As a business owner you face many risks from property damages and injuries to loss of product and much more. But did you know your business also faces risk when it comes to using technology. With the rate in security hacks, breaches, and cyber-attacks, the risk of data loss has increase exponentially causing businesses to lose money every day. To protect against those risks many businesses are adding cyber insurance to their portfolio of insurance coverages.
Harry Brelsford of SMB Nation sits down with Larry Meador of DataStream Cyber Insurance to discuss the increasing demand for Cyber Security, and the risk for not having the correct policies in place.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
A nation nation. This is a very special conversation with Larry meta, Larry, how're you doing?
Larry Meador
I am doing well, sir. How are you?
Harry Brelsford
Good, good. Hey, before we get into the good stuff about cyber insurance, which is that is just like one of the top three hot topics in the space right now. tip of the hat that you and I share a media background, you were at CNET. I've done a lot of writing and SMB Nation at the end of the day was an integrated media company with events. And so we have more in common than pulls us apart now that that's good and bad. Because you and I know where the bodies are buried in modern media. Let me tell you.
Larry Meador
Very true, very true. And there's quite a few to be found.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, yeah, it, you know, it was cool. I'll call it the 90s and 2000s. But it? Boy, howdy. I'll just leave it at that. Let's move on. You're at data stream cyber insurance as a channel chief. So first of all, a little bit about your background in the industry, including CNET. And then we'll talk about what does data stream do and what do you do?
Larry Meador
Absolutely be glad to do that. So I have actually been in the the channel as we call it. For Yeah, roughly 20 years now. 1920 years. Most of that time, I was with CNET in actually a scene that content solutions. So as I cut my teeth there, but prior to getting in the channel, I was kind of in the retail channel and the retail side of things, you know, worked with the old defunct Circuit City, the old defunct computer city and I promise the fact that they're all out of business right now and really had nothing to do with me. I just want to clarify that but yeah, Circuit City computer city, then I actually sold into every national consumer electronics and IT retailer in the country. Before I came over to the reseller side of the business with CNET then greenlink networks. And now with data stream. Yeah.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, interesting. We, you know, everyone listening to this has awareness of cyber insurance. Okay, so we don't really need to define what is cyber insurance. But what is datastreams? What what what does that company? Are you like Allstate?
Larry Meador
You know what we are, we are a insurance broker. We're cyber insurance only. That's what we specialize in. And we're out that we've actually got 30. As of right now, we're always adding more but right now we've got about 30 carriers in our portfolio. So we're talking to big ones, you know, travelers, AIG, cowbell, coalition, CFC, many others, I don't have time to list them all. Yeah, but yeah, so we've got everybody under our portfolio. And our core mission here is to get out there and help ensure the SMBs that all of our MSP friends have as clients. But we can also, and I say this a little bit cautiously, we can help MSPs as well get cyber insurance as well as techie and no insurance for their businesses. But unfortunately, the MSP reseller channel is just a very difficult vertical to get insurance for. So it takes a little bit longer time. And, you know, sometimes we don't have as many positive results, you know, with with good premiums and stuff like that, but we still can get out there and find probably more offerings than what you might be able to find on yourself. But so really looking at those SMBs but we can also help the MSPs as well.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, you know, I carried the bag has the day to day computer guy in the 90s and 2000s. And it was fun until it wasn't downloading drivers at 2am There comes a day we're been there done that. Yeah. And so then I became a community as you know, SMB Nation and again probably resembled see that in more ways than we realize and but I've been in conversations on my podcast series, I'm just face to face that you know So with cyber insurance and where that's at today and being an MSP, I would exit the industry, I would exit the industry personally, Harry Brelsford would say, That's it, I'm done. 20 years, you know, I didn't sign up for this, I'm gonna go do a different kind of startup, and I'm a startup guy. So I already have a short attention span. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing old dudes like me? Who are like, I'm out? I didn't sign up for this.
