Parallel Entrepreneur with Mark Cleveland

Michael Peters (00:00)
why the hell would you allow your competition access to your competitive advantage? Well, good question, right? But I'd rather have a piece of something than all of nothing. Right.

I wanted to ask that question once and use it many times. So that was something that nobody else was doing. And it just made logical sense ...

If I neglected that - at the end of the road and everybody's gone, it's just me alone - who gives a shit about what I did if I lose everything else along the way.

Let me do this one thing 100%. I'll do it right versus doing many things at once where everything is done half-ass.

Mark Cleveland (00:42)
I'm honored to welcome a true parallel force, Michael Peters. He's a venture capitalist or a venture catalyst, a trailblazer and a fierce protector of digital trust. As the founder of Lazarus Alliance, Michael and his team have built frameworks over the last 26 years, keeping global enterprises conforming to the most current regulatory mandates and requirements and maintaining cyber resilience. He doesn't just talk security.

He architects it. Where his second company comes in, Continuum GRC, they've developed AI infrastructure that is aligning risks and audit compliance and global corporate governance with real world innovation. Michael's journey spans Fortune Five giants, cutting edge startups and federal agencies alike. So he's navigated just about every structure. He's here to talk resilience and risk in the relentless pursuit of doing the right thing, especially when it's hard. Michael, I have been looking forward to bringing you into the Parallel Entrepreneur universe. Welcome to the show.

Michael Peters (01:43)
Hey, thanks so much, Mark, for the invitation.

Mark Cleveland (01:45)
Let's set the stage where you can tell the listener a little bit about the two companies that you're operating

Michael Peters (01:52)
I'll start with Lazarus Alliance. That's the oldest of the two companies that came first. Its core mission is really audit compliance, regulatory assessments, cybersecurity assessments - the less glamorous stuff that you don't really hear about behind the scenes. It's turning the rocks over looking for for problems, for bugs and issues with corporate security and conformity with regulatory and industry frameworks. Some of those frameworks are mandatory. They typically come from certain regulated industries, government mandates. Other frameworks, they're more industry driven or sort of activity driven. Maybe it's healthcare or technology compliance or something like that. There's hundreds of frameworks out there, which is great for our business. It gives us a lot to get our arms around. Over the years, we've... amassed a pretty formidable collection of accreditation, authorizations, certifications, and things like that, capabilities for the business to operate in a lot of industries and certainly in all jurisdictions. So that's been beneficial to our resilience as an organization, but also being able to offer customers wherever they come in the world, sort of a one stop shop, if you will, because a lot of organizations have more than just a compliance framework to be concerned with. They also have their business, their technology stack, their customer shareholders and things like that to protect. So the diligence and proactive cybersecurity efforts are vital to their success. Along the way, in order to work smarter and not harder, I was looking for some tooling to improve our deliverables, to improve the process, to eliminate as much manual tedious labor as I could, to eliminate a lot of error that comes from manual processes.

And a platform didn't exist. I couldn't find tooling. The best thing that the industry had to offer was using was just spreadsheets or as I like to call them, "spreadshits." ? They're stone tools. So, you know, we wanted to do something better.

Mark Cleveland (04:07)
No.

Michael Peters (04:15)
So that became the origin of what Continuum GRC is today. So we can probably trace our roots back to about 2005. And we started with the consolidation of frameworks and had a large health care client at the time. And they had a multitude of compliance frameworks that they had to comply with. That basically was the genesis of the idea of what is Continuum GRC today. Now, it didn't start off as Continuum GRC. It actually started as the HORSE project. Now, HORSE.

Mark Cleveland (04:53)
Now your HORSE project is something even different still. We are parallel entrepreneurs here. We're introducing three companies in the first four minutes of the conversation.

Michael Peters (05:03)
Yeah. So, HORSE was an acronym for the Holistic Operational Readiness Security Evaluation. Now it's, it's no coincidence that, this customer was in Louisville, Kentucky HORSE racing country, right? I'm a creative, you know, artsy kind of a guy. So, hey, let's use this. I can make an acronym out that, so, that's where the HORSE project started. And it was really this, this consolidated framework. I wanted to ask that question once and use it many times. So that was something that nobody else was doing. And it just made logical sense ... to me. Plus, I didn't want to ask the same subject matter expert a dozen times, you know, when I was dealing with a dozen different frameworks, to me, I'm just irritating them. Now, it was not in my best business interest to do that, as a consultant the longer I'm there, entrenched, billable hours, woohoo, that's the, best thing you want that. But, ? I didn't, I didn't think that way. I wanted to be efficient. I wanted to get in, get out, do my job. So I tended to prefer more fixed rate type engagements. Plus, truth be told, I find a lot of this just horribly boring. Yeah. Exactly.

Mark Cleveland (06:19)
Automate the boredom.

Michael Peters (06:21)
But then very quickly, I need to start building a platform supports evidence collection and status of different interviews and processes along that continuum of what is a compliance assessment.

