#S2Roadshow Recap – Week Five

St. Paul, MN and Dallas, TX

If you’re new, or you’re confused about this #S2Roadshow thing, start here (maybe).

Previous Week’s Recaps:

The purpose of the SecurityStudio Roadshow (#S2Roadhow) is to meet people and make partners. We want to meet people, understand their businesses, and help them grow using simple, fundamental, and compliant solutions (S2Score, S2Org, S2Vendor, and S2Team/S2Me).

Our mission is to fix the broken information security industry. Success requires collaboration, partnership, and transparency.

Together again! This week, John and I were together doing our thing. Good times!

BBQ Reviews

In full transparency, we have a secondary mission on the #S2Roadshow. We eat as much BBQ as we can. After stuffing ourselves, I summarize our BBQ reviews at the end of each recap article (see below).

Sideshow – Cyber Security Summit

This wasn’t a stop on the SecurityStudio Roadshow, but a stop for FRSecure. FRSecure rocks and I love getting to preach for us/them! The Cyber Security Summit is an annual event that brings all sorts of great security folks together in the Minneapolis Convention Center for three days of security awesomeness. I gave my talk on Monday, titled “Tackling the Talent Shortage Problem: An Honest Look at Challenges Related to Finding and Retaining Information Security Talent.”

I’m the guy with the beard (in the pic). If you’d like a copy of my deck, it’s available here. Use it. Steal it. Distribute it. Do whatever you’d like with it. 😉

Great conference. Great attendance. Great everything. It was fun.

St. Paul, Minnesota

In case you didn’t know, John and I are both from Minnesota, so this is a short road trip. We traveled all the way from Minnetonka (where our offices are) to St. Paul on Wednesday.

John and I both spoke at the Minnesota Counties Computer Cooperative (MNCCC) Halloween Cybersecurity Workshop titled “The Wicked Web”. There were a hundred (or so) people there representing local governments throughout the state. Originally, only John was scheduled to speak at this event, but a scheduled speaker backed out at the last minute. The fine folks at MNCCC asked if I would fill in.

Sure I said! What will I talk about though? I whipped up a presentation titled “How do we secure America?” Why not, it’s fitting for government people, right? It turned out to be a good talk, primarily because the audience was awesome!

If you’d like a copy of this deck, I put it here. Same as the last one, feel free to use it however you’d like.

John gave a demonstration of the S2Org tool for the audience and we invited them all to use it. It’s free for crying out loud! It was nice to see many counties/cities (~10) take us up on our offer. If you haven’t tried the free S2Org tool yourself, do it!

Dallas, Texas

John and I left for Dallas on Thursday morning. We grabbed our car from Wonder Woman, then headed to our first meeting.

We drove straight to Hard Eight BBQ where we had a meeting scheduled with some of the guys from @Risk Technologies. The BBQ was good (see below) and the meeting was great! @Risk has some really cool things going on and we’re happy to be friends!

We took a partner phone call in the car while we drove to another meeting. This meeting was with Ryan at FRG Solutions to collaborate on some cool go to market ideas. Great ideas and a great call!

Along the way, we were a little troubled with this picture.

Our next meeting was with John Ross, a super cool technology executive from Dallas. John was in the audience during my ISC2 keynote a few weeks back. In the middle of that talk, he went out to the lobby and grabbed me a cup of coffee. How cool is that! Anyway, we’re meeting again. He chose this coffee shop called Ascension, and these guys take coffee to a whole new level!

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It was cool to catch-up with John and talk about ways to work together. We talked a lot about starting businesses, finding the right path, and our faith. I LOVE good people and I love working with them too. This was a wonderful way to end my day (John went on to have another meeting or two after this one).

ICI Events

On Friday, we attended a really cool event put on by ICI Events at the Four Seasons Resort and Club. The event featured a unique format for bringing vendors, partners, and business consumers together, starting with a speed dating round where a few business consumers would sit at your table for six minutes while you told them about your solution. After the six minutes was up, people would switch places, and you’d do it again. This would continue until all business consumers had seen all vendors. After the speed dating round, consumers would vote on which vendors they’d like to know more about. It was pretty cool and we made a lot of friends!

