Why Proactive IT Clears the Way for Excellence | The COVI Way | Episode 10
Brian Blanton, CPA and owner of Blanton & Associates, has spent over 25 years building trust with hundreds of dental and medical practices through financial planning and consulting. When he acquired his accounting firm in 2014, he inherited more than just clients and processes—he inherited a technology ecosystem that wasn’t serving his business objectives. Rather than accepting the status quo of reactive, “break-fix” IT support, Brian sought a strategic technology partner who could help him build a comprehensive plan for growth, security, and operational excellence during the firm’s critical tax season periods.
The transformation from after-the-fact IT support to proactive technology management has fundamentally changed how Brian’s firm operates. Through regular strategic reviews, three-year planning cycles, and continuous security assessments, his team now enjoys the peace of mind that comes from having redundant systems, cloud-based infrastructure, and device security protocols. This approach has proven especially valuable during tax season, when the firm completes 40% of its annual work in just 10 weeks. The partnership extends beyond simple technical support to include regulatory compliance planning, risk management, and strategic technology roadmapping that aligns with business growth objectives.
For business leaders evaluating IT partnerships, Brian emphasizes the importance of finding providers who share your security mindset and commitment to ongoing improvement. True technology partnerships require continuous monitoring, regular system evaluations, and proactive planning rather than one-time implementations. The key differentiator lies in transparency and regular communication—monthly check-ins and quarterly strategic reviews ensure that technology investments remain aligned with business goals while providing the documentation and insights leaders need to make informed decisions about their organization’s digital future.
Episode Summary:
Join Cody Lents as he sits down with CPA Brian Blanton from Blanton & Associates to explore what it really means to build trust through strategic IT partnerships. Brian shares his decade-long journey from inheriting a problematic technology ecosystem to creating a proactive, security-focused IT environment that supports his accounting firm’s most critical periods.
Key Topics:
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Proactive IT planning prevents costly downtime during critical business periods like tax season
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Regular transparency meetings build stronger partnerships than reactive break-fix approaches
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Security doesn’t have to stop productivity when implemented thoughtfully with business context
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Cloud-based infrastructure can dramatically simplify operations while improving reliability
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The best IT partnerships focus on strategic planning cycles rather than emergency responses
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Episode Transcript
The COVI Way - Episode 10
Featuring Cody Lents and Brian Blanton
Welcome to The COVI Way, the podcast where we break down the intersection of people and technology. Because IT isn’t just about fixing problems. It’s about enabling people to do their best work. I’m Cody Lents, the VP of Sales at COVI. And today we’re diving into something every leader grapples with. The value of the intangible. What it means to trust the systems and the expertise working behind the scenes.
I’m joined by someone who’s mastered that over the past 25 years. Brian Blanton from Blanton & Associates. Brian’s been a go-to financial strategist for nearly a decade and here’s what makes him different. While most crunch numbers, Brian builds trust. Since 1999 he’s guided hundreds of dental and medical practices through complexities for financial planning. And in 2014 he took the bold step of acquiring and transforming the firm that trained him.
Cody: Well, Brian, thanks for joining us today. I know that we go back a few years. I know you met Chip first and then you met us. I think about 10 years ago. Was it 10 years?
Brian: I started working with COVI. So it was around 2015, if I remember right, 2014 somewhere. That was back in my tech days. So I not only don’t remember them well, I don’t know that I want to remember them that well. I do enjoy the consulting piece and still like to get my hands dirty every now and then. But 2015 would have been a year that I was chasing Windows XP expirations. So deploying probably 50 or so computers a month that year is my guess. That was back when I was on site for all of them and chugging around big all-in-ones that were heavy or big computer towers that were heavy instead of light laptops. That was about a year after I took over management of our accounting firm.
Cody: Yeah, I was actually going to ask about that. Could you tell us a little bit about your journey into being a CPA finance advisor? And then when you did take over, like how you got into the ownership side of it?
