How did you name CyberCore? That all kind of came together and we're going to talk about the timing of this next, but it's interesting. You know, I always find it interesting the moment right when you pull it all together and you design it. Tell me about those first months.

Yeah, you look back and those pivotal points in your career or in your life, and clearly the day that we decided that we were leaving GE was pivotal. We had to go home to our wives and John and I lived next door to each other, which was interesting. He's four years younger than me so he was a little, you know, in his mid-career at GE. But we sat down and we were sketching up where John and my role would be in the company and we were thinking about what kind of name we would come up. And John is very innovative and he's extremely smart in terms of the operations side of the business and he started sketching. We had a couple of Coors Lights I think that's right. And he started sketching on this napkin, cyber, cyber. And then he had this core competency and I'm like I'm just sitting there staring at him. I'm going, don't have another Coors Light. I don't understand what cyber is. Cyber wasn't even a word. Right, that's right. So here we are in August of 2000. And so he's sketching it out and he's got this little tornado and all of a sudden he's saying this thing's going to spin, it's going to be a whirlwind of technology. And I'm starting to catch on to what he's saying, I'm starting to think hmm, cyber, I don't understand that yet. But I understand core. I understand the whirlwind of technology. I like that and I don't care. I want to start a company. I don't want to be my own boss and I want to control my own destiny and drive my future.

We know the business inside and out. We know what we're doing. There's a huge market share out there, but the market was still pretty stagnant. It wasn't accelerating. At any rate, there was really nothing going on on the defense side at that point. So off we go. We resigned from GE. At that point we said, hey, we're going to do it. And we resigned on a Friday and Monday morning. We had a little office up and running and, before we knew it, a couple of people from GE came over and said hey, we want to join the team. We're like it's going to be tough to pay them, but we'll figure this out. And so they came on board and we started with about three, four people.

So so much unpacked there, right, I mean just so much unpacked. It seems like, you know, I love when I get an entrepreneur in the room because they tell us that story and there's just, it's your life. And it seems so ordinary, right, because you did it and it was successful. And but so much unpack it's. It's the courage to leave the study stable, right, and I remember my wife's look when I said, hey, we're having a lot of success here at Merrill, let's just leave business. What's the worst that could happen? And um, and so it's the courage.

It's the support from the family Huge. It's your brother and you, different competencies coming together, having trust, faith in a partner, the creativity around it, but, more importantly, the excitement, right, the creativity is driven. I'm sure the core is light, enhance it, but it comes from the excitement. And then you just said something at the end which is great, from the excitement. And and then you just said something at the end which is great, talented people came in. And the difference, I think, between successful entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who struggle is you didn't say, hey, we're not ready, we don't have the money, let's wait till the cashflow gets to a certain level. It's, they're talented, we'll be successful. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Let's just get them and let's run.

Yeah.

Right, yeah, Just pull the ripcord and pull a bandaid off and let's go. Either we're going to do it or we're not going to do it, and I think our it's awesome. I had spoke one time, maybe about 10 years ago, on calculator risk, which meant, don't you know, I did mortgage the house but I I basically was calculated in terms of where I was going to put that money. I just didn't take it and say, hey, we're going to stop paying people and bring them on. But we were really blessed with our you know, as you mentioned, with the spouses and my wife Emily and John's wife Christine. They were so supportive of what we were doing and that really helped us breathe. It helped us relax a little bit during the day because, as you know, there was so much stress in the business with a startup and trying to get it off the ground and get going, and then, as you hear, our story goes on. Things got really turbulent very quickly about eight months, Right?

Well, I don't know if I've ever told you a story. So when I came to Maryland from New Jersey, my wife and I had to take a three quarter pay cut. It was making almost nothing. She's like, let's go Right, If you think this is a good thing, she's. And we came down. And I always say this. And the reason for the story is I always say I don't think I really fully appreciated how much risk I took until after I was through it. That's right, Because I was just focused on outcome and and I was determined and I was, I was confident because I was determined. And that's what I hear from you. I hear listen, we're not going to go thinking risk first. We're going to think about what we know, what we can do. We know what we can accomplish. Let's just go accomplish it.

Just make it happen. That's great, and stay focused and don't get out of your swim lane and that was really our key to our success out of the block.

Yeah, future entrepreneurs, take that one, take that, take those pieces. Those are nuggets, those are takeaways. Right, Michele? One Takeaway, one Takeaway, one. I've noted it moment that changes the course of the business. Some people call it luck, some people call it fortune. I like to call it an opportunity, recognized, seized, and an entrepreneur understands. You had the moment of all moments, the most heart-wrenching but biggest moment that could have possibly happened in your business. Tell me about that eight months later.

So we start, we launch in August of 2000. We've got a nice little business going. We're not killing anybody or building anything that's so great, but it's starting to move and we're starting to see some success and we're slowly utilizing relationships that we've had in this space for 15 years and it was going pretty good. And then all of a sudden, nine months later, 9-11 hits and the world stopped and we stopped in our tracks. We're a defense contractor in the intelligence community and we're starting to think we can't get anybody to return our phone call. Everybody's just stagnant. And we reach out to our law firm and we're starting to ask them what their bankruptcy protection law is in the state, because we can't seem to get any traction.

And our biggest client calls and says we're actually bidding a massive contract that we'd like you guys to be part of and we've had such a good relationship with this individual that ran one of the biggest defense contracting companies and he said we're going to bid this, we want you on the team. Long story short, about two and a half, three months later, they fast-tracked the contract Out of 11 companies they won. They turn around and call us and if I look at a pivotal moment that I didn't recognize how pivotal it was going to be is when I got the phone call and said are you sitting down? I thought it was bad news. I said, oh man, we're going to lose this one and I don't know what we're going to do. And he said we have just been awarded a 10-year contract worth $2 billion. We're going to award you a 10-year contract and you're going to help us do all the infrastructure.

