The Strategic Evolution of IT Partnerships - Balancing Security and Creativity

In this insightful episode of The COVI Way, VP of Sales Cody Lents shares his decade-long journey with COVI, from technical roles to developing the sales philosophy that defines the company’s approach to IT partnerships. Cody’s evolution mirrors COVI’s transformation from Netlink, an internet provider-sounding company, to a strategic technology partner that emphasizes co-evolution with clients. His experience of following founder Chip around for a year to document and standardize partnership approaches reveals how intentional relationship-building becomes a scalable business practice. The discussion highlights COVI’s core belief that standardization isn’t about limiting clients but creating a foundation strong enough to support meaningful customization and innovation.

The conversation explores one of modern IT’s greatest challenges: achieving the delicate balance between security and productivity in an increasingly complex technological landscape. Cody explains how COVI’s approach involves implementing robust standardized baselines that typically move client IT assessments from scores of 20 out of 100 to 80-90 within months, creating the stability necessary for creative problem-solving. The company’s philosophy centers on “good conflict” – the productive tension that emerges when technical constraints meet business objectives, leading to innovative solutions that serve both security requirements and operational efficiency. This approach recognizes that without proper security foundations, creativity becomes unsustainable, but without room for customization, technology becomes a barrier rather than an enabler.

Looking ahead, COVI’s strategic vision acknowledges that cybersecurity breaches are not a matter of “if” but “when,” requiring a fundamental shift in how organizations approach technology resilience. The company’s value proposition lies in making security incidents feel like “a bug on the windshield” – manageable disruptions rather than business-ending catastrophes. By combining standardized security protocols with deep client collaboration and education, COVI helps organizations build cultures of security awareness while maintaining the flexibility to innovate and grow. This forward-thinking approach positions technology not as a necessary evil but as a strategic accelerator for organizational missions and visions.

https://youtu.be/63xQ3pcRXvs

Episode Summary:

In this episode of The COVI Way, Dave Vint interviews VP of Sales Cody Lents about his 10+ year journey with the company, from technical roles to developing COVI’s strategic sales approach that emphasizes partnership over traditional MSP models. The conversation explores how COVI balances the critical tension between standardization and customization, using robust security foundations as the baseline that enables creative problem-solving and innovation for clients. Cody and Dave discuss the evolution of cybersecurity challenges and how COVI’s philosophy of “good conflict” and collaborative partnership helps organizations prepare for the reality that security breaches are a matter of “when, not if.”

Key Quotes:

• “Standardization is a requirement to sustainability and survival.”

• “You don’t get great productivity without great security.”

• “We avoided the MSP ‘raise prices, cover less’ model—and we’re better for it.”

• “If there’s no tension, there’s no growth.”

• “We don’t just protect systems—we empower a culture of security.”

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Episode Transcript

The COVI Way - Episode 7

Featuring Dave Vint and Cody Lents

Welcome to The COVI Way, the podcast where we break down the intersection of people and technology because I.T. shouldn’t be just about solving problems, but enabling people to do their best work. I’m Dave. And today I’m sitting down with Cody, our other regular podcast host, to talk about his history with COVI, security in modern times, and how COVI balances the needs of strong standardization with strong creativity.

Dave: Cody Lents, the two interviewers unite. It’s gonna be interesting. And it should be fun. We can talk. We can definitely talk. That’s not gonna be the issue here. So Cody, I’m really excited to sit down with you today and share with our guests more of your story and what makes sales at COVI, sales at COVI. Yeah. So to kick off with the first question, how long has it been since you’ve been here?

Cody: So I started in the early fall of 2013. And that was technical roles. And then Chip and I started envisioning what sales was going to look like. I think at the end of 2015, it was 2016 when I first started doing activities.

Dave: And during that process, I know when you initially came in, it was more tech that you were working on.

Cody: Yep. So I went to college for, I’m not exactly sure what my degree is called, but the focus that we did was networking and security. It’s just a general IT degree on paper. And then so it came into that and then decided in that 2015 timeline that I was either going to really focus on cybersecurity or I was going to focus on sales. And because we had a few clients grow faster than we did and we saw the strain it put on us operationally, we decided proactive sales was the appropriate move for COVI at the time. Also, that was when we were called Netlink and everyone thought we were an internet provider. Hence the beginning and inception of COVI.