Mark Cleveland (06:39)
Along that continuum. So now there's the name of your next enterprise.

Michael Peters (06:45)
Right. Yep. We started, with a simple question and answer type of a, of a software mechanism. What we did then was, we rebranded, okay, transition to Continuum. It's a whole new platform and it really needed to be more formalized. And I felt that, well, things were definitely changing.

Now, from an exit standpoint, I did have an offer for the HORSE project. A cash offer for the project, which in hindsight, I should have taken, "I should have taken that," sort of a thing. But I was pivoting to what is Continuum and I really didn't want to have anything interfere with this transition. I think a big corporate entity like that, they may have just said, hey, you know, this is a derivative work and then the lawyers get involved and stuff. So I was kind of concerned about that. So we went our separate ways. But I probably should have taken that deal. So, yeah.

Mark Cleveland (07:49)
Well, you know, in retrospect, one of the things that I hear most often from other parallel entrepreneurs or frankly from entrepreneurs period is that, "Man, I should have sold." And you don't really know in the moment because you're such an optimist or you really can see into the future three to five years out. It's your baby, too. Right. And I do think there's a difference, though. I think.

Parallel entrepreneurs in my experience so far tend to be a little bit more objective about the business and a little bit less emotionally involved in it. And then when they still pass on great offers, it's not that that alone is unique, but might be able to see through and to a transaction and get out early. Now, getting out early is the question we were talking about before, right?

My grandfather used to tell me, Mark, if you want to be successful, you got to leave a little something on the table for the next guy. And that might mean that it's good to sell now and they see the growth, you see the growth, you presented a growth opportunity, you got a platform for growth. And so they're buying that future cashflow from you right now. But they know in their own mind, their plan, they're not telling you their plan. Their plan is going to get 10X out of you or 15X out of you as a foundation. And then you're like, should I do it? But what I like about your decision to pass is that it was a risk management decision. Really, truly, right?

Michael Peters (09:10)
Yeah, yeah. I didn't want to interfere with building Continuum GRC. I think it absolutely, I mean, it was a very large corporation that was wanting to do this. And I'm just like, you know, I'm one person, they're a corporation, they could just bury me in legal, you know, an illegal quagmire and just kill everything that I'm doing,

Mark Cleveland (09:16)
Yeah, no corporate.

Michael Peters (09:35)
just for fun, you know? And I just thought, no, I don't need to make that deal with that particular devil.

Mark Cleveland (09:41)
Tell us about jurisdictions. Let's dive into what jurisdictions mean.

Michael Peters (09:44)
In the United States, federal compliance programs, these are things like FedRAMP, GovRAMP, CJIS, DFARS, all the rage right now is CMMC for the Department of Defense. In the EU, we have things like ENS out of Spain, C5 out of Germany, GDPR, which is sort of universal EU. You know, there's others, you know, like Asia. DPDP, it's the privacy laws over in India. There's some purely international standards like the ISOs. There's a bunch of private sector, you know, like the SOC 2, that's, that's a pretty popular one in particularly in the United States. There's a lot of commonality between frameworks.

Important for our development of the Continuum GRC platform is what we just refer to as automapping. But it's automatically correlating those different frameworks with the common standards so that I can answer that question once. And then every other framework that I'm involved with, automatically populates the information there, shares the evidence and things like that.

I kind of took the attitude with Continuum because while it was incubating, was built inside Lazarus Alliance, Lazarus Alliance customers, battle tested, with real customers, real auditors and things like that. And it was a major, you know, differentiator between us and the competition. People were like, hey, I've never seen this before. This is cool. You know, I'm getting a... a really nice competitive price out of you guys and your timelines are pretty quick and stuff like that. But 2015, I decided to separate the two companies. So split the software off into what is now Continuum GRC. We've built the platform so it's brandable, white label, ready kind of a thing. So my competitors could actually and do utilize this platform to take care of their customers. And initially people are like, why the hell would you allow your competition access to your competitive Well, good question, right? But I'd rather have a piece of something than all of nothing. Right. Plus, anybody using the platform, it's pretty undeniable where where it comes from. that just kind of makes me smile.

Mark Cleveland (11:54)
You're absorbing and serving competition. Providing scalable AI enabled tool sets for your own team, real time improving both services.

Michael Peters (11:58)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Cleveland (12:06)
Let's rewind to the first company that you might have started that was serious that you sold. Let's hear what the learnings were from that experience and how it helped lead you to where you are today.

Michael Peters (12:18)
So my parents, they owned a family resort in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. 10 cabins, summer times were just hopping. The winter time, not so much, with snow drifts up to the rooftops. I'd have this influx of friends that I have for a week. And then then they go and then new friends would come to town for another week.

Typically Saturday was the big check-in day. Everybody's scurrying around, coming and going. One of my friends had a tennis ball cannon. In those days, beer cans, soda cans were steel. right? So you could assemble these cans, seal them up with electrical tape. The top can was fully cut out and a tennis ball fit snugly into it. The bottom can is where you put lighter fluid in and set it on fire and it would boom, like a big cannon.