And that opened up a whole opportunity. But it also created so many unknowns for us with how we're going to get the capital to grow. We don't have a big enough facility. We're going to have to build that. And so we went into overdrive and just started putting everything on the whiteboard and started figuring it out and pulling in the right players to help us. And off we went and from that point it skyrocketed over the next seven years and just, the growth was exponential and it was just. But it was tough to keep up with. It was a stressing on us, it was a stress on the company, it was a stress on our families. Everybody was under the gun. But we knew it was going to be a huge success because it was growing so fast. So that was a good time, but it was also a very stressful time that we dealt with.

Yeah, that's amazing. I think what's amazing about it is moments like that. So the definition of luck, right yeah, luck isn't random, right Right. Luck is purposeful, luck is execution, luck is recognizing and that was a big moment. But also, you just hit it on the head, okay, so we got it. Now. What? Right, right Now, we got to execute on this son of a gun, absolutely. How do we, how do we get that thing and and get it running a full speed so that you can build the business, the business that you want, right, and keep the reputation that you have? And the reputation got you the opportunity. That's right.

The relationships, the reputation, past performance. They knew we were executors. They loved us. They loved working with us, which made us feel great. But at the end of the day, they put a lot of faith in us and you know, john and I have spent a lot of endless weekends and days and nights not letting anyone down. It meant everything to us at the company. It had a reputation and that's why people were attracted to it. A lot of employees that came on board were like we want to be part of this. We want to be part of the success. We want to be part which is more important than the success was being part of the mission, defending our national interests and being part of that. We had a lot of military that worked for a firm. We had a lot of people that the parents were military and it meant a lot to them and it meant a lot to us.

So we we put a lot of effort in that area, so so let's go from there.

What? What describe how? How you built a culture right If you have this giant, this giant monster, just thrown in your lap and you've got to manage it. But you also have to build a culture, right If you know there's no such thing as a great company with a terrible culture. So how did you balance all that? How did you manage all that?

Yeah, I think that was the hard part was trying to diffuse a lot of the stress in the organization to try and make the quality of work and the life for the employees beneficial to them, not only financially, which meant a lot to them.

We put a lot of incentives out there to help drive behavior, to help grow the company.

But in a fiduciary responsibility for us was that we had to control. You know we couldn't just go out, you know, buying other companies or doing things that didn't make sense in our swim lane, so we stayed focused on that. But we also built a culture where we would do a lot of events. We would do huge, like Oreo games, but we didn't invite the employees only, we invited all the family and we spent a lot of time at those events going around to the spouses, the husbands, the wives and the children and thanking them for the sacrifice that their loved ones are doing working for CyberCore. Because it was a lot of work A lot of times it was weekends, it was late nights of getting systems up and running, mission-critical work that had to be up and running, and a lot of people sacrificed a lot of things, but a lot of them did it for us, and they did it for the mission too, which meant a lot to us. They knew how patriotic we were and they wanted to be part of that success.

So the culture is defined mission, collaboration around an outcome. Be grateful for the people and the families that you have and let them know it. I mean, I think that's fantastic.

You hit it all out right on that head and I think that breeded. We would say to them when we would look to an employee would say hey, I have a friend that wants to come work at Cyber Core, and we would absolutely the first thing we would say they'd have to have the same values and the same mantra that you have and that they're going to bring that to the table here. If they're not on board with that and they're really talented from a technical standpoint, we're not interested.

Yeah, and a lot of the younger listeners, maybe from the ground up, may not fully appreciate that the post 9-11 moment was the first time where we as a country, we were attacked on our ground and it was jarring. And the entire security and defense apparatus of the largest military and the biggest country in the world was changing radically, at light speed, and you were literally at the center, the core of that change. I can't imagine what the frenetic pace that is. Yeah.

I think you know, if you looked at that time in our country it was critical and it was critical what we were doing and what all the other contractors were doing and what the government was doing. We had to secure the networks. We had to secure the penetration that people from outside countries were trying to get into the networks. And you know, take our critical information and our. You know.

And the networks are all new. I mean, the internet is really just getting going right. At that same time, early 2000s, this is starting to pick up. So that's developing at a breakneck pace and you have the whole military complex changing at a breakneck pace.

And you have government agencies that have changing at a break and you have, uh, government agencies that have systems that are 20 years old that can't can't support them. So companies like ours were infiltrating with you know all kinds of new technology, collaborating with great manufacturers and being part of you know a full solution yeah so.

So how did you and john handle stress points? I mean, mean, is it natural Because you're brothers, right? I'm sure there's been a few times in the backyard where you guys tussled and may have gotten into it. So how did you handle that? How did you guys did you get along? What was your mechanism for your relationship to make sure that you guys were together and being productive as brothers?

to make sure that you guys were together and being productive as brothers. You know, the first thing I would say to any entrepreneur with a partner, whether it's your brother or just a regular partner, is 100% respect and be careful what you say, because you can't take that back once it's said. And I think we took a lot of our upbringing and there were a lot of days that we had, you know, hundreds of employees out on the floor and we would go into the office together and just sit there and say how are we going to make payroll? How are we going to, how are we going to do this next launch? They want us to build a 10 billion, a million dollar build right now. We also got three in the queue that we can't even get out the door and we got this one. They want us. Mission critical has to be done, but I think his we were very lucky that we both were not on the same path in terms of what we did for the company, and that was the most critical. I always said to John we do not want to go to the customer together every day. You go left, I'll go right. You attack this side, I'll attack that.

John was an expert in operations so he knew supply chain inside and out. He built our 100,000 square foot distribution facility out at Oak Ridge he it was the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. You know $10 million worth of product in there. They mopped the floor every day. I mean the place looked like it was the most customers would come in and they're like these guys are organized, these guys they've got a system. And we spent a lot of money on infrastructure too and we reinvested a lot. We built a $4.5 million skiff inside our facility. We had a data center. One thing that we did when we built our facility we put everybody in one facility. A lot of people were saying, hey, why don't you executives move up the street into a high-rise in a glass building? I said we're going to be on the ground floor. I love that and we are going to be able to come to the front door and we're all going to be part of this collaboration together.