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JP Hill (pictured above) was a key player in putting this all together and he made us feel very welcomed. JP was the key person who put together the ISC2 Cyber Aware Dallas event too, and he’s Dallas ISC2 Chapter President. In his free time (joking), he’s the CISO at Secutor Consulting.

Like I said, we made a lot of friends here.

Trip Home

Normally, my trip home is spent working on the plane, but this trip home was a little different. I met a guy named Chad on the plane. Chad is a social worker from MN, and we somehow got to talking about Jesus. We talked about everything from marriage and family to work and hobbies, and everything in between.

Well, that was that. Great trip(s) this week!

BBQ Reviews

Only two BBQ reviews again. We need to step up our game.

Hard Eight – https://hardeightbbq.com/ – Overall: 7.25

We met the guys from @Risk here and they paid for it, so the value was great! I don’t even know how much our food cost. The experience was unique. You walk up to a big pit full of meat and grab what you want. There’s everything in this pit; turkey, pulled pork, brisket, ribs, sausage, etc. There were even some kind of weird shrimp kabob things. Once you grab your meat, you go inside to pick your side dishes and beverages. At the end of the line is the cashier, and after paying, you go find a seat somewhere.

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The meat was OK. It tasted sort of rushed and bulk-prepared where I like meat that feels like it was cooked in the back yard. I could hardly notice the smoke in the meat and the pulled pork was watery. The best meat I had was the turkey, which was really good. Overall, this place was OK. I’m not sure if it’s a place that I’d make a special trip to go back and visit.

Cousin’s BBQ – https://www.cousinsbbq.com/ – Overall: 7.75

I arrived at the DFW airport for the trip home and realized that I’d only done one BBQ joint so far on this trip! I sort of panicked a bit before finding this little gem in the DFW airport. Thank God! A man can’t take a trip with only one portion of BBQ.

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My expectations for this place were low to begin with. After all, what kind of BBQ can you expect to get in an airport? Needless to say, I was very pleasantly surprised! I ordered pulled pork and brisket, with broccoli salad and cole slaw on the side. The meat was surprisingly moist a very flavorful. The smoke ring was good too. In a pinch, this place will definitely do!

BBQ Summary

Again, two new BBQ joints to add to our list. The winner this week was Cousin’s BBQ. Pecan Lodge is still the the overall #S2Roadshow leader with a score of 9, and Bowlegged BBQ is still in the #2 spot. The current overall standings are listed below.

Overall Standings (at the end of #S2Roadshow Week Three):

  • Pecan Lodge – 9
  • Bowlegged BBQ – 8.75
  • Divine Swine – 8.5
  • Big Ed’s BBQ – 8.25
  • Mission BBQ – 8
  • Cousin’s BBQ – 7.75
  • Blackwood BBQ – 7.5
  • Broad Street BBQ – 7.5
  • Hard Eight – 7.25
  • Spring Creek Barbeque – 7.25
  • Redd’s BBQ – 7.25
  • Lucille’s Smokehouse BBQ – 7
  • Smoque – 6.75
  • Sweet Lucy’s Smokehouse – 6.75
  • Red Coal BBQ – 6.75
  • Hambone’s Smokehouse – 6.25
  • Shakedown BBQ – N/A (wasn’t open when it was supposed to be, wasted trip)

Next Week’s #S2Roadshow

John and I are together again for the first half of the roadshow, then I’m going solo for the second half. We’re excited to go up to Fargo, ND this week to hang out with Network Center, our partners to the north. They put on this amazing event every year called nVision, and both John and I are speaking on the main stage there. John comes back home and I head out to Rochester, NY to make some new friends. I’ll be speaking at the ISSA chapter there.

Looking forward to another great week!

Stay tuned for next week’s #S2Roadshow updates. You can follow us on Twitter (@evanfrancen, @HarmonJohn, @StudioSecurity, and the #S2Roadshow hashtag) and on LinkedIn.

See you next week! If you want to collaborate with us, get in touch!