Brian: I had a kind of what I believe is kind of an unusual career because, you know, most of us who go into the CPA profession, you know, we go to college, we get our degree in accounting. We graduate, take the CPA exam. We’re working for a big CPA firm in public accounting and then eventually transition over to industry after working at a public accounting firm for a few years. I did it all backwards. I started out working in industry and I ended up owning a CPA firm later in my career.
But I started out working as a controller and then transitioned into doing financial consulting work. And through the financial consulting firm I worked for, had a department that did accounting work for clients. And so I did a lot of financial consulting with those accounting firm clients and got to know them. And then when the owner of the firm reached the point he wanted to transition, he transitioned the investment advisory, financial consulting, planning part of the firm to a larger investment advisory group and transitioned the accounting firm to me. And that’s how I ended up being later in my career and owning a small public accounting firm. But it’s been great. I’ve really enjoyed the journey and love what I do every day.
Cody: Yeah, that’s a fun upside down perspective. Shameless plug for the upcoming Stranger Things release. All of my kids are obsessed with Stranger Things. They just found it earlier this year. So I’ve been on a Stranger Things marathon for months at this point.
Brian: A great series. Yeah, my kids love it. They love it, too. I’m in it for the music. In fact, I kind of like it myself. So maybe I’m a little bit of a nerd. So but that’s OK.
Cody: Well, you’re in good company here because behind the cameras over there is music and video geek. And then, you know me, I’m a geek of all sorts of varieties or obsessed with running. So it kind of flips the other side. When we first met or you first met Chip, I know that the way that you described it was the technology ecosystem and your partnership with the outsourced IT you had at the time was not doing what you thought it was supposed to be doing. Could you tell me what you do think IT is supposed to be doing? Like when things are right, how’s it supposed to go?
Brian: Well, I think going back to the very beginning, one, just trying to get a good understanding of the ecosystem that I inherited was a big reason why I brought Chip in in the beginning is to really, Chip, can you do an inventory? Can you tell us, what is the current technology we have? How old is it? How is it performing? Let’s run some tests. We know we’re going to need to do some upgrades in the future. And we need some sort of plan for strategically, how are we going to do that? Are we going to phase out systems, what new systems are we gonna phase in, if we’re gonna grow, my industry, being in public accounting, we’ve got some regulatory things we gotta be concerned with, we’ve got the IRS circular 230 requirements, we got written information security plans, this nowadays, and so having someone we can partner with to help us through that is really critical.
As a firm manager, I don’t have the time and we’re small so we don’t have the resources to have full-time IT help or expertise on site at our firm. And so trying to locate a good partner that we can work with who’s going to not only just help us fix a problem that we have today, but is going to be there for us to help develop a plan that we can work through over the next three year cycle, the next five year cycle. That’s really been a critical help to us and it’s been great.
Cody: Well, thanks. I remember you and I started directly working together in like 2018. Is that right?
Brian: That sounds about right. It’s been a while now. So I didn’t inherit what COVI inherited out of the gate. I inherited a little bit more stable strategic planning approach, which I appreciate.
Cody: Well, when you came in, yeah, we had we’d done a lot of the heavy lifting at that point and developed kind of what our strategy was. And, you know, Chip helped us a lot with that. Yeah. And we were I felt like kind of on a good path at that point. And then really the things that concerned me the most really when we started working together was just the security aspect of things and making sure that, you know, we have as as much security as we can that allows us to protect our data, have backup redundancy to our data, and be forward thinking was really the critical aspect at that point. We kind of had already had our plan for hardware replacement. We had our tech stack for software put together at that point.
Brian: And we’ve looked at that stack a couple of times over the years. We tried to simplify or find cost savings or engage remote access at a better price point. We have. We’ve tried some different things. We tried. We went from hardware on site to hardware as a service to now where we live. We live in the cloud based ecosystem now where everything is cloud based. You know, our hardware is really nothing more than a router and, you know, an internet connection at this point. So it works really well.
Cody: The pandemic, we went from a giant server rack to a small network cabinet.