I love that, absolutely love that, and I and I love the be careful what you say, cause it sticks. So, Michele, you're doing a wonderful job, thank you.

Words matter. I agree, and I'm sorry I don't think we got that on on film. Can you say that one more time?

No again. Parallel. Michele was a big part of design in this and same thing. Be proud Something your clients are proud of, something your employees are proud of, and build it out for them.

That's right. That's why they want to come here.

That's why they want to come. That's terrific, and then more of the family came into the business.

Yeah. So a couple of years in my one brother who lived in Long Island, 15 months younger than me, called up and said hey, I've been in this other industry for the last 10 years. I want to move to Maryland and I want to. I think he thought we played a lot of golf and it didn't work, but he said he's going to come down. I said, well, it's going to be a challenge because we're kind of just really ramping up and you're really not in the technical space. I'll start at the entry level. And that's all he needed to say to me. I said wow. I said okay, so come in, because I knew he was smart as a whip. I mean, and this is my brother, andy, and he was so smart and John and I knew you could trust Andy with everything we had, and we had a lot of information and things that we were working on that we needed to bounce off other people besides just our law firm and our accounting firm. We needed someone we could trust outside of John and I. So Andy was perfect.

And then, as the business really started to grow, I called my oldest brother who worked for the Bank of New York, tom, and said, hey, we're going to be hiring a high-level CFO. Oldest brother who worked for the bank of New York, tom, and said hey, we're, uh, we're going to be hiring a high level CFO. What qualifications would I want in terms of a CFO I'm going to be interviewing down here? I mean, he lived in New York and he said, well, this, this. He gave me a whole laundry list. I said, okay, we're going to, we're going to be hiring that person pretty quickly. And, of course, the phone rang two days later. It wasn't Tom, it was my mother. Oh, tom's going to work at CyberCore. I said, yes, mom, of course, of course Don't say no to mom.

That's a good takeaway.

Tom said I'd be interested in helping you run that company. It looks like what you're doing is absolutely phenomenal and he's a whiz finance, which meant the world to us, because I think there was a lot of Enron stuff going on and I was kind of getting a little nervous with that piece of the business as it was growing so fast and all the bank relationships. And Tom said I'll relocate to Baltimore and I'll run the finance for you. That was a no-brainer. So Tom came in and off we went and the four of us were kind of meeting in the conference room every week talking about family matters and then talking about the business all day.

Right, the four horsemen of Long Island, that's so true. Well, that's such a good story. And we get that question from entrepreneurs from time to time, mostly with kids. Yeah, but that's family, right, and you know, if they come in, you know can they slack off or how do I? You know how do we have a respectful relationship? So you guys figured that out. You were able to create a because you trust family. That's the advantage of family. You said it. You know you can trust that they're there looking out for your best interest, because they're family.

Yeah, for us it worked. I mean, I was the kind of the CEO and I ran the company, and so we would meet and everybody would just air out what was going well, what they like, what we can improve on, but we never had any big issues. That's great, and so from that standpoint it was a huge success. But we also have 25 grandkids out there that all of a sudden start looking at the business and you start figuring out you know, hey, can I come work there? And it's so. We had a famous saying, which is you decide when they come in, they decide when they leave, and so you gotta be very careful and make sure that's really what they want to do. And are they you know, um, you know, on the computer side, and, and is this something that they really have a passion for? They just want to come work and stay at the firm.

Right, right, no, that's great. So you're ramped up. You've got the right people in place Yep, you know the four horsemen are in place and you have other executives Yep, you've got some great, dedicated people. They're all about the mission, they're all about this change and the company's growing. You had your stress points. You got through them right, brilliantly.

So when did you know you had gotten over the top? Yeah, probably about four or five years into it maybe about five I think that we started really feeling comfortable. We were able to release some bank relationships that we didn't need anymore. We could self-fund a lot of the work that we would do and we started controlling our own destiny. So that was really good. I mean, that meant a lot to us at some point when the receivables got to a point where we could just kind of fund the business ourself and it allowed us to control. We were very fiduciary in our spending of company money and stuff, but we also wanted to control our own destiny and so those areas, those reflection points, were at that point we felt really comfortable. We had good advisors. We had Mike Bader from Venable that was our lead counsel since we started and really helped us, advised us. They had some high-tech lawyers that specialized in the defense side. So we met with them a bunch of times and saw what other firms were doing. So that kind of worked out pretty well for us.

Mike is a wonderful guy and had a great career, even after his legal career, in the venture capital world, so obviously very smart in this space. And so your capital was banks before that. And that's always tough, right, because banks they can be great partners early, and as soon as it starts to get a little complicated right, then all of a sudden they're like wait, everybody, slow down, I have 25 restrictions I have to put on this money and that gets very frustrating.

Yeah, I think the biggest challenge for us was as entrepreneurs. The bank would come in. We had all these specific you know, specific covenants and a lot of entrepreneurs know that Our debt to equity was out of whack. We were growing so fast. So they'd come in and say, hey, listen, we need you to slow down the engine. And then, as soon as they went out the back door, someone would come up and say, hey, we got this project for 2 million. So I'd call a customer and say, hey, can you pay us that other? You know the other 3.2 you owe us. Instead of giving us 3.2, give us 3 million, give us 3.1. And they'd be like, sure, and then they'd pay. And then I'd rethink and I'd tell the guy let's go to the next project. Then the bank would call a week later Did you just get another big project?

That's such an amazing statement. The difference between banking, banking and an entrepreneur. Right, you have to slow down because your debt to equity is out of whack.

And you're sitting there, what? Yeah, we're growing like crazy, it's all profitable and the business is doing amazing. The funniest story was at one point we were dealing with a bank which we leased pretty quickly after this. But we went up to a meeting in New York and there was a guy that we hadn't seen before and John and I looked at each other and said I haven't met him before, and so they were very hush-hush and all of a sudden we realized he was a workout guy and we're like what? They're like no, we're just protecting our interest. We just want to make sure, as this company continues to explode through this growth, that you know we don't have an issue, but if there is one, you'll have to deal with him.