Dave: I love that. Yeah, I did always struggle with that name. It was a pretty cloud logo and it was there, but it definitely felt about communications and connectivity over, you know, I.T. consulting and professional services.

Cody: That’s right. Which should be fair. I mean, the IT business was a little bit different at that time. I think the brand, the Netlink brand started in 2000, I believe. So right on, right on par with everybody else that was doing tech at the time.

Dave: Makes sense. At the time when you started to jump in and explore what sales could look like at COVI as the brand transitioned, tell me a little bit more about Netlink’s focus back then and how COVI’s focus has transitioned over time.

Cody: Yes. So I’m going to center a lot of this conversation around our founder Chip because it’s completely relevant. My initial move into account management and sales was let me figure out this amazing thing that Chip has been doing over the years and find a way to replicate it, standardize it, and then scale it. And I feel like I was moderately successful of that over the time. But I do know that when I’m consulting a startup, because typically they’re looking for information, not partnership at that time. I do know one of the main components when I’m in that room of consultants that’s talking to a founder or a group of founders is that when they talk about sales or the chief revenue officer level of maturity, it is your first stage of that is to get someone in there that’s gonna follow you around for a year and write down everything you do so that they can start to create a sales department as opposed to an entrepreneurial department, basically.

I, in my youth, had no idea that that’s what I was doing, but it is exactly what I did with Chip. So Chip had the high emphasis on partnership and relationship and doing the right thing every time about having hard conversations. And it allowed me to prioritize and organize information in a way that was appropriate to what COVI became. And so I think you know this already, but the name COVI stands for co-evolve and the logo with the carrot stands for we are greater than I or the collaborative approach to what a true business partnership would look like at that C level or leadership level. In our case, it’s usually tech oriented or at least tech adjacent.

And so over that time, I then, I think I had four accounts to start out with and I standardized the crap out of them and had it to where I could literally close help desk tickets without like driving down the road, like on a phone call, because things were so standardized. Now to our viewers, we do not recommend closing tickets while driving. Disclaimer, legal liability says, via.

Dave: Yeah, under the hood of that was those organizations happen to just be organizations that could be hyper standardized. They didn’t need a lot of customization. They were very repetitive tasks and entry level positions like frontline work.

Cody: So that is not always as we know the way to go is that over standardization that I usually have an 80 20 rule like with most things and say that we’re going to try to standardize 90 percent of the things we can. Probably going to land closer to 80. And then we’re going to find the right alignment for the other 10 to 20%. That was hard learned when I started to bring on my first few accounts outside of those four because I was so comfortable and used to how it was that I realized, oh, I need to find a way in coordination with the rest of our team, which was five people at that time, to get these standardized pieces done as fast as possible so that then we have the data to start understanding and executing on the other 20%. And that was something that started to take shape in early 2018.

So I’m boarded two larger clients in January and February of 18, and realized that larger clients were a lot more difficult to transition with. And that was the beginning of where we’ve landed today with strategic partnership and alignment and implementing technical operations and those types of things at organizations. It was a lot of client and COVI pain in early 2018 as a result of bringing in a more larger small business that was around 50 staff members instead of before then we were usually 20 or less.

As we excelled forward at the end of 2019 with getting to the over 100 staff member count, we realized that that value proposition that we thought would diminish the closer we got to that actually started getting better. That we were able to provide more value to our partners than we were before. So then I got to go on whole other journey during the COVID reprieve is what I will call it. Luckily enough, we had remote access pretty scalable at all of our organizations. So it didn’t take a lot of lift for the COVID requirements and it allowed me to take a little break and get to some creative thinking on the things I was seeing with that larger level client, which that’s the journey of nothing to where we are today.

Dave: I know that that remote access piece was a unique part of our history compared to a lot of other MSPs.

Cody: Oh yeah. We definitely consider COVI and or Netlink an early adopter in that space.

Dave: Tell us more about Chip’s vision for that and how that came to be.

