Ep813: Scott Alldridge – Hot Coffee, Cold Reality: The $10,000 Drone Delivery Mistake

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Quick take

BIO: Scott Alldridge is CEO of IP Services and President of the IT Process Institute, a bestselling author of the VisibleOps series, and a Certified Chief Information Security Officer.

STORY: Scott’s worst investment was a stake in a startup promising to deliver hot coffee by drone. Excited by the futuristic idea, he invested before the concept was proven—but the project quickly crashed when the FAA banned drone deliveries and a prototype failed spectacularly.

LEARNING: Being first doesn’t always mean being right. Due diligence is non-negotiable.

 

“You don’t have to jump in. Being the first with the most doesn’t matter if it’s a bad idea—you’ll lose money anyway.”

Scott Alldridge

 

Guest profile

Scott Alldridge is CEO of IP Services and President of the IT Process Institute, a bestselling author of the VisibleOps series, and a Certified Chief Information Security Officer. He holds an MBA in cybersecurity and has over 30 years of experience in IT and cybersecurity leadership. Scott empowers organizations to achieve resilience through process excellence, Zero Trust, and AI-driven security.

Worst investment ever

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, coffee isn’t just a drink; it’s a way of life. Seattle is home to Starbucks, and in Oregon, coffee culture runs deep. So when Scott was pitched an idea that combined coffee and technology—delivering hot coffee via drone—he couldn’t resist.

The concept sounded revolutionary: push a button on your phone, and a drone drops off your piping-hot Americano right at your doorstep. It felt like the future—part Amazon innovation, part TED Talk dream.

Excited, Scott invested for a 3% stake in the startup. The founders promised a caffeinated empire built on convenience and cutting-edge tech.

But just three months later, the buzz wore off. The FAA issued a cease-and-desist order on all drone delivery experiments, particularly those involving liquids.

And then came the final straw: the company’s prototype drone spilled an entire cup of hot coffee mid-flight, grounding both the drone and Scott’s hopes. The “coffee drone revolution” turned into a $10,000 lesson in wishful thinking. Delivering hot coffee by drone was never going to fly—literally.

Lessons learned

  • Being first doesn’t always mean being right.
  • It’s tempting to jump into the next big idea, especially when it sounds exciting and visionary. However, early-stage innovation carries significant risk, especially when the concept hasn’t been tested or proven.
  • Enthusiasm can cloud judgment. Instead of investing based on a slick pitch deck or futuristic concept, it’s smarter to wait until an idea is validated, tested, and compliant with regulations.

Andrew’s takeaways

  • Every idea looks brilliant until reality—and regulation—show up.
  • Even in large corporations, where top analysts and executives lead multi-million-dollar mergers, success isn’t guaranteed. Only about 20% of them added value within three to five years.
  • Business is hard, and due diligence is non-negotiable.

Actionable advice

Always do your due diligence. Before investing in any idea—no matter how exciting—slow down and dig deep:

  • Validate the concept. Is there a working prototype, or just a fancy pitch?
  • Check the regulations, especially if the business operates in a grey area (like drones or cannabis).
  • Assess the risk. What happens if laws, markets, or consumer behaviour change?
  • Stay patient. If it’s truly a good idea, it will still be good when it’s proven.

Scott’s recommendations

Scott recommends his Amazon bestseller, Visible Ops Cybersecurity: Practical Ways to Enhance Your Cybersecurity Posture, which breaks down complex IT security concepts into real-world strategies that leaders can actually apply.

For executives who don’t speak “tech,” he’s also written The Visible Ops Executive Companion Guide, a concise 105-page edition with zero “geek speak”—just actionable guidance.

And coming soon: Visible Ops AI: Artificial Intelligence Governance with Practical Guidance, where Scott explores how businesses can safely and responsibly integrate AI while protecting data integrity.

No.1 goal for the next 12 months

Scott’s goal for the next 12 months is to double down on two things: growth and impact.

On the business side, his goal is to expand the top-line revenue of his IT services firm and bring in new client partnerships. But there’s also a bigger mission driving him—making the world a safer place through smarter, more disciplined cybersecurity practices.

Parting words

 

“Thank you for having me today. Let’s keep the world a cyber-safe place.”