So, as relationship down in, uh in, uh in with another bank, and I called the person up and I said the top person. About a week later I said what's the payoff? On the note, and they gave us a number, whatever it was, you know, 21 million or something. I said, okay, we're going to pay that off this afternoon. We have a new relationship. And they were like no, we love you and you borrow money and we hate you when you pay it back. They were not happy with us, we moved on. That's amazing.

Meanwhile, by the way, the guy over the corner had a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He was he's, he's, he's pounding his fist. He was like I'm the guy who works at it.

No, work it almost sounds like they sent a hit man over to convince you.

It didn't take me long when I got back to exit that relationship, but I already had stuff in the. That was the one thing that we really did. A good job was, as we had existing relationships, we were always massaging and seeing what was out there and meeting with other financial institutions. Are we going to fund it ourself? Are we going to expand the growth and everything? We really threw the net out there pretty wide and I recommend a lot of entrepreneurs as you're growing your business and you think you're secure with one relationship, just explore other options and always have something in the backdrop in case something the shoe hits the floor.

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. So you're running, you're accomplishing something big. Yeah, I mean, you were firming up some really important defenses in the military, in the government, and you really were at that pivotal moment. I mean that had to feel great. You were making this change. Now you're successful, you're self-funding, you're growing. You're managing a massive business. You've tackled culture. You're managing a massive business. You've tackled culture. You've, you know you're, you're doing, you're doing this, this.

Not only is it a great service, but it's a service that is obviously been in high demand ever since. And only it only gets more in demand as time goes on and at some point you think, okay, there's an exit here. Right, we built a business. You had a unique exit right, and you didn't even fully exit right, but you had a unique process to gain liquidity. And listen, every entrepreneur out there, even if you want to keep the business forever right, I always say you know, we want Verge to be a forever company. It's still out there, it's still in your head. There's still so many entrepreneurs out there and they have cash flow, but they don't have liquidity, because that's what being an entrepreneur is pouring everything you got back in. And so you hit that moment and you sit down and you make that decision. We should think about this. Can you walk me through the beginning phases of that and where you went, because your exit is really, I think, interesting for entrepreneurs to hear.

Yeah, and I think, if you actually there was just some news that came out two weeks ago we just did the final sale to Eula Packard. But in 2007, no even thought process of any type of liquidity. We were dumping every penny we made back into the business. We were building a SCIF, we were building a data center, we built a new facility.

For those who don't know, a SCIF is.

It's a high-level facility within your facility where they can't penetrate through it. Got it. You can't penetrate any technical information out of it. Everything in there is high-level security and you can't get out of it. It's Fort Knox inside your building. Got it? Very expensive to build, very expensive to run, but it was necessary for us.

But what happened with that whole process was, as we went and really started growing and we really felt comfortable, we had everything going great. It wasn't that we went out to think like, hey, this is a good time to start taking some chips off the table. The market went crazy and New York and all these private equity firms started flooding the mid-Atlantic area and they started getting all the contract. Now they couldn't buy the big guys, they couldn't buy the Northrop's Lockheads, but they can come after what we call the tweeners. These are not small businesses, but they're companies like CyberCore, about 250 million in revenue. They can scale them, they can buy them, they get to clearances and they can scale them pretty quickly.

When they approached us we were absolutely adamant that there was no interest in any sale. We were loving running the company. We finally felt like the stress level was down. But we were challenged with one thing we were cash poor. Every penny we made went back into business, not only went in, we added more to it because we kept getting bigger projects and so as soon as we got paid we would go to our CFO and say, hey, we'd like to take some distribution. He goes I'd love to give it to you, but we just gave it to a new project that we're using.

So from that standpoint it kind of the private equity opened our eyes a little bit. We didn't want to go to a strategic because that process you go through and then they find out all your clients and they know everything you're doing and how you're doing it. And we had a lot of secret sauce in our business. We were doing a lot of creative, really good things that the customer liked and we didn't want to share them with everybody. Why we were so successful? Because people were saying how are these guys so successful, growing at this rate year over year? And a lot of it was a lot of the quality work that we're doing, but it also was relationships and it also was being very smart on the proposal sides and understanding what the client was really looking for.

Yeah, and an NDA from a strategic is nice, but they don't unsee what they've seen. Yeah, exactly yeah, they don't unsee.

They'll sign it in two seconds, but I'll hear about it three weeks later and I'm like where'd you hear that from? Because the only person I told was this person, Right right right.

Sounds like the neighborhood gossip channel. So then, how did you get engaged?

Yeah. So they came down to the mid-Atlantic area. Mike Bader, our law firm, said hey, we've got this private equity firm. They've been following you, they want to meet with you. Why not do a round of golf and just hear them out? I said we'll hear them out, but we're not interested. I think we're just going to keep running this at this level. And then they started you know they're very intelligent executives. They started saying, yeah, I agree with that, but don't sell the company. Just sell a portion of it to us and let us be partners with you. Let's grow it together. We have a huge, a lot of powder on the sideline. We can help you grow this thing exponentially and we can really get it done quickly. And we really liked the team.

And although we liked them, we still went out to a big M&A firm, lazard, and we put a process together, because I hadn't been through it before and I wanted to see how many people would come and how many would put a bid in on CyberCore and how valuable it really was. Obviously, they gave us some numbers, but it's like your house, you're not going to sell it to the first person that walks up because they say I'll give you this price. So we put a process together, had Lazard take us out and we explored it and we did about 13 management presentations. We probably got 10 bids and went to a bid war and so we sold off a portion of it. We were like, wow, this is really great and it worked great. They were phenomenal partners. They were very finance-driven performance performance. But the market was rocking. We were running a great show and they really liked it and we had a really good.