Cody: So going back to standardization, and I know that you know this, but for all of you, Chip, who I love dearly and I like to fight and he is standardized the crap out of everything. And I am let’s make this even more valuable for the client. And sometimes those don’t align when they do. It’s great. And when they don’t, is when we get to be creative, which is my favorite part of my job is getting from the conflict to the resolution that however long that journey is, that is the puzzle that is so fun for me to do, which is the same thing that we do in our consulting engagements with clients. It’s, here’s the problem. Here’s our constraints. You would like us to have this silver bullet. But if we do this, this, or this, then we’re not going to able to recover you as fast, or you’re to be this much more exposed to risk, or your people will be this much less efficient. So. And if we can pause there just to call out for the sake of the show.

Dave: Because it’s something you and I talk a lot about, tension is good. Conflict is good. Without tension, there is no growth. We’re big believers in the Challenger sale as a book around here, at least in its core concepts. I haven’t read it in about a decade. So it’s a fair disclaimer. But to say, hey, if there’s no pushback, if there’s no challenge, if there’s no ask, then there are things under the surface that we’re not exploring and they’re probably going to be missed opportunities.

Cody: Yeah, go ahead. I think and I say this in an odd way, but I say it a lot and I’ll qualify it a little bit more in a second, but I am not a huge fan of MSPs, which we are. And that isn’t about outsourcing IT and it isn’t about an MSP in a vacuum. It’s about the model of raise your prices as high as you can and cover as little as possible. And I find that to be a primarily and probably egregiously unhelpful institution in our society. And so what I love about what Chip did intentionally and by nature, and then what I did by happenstance is we avoided that business model and created a more value approach. Hey, this is what we do. This is why it costs this much. And this is how it impacts you. And then anything we need to do that is more custom on top of that, we address individually.

In that same vein from a set it and forget it managed service provider philosophy or perspective. If I come to more than one or two meetings in a row to a client and we haven’t had some type of discomfort in the meeting, could be really small discomfort. It could be like my hairs in my back and my neck are sticking up. Just runs the whole range. I know that something either myself or someone on our team has not been looking at what will benefit them or what is going on from a risk perspective or listening to what problems coming up or strategic objectives that they have. Now, I know that you know, most of those lie with me, strategic objectives, problems, like all of that.

But there is when the team brings to me like, hey, ex-CEO just got phished. When we look back at the history, he asked to not have a password on his computer eight months ago. We were able to handle that conversation in a way that didn’t happen. But you might want to reinforce that. I can’t imagine doing my job as effectively when I get to those tables with leaders or co-managed IT situations with other internal IT peers of ours that I don’t have the empowerment from our team of all the technical data. And as you know, that was something that I audited on a quarterly basis for the first 2016 through 2020. And so the fact that that is primarily systematized from a technical perspective and then definitely systematize from an operations perspective has allowed me to be more present but still have the same data in our meetings.

I just have joy in all of those meetings. I am a more accounting mind, IT finance geek by nature. So doing those audits was fun, but it was also more of like a disassociative fun than it was where I didn’t feel as impactful. I like this was a need. I enjoy the work. This is a need for me to go create impact. Now I feel like I get to show up and create impact all the time or pursue impact all the time. That is a newly self-realized situation for me and quickly becoming a requirement for employment. It’s so much more energy in that space.

I remember being like going down through spreadsheet and spreadsheet and being like, man, if I could do this all day, that would be the life. And now then I would like get three days of that in a row. And I’d be like, this should all be automated. Why am I doing this? And so the fact that we’re in a place where I can show up with valuable information and data and then be present for strategic conversation and empathy is a frictionless reality that I never thought would exist, or could exist, I should say. Never thought could exist. So yeah, that’s good.

Dave: Let’s take a step back and talk more about standardization versus customization. I know at COVI we talk a lot about how everything starts with customer pain. The entire point of what we’re doing here is to solve customer pain, whether that pain is known or not. And obviously in the context of the IT space as much as possible. So within that, we talk a lot about standardization with our goal of creating safe environments that then scale to the unique needs of every industry, every business or nonprofit, and every individual leader’s goals. That’s hard. Tell me about how you approach that and how COVI explores that.