Larry Meador
No, I can't say we've seen a whole lot of that. You know, what we do see is a lot of people who just don't know how to bring this into conversations with their clients. And as well as people that don't necessarily understand it themselves. And, you know, we have unfortunately seen so many people come and say, oh, yeah, I got cyber insurance, or we asked a couple of questions, it turns out, they got a rider on their GL policy. And we often have to break the news to them that, okay, you really need a standalone cyber policy, because most writers of GL policies don't cover a whole lot. Matter of fact, we usually kind of say that might buy coffee, for the first week. If you do have an incident for the response team, the incident response team, that's all it's going to cover. You'd really need that standalone policy, though.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Yeah, no, this is fascinating. So let's, let's pretend I'm bored again. And I'm excited about this opportunity. And I And by the way, I've seen this in what I call the secular world, or the real world where people who were maybe corporate executives, and you know, they get tapped on the shoulder at 50 at GE medical and shown the door, they run off and become like flood insurance agents, and this and that right, kind of career number two, are you seeing that? Is that part of your Salesforce career number two guys who may be worrying MSPs and they sense opportunity? Or you might not be saying that?
Larry Meador
No, not really seeing that. But you know, you bring up a couple of things. It's kind of funny, and that is, you know, you get bored and you want to talk about insurance, man, you must be really bored if you want to talk about insurance. But you know, you're talking about guys in their 50s all sudden kind of jump in and I make a joke often when I'm speaking to people is that, you know, happened in the channel for a long time. And if you had ever to ever would have told me up until about 910 months ago that I was going to be in insurance, I would have just laughed at you and said, Yeah, right. Sure. But then if you would have said, you're actually I haven't got to actually be passionate about it, I would have thought you are absolutely nuts. But here I am in my 50s sort of selling insurance. I mean, I don't really sell it. I'm kind of the PR and the voice and face of data stream. But yeah, here I am in the insurance business kind of going well, how did I get here? But loving what we're doing?
Harry Brelsford
If I were to become one of your salesmen in a high level, do I have to go pass some state board exams or SEC or fed or anything?
Larry Meador
Yeah, good question. So the insurance industry as a whole. And that does, you know, that does not exclude cyber insurance. We're all part of the insurance industry. You have to be a licensed agent to talk in depth about insurance to talk money about insurance to sell insurance, as well as anybody that collects a commission off of an insurance sale does have to be a licensed agent. So I had to take an exam, did that within my first 60 days of being employed? And I'm happy to say I passed it on my first try. But so yeah, you do have to be a licensed agent. So, you know, Harry, that's kind of what we're out here to do. We're trying to be the expert resource for our MSP MSSP partners, reseller partners, all of that, you know, MSPs, mssps. These guys are the tech savvy. They know cybersecurity way better than I probably ever will. But insurance remains one of those things. It's kind of a mystery to a lot of people. And you really ought to depend on an expert in cyber insurance, because it's a little bit more complex than some of the other insurance products that are out there.
Harry Brelsford
Well, yeah, yeah, the little I know about your area, I would concur. Aye. Aye i at the complexity, I concur, because I recently what do I carry the million dollar commercial general liability for my company, whatever that is, again, I don't know what I'm talking about. But I'll tell you a funny story. You know, I was with the firm out of Portland that was going to the commercial markets and kind of lost touch with the guy and I started poking around my membership at U S. A. Okay in San Antonio, and you They offer that. I mean, on a Sunday, I was poking around. And it was significantly cheaper than I was paying. I just, I couldn't believe that. I mean, I don't know why I don't know how but it just it met my needs because I have clients, one client, that's a DOD vendor, you know, in the compliance area. And so I have to show that I'm insured. Okay.