We stayed with them for four years and the company had doubled in size, ebitda had doubled up to about 20 million and they said, hey, what are your thoughts now in the market? I said let's go to another process. So we hired again and we did it and we sold off to a private equity in New York Mullis Capital and a great relationship with them and I ran it for about two more years after that and then I was at the. That was 2013. I stepped out. I said I don't want to run day-to-day, I'll be. I was the chairman of the board up until about a month, two months ago, just ran the board, so much to take away there.

So much to take away there, so much to take away there. It's just such a well-run process, yeah, and so much to take away. The first, by the way, is that Mike Bader is a genius because he said let's go play golf. What do you have to lose? Now? What people may not know, kevin is an exceptional golfer, he is a great golfer, and so what Mike Bader knew is you were leaving that with money one way or the other. This is a cashflow positive. But so there are entrepreneurs out there. They love their business. It's their baby, they know it's growing and they don't want to get rid of it. Such a smart approach, right, yeah, you were thoughtful. Okay, there's an issue with going to a strategic, even though that tends to get a higher multiple. That's right. Right, but there's an issue there. You found a good partner, but you still went through a process. You were fair to yourself and to your shareholders, yeah, and you sold a little.

Yeah.

Enough, that I'm sure. And I'm going to ask you that question how did it change your life when you got your first taste of liquidity? It's almost all right, I can exhale a little bit, but not enough of a sale that you can go play golf every day. Now you're still highly motivated and it seems like such a great balance. It's one I think sometimes they call and Sean, I don't know if you've ever heard this term Silicon Valley of the East. Right, the Baltimore-Washington Corridor is Silicon Valley of the East because there's so much great technology that's developed here. But one of the main differences between that and Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley they want to keep companies until they're multi-billion dollar organizations and the East tends to turn over more because they're engineers, they're ex-military, they grow a business.

Contracts run out, contracts run out. You grew a business. You got it really big, bigger than most in the East, but you still want to keep going. So you took a bite. That's such a good, that's just such a good process. You ran and you, what was that like on the other side? Did it change your motivation? Were you just as motivated? How? How did how? Did having that one piece of liquidity, but with the big backend bite. How did that work when you're in your head.

I think it really. Um, I knew at some point, at some point in there, as the company grew and it kept getting bigger and bigger and our financials got stronger and stronger and we were able to really exponentially grow the company at some point. I just didn't know when that ever point was going to come, because every time I look at my bank account I'm like it's going back in the business. So when I agreed to do it, john and I said you know what, let's do this, but let's stay in control, let's keep running it and let's really look at the second bite of the apple as the big one. And so we did it and it really allowed us to sleep at night a little bit better, right, because we didn't have everything tied into the business and into facility and everything that we had built. So from our standpoint, that was like the first time our wives could sit back and say, okay, they're not ready to retire, they're still in their Thank God, they're not ready to retire, they're, you know, still in their uh, thank God, be home all day. But, uh, it really helped. Uh, it helped John and I just kind of take a deep breath and now have partners and say hey, partners, we're all in this together, you know.

And they were good partners and out of the 14 companies, even if they weren't the highest bidder, we probably would have picked them because they would. We knew the background on them. We knew by talking to them. I mean, we had a lot of meetings with them before we made a decision and it was important to John and I. We were like this is important, we've got to make the right decision because we've got to live with these guys.

And they were good partners and they actually helped us. They knew a lot of people in the space. They helped us build a really strong board. They knew some people that ran the agency before generals that came out and they said, kevin, you go meet with the general and you get him to come on the board. So I met with the general. I said, hey, we want you to sit on Cyber Core's board. And he said to me I don't think so. I said we're going to make it worth your while, we just need you to come on the board. And so we had a golf event with him and at the end of that I said if I beat you, you're going to come on the board he says you didn't tell me that you were three handicap. That was kind of unfair.

Hey, military intelligence. You had access to it. You didn't use it.

Yeah, that's and that. And then we kind of went along and then we had our goal for the next exit was to get to a certain EBITDA number. And that really drove our motivation. Because now we started Mike and Beta was helping us with the exits out of that and we were like, wow, if we can get this thing to this number, which we think we can do and we did it in 48 months we doubled the company and we got it up to that number. And then we knew that it was it because the people that were buying it from there were like, well, we could take this thing to the stratosphere. This company is just positioned. And so we did one more sale and then I just ran a board and then so we kept it going.

That's, that's that's so good, and and and the other interesting thing for, for those who are thinking exit, there was a little tidbit in there and you said you know, these guys are great partners. And there's a couple of things here. One you picked a good partner. Right, the fact that they could bring in business. Too many times what we see is people are so focused on just getting some cash right. Focus on the next step as well, right, what can this become? And to get an extra turn on a multiple and pick the wrong partner does long-term damage to your outcome.

And they saw a huge value with us. They were very adamant that John and I stayed in, that we would run it and that we would have control and we would report to them, which was fine with us. But they had some ad back so they took our Ravens box away from us right away.

So that hurt.

It is private equity.

It is private equity, yeah. I mean that was the other point you said. You said, listen, they're very numbers focused. If you're going through a process and private equity is on the other side, it's kind of like the other extreme of the bank. That's right. Right. Where the bank is on an extreme, then they don't want to hear anything you have to say that's right, All they care about is the growth of the enterprise.

Yeah, and we delivered what we had sold them on. So they liked that. Obviously, that made things easier. We didn't oversell what we could do and as we kind of moved along together, it really was working well. And then all of a sudden we could see ourselves in probably about the 44th month being in business with them. It's only four years. Fourth month being in business with them it's only four years. We started saying, hey, we can hit that number we should start talking about before we get to the EBITDA number that you want. I think it's a good time for us to go again.

So that worked out well. Yeah, it's a great story, it's a great design. You retain control of the operations, because what we also hear a lot is there's these acquisitions and the acquirer, whether strategic or private, says hey, we want you here for the long haul because we believe in you, and six months later you're out, and that happens more than it does. No question, right, your outcome is actually the unique outcome. So you did it by growing, first of all, perform and the relationship's better, but there's got to be more to that.