Cody: So attention is how we explore it to answer your questions in reverse order. It is impossible for an organization of more than made up numbers, one to three people to provide fully custom services all the time. So standardization is a requirement to sustainability and survival. And over, I’d say probably the past five or six years, myself and Jack and Teddy with Chip consulting with us have put so much energy and so much time into finding the impact and value of that standardization for our clients. So it wasn’t so COVI centric. The COVI centric pieces is a real situation. That is reality and it is a necessary requirement. Understanding how that impacts an organization.

So a good tangible example is when we do our IT strategy assessment and we see like all this, the score is 20 out of a hundred. It’s terrible. And then as part of our analysis, when we’re analyzing all the information, we are also looking at if we do choose to if we do find that we are a good fit for this organization’s problems and complexities and infrastructures, and they do choose to go with this, what does that score look like right after we’re done reaching the COVI standardized baseline?

And more often than not, we’re in the 80s or 90s. And that’s not how it always was back in the early days. But in the past five years or four years, it has been a significant change. And we’ve had a few organizations that were a lot more mature in their IT journey, where it was less impactful. It was more of like a 50 to 80 than a 20 to 80. But I’ve had one where I like a one liner in most of my assessment response sessions where it’s like, hey, this looks really bad. It almost always does for an organization at the stage of the game that you’re at. Just realizing it’s almost like the opposite of sticker shock.

They’re like, there’s this like panic of like, oh, we are about to just die from a technology perspective. And like, no, you just have a lot to do. And for people who don’t do it all day, every day, it’s really hard. But for us, it’s like one to three months. And then we get to get into the customized portion of it, which is, OK, where can we implement some type of automation that can enable your sales team to focus on their calls instead of putting things into a system? Or in our case, where our service desk technicians can execute the help that is being asked of them from clients instead of reviewing 13 different locations and places of documentation for what’s appropriate for coverage and what’s going to generate an invoice and then whether or not we’re going to care if it generates an invoice.

So now we have building automation and clarity in coverage for clients. And we have a help desk that can take a phone call and immediately empathize and go to work. And that is fun to see how our intense amount of effort and by the skin of our teeth hanging on to our creativity while being overwhelmed and over capacity has been able to generate that internally for us while we were doing it externally for clients and how that information and knowledge and experience and expertise feeds off of each other. So we get better because we help our clients get better. And then like, it’s just a cycle of, now we can implement this for us.

Oh. Now we can have that for all of these organizations. Oh, there’s this really new, weird, challenging puzzle in this architectural firm that we’ve never seen before. Oh, we can expand that knowledge to all of our architectural or architectural-adjacent clients. But also, this also applies to marketing companies in this way. And this applies, oh, at COVI, now we can do this instead of what we were doing before. And that will allow Cody and Luke to show up to meetings without an hour of prep. It’ll be 15 minutes of prep.

So now we can do our meetings in person and set up virtually sometimes, which allows us to interface with more people, which allows us to find more problems to solve. And as the sales leader, I hate to say this, but a lot of times those problems are problems that don’t generate extra invoices. So they are just problems because they didn’t know to ask us to help them or we didn’t know they existed or if it’s a newer client and they’ve had bad experiences in the past with IT resources, whether outsourced or not, they might not tell us because they’re afraid it’s going to cost a lot of money.

And we haven’t developed that trust yet towards like, hey, we’re going to tell you it’s going to cost a lot of money, not just surprise you with it. And then we’re going to help you evaluate whether it makes sense to invest in it or not. So that entire symbiotic ecosystem is another thing that gives me a lot of energy. And it’s why going from internal meetings to client meetings and coming back, which used to be probably the most taxing part of my job, is one of the most energizing parts of my job.

Dave: Yeah, that makes sense. I know that’s an area that I’m really passionate about, too. It’s those areas like, hey, it’s not like this is going to generate a lot of work for COVI, and hopefully not generate a lot of work for you, Mr. Customer. But did you know based off what you just described to me that this is possible. This is something that we can do and it’s something you can do. We just have to realign this process and it will solve a lot of pain for you whether you knew about that or not. I don’t know about you, that is my favorite part.