Mark Cleveland (13:07)
Haha.

Michael Peters (13:12)
Grownups were like, "Hey, this is pretty cool. Where can I get these?" So I would make, you know, half a dozen of these things in preparation for the Saturday influx of customers. And I'd start popping these things off and, five bucks, seven bucks, kind of like a dollar per can, right? That�s good money, right? For a nine-year-old.

Mark Cleveland (13:32)
So your second business.

Michael Peters (13:34)
You probably recall the old school bulletin boards, dialing into your computer and then you'd have a little bulletin board system set up. So I started that and I think I got up to about eight phone lines coming in. So it was a respectable service. the same liked exploring, what you would refer to as war dialing these days, I suppose. But I would see who listens, who's answering the modem. And I would find my way into some very interesting companies. This one afternoon, I recall, it was... Bell Labs, and I'm just roaming around their network. I started chatting it up with this laboratory, scientist kind of a guy. It didn't take him long to figure out that I didn't belong there. So then he started interrogating me and then I was like, okay, I'm out of here.

Anyways, these organizations were connected to what was referred to as the internet. So that's really where my interest was. It was just like this big network that somehow was out there. So universities were pretty easy to get into. Sometimes other corporations, not securing themselves too well. So it really wasn't too hard. That started to lay the foundation for what Lazarus Alliance is today. You've got your organization, your intellectual property, your assets. What do you need to do to, keep people, protected? That was kind of this ISP and hosting company. I was also way ahead of the curve there. When I sold it, I think it was was 1995. I had a handful of customers with websites. I mean, websites were like unheard of, it was almost like owning a Ferrari or something, you know? rare and very expensive and very, very primitive.

Mark Cleveland (15:31)
So you're treating the internet as a place to explore. You're in Lazarus Alliance, you're building infrastructure, you're treating Continuum as a place to explore AI. These are two of the most significant modern developments in technology. How do you view AI today? How are you using it in order to improve your personal performance, your business operations? Because I think you're probably defending against AI at the same time you are developing and creating and using AI.

Michael Peters (16:00)
So more so on the continuum GRC side. The way we're using AI in that platform is to, as an example, reduce the time that it takes for users putting descriptions of their technology and conformity into the platform, and populating the framework questions.

But also on the auditor side, helping to create the technical descriptions of their testing methods. I would say that the technical writing aspect of AI, it's probably eliminated of what the humans had to do before. And it's doing it at the level that meets or exceeds the minimum standards, all with perfect grammar and punctuation and spelling, as opposed to when people are doing it. Sometimes it's broken English, fragments of sentence, horrible grammar. So this AI really helps to get them up to speed very quickly, at the level that meets the requirement so that they can proceed with what's really important. We joke about we're in the business of providing corporate root canals. Well, nobody wants one of those, right?

Mark Cleveland (17:21)
One of the most frequently asked questions that a listener would send in is like, I want you to spend more time on time management. How do these guys do this on a time management?

Michael Peters (17:30)
I read some scientific article that it takes eight and a half minutes for your brain to properly regroup on that task once it's been distracted. I mean, holy crap I get a couple hundred emails a day. How can I possibly get anything done if I'm constantly paying attention to that barrage of noise. No it's just impossible. So turn the noise guess you could call it focus time. I'm most effective when I have it on my calendar scheduled, when I disconnect from all of the things to focus on that task. Let me do this one thing 100%. I'll do it right versus doing many things at once where everything is done half-ass. right? So you want to avoid that, which is also probably an interesting thing to talk about when it comes to running multiple businesses.

Mark Cleveland (18:13)
Mm-hmm. And I'll make my contribution. I don't read my email. I don't I have people who read my email and know what to do and and bring it to my attention and classify it and put it in files. And then I go look at something that's been processed already that I need to make a decision about.

And I'm going to ask you this question a little bit later, like what's on your nightstand, Michael? But what's on my nightstand is this book, Time Anxiety by Chris Guillebeau. He talks about the illusion of urgency and a better way to live with the experience of time anxiety. Some of the things that I think I do already and some things that I don't do well enough. I don't say no often enough.

I say yes if you want to meet with me 30 days from now or 60 days from now, because my calendar is kind of light that far out. But would I have said yes if you asked me for that meeting tomorrow? Chances are no. Well, if I'm not going to say yes tomorrow, why would I say yes 90 days from now?

So for me, I try to pull the distractions out, but I've also tried to work on a skill I call context stitching. Context switching is going from this meeting you said you had earlier today with, you know, somebody from Ireland and 15 minutes later, you're talking to somebody from Abu Dhabi and the challenges and the situations and the clients are always different. But we're, moving from a related universe into a near related universe. So we have to clear. So I do a little bit of breathing between these meetings. I always have my meetings stop five minutes before the hour or start five minutes after the hour. So I can build in a little context, adjustment times. I like your advice to turn off all the pop-ups and the notifications and distractions. So in this context, what are some of your other time management disciplines that help you run two major global companies at the same time?