Brian: That’s right. I think the pandemic changed, changed the world for all of us. And, you know, we went from a situation where, you know, we had to have staff in the office every day working just because that was the legacy system that we had to, oh, we have to figure out how to all work remotely now. And thankfully you guys were there to help us quickly jump from one to the other. So we could work remote.
Cody: Let’s talk about that. One of the I guess, selling points or value propositions of outsourced IT that I hear, and this can be like you where you’ve outsourced it all. Or it could be where an internal IT department outsources different components, whether that’s security or some specialized software, whatever that would be. Maybe it’s just a one project that isn’t in their wheelhouse. So they look to hire a professional services team that has a lot of experience in it.
At COVI, one of our main things that Chip and Dave have focused on that we don’t lose as we’ve grown larger and larger is that we continue to expand our depth and our breadth of experience and expertise. How does that feel on the other side when you’re working with us where we’re able to integrate into the different parts of your organization so that we can help provide the right information or plan for you to make the right choices?
Brian: No, I think it’s, you guys have always really done a great job of coming in and doing a presentation for us to put together what is the next best step to take in terms of security. Like I recently had a quarterly meeting and I love our quarterly meetings that we do. We recently had a quarterly meeting and we talked about device security and how that’s gotta be the next, maybe the next evolution in our security protocols that we have. We went through the whole multi-factor authentication security protocol. We have all that in place at this point and now device security is sort of the next step in the security process. And had a lot of good conversation about that and looked at what devices need to be part of this, what devices shouldn’t be part of this, and how do we go about setting up that system. And it’s certainly nothing that I have expertise in, right? My expertise is in doing accounting work and doing tax work and some consulting work related to financial aspects. But no, it’s been great having a partner who can come in and teach us something that we don’t know, which is on the IT side, particularly the security side, to help us get better.
Cody: Is there ever a time when you or someone on your team has felt like the security was too much or like the restriction was in the way?
Brian: Oh, absolutely. I feel like you can put in place so much security that you can’t get work done any longer. I mean, I think that’s very true. I ran into a situation with that actually not that long ago. And you may recall this, Cody, I don’t remember. But we were looking at whether we had to lock all the ports on all of our laptops, which is a great security protocol. The USB ports, Right, the USB ports. But it doesn’t really work when you have clients who are legacy clients who are still handing over thumb drives to you with their, in our case, QuickBooks backup files that we use. And we’re like, well, we’d love to have that security in place and we understand the importance of it. But if we do that, I don’t know how we’re going to get this work done.
Cody: Yeah, the day will come. Intuit forcing everyone to QuickBooks Online. And we’ve tried to do that too. Most all of our clients are on QuickBooks Online now, but we still have, you know, we got some legacy clients out there who are, you know, still holding onto QuickBooks 2014 version that they’re using that, you know, we have to be able to integrate that when we need to. But I’m hopeful we can get them up to QuickBooks version 2025.
Brian: Yeah, that’s the enterprise version now, because that’s all they offer. And the online version. But we still have to have a way to support those clients, realizing that we have to make some security adjustments to accommodate those things.
Cody: Because it will always take the world a good five to 10 years to catch up with the solution providers, like in this case, QuickBooks. Funny, I don’t know if you saw me look up. I was just trying to think of when you said 2014, I was trying to remember my first encounter with QuickBooks was a QuickBooks 2004 environment. I worked on a farm while I was in college and when I was just starting in the band and I, that was what we used for the fee bill. And I was just like, it was back when it was like a flow chart and like really bubbly pictures. And I was just thinking about it and I hadn’t thought about that probably since I was in high school. So that’s funny.
Could you tell me, what your catastrophic worst case disaster day looks like from a work stoppage or something where technology is interrupting your team. I know that it’s definitely going to be in quarter one of the year because of tax season. But what is the what are the what’s the nuance behind your greatest fear where technology is concerned?
Brian: Well, in terms of just day to day operations, you’re right. We’re extremely busy starting February 1st every year through April 15th every year. That’s our main tax season. And so any kind of interruption in service during that period of time is really a critical problem for us because we have to do so much work. We’ll probably do probably 40% of the work that we’re going to do for the year in a 10 week period of time.