Cody: Yeah, the did you know is great. When I ask a question and I wish I had an example on my head right now, but when I ask a question in a meeting and then they go. I don’t know. And then my only response can be, well, why not? Because it’s something that looks like it should be a super obvious situation, but it’s just something that we innately ignore because we have over the years. It’s like using a dull pencil because you don’t have a pencil sharpener, you don’t want to carve it with a knife. Like I didn’t know that there was a better way.

Dave: Just to know, that’s yeah, that’s great. And getting back to the point around a strong structure and standardization. We do believe at COVI that standardization and a strong foundation or baseline is what allows us to then get creative. In other words, without that foundation in place, without just the right amount of structure, it’s impossible to build out this arm and this wing. If you have solid stability that creates the room for creativity, then amazing things can happen.

And that is, that’s the deal with detail we obsess about. When I was with Apple, we talked a lot about how doing things with excellence and doing things with detail takes a lot of time. It’s relatively easy nowadays. This is going to sound crazy, but it’s relatively easy nowadays for someone to create and sell a cell phone. A lot of stuff inside is actually pretty standardized, especially if you’re looking at the Google operating system. But it’s probably not gonna feel great. It is probably gonna be kind of clunky to use.

Cody: Like feel or like feel or both?

Dave: Both. Because while a lot of people can put modules together and make something work, it takes a lot of time to get the detail and feel right. We used to talk about the corners on the iPhone. I think we called them, I can’t remember if it was squangles or squircles. But we had a fun name for it because it wasn’t quite a circle and it wasn’t quite a rectangle and it made for a really unique feel in the corner that you didn’t even think about it just felt right.

And I like to think about our IT processes that way. A lot of companies can come up with a process. We can come up with an IT guideline, an IT standard. But it’s another thing to come up with just the right standard that maximizes security and safety while also enabling customization. And I would say that’s true for policy as well as for process.

Cody: Yeah. Yeah. When you said that, I thought of how we spent like a month of last year working or planning, and then we had to execute the recording of the videos after that. But planning our like welcome to COVI videos for new clients because over the years it’s like, well, my computer keeps telling me to reboot for updates and I don’t want to do it. And then it does it on its own. And it did it right when I was up against a deadline. And like the conversation is like, yeah, you ignored it at least 10 times and then it did it. And I can’t help that.

But the time that you couldn’t ignore it just happened to be one of the really impactful times. And I’m really sorry that really sucks. But there’s not a lot we can do. And actually, at that time, Microsoft forced that reboot. It wasn’t even a COVI enforcement. And I think that’s changed now. But again, I’m not under the hood enough to know. Don’t quote me on that.

But the one of the things that we do is we have a few cybersecurity like philosophical education moments in the in the videos because it’s really frustrating to have to do things from a cybersecurity perspective when you don’t understand why. And so I.T. departments, whether it’s a managed service provider or a big corporate internal I.T. department, are really bad at telling people why things are the way they are. It’s a non-malicious dictator mindset because of the fact that they probably have 300 tickets to close and you’re gonna, this conversation’s gonna take me what would take me the same amount of time to do three tickets. And so that is the culture of IT, especially I would say internally and for that education campaign and the empowerment of like, hey, yeah.

It really does get annoying to have to pull your phone out and work through your multi-factor authentication every time you do that type of activity. But it feels like you’re losing a minute here and there and those minutes add up and you might be losing 10 minutes a week to that process, which feels unproductive and inefficient compared to former processes of, you don’t have a password or you have a memorized and you move forward. But if you experience even a limited cyber breach, you’re going to experience probably minimum of 24 business hours of disruption. And those little 10 minutes don’t add up to that for years and years and years. And so it is a really point of pride for me to see how after we were able to get our standardization from a COVI perspective and get all of our business units in sync that we were then able to extend that knowledge to clients in a way that focused on people instead of just on the technical controls and the risk posture and the like, I love the information so we can the leaderships can our leadership team can make quick decisions. That’s great. Or good decisions. Awesome. But if the leaderships people can’t align with those decisions in a way that helps them stay empowered and focused on what we call the meaningful work, then it’s like they’re just going to get frustrated.