Michael Peters (20:08)
Structure is super important. Not allowing people to put stuff on your plate, without your permission. I also shorten my meetings. I, I do the five minutes before, you know, that buffer time. I like doing that too. Adding a little buffer time that helps me be more polite to my next, you know, my next meeting, right? So, cause I, you know, I don't want to be late to everything. That's rude, you know? So.

Mark Cleveland (20:37)
I struggled with that for a long time. They used to call it Cleveland time instead of central time. And I really had to focus hard on respecting my own time, not trying to do one extra thing before I did the next thing. I was really a slave to some form of performance. There was no end to the things that I could do, so I would try to do them all.

Michael Peters (20:58)
Yep. yeah. Well, I have to say I probably suffer from that as well. It's every day. It's what I didn't get done, you know, and that gets transferred to the next day where, okay, what will not get done today, you know? So that's pretty constant. Now, what's the typical day look like? Well, I'm generally up at 4 a.m. and then, you know, I'll... first thing, me and coffee and good, quiet prioritization time. I don't accept outside meetings until nine o'clock.

And really nine to three is kind of like open season, if you will, you know, it's, available to whomever I need to meet with. And then, then pretty much the end of day is four o'clock. Now, you and I are talking on, on a Saturday. I was in the office at 4 a.m. with coffee and I was chatting with a customer in Indonesia and then it was off to that customer that you mentioned from Ireland. This is what kind of happens after hours and on weekends and stuff. Now, I will spend quality time with my family. My time with them - it's rare that it gets disrupted. So I turn the noise off. Phone calls come in all day long. It doesn't mean I have to answer it, you know? That's what voicemail's for.

Observing those boundaries, I think that's super important. Also, you know, my family deserves it. So I want to, want to do right by them. I want to have a good relationship with my wife and my kids. And If I neglected that - you know, at the end of the road and everybody's gone, it's just me alone - who gives a shit about what I did if I lose everything else along the way. So, I think that was something that I, I just built into my mindset from the beginning.

Mark Cleveland (22:40)
Yeah.

Michael Peters (22:45)
When I was in early days in my college experience. I was in a programming class and Pascal, that'll date things a little bit. So I was learning Pascal at the time and the professor was all into this just, you know, super geek kind of thing. But he talked about how he just did this stuff at work because he was a professor, then he would do this at home and it just consumed all of his time and his family left him because he just ignored them. He didn't pay attention to them. I'm like, how stupid and sad? I don't want that to happen to me.

Mark Cleveland (23:22)
You've used this word in our other conversations about being family responsible. And so what you just described as being family responsible and that example is a part of your culture. It is a firm time block and a firm commitment in your personal life. And it is obvious to everybody that you work with. So you have installed a family responsible culture in your company and you live it. So you're mentoring that way by example, just my observation.

Michael Peters (23:50)
I think that's fair to say. You know, some, some employees freaking awesome, right? They're, they're just in, right? And then there's others that they'll do what they minimally have to do, you know, and you don't necessarily know when you hire them and you find out along the way. for employees that are not not really being successful, there's always one-on-one type conversations to mentor and get to the bottom of what the problem is. Okay, why are you not doing your job? Well, maybe you don't know how. Maybe you can't. Maybe you don't want to.

Mark Cleveland (24:25)
Yeah, want it, got it, and can do it.

Michael Peters (24:28)
Yep, there you go. You know, so we'll have those conversations and these are, you know, this is an effort to rehabilitate, because I don't trivialize the employee relationship. They're important, you know, or they should be important, or that could be important, you know?

Mark Cleveland (24:47)
Yeah, they could emerge as to be your superstars with just a little bit more alignment. And sometimes I've found that the employee is demonstrating and showing me a pattern that is highlighting something that's dysfunctional in my own organization. And it's actually, okay, I'm the one that needs to get sort of realigned.

But these relationships, they're so important because they're people, right? And you are charged, ultimately you're charged with keeping the full barrel of apples without a spoiled apple in it, if you can. That's your responsibility, right?

Michael Peters (25:08)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. 100%. But, at the end of the day, it's, it's about personal accountability. If you're not willing to, to step up to do the right thing, to be a productive member, maybe even participate in re-engineering your position to better fit your skills and your personality and your attitude and stuff like that. At a certain point in time, it's like, okay, this is not going to work.

Mark Cleveland (25:45)
Do you delegate consistently between businesses or do you delegate differently in each business?

Michael Peters (25:50)
It has to be different. And the reason I say that is because even though there are so many synergies, business synergies between the two companies, the types of employees are one side, I have

Mark Cleveland (26:02)
It's a big difference.