Cody: It’s your Black Friday.
Brian: So we want to try to do everything we can to give ourselves the best 10 weeks we can that time of year for our team. So putting in place things like redundant internet, right? So if one of our internet service providers goes down, if our main one goes down, we have a secondary one we can change over to if we need to. Or I guess worst case scenario, everybody takes their laptop and they flee for an internet connection somewhere outside our building.
Cody: Which is why device compliance is so important.
Brian: So we have, right. So we have sort of internet, have redundant internet and then the third tier of go seek internet elsewhere strategy.
Cody: Solution based plans to process based plans.
Brian: Exactly. So that’s a big issue. There is just having consistent internet service. And then the cloud applications, I’m trying to have service providers that I liken to it where they have a good track record of uptime and they have a good track record of backing up and data redundancy and things. So hopefully we don’t encounter issues with our service providers there. So that would be a bad day in tax season would be a day that we just start offline and we just we can’t work. That’s a day loss that’s really hard to make up.
Cody: It’s 10 weeks, 40% of the work. So one day in there, you’re losing. Like that’s a pretty big, I guess. It’s hard to replace It’s not even just opportunity costs. It’s just fulfillment costs so that you’re making up that time with overtime, I’m guessing.
Brian: You’re either making that to, well, we’re already working overtime, but you’re either making it up with additional overtime or the worst case scenario is you’re having to tell clients, I’m going to have to extend this tax return. And then you’re not meeting client expectations. And that’s something that we want to try to avoid at all costs is not meeting those expectations.
Cody: Do you ever have to extend a tax return because of the client, not because of something like that?
Brian: Certainly that happens. I have clients that extend their tax returns every year just because they’re not ready to work on taxes in the first quarter of the year when the government would like them to. And I’ve got clients that extend their tax returns because they, for example, want more time to fund their retirement plans. And so they want to do tax extensions for that. But mainly it’s just when our clients want to get their tax returns done and they can control that. We can extend them. They’ve got an additional six month automatic extension to get things done. And so some of them like to take the extra time to do that. Gotcha. Our preferences work as hard as we can and try and get all those returns done on time and out the door by April 15th. And then take like a two week vacation. Take a vacation for the end of April. I have a little bit nicer summer where we can enjoy a little more time off. So we try to give that back to our staff as you know. We’re closed half day Fridays all summer long to try to give that back because they do work a lot of extra time. And that was 10 weeks between February and April 15th.
Cody: My mind processes it kind of like a someone encoding in development. It’s like, hey, enjoy the holidays. You’re about to be in the basement for three months. And then you’re going to have a relaxing season before you go into your next sprint, which is another basement for three months. Whenever Ashley, our scheduling assistant, is like, I want to schedule with so and so. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Shoot it. I’ll shoot him an email and let him know some highlights of what we’re doing in the background. And then we’ll talk to them in May.
Brian: Right. Because we have. That’s certainly what I’ve told Ashley before. Yeah. Reach out in February. I’m like. No can do. Let’s. If you even receive the email. Yeah. Push that back a little bit.
Cody: We have quite a few accountants that we help and there is a documented unique in our system. We have like exceptions and uniques and things that are unique is no meetings. February, March or April. We usually say from January through April. Pretty much. And then I know that we can probably do a phone call in January or a phone call at the end of April. We’re not going to get any real face time until May. And nor are we going to want to do any sort of implementation of any new systems or processes at that time of the year unless it’s an emergency and it’s something that has to be done.
Brian: Yeah, crisis management. Yep. Fully empathize with that.
Cody: In that vein, I know a lot in the IT space, people talk about proactive this, proactive that, proactive maintenance, proactive security, proactive support, all these different things. That’s something that I know we do pretty well. You’ve told me that before, I’m just kind of speaking your words back to you. But could you tell me how that makes you feel or what it’s like to have that peace of mind to know that things are kind of out of sight, out of mind, and when they’re not, that you’re going to be alerted to it?