They got a flat tire on the way to the office. Then they had to reboot their computer when they got there. And then they had to re-authenticate into all of their applications and get their phone out five times to click their authenticator button. And then their email was syncing. And so all the emails weren’t there yet. And so they missed four important emails because they moved on to another task before it was there because of the reboot. And then the guest Wi-Fi went out. And so then their presentation was harder to do.

Like all those things just add up over time. But if they understand that, like, well, we use guest Wi-Fi because if we don’t, the likelihood of you getting hacked is this percent. And if your organization experiences that type of breach, then 75 % of them go. I think it’s actually 65 % of them go out of business within the next 18 months. And when those just little nuggets of information that aren’t like, here’s your Ted talk on cybersecurity. Yeah, they help employees reposition and reframe in their mind. Oh.

This is a really important task that I need to do to make sure that I can do these really important tasks that I wanna do. Just like brushing your teeth so that you can go and have good dental health, which then extends to your whole body. Or take care of my feet and get the right shoes so that I can walk all day or stand all day or do whatever I’m doing all day as opposed to putting on the cool Chuck Taylors that I long to return to that I can only wear for five minutes before experiencing hip and knee pain.

Dave: This is one of the worst ones I’ve done in a while.

Cody: All right. As we wrap today, I’d like to bring us home by tying in more of what we talked about to security, which you were just getting into. Because I feel like that’s the area where concepts like strong foundations and standardizations against users being able to do the work that matters. I think that’s where this conversation matters the most. Because we could make the most secure environment in the world, and nobody would ever get any work done.

Dave: On the other hand, we could make it the most enabling and freeing environment in the world. And it would probably be hacked or phished or social engineered within 72 hours. Right. And size of organization doesn’t matter anymore because of the economy of scale or commoditization of hacking on the dark web. Right. So exactly right. Share with our viewers COVI’s approach to balancing those two things, security and productivity.

Cody: So I think a lot of it comes down to unique experience that we’ve had amongst ourselves on the team. It’s like specifically thinking of like me and Teddy and Jack and the things that we’ve had to solve for ourselves and for clients over the years that have been highly complex. And it was like we used to have two or three of those problems a month. And now it feels like we have two or three of those problems a day. Everything’s moving so much faster. So from a planning perspective, we are constantly seeking clarity. Hey, we really need to do this new cybersecurity measure because these new things came out into the world.

And this is how it will negatively impact our clients because we are in the when not if era of cybersecurity breaches. If we don’t do this, then this is why we fail as a consultant. This is why we fail as a security provider. Like why are we even in this business anymore?

Dave: Cody, I know that you’re really passionate about how security environments have changed over time and what kind of resilience is necessary over time. Tell us a little bit more about that evolution and what COVI has seen.

Cody: There’s lots of tension and conflict around that moment of clarity on getting it to the most simple explanation possible. And so then clients and their people can know because we can protect the infrastructure and the data and the applications as much as we want all day every day. But if we can’t help empower a culture of security, then they’re not going to be prepared for the phishing attempt or the text version of a phishing attempt or the phone version of a phishing attempt or random person that’s walking in and trying to plug things in to their environment because they say that they’re a vendor or they’re just doing it because people are not by nature programmed to challenge those types of situations.

And we’re not dealing with the Pentagon where we have all of these measures in place and a culture of security just by default. We’re dealing with organizations that started as an entrepreneur or a solopreneur that landed to a bootstrap startup that now might be 50 people deep, but they still have the remnants of the beginning. We, through clear and concise presentations and planning and data or information flow to our clients are able to then start to reverse engineer that culture of security from the top down and from the bottom up controls from the bottom up and then information and leadership from the top down. We are we are a standardization and security first organization because that is what’s required to facilitate and sustain the creativity needed to be strategic.

Dave: You know, Cody, as we wrap this up, as we bring this to a close, I know that balancing security and open creativity is one of the hardest challenges that an MSP, an IT company, security firm or internal IT will ever face because these things are becoming more complicated every day. It used to be that technology was relatively simple. I feel like it was scary. It was ambiguous and there was risk there. Don’t get me wrong, of course, but there were IT firms popping up all over the place. Cause if you were a little bit nerdy, you get to work right away. And there was a lot that you could do to improve a small business, move them forward and open them up to new creativity and productivity.