Yeah, I think it was expectations. We had a lot of long conversations before we picked them as one of the on the second go-around as the company we were going to go with. We looked at strategics and we knew we were outright. If we got acquired by our strategic, they would take us out immediately and say we're going to have our team run it, which would be fine. But we knew with this private equity that they wanted us to do. They really, really passionately were like we want you guys to run it. But if the world changed and they did come to us in eight months or a year and said you guys are out, we had built up enough liquidity in our personal life that it wouldn't have changed that much for us. But we just loved running the business and they knew it and they knew the culture was built around us. But they knew that we were not the type of people that were like we're not going to let them in. They were part of the team, they owned a large portion, so we all collaborated together.

Yeah, I think that's great. I think it's great you treat each other with respect and the key was set expectations, meaning be honest. Right, you know, we know what you want and you know what we want. Right, we want liquidity, we want a bigger bite at the apple on the second round and we're not ready to retire, and our wives certainly aren't ready to retire Sometimes.

Sometimes I have to tell you the spatula story. I'll tell it right now. I had a client who retired and his wife was a little unhappy with his presence in her world after he worked 80 hours a week for 30 plus years, and so he decided to do something nice one day. He decided to clean the kitchen before she got up and put the dishes away, and the poor guy was holding a spatula. And his wife walked in the door and said what are you doing with that spatula? And he said I'm putting it in this drawer. That's not where it goes. I've been putting that spatula away for 30 years. You're not going to decide where it goes.

And he said I just put it on the counter and I walked away. So for those who are thinking about retirement, remember the spatula story. So this is great. So you had this great relationship. You executed. Yeah, been the key to your whole life. Yeah, key to your whole life right, go down to Maryland, get a degree. Go to New York, be successful, get in the GE. Be one of the ones that go up, not down. Execute at the beginning, with all the risk. Execute with your private equity partner. I mean this has been a consistency of the process for you, your brother, your family. And so second bite comes you're successful, you're still involved, you're still the chairman, you're pulling away, but you got to go. Execute on something. Yeah.

Yep.

But you got to go execute on something. Yeah Right, you can't. People, people with your mentality they don't just just go to the golf course every day. I know you love to play, but you got to be executing somewhere and you really created a diverse portfolio of executing. I think this is important for people to hear, because if you're exiting, you have to understand who you are. Entrepreneurs just don't turn the light, switch off and go into the super leisure life. It's not possible, right? You need it. One of the reasons you love golf is it's competitive. You have to execute, but there's also your charitable endeavors, your family, right, the business and the industry. Walk me through how you made that transition and what are some of the areas that you got involved in.

So I think that you know, being an entrepreneur and coming out and executing it, probably at 50, was challenging. I don't think we really thought through that process. What would we do if we did exit out of the business? Would we go do another business? Would we just stay at home? So we stayed at home for about a week and that was an absolute disaster. And every day we just go on the website and look at our bank accounts and say, okay, we don't have to go to work but can't watch Mr Ed all day. So we got to find something that we've got some passion about. So I kind of started moving towards board positions. I ran the board and was chairman of the board and took a board position at St Joe's Medical Center, which I have a long history with. My wife was a candy striper there, her father was a doctor there, so that was really important to me. And they approached me and said, hey, we're looking for some business and some technical people to come on, and so we did that and I really enjoyed that. I've been on that for about five years and then just trying to figure out what to do and about a year I got really antsy and I just started saying this isn't me. I've got to start figuring out something.

My son worked at the company I sold. He had been there seven years. He was excellent in the business. He knew the space inside and out. And I started talking with him about where does he see himself going? And he's kind of an entrepreneur himself. So we started talking. I said you know, I'd love to do a collaboration with you. It was kind of my dream would be one day that he would run CyberCore. But I didn't want to put that pressure.

CyberCore was a huge company. It had a lot of moving parts. It was very complicated to run just from so many different facets of the business. But I kind of pushed him on where he saw himself. He was really enjoying his career. Before I know it, I'm back with the law firm and I'm setting up another company. And it really was fun, you know, because my wife stood up and said you know I'd like to get involved, because she worked with us in CyberCore in the early days and worked for GE for a while. She said I'd like to participate at some level with this. And I was like shocked because she says I've watched you for the last 20 years build CyberCore and all the things that you've done. This could be kind of fun. I know we're not going to build another CyberCore that big, but we're running a company Don't count on it.

Yeah, so we've been having a lot of fun. So the last year we launched a company called InisCore Technologies down in the intelligence community and it's off and running. My son runs day-to-day and my son runs day-to-day and we've got a facility over on Deerco Road and we've got one out at Elkridge and it's taken off really fast and he's having a lot of fun with it and we're having a lot of fun all of us together working. It's really worked out pretty well.

I see round two coming. Yeah, I see round two coming. Right, you've got the. Your son has your blood and he's he's motivated and he has now he has a. He has a really good mentor. So your dad was a mentor right With his military background and his structure, and your son has a mentor and he's motivated. I know your son, patty's a great, great guy and I'm excited. I'm excited for you guys. How is that? How's that going with working with your wife and your son? How's that relationship going?

It's been really good. My wife has watched this business inside and helped us. In the early days when we launched CyberCore, we couldn't hire each person, so she came in and John's wife came in and every day they would just work for free and they were helping us hire. We were hiring about five people like every two days and they were processing and doing all of it and we kept saying one day we're going to pay, you Just keep processing and getting these people in the door. And so now, with my wife and son my wife's extremely smart went to University of Maryland and my son he knows the space inside and out and he's a relationship person, and so I've been basically just kind of guiding him along Like, hey, let's go meet this person when I'm in town, let's go talk to this individual have you thought about this? And he really is kind of stepping up to the next level of running it and he's had a lot of success. He's already have over like 10, 12 employees on board and he'll have 25 within the next quarter.