Scott Alldridge

 

Read full transcript

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Matt, Hello, fellow risk takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever. Stories of loss. To keep you winning in our community, we know that to win in investing, you must take risks, but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, and I want to thank my listeners in Oregon right now for listening to this podcast and sharing also and fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests. Scott Aldridge, Scott, are you ready to join the mission?

Scott Alldridge 00:39
I'm excited. Thanks for having me. Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 00:42
of all people, of all people, I can't wait for your story. Why is that? Well, let me introduce you to the audience. Hold on, ladies and gentlemen. Scott is CEO of IP services and president of the IT Process Institute. He's the best selling author of the visual, visible ops series, and a certified chief information security officer. He holds an MBA in cyber security and has 30 plus years in IT Cyber Security Leadership. Scott empowers organizations to achieve resilience through Process Excellence, zero trust and AI driven securities. Scott, take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.

Scott Alldridge 01:24
Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me, Andrew. I love your podcast. I've listened to several episodes now, and I'm just thrilled to be here. So go listen five star. Mark it up for all your listeners out there. It's really great. I think the unique value I bring to the world is I kind of was born an entrepreneur. I started, literally when I was nine years old, as being an entrepreneur with a raspberry patch, believe it or not, and have reinvented that different businesses throughout the years. And of course, the last 30 years, I've been doing cyber security and IT management and really focusing on doing best practices. And so the unique value, I would say, is that I really am a little bit like you're on a mission to help a million people. We're on a mission actually, to help a million businesses. And IT managers, directors and cybersecurity professionals keep the world a safer place because we read the news every day, and, boy, everybody that reads the News knows we need better cybersecurity practices.

Andrew Stotz 02:18
Yeah, it's interesting when I think about the risks that are lurking beneath the surface are much I mean, when you look at the risks that are out there, it must just terrify you as you see what companies are doing and what individuals are doing. I'm just curious, like in your line of work, what are some of the, let's say, top one or two risks that you see that companies things that companies are exposed to?

Scott Alldridge 02:46
Yeah, great question. I'll actually start with a little story I sometimes tell later on. But interesting enough, there's this thing called the dark web, and that's where a lot of the threat actors and the evil doers live in the world of cyber and they're connected the internet, so they can be anywhere in the world, and they can hack and attack anywhere, wherever you are. So no business is safe if you're connected to the internet. That's just the truth. But the reality is, there's a thing called the Tor Browser. Nobody should be using it. It actually allows you to access couple browsers, but it's one of the more popular ones on the dark web. And here, about three months ago, we were doing some lab stuff on some Tor Browser, just some cyber shop workshop stuff. But stumbled onto an ad that popped up, believe it or not, on a site that said, Get your ransomware franchise kit today. And it said, for $295 you can join our ransomware franchise listed a bunch of benefits that we give you a kit to go out and scan networks, find vulnerabilities, find ports that are open. If you get stuck, you can escalate to our expert team at a one 800 or an online, real time chat. We'll walk you through how to hack in, and then when we get the proceeds, we will split the profits, 5050, we also can use our one 800 call center to settle up for the crypto because most businesses don't deal in crypto. I'm thinking to myself, if you're a sharp, smart middle school kid, high school kid, and you want to be a little nefarious and you're a little upset at the world, you just go buy a franchise on the dark web, and you're a ransomware attacker. To me, that's one of the most scary things I've seen even just recently

Andrew Stotz 04:23
that is terrifying. And I think that, you know, the problem is, most of us just don't realize that, that that's out there. We like to think that the world is good. And I have a friend of mine that he does a lot of he's a very honest and sincere guy, but he has to go on the dark webs to do some stuff to help his clients and all that. And he started telling me what's on there. And it just terrifies me when I hear about it.