Brian: That’s I think that is really the whole reason for our partnership. That’s why we work together now. That’s why we’ve worked together for the last 10 years is that you guys are very proactive and you are looking ahead. We have a cycle that we’re working through, about a three-year cycle, where we renew kind of our plan every three years and we look at it every three years to decide, you know, where are we going to go next? You know, whether that’s in terms of hardware or whether that’s in terms of software security and updates. So that’s really been critical and that’s one reason I would say you guys stand out from the other IT groups that I’ve talked to and worked with. I feel like most IT groups out there really, you know, they’re really after the fact. IT is what I’ll call it. If I can use that term.
Cody: Industry lingo is break fix. It’s broken. I’m going to fix it. So after the fact is going to be adopted in Cody’s repertoire now going forward.
Brian: Damage control or whatever you want to call it. But I feel like we’re taking the steps to try to do everything we can to prevent getting in a situation where we have to do a lot of damage control.
Cody: Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t want to completely bash that perspective of break fix because that after the fact is a whole lot easier to sell and explain. And therefore it’s a whole lot easier to buy and spend money on because you feel a lot of pain or challenge or problem and they solve a lot of pain or challenge or problem and it’s very easy to see exchange of value. Ours is not as easy to see. What is the…
Brian: I think that’s true. Sorry to interrupt you. No, you’re good. You know, you… One of the things I’ve always said about IT and I say it about payroll too a lot is it’s a thankless job in a way, right? No one is gonna typically call up their IT folks and say, oh, hey, everything’s running great. We had a great day today. It’s not typically what happens. Same with payroll, right? Thanks for running my payroll this week. Thanks for getting this turned out great. You sort of expected you.
Cody: Note to self, email payroll.
Brian: You’re just expecting that to run 100% uptime all the time with no issues. And the reality is there’s a lot of work that goes into trying to make that happen. And it all happens behind the scenes. And I think it’s often very underappreciated.
Cody: I think we are also unique in that we do get a lot of positive feedback from our clients. It’s usually not as spontaneous as that example, but we do get a lot of emails of like, I had one just the other day talking about Ashley Stephenson on our team that said, hey, just want to let you know Ashley did a great job. She made me feel like everything was going to be taken care of. And then when she got off the phone, everything was just fine and taken care of. And I just, it’s just a random email I got in the middle of a different email thread about a completely different conversation. We were talking about different things. This is a, a treasurer on the board of one of our nonprofits and we were talking about nonprofit stuff and he’s just, Hey, by the way, and you don’t usually get the, by the way, it’s like you said, in payroll or IT, you usually just get the, Hey, I’m under a lot of stress and I need help. Is it a good version or you get the bad version, which is freaking help me now.
Brian: Right. We’re in damage control. Right. No, that is, I think, a huge differentiator. You know, prior to working with COVI, there was no such thing as a planning meeting with an IT company. I mean, I’ve never had never experienced that in my career.
Cody: Yeah. And I was really not to toot my own horn, but I was really intentional about not calling our quarterly meetings quarterly business reviews because in my past sales positions, which before I went back into IT, I had some sales roles. That was just a meeting to upsell or revisit quotes. It was just a sales meeting. It wasn’t a business review. It was a give me business, please meeting. And Chip and I talked a lot over coffees and beers in the 2015-16 range of, hey, if we’re going to do this, let’s do it meaningful. So what value are we going to bring to these meetings? And then we call them technology business reviews. And it was, here’s what your infrastructure looks like, here’s what your software looks like, here’s what your users look like, your security, your backups, and here’s some things that we’re thinking about. And then we do have a section of projects where we talk about projects that are ongoing and the status they’re in or projects that are upcoming and what they’re addressing and how much they might cost. Or if we do have open quotes, we do do them. I don’t wanna lie, but that’s kind of an afterthought. The meeting. It’s part of the process and it’s a normal part of the process. But the real value is that and all the other things that you talked about.