Michael Peters (26:05)
auditors, cold, cold stone killers, stone cold killers, right? So I've got that, these are the enforcers, the tough love people over on the software company, bloody artists, you know.

Mark Cleveland (26:18)
You got some flip-flop wearing torn jeans creatives.

Michael Peters (26:21)
Oh my God. Yep. You know, so I have to apply different management styles to the two different companies. They're different animals and I can't herd them the same way.

Mark Cleveland (26:35)
You talked earlier about how you didn't want things to be placed on your calendar without your permission. didn't. You're you're turning off the outside access in order to create more capacity for these things that you have to do, choose to do, need to do. You're expected to do. And I find one of my challenges was what I call upward delegation. Somebody would begin to bring me a problem. I would begin to participate in what I think is this really awesome collaborative experience. And then I would notice a pattern. Boy, every time there's a problem at that desk, it gets upward delegated to me. And I was buying into that, maybe thinking I was important, maybe thinking I was helping solve a problem that was avoiding mistakes. Do you ever experience upward delegation? How do you handle that?

Michael Peters (27:20)
More in the beginning, for sure. You know, now, no, not so much. I've got an excellent COO, excellent project management, and on the service side, those people really, they're minding the fort, they're directing traffic and things like that, and they'll bring me things that they believe require, require my attention, right? But every now and then, an employee just, they a problem. Sort of like in the auditor space, I'm kind of like the grand poobah of the auditors, right? I have the most experience and the best credentials. I outshine them

Mark Cleveland (27:58)
26 years in the making.

Michael Peters (28:00)
You must be talking about my marriage, 27 years.

Mark Cleveland (28:03)
There you go.

Michael Peters (28:05)
Yeah, we've, I guess, Lazarus Alliance, we incorporated in 2000 originally. So, you know, 25 years plus. Now, the mission, has been refined over time. We've gotten more specific, honed in on very specific synergistic type activities. the earlier days, it was more jack of all trades kind of a thing, but now it's very, very specific mission.

Mark Cleveland (28:35)
How do you ensure that your vision and values are aligned across these wildly different ventures?

Michael Peters (28:42)
Part of it technology drives, quite frankly. Also, I think the of processes certain want to instill in your organization. an example,

I want my teams to approach audit, regardless of framework, regardless of customer, essentially the same way. There are just fundamentals that are universally applicable. like McDonald's makes the same damn looking hamburger time and time again, this repeatable, sustainable kind of thing.

I want our service delivery to be very similar. The audit experience, the steps and things like that, very formulaic. The Continuum GRC platform helps to enforce that rigor, right? So now I have technology putting guardrails and boundaries and checks and balances and things like that, to control that experience.

The systems are designed to report that information to us. So my system will report back to the project management system whether or not my employee did this properly.

Mark Cleveland (29:54)
As a parallel entrepreneur, what are the most important skills or traits that you think a parallel entrepreneur should develop?

Michael Peters (30:00)
Just the ability to compartmentalize issues, to separate issues for focus time. Being able to take a reasonable amount of time, but not too much time to make better decisions, to be able to process or prioritize things. So prioritization. And then, just reducing the noise. Organization prioritization. That's probably if you were to distill it down, where I would be, I don't know if you've ever, used like the white noise systems or sleep sounds from Amazon, you know, where they have the ocean waves and stuff like that.

Mark Cleveland (30:36)
Yep, I do that. totally do that. And also the solfeggio frequencies so that I get some perceived benefit out of the 528 Hertz that opens up my heart, right? I do all that stuff.

Michael Peters (30:41)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm just laying there and my head's buzz, buzz, buzz. I can't sleep. That usually happens more in the morning. So being able to just remove all of that thought. I'll just focus on something. It might be the little fan noise. Something that has a certain rhythm to it, right? So that I can just take a moment, clear my head. And then I'm out. Right. So, you know, you can do that while you're awake, you know, and just kind of focus. When I was in law school, really don't sit still well. And it's kind of been a nuisance growing up. And, you know, I get fussed up by parents and teachers and hold still and, you know, or do your work or something like that. And it's just like my mind say here and it's there and I want to do this and I'm interested in that and buzz buzz buzz. And who knows maybe it's undiagnosed ADD or something like that. I don't know.

So what I found was I had to break my studies up into about 15 minute chunks. So I just really focused for like 15 minutes and then my mind naturally starts wandering, particularly towards like, I wanna do something creative. I wanna write an article or go into the workshop, build something or whatever, put something in the yard. Right, yeah. So anyways, that would just, once your mind starts

Mark Cleveland (32:05)
Build a cannon. Build a tennis ball cannon.

Michael Peters (32:15)
starts wandering, you're not learning anything anymore. So I just started breaking it up. So 15 minutes, OK. Now I'm going to do something else for five minutes. Just, poop, shift gears, and then come back. So what I love during my workday are 15 minute meetings.