Scott Alldridge 04:51
It is sickening, honestly, because it's all the way from, you know, any kind of narcotic or nefarious activity or drug to human trafficking, to all kinds. Kinds of just incredibly awful things. It really, truly is a dark place. And, yeah, that's exactly right. One other little side note too, to think about cyber just in general, is that, you know, I'm thinking about the Caesars MGM Grand hack that happened about a year and a half ago. It was actually, you know, they've got all the best cyber tools, the best cyber people in the world, you know, they're a casino, they're worth millions and billions, and yet, one phone call to their Help Support Center to get them to change an administrative password through somebody who fished them, and they changed that, they elevated, they broke and they hacked inside, they elevated the password and was able to bring it to its knees for about 26 days. Cost them right at $198 million is what it cost them. And then just a couple months ago, actually, they just settled for $49 million with a class action suit for all the data that they stole, the confidential information that was there. So just to summarize, right, even the biggest, most sophisticated willing to invest in cyber because they had a lot to protect if they're getting hacked. How much easier is it for your typical small business that no longer is not a particular target, based on what I shared just a little bit ago, everybody's a target. One phone call, 140 $9 million that's pretty crazy. Think about,

Andrew Stotz 06:16
and just just to understand your business for a moment, like if I think about, let's say I have one of my businesses is a coffee factory, and we've had it for 30 years. We have a list of clients, and we have a lot of client detail. We have employee data detail, we've got our recipes, you know, we got all of that stuff and I just can imagine, you know, if an expert like you was to, if we were to hire an expert like you, it just would be crazy what we would find. But what is the service that you offer? How do you what? What is it that you generally are doing with companies?

Scott Alldridge 06:49
Sure. Yeah, so I've been, you know, privileged to be an advisor to some of the, you know, larger companies across the, really the world, but more in the US. But my business is IP services. We are what we call a managed services security provider. So we're the team that you subscribe to that we come in with our bench of experts, and you don't have to have all of them hired full on. You actually get a whole team for a portion of the cost. But then we also are up on the latest and greatest techniques, methods and so forth to keep your business safe. So we roll out. And one of the things in my book, which we'll talk about later, probably talk about a zero trust methodology. It's been around for a while. We've been promoting it for years, but the idea is exactly what it says. It's like, you trust nothing and verify everything. And that's been said before. And so this idea of using that what they break it down into seven pillars, if you will, of the way that you do cybersecurity. So I speak to it as layers. So we come in, and we start off using with an assessment of what we call a penetration test, and we look at all the weaknesses in a particular network, whether it's small, medium or large. And then when we find those vulnerabilities, we prioritize based on what the risk is, how we're going to stop, you know, and plug those holes and put the right layers of cyber security in and it takes a lot of layers. Honestly, you almost can't have enough layers. That's kind of where it's at in the world today. But that's my business. We deliver those services.

Andrew Stotz 08:09
And if you think about, are you focused on small, medium or large size businesses?

Scott Alldridge 08:14
So we may do what I would call, generally speaking, SMB. So usually, you know, could be up. We have a handful, under 100 just under 100 but using 100 to 100 to about 2500 employees is a really good fit

Andrew Stotz 08:25
sweet spot for us. And just out of curiosity, I mean, I'm talking about totally selfishly about my business and thinking about it, you know, when you come in, let's say that you come in, and I don't know how long an engagement would last. Maybe you can tell us that. But the other thing is, like, you know, I'm assuming that it would be pretty quickly. You'd be like, we need to close this door. We need to close this door. Like, you're going to basically find three to five major vulnerabilities that we didn't even know, and you're going to help us, you know, fix those immediately. Or, how does it work?

Scott Alldridge 08:59
Yeah, so it's exactly right. A penetration tests are typically different methods and levels, but we actually use a patented process, and we actually use a third party that we're partnered with. And the reason is, is because we bring in a cyber security program, right? Some of those layers, we can't be the ones that are managing your cyber security and then tell you we're doing a really good job. We need to have a trusted, validated third party that can attest to the fact that you we really have plugged the holes in your security postures tight. But when that relationship we have the ability to do some different types of penetration testing and through we, at the end of the podcast today, I actually have a little offer. I extend your audience around that, but, but the point is, is that what we do find stuff we've never ran a report hundreds, maybe even 1000s, of companies we've not ran into a report where we don't get some findings, and most of them, quite frankly, are a lot of things they don't think about. And of late, the more recent one is we've added, they've added an element of scanning for the deployment of AI, your, you know, chat, gpts that's on your network. And it actually give us a summary of the vulnerability, kind of a score as to how risky that particular AI that you're using is on your network, because that's just one thing that a company may not think about, and that's one thing that the penetration test actually checks off for.