Brian: Yep. And recently we in this year we changed we used to do three quarterly meetings and two annual meetings or four quarterly meetings and two annual meetings. Sometimes we combine those if the timeline lined up and we’ve switched to just doing monthlies and quarterlies because cybersecurity and innovation in the tech space is changing so rapidly that we’re seeing too much lag in, we had this conversation three months ago and we haven’t had any progress and now we’re in the next meeting and we’re talking about it again. Those little 30 minute meetings in between have made it to where a lot of this new AI driven innovation has allowed things to move along faster or AI driven cybersecurity threat has allowed us to close those gaps quicker as well. And then in your case, especially in quarter one, but in general, we’re our plan is pretty robust already. And we’re really good at working together because of the amount of time we’ve spent together. So your monthlies are just emails. Unless there’s something really important, then we’ll let you know, like, we really need to talk this month.
Cody: Right. And that works great for us. I mean, we’re a small firm. And so as a small firm, you know, a quarterly touch base makes sense. Monthly is probably a little more than what we need. But an update, a quick email update every month is just wonderful.
Brian: Yep. And part of our motive behind that is just to make sure that we’re doing our jobs right. Like it’s almost a check and balance on our end. Some of it is so that you know as well, but it’s also like, hey, we need to make sure that everything’s right. Are there any new trends on the cybersecurity reports that we haven’t caught with our other systems? That reading cadence is what… It’s way of helping to just keep on track.
Cody: Well, it’s our final quality assurance check, basically. And that’s what we do with our clients, too. We do a mid-year tax projection for all of our tax clients just to kind of take a look at. Yeah, that’s good. We set some plans early in the year for what we were going to do tax-wise. We’ll do a mid-year check-in and run some numbers and see if we’re on track for that. And come back and do that again towards the end of the year around November time frame, December time frame, just to make sure things are still on track with where we thought they were at the mid year. And that way it gives us a little opportunity to make any final adjustments we need to before before we close out the year.
Brian: Yeah. Recalibration before the surprise hits them when they see what taxes look like. Nobody likes that phone call on in April that, you owe a bunch of taxes that weren’t anticipating. So we we try to avoid that.
Cody: Yeah, I totally understand that. I’ve only had to pay on taxes once and it wasn’t significant, but it was still like, I don’t really want to do this. So it’s not a fun experience, especially when you’re not expecting it. Yeah, that was that was really what it was. It was the surprise of it. I wasn’t expecting a big tax check, but I wasn’t expecting to have to pay either.
So with all that proactive and behind the scenes work, how important is like in the meetings and just in our daily interactions, how important is the transparency component of your IT relationship?
Brian: It’s really important to me. I know there’s probably a lot of people out there that are happy to be very hands-off and just let it all happen behind the scenes. For me, having the transparency and feeling like I have just a little bit of control in the process to know what’s going on is important to me. So I really do appreciate the meetings and the transparency and the reports and being able to have a feel for what’s going on.
Cody: Is that your business owner hat that appreciates that?
Brian: Oh, absolutely. Yes. As a firm manager, absolutely.
Cody: As your technology user hat, how does transparency impact you there as well?
Brian: As a user, yes, I like that as a user. As you know, I kind of call myself a power user. I guess I would say I tend to like computers.
Cody: Brian’s pretty tech savvy.
Brian: So I like to know what’s going on. Security frustrates me as a user. I remember the day that you guys, I think it was Jack who took away my administrator privileges. Yeah, that was that was hard to give to give that up.
Cody: That is an ongoing. It’s a recurring conversation we have with new clients is, hey, this will probably be the most frustrating thing. And this is also the number one protection to keep you from getting malware, specifically ransomware. And I’m pretty sure I have that conversation weekly at this point.
Brian: I understand it. And I understand it. And I still don’t like it 10 years later. But I understand why it has to be that way. Yep. Even though it frustrates me a lot when I’m just trying to upgrade something and I have to wait for credentials to come through from the help desk. It drives me a little insane. I understand the reasoning behind it.