Mark Cleveland (32:32)
So the advice that you'd give to your younger self might include 15 minutes, dude, that's enough. And ? project management, get to the point. I think that project management specifically, the ability to manage multiple swim lanes and move between

Michael Peters (32:39)
Get to the point, right?

Mark Cleveland (32:49)
deliverables within the context of a project and how to put milestones together. think that's really, really important. But in the context of you speaking to your younger self with all this wisdom, what's the advice you'd give to your younger self?

Michael Peters (33:01)
There's a couple of things. One, getting to the point, being very precise or concise with your message, with your time. So in kind of respect with that, okay, younger self, be a little bolder, be a little braver, cause there opportunities that if I were a little bit, a little bit bolder, a little bit braver, uh, it might've been something. And I see a guitar on your wall. Um, which is what got me thinking. I still play a multitude of instruments and I've written music and performed and things like I got a scholarship as a go to college. I did not take this scholarship and go to college to be a tenor because I didn't want to be a tenor as a career. But even as a teenager, gee, what do I want to do when I grow up? Well, rock star kind of sounds cool, But my risk averse brain is like, well, you you'll probably end up dying, you know, because you're going to party too hard or, you know, something like that.

Also, I'm like, well, more people fail than make it. I don't want to be a starving artist. So maybe I should stick to engineering and complete that mission. So I'm making risk decisions as a 17-year-old, right? So that's where be a little braver, just try it out, maybe say, yes, let's do this. do that for the next couple of years. And Hey, if, if we're just not making it, okay. Join the military, go back to college. You don't know what you missed if you didn't go there. So.

Mark Cleveland (34:38)
Well, there's still time, Michael. You can still become a rock star.

Michael Peters (34:42)
Have you seen like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards these days? I don't know, man.

Mark Cleveland (34:47)
Some of our idols. I really value this perspective on youth. A friend of mine said, one of the ways to stay nimble, active, available as time progresses, right, is to have younger friends. If the only friends you have are your peer groups, your other CEOs, people who you looked up to and who mentored you and they're your friends. If you're always been looking horizontal or up, it's really, really life-affirming and exciting to give the gift of your time and to receive the gift of their everything's possible perspective. Or maybe even they're sort of trying to wander through questions that maybe we've seen a little bit of that. We get a little sage on the stage opportunity to serve.

Michael Peters (35:22)
Yeah.

Mark Cleveland (35:30)
Yeah, I think having younger friends is a secret to a successful...

Michael Peters (35:30)
Yeah. Yeah, quite young.

Mark Cleveland (35:35)
Second half, as they say.

Michael Peters (35:37)
I've never really gotten into participating in these CEO roundtables. I did enjoy your group first time I participated. And it was more interesting to me because there were more similarly experienced people.

I'm totally up for learning a new trick "gee, I'm wrestling with this sort of thing, so you've seen that, what did you do" kind of thing.

Mark Cleveland (36:03)
Yeah, you're talking about the Parallel Entrepreneur Network and I observe, because I don't even facilitate it. I haven't got a professional facilitator. I get to go be a part of it. What I've observed is the younger members - and I think this is emerging as a theme that I'm going to develop, you know, when I write my book someday - is that the younger generation today is more likely to be as they become an entrepreneur, a parallel entrepreneur, they're less likely to do things in serial. They're doing things simultaneously. And I think that might be because they're more technology aware, more technology enabled early. They're constantly testing and evaluating and willing to abandon quick in order to go

Michael Peters (36:41)
I agree with that.

Mark Cleveland (36:49)
keep finding that thing that gets traction. Those are some super powers. I think I'm really hopeful for the Parallel Entrepreneur identity to be exposed, uplifted, inspired by the youthful engagement and the possibility thinking that I'm seeing in the network and the conversations.

Earlier we talked about a book that's on my nightstand, which is back to time, you know, Time Anxiety. What's on your nightstand and what have you been reading lately?

Michael Peters (37:21)
I think the last book that I read was To Sell As Human from Daniel Pink. Excellent read. It really kind of took some anxiety out of being a salesperson. You know, I'm not good at sales. I can't do that. I mean, it's such a common thing, right? you know, the message that Daniel Pink has in his book, it was almost like it took the fear out. It's like, you're actually doing this right now. I'm doing this right now. You know, I'm selling an idea, right? And so anyways, it's just more of a natural thing.

You know, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Once you get over that, right, fear is the mind killer. Well, yeah. So excellent book. I have a new one. It's called The Crowd from Gustav Le Bon.

Mark Cleveland (38:13)
I've not heard of that one. Why is it on your nightstand?

Michael Peters (38:16)
Well, actually an employee recommended it to me. he's a developer, artsy side of the house, it's group psychology and things like that. He described it. I thought, let's pick it up. So I did.

Mark Cleveland (38:31)
So, you know, it's interesting. I'm making an observation. All of our conversations and how you're running your business and then this, you know, this 15 minutes of focus and then I want to go write a song. So many parallel entrepreneurs are artists and many of them are musicians and ones that aren't musicians are usually some form of art, creative endeavor. And you've got to, you did this law school thing. You did the engineering thing. You did the, the, highly disciplined, the military thing. And yet you were also creative. You have these two significantly developed sides of your identity. And now look, the business you're in is a significant audit engineering process and a significant creative process.