Andrew Stotz 10:13
Now I think that any business owner that hears what you just said says, I need that. But the question is, Is it difficult? Does it require a lot of work from me when I hire you? And is it expensive?

Scott Alldridge 10:26
Yeah, so the cool part is, is that it's not difficult, and we actually can do it incognito, so you don't necessarily have to disrupt your IT teams. Rather, you want to check on them, because you got, you know, Bob, Mike and Sarah, telling you we are good cyber wise. Sometimes that's an interesting thing to be able to do as a, you know, an owner or a president or an executive, to say, I want to check on my team. It's trust, but verify, right? It's not just not trying to be dishonorable to your team, but and not trusting them, but you got to verify, and that's the way you can verify. So it's very easy to do. It's pretty simple. Pen test can run from $2,500 up to about 10,000 for the size of companies that I just said, the new practice, and the best practice over the last year and a half, two years now, is they used to do different types of tests, like once a year, then a couple times a year, once a quarter, vulnerability scanning. The new thing is that every month, you should be running a variety of different vulnerability and penetration tests on your network. And the reason is, is because environments in our world, IT environments, network systems, operating systems, applications. They're forever changing. And every time something changes, a new vulnerability may be exposed. So every month, doing, you know, the regiment of so that's one of the services we offer, is we actually will come in, deploy the penetration testing services and some other things around it, and then we'll be able to do remediation and then put layers and work on you over time, because everybody can't budget to afford everything right away. But penetration tester are a little bit expensive actually to run, but they're a very fast way to see where those big holes might be in your security. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 11:57
Well, I'm glad to have you on the show, because I know for myself and for the listeners you know it this, get this can really hit home. And so I'm interested in learning more, but now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be, tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story. Sure.

Scott Alldridge 12:18
So live out here in the Northwest. I'm actually out in Oregon, in the United States, and here in the Northwest, we're kind of the coffee capital of the world. We were doing coffee, obviously, not before other countries were doing coffee, years before the United States, but it became somewhat of a popular thing. The home of Starbucks is in Seattle, and so coffee is a big, big deal. And I had a lot of interest in coffee, and I know you just noted you're in the coffee business, so we had somebody, kind of, you know, pitch us here about five years ago on the coffee drone disaster, is what I'm going to call it. And it's, you know, kind of this dream idea that be able to deliver coffee with a coffee drop, be the world's first drone, you know, drone, because Amazon's doing a lot of drone stuff. They were testing it about four or five years ago, became this big thing. Then it basically became straight out of a TED talk, right? Like you could just think it click a button on your phone, and then the drone shows up with your hot cup of whatever you like, right? So I'm thinking, this is fantastic, right? I love coffee. Interested in the business always have been, been a coffee drinker, and, you know, pretty enthused, if you will. And a matter of fact, I was doing coffee stuff and work with a had a little coffee stand before Starbucks was even in our town. Now, there's like 10 Starbucks in our town. It's that kind of thing. But anyway, so they pitched it. I listened to the deck, talked to a couple people, sent on a couple calls, threw in tank, a 3% stake. I'm thinking that's a lot for Tim, but they're pitching It's not much. I'm thinking this is going to be a, you know, caffeinated, charged empire, all excited. Three months later, the FAA, of course, did the cease and desist on all the drone delivery stuff. They're now re imbibing it some, because you're seeing drone delivery. And of course, who knew, right? I mean, the idea that you're flying liquids around stuff that could be, you know, hot coffee on people's heads, honestly. So the final straw, you know, of course, the prototype literally spilled this Americana, you know, the pilot drone was grounded. It spilled it all over the place. It was actually on a video. And so that's my worst investment. I don't know what I was thinking delivering coffee through drones was going to make me hundreds of 1000s of dollars. I was getting a huge stake in the company. Well, of course I was, because it was never going to fly. No pun intended.

Andrew Stotz 14:34
So how would you summarize the lessons that you learned from that?