Cody: And I do appreciate that those types of it’s called privilege access management. Those types of solutions are getting better and better at making that disruption or lack of autonomy less and less impactful. We used to have to revisit it with our clients quite often. And now it’s mostly just new clients setting the expectation and helping them understand from an education perspective, the why behind the what and then the creative, like the fun, enjoyable side where you get to be creative in the cybersecurity spaces. Some of our clients need it because they do like field implementations that require network access at client locations. So they need to be able to configure things. And other other reasons like that. And so being able to find creative ways that can keep the security gap closed and allow the autonomy and unique niche use cases. That is probably my favorite type of puzzle that we get to solve. Like it’s the least standardized where like strategic planning, financial planning, all of that that we do is kind of the same process. It’s different with every different organization. So still fun. But the nuance of the complex problem solving, that’s different. Everything’s different every time. And if we did that all the time, I’d probably hate it because of the chaos. I like the challenge when it comes up every once in a while.
Before we jump into the tech tip, if you were talking with a group of just business owners or CEOs, executives, whatever, business leaders in general, of all sizes, of all shapes, as far as organizations go, doesn’t have to be in your industry, what advice would you give them when looking to engage like an outsourced security provider or an outsourced IT partner?
Brian: I think when choosing a partner, one, you have to find a partner that has the same mindset and approach to security that you do as an owner. As I was telling you, Cody, that we came into this with a very strong security mindset that we want to try to have as high a level of security as we can to protect our clients’ data. We’re dealing with highly sensitive information that hackers in the world would love to have access to. So trying to have high security for the purpose of maintaining that information, maintaining our reputation, and meeting our clients’ expectations is really critical.
So I think as a business owner, you really want to find a group to partner with that is going to really be there, be proactive, help you develop a cycle to, whether that’s replace hardware or put in place new security protocols. You really want somebody who’s thinking ahead, figuring out where we need to go next with security to help you do that. And then be there to help you implement it. And then be there to monitor it.
I think there’s a lot of firms out there. And I’m sure, Cody, you’ve met many of them, then they’ll come in and they’ll put something in place once they sort of implement it and then it’s over. And security is not a one and done implementation project. It’s an ongoing implementation project. You have to continuously look at the system, improve the system, evaluate and adjust as you go along. And so you need a partner who’s gonna be able to help you do that.
Cody: I think it would be too difficult to dive into how you size that up. Maybe that’s another podcast we could put together. We don’t have time left, you’re right. But I do know there are a lot of online resources, or you could ask AI to help you find that information. If you do, I recommend Perplexity for that type of research.
A shameless plug, there’s probably some blog posts that I’ve written on our website that I can’t think of by name right now that would address a few of those components. I also might be wrong. But in light of that and blog posts, the tech tip of the day, I want to highlight going back to reporting that we talked about earlier. And it said in all sorts of activities, all sorts of industries that you just don’t know what you don’t know. And when you’ve outsourced your cybersecurity, whether that’s to a platform or solution provider that’s software based or a company like us who’s a managed security provider.
Requesting a report or even just a summary of activities on a regular basis is key to knowing that you’re protected and that you’re safe. Knowing that you’re evolving, knowing that your company is looking at trends and making sure that things are being taken care of. And like you said, Brian, that we’re forecasting and planning for the future. If you don’t have data like that, then as a leader of an organization, you don’t truly know that what you think is happening is what is actually happening. And I don’t mean that to say that outsource providers or solutions would ever try to do anything malicious or negative to hurt you, but you don’t know that they didn’t just forget to check something or that they didn’t just unintentionally or intentionally set it and forget it. Sort of going back to the break fix piece. What did you call that earlier? Damage control. The damage control. After the fact. After the fact.
Brian: The after the fact component. I’m going to have to adopt that. So thanks, Brian.
Cody: Hey, you’re very welcome. Thanks for inviting me today.
Brian: Yeah, I appreciate you coming out.
Today, we heard from Brian Blanton about the value of quiet, competent IT environments, one where risk is reduced and productivity is multiplied, not through luck, but through expert systems and people working behind the scenes. From trust to transparency and from uptime to peace of mind. This reminds us that in a well-run firm, IT and cybersecurity doesn’t get in the way. It clears the way for excellence. Learn more about Brian@Blanton-CPA.com.