I don't know if you considered that before, because it's definitely emerging in this conversation.

Michael Peters (39:19)
aspects, yeah, it has occurred to me. And it's also how part of my day is managed. Sometimes I'm working on the rigor and the tough knucklework on the audit side.

But then it's just like, I've got to take a break. So I'm going to go spend some time with the developers and discuss the feature aspects of something or tell them what I want and stuff like that. So basically partake in the creative aspect, which is stress relief. Now, where that side of the house stresses me out is time to deliver. And it's just like, you guys are in the only profession that I can think of where I pay you to make something and then along the way you break something else and then I got to pay you to fix that stuff. What profession can you get away with that shit? You know? Anyways, so that's not my favorite part of the software business, but the creative part, 100%. Love of a thing.

Mark Cleveland (40:27)
And the customer facing part you clearly love too.

Michael Peters (40:30)
You know, I like solving problems for people, helping nobody really knows That was part of the reason to get into the cybersecurity business. And really, as we were defining our mission, we kind of refer to as the proactive side of cybersecurity. You know, we're turning the rocks over. We're finding the problems before the bad guys do, right? As opposed to the reactive side of cybersecurity, which is much more sexy. You know, it's in the news. This company investigated and found the bad guys and did the forensics and stuff like that. Yeah, we used to do that, but I don't... I don't care for damage control. I don't want to be the cleanup crew. I want to be the people that prevented it from happening in the first place. I don't want you to know that I'm working behind the scenes taking care of you. That's a good day, right? Just pay your invoice and we're fine.

Mark Cleveland (41:36)
Fine.

Mark Cleveland (41:36)
Michael, what is the biggest challenge that you've faced as a parallel entrepreneur and how did you navigate it?

Michael Peters (41:42)
Adapting to change, not an issue. The ebb and flow of business, you expect that. The more successful you become, the more the haters crawl out of the woodwork. Those are things that you kind of expect with success and growth. Probably the biggest challenge that we face Is these bureaucrats that, "oh, you've got this automated system. It's doing the work for the human, and therefore, it's a form of consulting. And now you're running into impartiality violations and that's their opinion," which is not a good thing when you're in the audit business. You know, you have to be impartial. But, you know, because the tooling facilitating what I'm it's keeping better records, providing better reports and outcomes and security and accountability and things like that.

It's kind of, a smooth brain, ? attitude that, that we occasionally experience, you know, and I tell you, it reminds me of, what's his name? Arthur, Arthur Clark. You know, the, think the quote goes, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right.

That becomes this obstacle. We have to, prove that, no, it's not magic. You know, people are doing the work. This is just making, making the whole thing better. And, so, proving that to people with different mindsets, a persistent

Mark Cleveland (43:08)
Yeah, and more complex. It comes from the customer at times, and you'll have to navigate that human relationship as well as sort of the fact that this leap of technology and this leap of capability is still a leap, not magic.

Michael Peters (43:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Cleveland (43:24)
So we're talking a little bit about what's next. And this is a surprise. What's next, Michael?

Michael Peters (43:29)
Well, it's not starting another tech company. So that's for sure. I do enjoy writing. I've written a couple of business-oriented books. But I have the blueprints, the framework for a sci-fi trilogy that I've mapped out. I've done this a number of years ago. And it's my first fictional work. And it's remarkably different from an experience in doing it. And what I mean by that is that you, at least in my experience, you have character development. I've got this character in this storyline, so you have to develop that. Well, that's not something that I can just turn it on and off, I'm gonna spend 15 minutes during a break writing a chapter. No, it doesn't work that way for me. You have to spend hours immersing in the character in the story, the technology, every aspect of that in order to to effectively articulate, so that people can mentally picture exactly what you're writing about. So there's a lot of detail and immersion into that process. And I just don't have that amount of discretionary time right now. So whenever that exit comes, that is what I intend on really focusing my attention on next is having the time to develop those stories. I think once the books are written, now, who knows? They may be boring, not popular or maybe they are. The real goal is to complete the mission, right? But you better believe I will hire somebody to do a screenplay and try to promote them. I think it'd be super cool for the grandkids to see grandparents with cameos in the screen or something. It might be kind of fun.

Mark Cleveland (45:17)
Yeah. You're going to be the Quentin Tarantino of sci-fi grandparent appearances.

Michael Peters (45:24)
Yeah, maybe so. But that sounds like what's next. It sounds like nice, easy pace and something that I can do at 4am because I'm sure I'll still be getting up at 4 a.m. Hey, I can develop a chapter or two, right?

Mark Cleveland (45:39)
At least a character. I have a feeling there's a lot of people that you've done business with or ran across in your life that have made some great character development contributions to your thinking.