Scott Alldridge 14:38
I think the practicality is like, you know, first off, when you're investing in something, it's a little bit of a catch 22 because if you want to, you know, be early, an early adopter, right? And you've got something inventive that creates value, and it's, it's, of course, intellectual property, and you're the firstest with the mostest and the bestest, it becomes that kind of thing. So there's big opportunity. But I. Also think your risk is huge, you know, much, much higher. So maybe for me, thinking a little farther down, so things are a little more tested, a little more beta, a little more proven, not jumping in just based on a great PowerPoint and a great pitch deck, really see that the product has been proven, that it really can work if it's a product based, you know thing, if it's something else, it might be a different thing. But that's my biggest lesson. Is, don't you know, Wait, calm down. You know you don't need to jump in. Being the first with the most is, if it's a bad idea, you're going to lose money anyway. So it's crazy. That's my lesson. Okay, by

Andrew Stotz 15:31
the way, do you know who is the originator saying the first is with the most is? I do not. So it was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a Calvary man in the southern side of the Civil War, and he was one of the winningest, you know, Calvary leaders. And they asked him, How did you, you know, do it? He said, I get there first is with the mostest. I like it. And that was good. And it's interesting, you know, one of the things that made me think about in Thailand, sorry, in China, they're doing coffee delivery all the time by drone, and they've set it up where they're delivering to, like a unit. And people go to like a park, and they go, I want KFC. There's a whole thing. You press button, I want KFC. I want a coffee Starbucks. I want to this. And that five minutes later, a drone arrives, comes into this unit, deposits whatever it has, and then a box opens, you take it and now, and it's got, like, storage areas and stuff. It's incredible. What they

Scott Alldridge 16:28
write about that. I read a little blip on that also. I didn't believe it. I didn't know, I didn't know it really existed. I thought, well, that must be something, yeah, okay, definitely it's getting more. They're doing delivery now in some markets. You know, Amazon's doing delivery in certain areas, but Yeah, way before it's time, not proven, not a good method, yeah, yeah, it was a bad,

Andrew Stotz 16:45
bad. And if I look at that also, I just one of the things that I just think about is business is so hard. Business is hard, you never know where as I tell people when they start business. I said the most important thing in starting your business is, don't make the wrong mistake. And they say, well, what's the wrong mistake? I say, I have no idea what it is. You know, you don't either, but just don't make it. But you can't do a business without taking risk. But you know, the product market fit and trying, you know, and it's not the only you're not the only one that come on with something like this. The cannabis space is also filled with so many people that went into it with all the excitement. They were high with excitement, how we say? And then all of a sudden, the regulation changes, and that, that's something that, you know, is something that we've got to always think about, but you just never know where it would come from. So let's now go and imagine a young man or woman right now today, and they've had an idea presented to them similar to what you faced. They're pretty excited about it. So based on what you learned from this and what you continue to learn in your life, I mean, look at all the risks and other things that you've seen through your career, what would be one action that you'd recommend that they take in order to avoid suffering the same fate?

Scott Alldridge 18:10
Yeah, I think you honestly probably the biggest is due diligence, and people tend to shortcut it, because we get excited, the passion takes over. We've wanted to be in a business. We want to do a business. We've got a night. We've got an idea, and so we let the passion rule, and we really don't do the due diligence, and I mean on all fronts. And I actually mean that even if you're acquisitioning a business, a lot of smaller companies, they, you know, even you know, they just don't know how to do great proper due diligence. And then they don't find out where the issues are beforehand, and the investment doesn't turn out. But if you're starting, I think the same rule applies. You have to really do your homework, and it's not easy, and you've got to be prepared for that doesn't work, or, no, or this is a bad idea, stop, drop and roll and look for the next investment, and then continue the due diligence. And again, nothing's going to be a sure thing. You're never going to eliminate risk, right? The if there's even the most proven businesses are risk, even franchises fail a lot. So anyway, I think that's the biggest thing, is due diligence for me. Really take your time, be patient, be smart and be willing to walk away.