We are past the point of creativity and basic productivity being unlocked for a business. Nowadays you could purchase a cell phone at Best Buy and get to work as a small business, right? Things are a little bit different now. The challenges of an IT MSP are different now because instead of there being a handful of systems that you would implement, like basic internet, Microsoft Office, and perhaps a really good email and fact solution, now we have thousands, perhaps even millions of tools, often a lot of them industry specific, that need to be implemented, that they need to talk to each other and somehow be secure.

Even though you’re opening up thousands of doors between applications in every single business so that collaboration can happen. We’re talking about CRM tools like Zapier and all kinds of other solutions that just create endless security holes that we’re constantly running around trying to keep an eye on. So in a world that used to be relatively simple, it’s now incredibly complicated. And if that wasn’t enough, now you have an entire generation of nerds with malicious intent that grew up just learning how to get around systems. It’s almost a challenge accepted kind of situation.

So as an IT firm, what can you do? The temptation first, if you’re on the technical side of the equation and that’s your focus, is to lock it all down.

Cody: And then if you’re on the customer experience side. Explicit deny. Exactly. Straight to jail.

Dave: And on the other side, again, the customer experience side, depending on your role and your job in the IT organization, you’re so excited about what new solutions you can bring to the table. And obviously both sides are excited about both things, but prioritizing those and bringing them together, that’s tough. And we’ve talked about the Apple, you know, squirkel, squangles, whatever. That’s where those details matter, right? So at COVI, I know that we’re really passionate about finding that balance and it comes from a lot of good conflict. It comes from a lot of tough conversations, a lot of exploration and a lot of us staying on the edge with what is possible. But we know at COVI at the end of the day, we’re here to enable productivity. And that means we also have to protect security. If security goes down, productivity is out the window. And so that’s why we work so hard with our customers to find that balance for them.

And yes, we have worked really hard to create a security standard that we can use across the board as a baseline. We feel it is the standard minimum requirement that enables us to grow. But that baseline comes from days and days and days. And the us there wasn’t COVI. The us was COVI and everyone else that we serve. This constant collaboration. So if I were to break it down into steps for what we do here. It’s first, yes, it’s a lot of good conflict amongst ourselves. Two, it’s a lot of good collaboration with our users. Then three, it’s taking our users on the journey with us as best we can to make the complex simple and explain, okay, this is the challenge we’re up against. This is why we’ve made this decision. Do you have any other context that you could share with us that would be helpful as we implement it uniquely to you?

And then four, we get to get back to, and what are the things that your organization is looking to do beyond this so that we can continue that cycle? The what’s next.

Cody: Yeah, using your Apple analogy, we can’t get to the squircles if we don’t have a high emphasis on security and privacy. We don’t have a lockdown app development process where our app store is completely locked down. And now we can focus on how’s this feel?

Dave: Exactly. Because otherwise it could feel great and then you’ve just got my credit card breached and now I hate you.

Cody: Exactly. Finding the balance, the endless battle.

Dave: As we wrap up today’s episode, a couple of call outs in summary. One, as we talked about a lot and as a reminder to all, good conflict is how organizations grow. It’s how business relationships grow. It’s how trust grows over time. And we always encourage our organizations and our peers and friends lean into the good conflict. It’s how good stuff happens.

Two, you don’t have good productivity without good security. The two have to go hand in hand. If you have one without the other, you have a system that is going to fail. And point number three is a reminder, and we can’t understate this. It’s not an if a security breach or security attack is going to happen. It’s when. That is the current age of technology. COVI’s passion is to make it so that it is a bug on your windshield, like it never even happened. And we wipe it away and it’s gone.

And again, a lot of organizations can fight for good security. But at COVI, we’re passionate about balancing security with creativity and productivity. We believe that’s how organizations grow and we’d love partnering with you and we’d love to continue to partner with you as we see what’s on the radar and open up your organization’s new possibilities. And that’s a wrap. We’ll see you next time here on The COVI Way.