Larry Meador
Absolutely, yeah, you got to show that and, you know, rumor has it, we're going to have a whole lot of legislation changes coming up down the pike that could, you know, go into effect for some of us. And we have to kind of prove that we've got some of this stuff. And I can say, from the SMB side of things, and this is often a surprise when you're talking to some of these guys, but these days, when you go to apply for a small business loan, many lenders are now starting to inquire, do you have cyber insurance? So, you know, you can kind of see where things are going with that, you know, if you don't have cyber insurance, these banks want to make sure that you're going to be able to repay that loan at some point in time. And if you don't have cyber insurance, that that may have a pretty negative effect on your approval rating.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, I could see that when I got a loan lifetime ago with SMB Nation, to finance growth, basically, I had to get a I had to add them to my life insurance policy, because I'm basically, yeah, I'm a key man at SMB Nation. So goes hairy, so goes SMB Nation, right? So they were added? In? Fact, I don't even have that relationship. I should probably call once again, USAA. I should probably call them and take a take a gander at what I got. But no, this has been very interesting. So final question, where what tactics are you using to talk to MSPs? I've seen you at shows before, are you on the road right now doing doing the booth and in the speech,
Larry Meador
the chai, I was just on the road for two straight weeks, I happened to be home in my office moment, but I'm getting ready to hit the road for next week, and then headed down to exchange after that. But you know, really how we're going to market here is we're approaching the MSPs. And asking them to become a partner with us. And that's absolutely free. You know, there's no commitment to them whatsoever. But then we're teaching them how to bring this conversation up when they're talking to their customers, perhaps in a QBR. We also run a cyber insurance readiness assessment that's basically an external scan. If they'll just give us the domain, you know, like www.yahoo.com, we're going to run this scan, and we're looking at things as the insurance carriers are looking at this. And we're basically just kind of taking a look to see, you know, do you have any risky open ports, do you have any CVE that hadn't been taken care of different things like that, we're looking at the domain, the subdomains, we print out a surface map, then we provide this report to the MSP, we don't give it to the customer. And we kind of, you know, basically give them a green yellow red score. Green means this client looks very insurable, probably going to get the best premiums. Yellow says, insurable might not be getting the best premiums, but they could take a couple of, you know, extra security posture steps or changes, add to their stack, and they probably would be up in the green side, the red typically means there's some things that are going to cause red flags that are going to keep them from getting approved. For example, the three hard things right now that are required by just about every carrier out there, MFA off site or cloud backup, EDR, MDR, XDR, whatever flavor that that you want. So those are the three real hard things that we're looking for. But then we take a look at everything else. And we kind of help coach that MSP and we say, you know, if they're yellow, or if they're red, that typically means you can bring us into the conversation as the bad cop, for example, if it's red, and they don't have MFA. Rhys MSPs told me this all the time. I'm talking to my customers for two years telling them they need to get MFA, but they're like, I'm not big enough. And you're just trying to sell me something extra. I don't really need it. Bring us into the conversation. And we say, Mr. And Mrs. Customer, you really should listen to your MSP because they know what they're talking about. Because without MFA, right now, you're uninsurable. Nobody is going to approve you. When we do that, all of a sudden, they go right to the MSP. Okay, you've been telling me this, how much does it cost? How long is it gonna take? What are we gonna do? And MSPs love us because we're really helping them protect themselves the MSP, because if their clients get hit by any type of incident, and they get knocked out for a couple of weeks, couple of months, that could dramatically impact the the MSPs revenue stream. So that's that's how we're trying to do it. And we try to make it real easy to I mean, we go Got a universal application that the customers fill out, they send it to us. We do all the legwork. Then we come back with comparative quotes, we highlight the differences between the quotes, we take a white glove approach and explain everything. And then we match the quotes to the customer's specific business requirements. So it's not like a one size fits all here's the policy is going to work for you. We really tried to take a look at that customer's individual requirements and match a very good policy against those requirements. And that will help them bind it and all of that good stuff. All right, so long winded answer what? Yeah,
Harry Brelsford
there we go. So well, hey, you're in the Dallas area. I'm in Austin. So let me know if you get down this way. Be fun to get together. And we'll reach out to you later in the year, maybe q4. I'd like to continue this conversation. Maybe you can be thinking about between now. And you know, let's get past ConnectWise and past and grownups and a couple of early November shows. Let me know what you hear. Let me know what the trends are as we head into 2023 in your field.
Larry Meador
We would love to do that. And I certainly thank you today for the opportunity to speak with Harry. All right. All right. Hey, take care now. Yep,