Andrew Stotz 19:15
Man, that's great advice. I also, I did a research study many years ago when I was an analyst, you know, full time, and that was, I looked at 5000 m&a deals and across the world over 20 years, and I asked the question, I wasn't so concerned about the share price, because I knew that you don't want to own the company that's buying. You want to own the company that's being acquired and and I also know that you can't make money if you buy after it's announced, and it's illegal to trade before it's announced. If you're an insider. Now, if you can figure out the conditions of what make a company attractive for takeover, then you could build a portfolio of companies to say. Right? The probability of takeover here is high, sure, but, but what I was more concerned about is, what was the return that the company that bought other companies got in the future? Because obviously we're always going to hear that this is a good idea to make this acquisition, to make this investment. And what I found was that about 78% of the time, within three to five years, the profitability of the acquiring company have fallen, meaning, basically only 20% of the time did an M and a transaction with a big companies listed in the stock market. Smartest people with all the resources, only 20% of the time did it actually add value to the acquiring company. And once you understand those statistics, it helps you to think, yeah, due diligence is important. And thinking about so much, about the integration, about all that. Now that's M and A you were talking about investing in startup, but the due diligence is still the same.

Scott Alldridge 21:03
Yeah, it's huge. So thank you.

Andrew Stotz 21:05
Let's talk about a resource. What's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners? I know you've also got a new book coming out, right?

Scott Alldridge 21:12
Yeah, I do. So one of the resources that I'm excited is this year, I released a book called The visible ops cyber security. It's really about enhancing your cybersecurity posture with practical guidance. It comes from a series of books called the visible ops handbooks released in the later 2000s in over 15 years, we've sold about 350,000 copies of this series of books. I authored the last book by myself. Co authored some of the others. But that book is pretty exciting. It's an Amazon bestseller already this year, and it's doing very well. And it really is an altruistic book. In one sense. I kind of give away our secret sauce. If you want to know how we run our company and how we design, you know, our services and what's built on zero trust and having the right philosophy. And it starts with leadership. And so I kind of go through all those things in the chapters. In the last chapter is the golden thread, where I weave a golden needle of thread through all of the various chapters to show how that really builds a really airtight cybersecurity program and posture. Excited. I'm also working on a new book called The visible ops AI, artificial intelligence governance with practical guidance. I think best practices is the subtitle. And so to working on that not finished yet, but it's getting close. I'm excited about that. And that kind of comes from just recent stuff. That's not really a big, formalized study, but I read a study between business being 500,000 employees. They have about 23 different types of AI that is being ran in their business, and they likely don't hardly know it. They know some of it. And we don't think about the, you know, how we govern and control and have policy around that to protect the business. And people are loading up all kinds of amazing things, like, you know, client list and financials and recipes, and they're thinking, woohoo, this is amazing how it's organizing my stuff and making us so more efficient. But they don't realize, is that data secure? What AI is it going into who could be looking at that stuff? So that's, that's a the book I'm kind of excited about that'll be coming out here this, you know, at very at the end of the year, right at the beginning of next year. But, but visible ops book is a resource that I would really encourage everybody to to take a look at. And I have another iteration of that that I wrote a few months ago that's called the visible ops executive companion guide, built off the book. And this one is a more of a, not a 400 page cyber security book. That's a little heavy duty for some. And it's 105 page executive guide, no geek speak. So you kind of talks about practical things, like we look at a delight and two study in there where it says, Hey, if you're of this kind of business, you should be spending this amount of your budget on it. And, oh, by the way, out of that budget, you should be spending this amount on your cybersecurity program. And it looks at things like, you're a candy company. Make world class candy, do it well, you're not a cyber ops organization. You're not trying to be a cyber security company. Why try to be so that's the stuff, the practical stuff that it gets into as well.

Andrew Stotz 23:56
I'm wondering if what this ends up leading to is that people move away from chat GPT type of independent and they move into something that I have on my computer, but I don't use that much, which is called copilot as an example, because it's built into the Microsoft infrastructure, and they can implement security with that. Is that where we're going with this?