Michael Peters (45:51)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Mark Cleveland (45:53)
A long time ago, I started to try to write. I started a fictional sort of a Tom Clancy book back in 1990. And I got, it's called Water Culture. And I got maybe 30 chapters into it. And then just life, I just started going off in some other direction. So I never came back to it and finished it. But I remember this character is this guy I know. You know, I was, I would richly harvest every opportunity I could to, I wasn't much of a writer probably at that point in time, but I do have one unfinished project that maybe I'll pick up too. Sounds like fun. What books did you write? You said you wrote some business books. What tell us what they were.

Michael Peters (46:32)
Yeah, yeah, one was called Securing the C Level and it was really about my experience becoming a CISO. And at the time I had no mentors. It was really a rare career position. I just kind of laid out what I had done to get there. There is another two that are part of the HORSE Foundation. One's really about policy and governance development. The other is about privacy and law, or cyber law more specifically.

Terrible sales, boring. I did a good thing I wasn't trying to make a living at it.

Mark Cleveland (47:23)
I mean, you were the chief information security officer at Colonial Bank. You did Fifth Third Bank. You went on to Cross View and then eventually LifeLock. LifeLock, of course, might reflect back on how you view how everybody's taking care of our own personal data in the monitoring services. Oops.

Michael Peters (47:41)
Whoops.

You could probably Google on it and it won't be too hard to find what that experience was all about. But all I can say is I maintain my honor and self-respect and I'll do the right thing.

You know, so sometimes it's tough, but yeah, just do the right thing.

Mark Cleveland (48:07)
It took you 30 days to figure it out or less.

Michael Peters (48:10)
Well, that there was a major problem. And I'm like, you got to do something about this. Well, some people don't want to do things about it. So, okay.

Mark Cleveland (48:19)
So what is your North Star? Most of us have an answer to that question. It's an intentionally wide open question. All this creativity, all this business capability, successes and failures, working closely with people and customers. What do you find is your North Star in that environment and your life?

Michael Peters (48:37)
Jeez, I feel like I'm wandering in the desert right now. So where's my North Star? It�s basically, it comes to taking care of my wife and I first and foremost. Somewhere out there is an expiration date. And I want to make sure that we're comfortable as we travel down that road together, that's the operative word together.

And what happens after that, I mean, sure, it would be nice to something on to our children, they're responsible for cutting their own path in so it's kind of funny. I mean, I just happened to have this ... let me see here, find the camera, sorry. ?

Mark Cleveland (49:13)
Oh, that is a globe that says Mars. Oh.

Michael Peters (49:17)
Yeah, Mars. You can see some astronauts in there,

Mark Cleveland (49:22)
Yeah, right. It's a, it's a snow globe, but it's it's a Mars thing, right?

Michael Peters (49:27)
Yep. So, when, occasionally my wife and I will talk about, you know, retirement kind of things.

Let's say we have a nice exit from these businesses, which I believe will happen someday. Gee, what do you do with that? Well, I told my wife, I said, we should talk to Elon about hitching a ride on one of his big ass rockets, you know? Get our little Tesla Rover to go out on the Martian landscape, park where there's, you know, hey, there's Earth, there's the blue dot over there, and then just eventually the oxygen's gonna run out.

Mark Cleveland (49:51)
Go to Mars.

I think that the very first commercial use of Mars will be people who put their ashes in a little pellet and get blasted off and land on the surface of Mars. We won't land there as alive people first. We'll land there as entombments, destinations.

Michael Peters (50:23)
I swear we can't, can't, we cannot, trash the place, man. What's up with that? We got a litter, the landscape on Mars with our, decrepit ashes. What the hell?

Mark Cleveland (50:28)
Yeah. Ashes. What are we thinking? Did we learn anything down here on this blue dot?

Michael Peters (50:39)
Oh my god, yeah.

Mark Cleveland (50:40)
So here's my fun just moment and reflection. What question did you expect me to ask Michael that I did not and how would you answer it?

Michael Peters (50:49)
Well, maybe a little bit more about how the sausage is made around here. But yeah, I probably would have gone into sort of an evasive maneuvers or something like that to avoid talking too much about secret sauce

Mark Cleveland (51:11)
Yeah, my my thought is that there's how I made this for that and there's who I am for this. the feedback I'm getting from people who've listened is you finally put a identity on something that I've been working at toward or with my whole life, thinking that maybe I was a little nuts.

But the idea of paralleling is being internally aligned with what you're doing externally. And it's easier, I think, for a parallel entrepreneur to to accomplish more within a business framework or more within a life framework if their internal alignment is consistent with what it is that they do with their time while we have time. And

I feel like we got to that today, Michael. So that would be, that's a blessing and I'm grateful for your time. Thank you for joining us on The Parallel Entrepreneur. It was a blast.

Michael Peters (52:00)
Hey, I couldn't agree more. I've had a lot of fun, Mark.