That's such a great story and you figured something out right. So one of the challenges we see with our clients who are business owners, when the business gets big enough and your situation, exactly, everything's tied up right. We talked about lots of cashflow, not liquidity, and then there's that mental fight my kids, who I love and I'm convinced I can work with which isn't the case in every situation, no question.

But when you get the talented kid or kids that you can work with but you don't have liquidity Right and the offer is there to change your whole family's life.

Yeah.

But then you're giving up something you found. You struck yourself a little balance here.

Yeah, I don't think I, even in hindsight, I never would have changed what I did because it really allowed me to step back and do those things like to build a new company and and to do if I would have put so much pressure on him to run it. I don't think that's fair to him because I don't know if he wanted to run it.

I wanted to run it. I woke up and every morning and you know it was funny in the early days my brother lived next door, john, and our mailboxes were down in the court and we would work all day at CyberCore. We would come home and then we would call each other and say I'll meet you down in the mailbox. We'd go down in the mailbox and we'd talk for another half hour and our wives would come out the front door and say these kids are in the bathtub, get up to the house and spend some time with them. But the passion that we had and he has that passion. But you know, as you know, running a big company with, you know, 500 plus employees and a lot of moving parts is extremely challenging and you have to be wanting to do that. You know running a small company is a lot different and it will grow, the company he's running now. But you know we'll cross those bridges as we get there.

Well, and you've given them a gift. You've given them the gift to go through what you went through. That's right. Right, because it is very different just taking over the operations of a company and building something ready, Michele, From the Ground up.

From the Ground up. You got it. Thank you for the, for the plug in there, and I can't imagine the dinner conversations at your house too. Conversations at your house too. I mean, you're just surrounded by ideas and the pace at which you're building this business and that would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall.

Yeah, at some point my wife's like, okay, let's not talk business, but it really is. And then you go to the mailbox. John moved. But I think the fun thing with with my son and my wife and now I actually my daughter, has been helping to consult with us because she's so technical. She's helping us do a lot of the, the social media and stuff. She's having fun. She just moved back to Baltimore, got married a couple of weeks ago, so she's having fun and she's. They get to see what, what I did and what I built.

And the reality is I think Patch has more fun in a startup because everything that he's doing he's doing it. It's not, like you said, like handing over CyberCore to him and saying, here, go run it. And it's like, well, you built it. I mean, you run it, you're selling it, sell it. If you're not, if you don't want to do that, that's fine. But I think what expectations with the kids is the most important thing is really finding out do they really want to be in this business? Do they really want to run it? Do you want to do? Because they're different than us?

Right and be honest and be honest, be honest. Be honest with them, yeah, and really encourage them to be honest with you Because of the lore of it right, that's right. And looking at and seeing it from the end backwards as opposed to seeing it from the beginnings forward. Yeah, sometimes they may not have a true understanding of what's in front of them. That's right, but Patrick does.

Yeah, he's seen it from the ground zero. But I think the big thing that he's having fun with now is watching this thing blossom and starting to grow. And we had a meeting the other day with these clients and they were like we're going to put you on this contract and we're going to move this one to you, and I could see his eyes just lighten up because it's his, he's doing it, he's running it and he's putting all the effort in to make it happen and I'm just really proud of him. That he's that he loves doing it and the success is there. That's the fun thing for him. He's starting to see success on his own and it's not my success. He's been doing it and he's people 12, but it will be a hundred within a year.

So at that point we cross that bridge and figure out what do we do when we get up to a hundred. Yeah Right, amazing, tough problem.

No, that's a. It's just amazing. And he has it in his blood. It's clear that he's so competitive.

I mean played lacrosse at Syracuse university. I mean, he's a competitive kid. You know, syracuse was a type of program that you were number one to win a national championship, or you're going to be, you're going to be out on the sidelines.

Like GE.

Like GE.

Identical characteristics? Yeah, Like GE. Well, it sounds like a chip off the old block. So as you look back at your life now blessed right Blessed and wonderful marriage, great kids, grandchild you know you've had the success in business. You're getting to be a part of your son's building, of his success. It's a question that's almost hard to ask, because you've done so well and you've executed. If you could go back to 21-year-old Kevin Powerly, what would you tell him?

Stay focused, stick to what you know and just be. I think integrity is everything and you know, if you look at our business in the intelligence community, I mean we're all at the highest level security clearance with the government. We're on light detected tests. We've got to do constantly. So we live a life of fun and passion but we're also very mission driven and I think that showed with everything in our life that we did. But coming from a military background, our dad instilled that in us.

I also was blessed to have a guy at one of the largest defense contracting companies that became a really good mentor of mine. He was a West Point guy, a guy named Milk Cooper, and he was just phenomenal. He gave us. I worked with him at GE. He was kind of my point of contact and when I left GE and started CyberCore he helped us along and he kind of guided us and got us business opportunities and he was so proud of us he goes listen, we have 90,000 employees in our company.

If you screw up there's nothing. I can do with that tidal wave that's going to come at me. So you decide if you're going to really want to take this on and and really sacrificed four of us in college at one time Go where you want to go. You're going to take out the loan, so I don't care. You want to go down south, go ahead. But I think that 21-year-old would stay. Stick to what you know. And I think that was probably our biggest success was getting in a business and staying in a business that we know. Did your dad see what you built? Yeah, he did. It was actually kind of fun.

Because I got to imagine not just that you were successful in business, but what you were successful in right the military guy watching his sons build the critical infrastructure to protect what he?

loved so much.

I mean, he must have been overwhelmed. What?

he loved so much. I mean he must have been overwhelmed. Yeah, we would do videos and we were obviously on the news a bunch of times with the ribbon-cutting events that we did out at the intelligence community no-transcript different than our competitors, and if they didn't understand the mission and what we were doing, we would drill it into them and they would figure that out. But you know, from that standpoint, I think you know, just being true to ourselves and and being ethical with our business, that was the biggest thing that that meant to John and I was like, just be ethical on everything we're doing and we won't have any issues. Right, we could solve a lot of we're going to have a lot of issues. We're going to have a lot of technical issues, a lot of glitches with legacy systems that don't test out. But when they called us, we were like let's just be ethical and do what we have to do to get this fixed and get it up and running and everything will work out well.