Scott Alldridge 24:18
Well, I'm not so convinced, because, you know, usually the fine print like Google, right? We all know how that works, and we all know about the Amazon world, right? We start talking about the barbecue in the backyard. We're going to get new this summer. And what starts showing up on your ads, right? Their fine print actually gives them, usually, rights to most of your data, to access the data. It's supposed to be anomalous. There's some fine print in there. There's some rules, some guidance, some governance around laws that what they can and can't do, but they're very good at taking this piece of data and that piece of data and then filling in the blank between what it is. So I'm not convinced that any of the AI, unless you're paying for a subscription at a business level service. And you've looked at their policies, and they're telling you, they're in writing, that they do follow security protocols, and your confidential data is kept confidential. Now, in theory, the latest iteration of chat GBT with a business account, I think it's 20 or 30 bucks a month. It's supposed to meet that bar, but I do think we need to move cautiously, because historically, we've seen things that were supposed to be everybody was convinced they were, but we're not totally sure that they are in terms of security or following the policies, or they're doing the service the way that they say they're doing the service and keeping it private. So I'm not to be a skeptic or whatever, but I just think there's a lot of caution around AI that needs to be applied, and you need to be careful, but there's a lot of things you can put in there, and a lot of efficiencies you can gain about stuff. And it can be used, and I think it should be used, and businesses should it's a competitive advantage, right? And they need to use it in the way that they can use it, or build their own LLM or their own language model that's unique to their business, that they can keep privatized. They can put the right visible ops cyber security controls around it, and that will make keep them safe and keep their data safe.

Andrew Stotz 26:04
Great. Now, let me ask you, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Scott Alldridge 26:11
Well, number one is, I'm, you know, continue to work on kind of growing the top line revenue at my IP services company. So we're looking for new logos and working on that pretty hard. But the other, you know, side of that is we really have a little bit of altruistic goal with, you know, the IT Process Institute. We kind of do research, benchmarking and prescriptive guidance, a little lighter on the research and pre and, excuse me, on the research and the benchmarking. We more work with a couple of other organizations now, because they can do it more efficiently and faster and less money, quite frankly. But then we take all that data, and we look through it, analyze it, sometimes put some regression analysis on do different things with it, and then we're able to kind of come back with some science to this manage by fact, not by belief, which is really what the series of books of visible Ops is all about. It's looking at what's proven, both quantitatively and qualitatively with science type methodology, science and research methodologies, and then saying, apply these practices, and you know, you're going to get the results right. And so that's the prescriptive side. So that's where I camp in. And that's an altruistic goal. It's trying to get better. It performance, higher user satisfaction, safer. Companies. Making the World Cyber Safe is a big, big part for us. It's really huge.

Andrew Stotz 27:19
Yeah, you mentioned that you had an offer. And just for the audience, we'll have links to your books that you've mentioned and on in the show notes, but maybe you can talk briefly about that.

Scott Alldridge 27:29
Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, come on a podcast like this, and to your audience that's so unique. I've got a couple things I'd love to do. Number one, I'll give you a business text line here in just a second that you can text secure 25 to but here's what I'll do. I'm going to send you a PDF copy of the executive companion book. It sells for 1795 on Amazon. I'm going to just send that credit as my team will they'll get it out to you. And if you do the secure 25 to the text I'm giving you, and then second, and this one, I've got three of so I got three in the bag that I can do for for the your companies, your audience, and that is, I can do a penetration test, do this scan to look for the AI, the stuff I talked about in this podcast, and give you a great report that you can go back and use your team or your current provider. Of course, if there's gaps, we'd love to talk to you about that as well, but we're going to do that lot of value in that. Those are 2500 to 10 grand. You could Google pen test for my company, and you're going to see a pop up, you'll be surprised. And it's an awesome pen test. It's a patented process that we do, and I'm going to give away three of those. So here it is, secure 25 put those you know that will text in to 54135912691, more time, 541-359-1269, and we're here in the USA. That's USA number

Andrew Stotz 28:40
wonderful, amazing. That's an exceptional opportunity. 541-359-1269, that is it okay? And Sid, text, secure, 25 That's right, yep, that's exciting. Well, listeners, there you have it. Another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, and now realize there's a lot of opportunity with reducing cyber, cyber security risk in your lives. And as we conclude, Scott, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Scots Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the

Scott Alldridge 29:24
audience? I don't. Thank you for having me today, and I just let's keep the world a cyber safe place, amen.

Andrew Stotz 29:28
And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our Well, fellow risk takers, let's celebrate that today, we added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside. You.

 

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About the show & host, Andrew Stotz

Welcome to My Worst Investment Ever podcast hosted by Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, where you will hear stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community, we know that to win in investing you must take the risk, but to win big, you’ve got to reduce it.

Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, Ph.D., CFA, is also the CEO of A. Stotz Investment Research and A. Stotz Academy, which helps people create, grow, measure, and protect their wealth.

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