And running and everything will work out well, okay. So last question yeah, what's next? I mean you other than you know more club championships, or senior club championships or, by the way, club championship or senior club championship. So what's next? Where, what? What? I mean you're going to work with your son, what's? Is there a big picture plan or are you taking it as you come?

Because this is something too people want to hear what that's like. As, as you get to this point, you know, if I take a look at where I am right now, my number one focus is to continually support my son on on Interscore, because I know I can make a huge impact there to help him and just guide them along. It's not I don't step in front of him and say, here, let me show you how to do it. I say here's how you do it. Think about that, bring it back to me, let's look at it. Let's go meet with these individuals. I know them from the days where I was in the space. Let's go meet with them and I watch him interface.

He's so technical, he understands the space, he speaks their language I've kind of been out of it speaks that language. So it's really fun to watch and you know what your son. It's fun to watch them grow and it's fun to watch him from another side of being an entrepreneur and pulling that out of them. As my wife says, don't push them so much, let them develop. And having my wife in the business has been a real treat. She runs all the books, she does all the finance, she does all the HR. She interfaces with all our engineers and helps us and does that. And it's all for the love of our kids to have them run their own company, because they're starting to see how fun that is.

Yeah, that's the biggest thing how fun it is to run. I think Patrick had worked at CyberCore for seven years. He's like I like CyberCore, but I like running my own company. Yeah, you know, he controls his own destiny. He can. He can really see that in front of him right now.

So it's different. It's different when you do it yourself.

And I would just tell any entrepreneur that you know exits out of the business is just to, if they choose to stay in it, stay in it at some capacity. Just keep your portfolio, keep your network out there. That's what I did a really good job of keeping contact with everybody. And then when I launched this company with Pat, it was really just reconnecting with everybody. Someone was like you're getting back in the business. I said no, my son's running it Well also an exit out the door.

It just means you're looking for a new door, that's right, you exit. It just means you're looking for a new door, that's right. Right, you know, you exit out of one, you enter into another and you've you really found a nice way to go through that pattern from different roles in CyberC ore and then a new with your philanthropic endeavors and now with your son and your wife and your daughter. Yeah, Great, great, great story, Kevin. This has been a hell of a lot of fun, Really fun. I really appreciate you coming in and it's not a surprise. I think if there's a common characteristic we see, right, it's the people, and I know your brother John, I know your brother Andy. You clearly great people from a great core family from up there in the Northeast, which is a great place to be from those core values, which is a great place to be from those core values. Put that in the mix with some entrepreneurialism, risk-taking capability and hard work, and there's a consistency there, right?

Yeah, and I think entrepreneurs and most people that will be listening to this podcast probably realize that entrepreneurs like us, we hang together right. That's why you and I have become friends. I've admired what, what you guys have built and when I came out the facility here I was, I went back. I was more excited for this facility than I was at our facility, but I I was telling my son this will be you one day. We're going to build a facility and they got.

It's just spectacular. It's a type of place that you would wake up in the morning and you would have a passion to come to know. You walk in these doors and you'd be like I'm part of something and it's just a beautiful. And we spent a lot of time with our facility. Our facility was massive, like this. It was really important to us. We had every facet you walk in. We had every military sign on the wall, every flag. You know everything that would create an environment for our employees to say, when I walk through these front doors and God, we trust, here we are. We are here to help the mission today and it's been fun. I mean, you and I have had a good relationship, but we're both very similar in personalities, in passion, in vision.

Our families are the most important thing, but our businesses are you know, there's no secret why you're successful or why I've been able to do what I've done. We really, every morning, wake up and we're, we're, we're, beat on the ground and off we go.

Yeah, I appreciate that and it's. I think there's a couple of similarities and one is having the core behind you right, the family, the, the, that core, that support level, and I think it's the mentality. It's funny, when I left Merrill right and I was at Merrill Lynch, and when I left Merrill as you left GE, there was something I didn't anticipate and that is. My job at Merrill was to advise people on their wealth. And I did have business owners, but it wasn't until I became one that I fully understood them. But, more importantly, they fully accepted me. Yeah Right, because they viewed us now differently. Yeah Right, as part of their community, as opposed to somebody trying to advise them from outside the community. And you probably experienced the same thing going from GE to owning your own business. It is different, absolutely Right.

That moment changes everything, yeah, so yeah, and I think that's the I like to surround myself with, with people that are similar and have similar views, and you know it's been fun working with Verdant's because you guys really are, you know, up cutting edge on the technology and doing these type of uh uh, educational things for the, for the clients that we can look at, we can go online.

You've definitely stepped, stepped the game up here big, so we're going to have to put a tornado on our logo. That's the only thing it's got to spin. We'll call it our Verdant's logo. We've got to start spinning it, okay. Well, I want to thank Kevin Powerly for coming in. This has been a wonderful conversation and thank you for opening up. Tell us your story about CyberCore, about your days prior to CyberCore and about CyberCore, about your days prior to CyberCore and the exciting thing you're doing within InisCore and your son, and talking about the honesty, about exits and how to think about those. I think this is going to help a lot of folks and for those listening, I'm confident you have enjoyed this conversation. If you want to hear more of those, we encourage you to subscribe on YouTube, spotify, you can go to our website Apple podcast I think we're on all of them.

Oh, we are everywhere we are everywhere and I would like to say too, if you, if you hit the the like and subscribe buttons, but most importantly, if you, if you like what you've heard today and you want to share this with a friend or a colleague, that that would be. That would mean the world to us. Oh, just perfect.

Yeah, we don't have a spinning logo to click on, but we're working on it. Thanks everybody for listening. Thanks, Kevin, and we'll look forward to the next From the Ground Up, thank you.