Umbereen R. Ahmed: Today we're joined by Richard Avery, CEO of Titanium Computing, a company redefining how small and mid-sized businesses approach IT and cybersecurity. Richard's journey from tech entrepreneur to trusted industry leader is a story of resilience, smart scaling, and a relentless focus on people. In this episode, we'll explore what it takes to grow a tech company with integrity and great leadership keeps innovation human. Welcome, Richard. Thanks for joining.
Richard Avery: Thank you so much for the introduction. really appreciate it.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: welcome. Well, let's get into it. Tell us about yourself and your role at Titanium Computing.
Richard Avery: Well I run a what is commonly called an MSP or an IT consulting company. We have got over a dozen people here that help provide support and technology knowledge. Most of them I've trained myself over the years. We've been in business for nine years. I left doing subcontracting work for the Department of Defense in 2016 and I decided for some crazy reason to go and start my own business and be an entrepreneur. I try to blame everyone else as people that were encouraging me and in fact they remind me no no this was your crazy idea. So that's just kind of where we at. I got into security early on. My father was a locksmith so I was drilling safes and picking locks before I was 10 and then eventually got into computers. I was born and raised in upstate New York and a New York birthplace of IBM. And one could argue the birthplace of cybersecurity. That adventure took me eventually to Lockheed Martin, as well as working at lots of other companies. Lockheed Martin got me my clearance. then from Lockheed Martin, I did a few more steps in the IT world and made it to Iraq and Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, doing cybersecurity network administration and a bunch of other things. Lots and lots of hats when you're in the desert. So. ⁓ That's kind of where we're at. you know, big and small, having supported small customers over the years and having supported Fortune One people over the years. that point in time, I was operating the largest supercomputer ever deployed to a war zone. It was the equivalent of three tractor trailers in size. So it was very large to just be sitting out in the middle of a desert base operating, you know, 10 terabytes plus a day of military intelligence reconnaissance. video. So yeah, that's kind of the adventure that I'm on and the kind of service that we try to give people is an understanding of low and high level security. Most companies don't really want to deal with cybersecurity, if apparently the password for the ⁓ museum video system was Louvre, right? We run into really crazy stuff like that all the time where people shouldn't have really, really easy passwords on stuff, but they do and eventually they regret it.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Well, thank you for that explanation and background sounds like you've done a lot you've built a tech firm that's both high performance and people centered. What's your daily rhythm as a CEO like?
Richard Avery: Lots of caffeine and encouragement for the team. You know, we do his daily stand-up. I still in the business as much as I want to be on the business. You know, it does come ⁓ with some challenges you know, I like to give back to younger technicians. I'd like to do things to assist people in their careers and in their roles going forward. So the day-to-day can be kind of crazy sometimes when somebody calls and says, hey, I my servers down, have some problems with this. least recently, we've breaking into personal people's laptops as they have been having all sorts personal issues that they've needed to have their accounts taken back over. So ⁓ one of the my father told me early on is ⁓ 2 thirds of calls are people wanting me to have them break them back into their own stuff. lock themselves out of their house, lock themselves out of their car, lock out of all sorts of things. So that's always been kind of the focus of my history in a lot of ways is that I know I need to know how to break people back into their stuff.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, I like that tagline, how to break people back into their stuff. What were the biggest growing pains in those early years and how did you overcome them?
Richard Avery: Oh I don't even know if I've overcame them really. The biggest growing pains is that every customer is different. Every customer has a need and most customers want nothing to do with cybersecurity. They want the security of having a lock on their door but they'd like that lock to just automatically unlock when they go to touch it. There's a reason that high-end cars automatically sensor for your your key fob and automatically unlock if you come close to them. You know people don't want the tediousness ⁓ of to unlock a vehicle ⁓ or having to press a button sometimes. So understanding you need to marry cybersecurity with good practices an explanation of good business security and usually nowadays that's along with cybersecurity insurance. And some other things that people are saying, hey, if you want to have this level of cybersecurity insurance, you need to be able to check these boxes at a minimum. boxes need to get checked every year. And usually, they add a box every year. ⁓ ⁓ able to communicate that to customers and assist those customers with checking those boxes and meeting those requirements has helped push cybersecurity forward in lot of ways.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay. When did you realize titanium had become more than just a service provider, but a trusted strategic partner for clients?
Richard Avery: when they said that out loud ⁓ comes down to ⁓ most people are not compliance people. Most IT people are not cybersecurity people. Compliance people are often not cybersecurity people and none those people are usually business people. So it's very strange that all of those hats ⁓
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay.
Richard Avery: our hats that I've worn in over the years, having certificates in business administration from Notre Dame, having two MBAs, ⁓ having understanding and management understanding has constantly helped me in moving ⁓ the forward. So when a customer says, I didn't think of the ROI on that, or I didn't think of the long-term financial implications ⁓ or the The costs of that impact, know, usually when I'm talking to an executive, I'm talking to them in executive speak. I'm not talking about the blinky lights or the, ⁓ the, what the ⁓ new technology is. Cause they don't care about that. That's not their industry. Their industry is whatever they're focusing on bookkeeping or banking or ⁓ or being a law office or a medical office. They, they, they, the last thing they want is a ⁓ process that slows down their work. So when you meet them in their field and say this is going to help your workflow, or at least it's not going to slow it down, then they're very interested in implementing strategies that will assist them in keeping their company secure.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, so to piggyback on this then, how do you balance innovation with operational stability and client trust?
Richard Avery: Operational stability is a question that I push back on to the customer because it is an incident response plan kind of conversation and a continuity of operations plan kind of conversation. When you build out a proper incident response plan continuity of operations plan which is required for a CMMC or required for SOC or required for any form of major literally have a what is how long is this allowed to be down for and you start to have that conversation with your customer when they say when you ask them what's a critical system that we need to maintain for you and keep up and running and they say well all of it ⁓ it all has to be critical but ⁓ when you get down to it and you say can this be down for an hour yes ⁓ great can it be down for a whole day ⁓ no no no all right So eventually you walk a company to sometimes understanding their own operational resiliency and understanding what their own requirements are. When you say to a customer, how much money do you make during the day? One day of operation is $14,000. A secondary internet connection for you is $100 a month. Why aren't we getting you a secondary internet connection and a failover software defined wide area network?
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: so that it automatically detects that your primary internet connection failed and it automatically rolls you over the secondary internet connection. And when you spell that out for someone, they go, yeah, one day of operation being down, the internet service provider can't come and service me immediately. I to still be up and running. ⁓ So you offer them solutions that are ⁓ very conscious and you justify, like, hey, you're going to have one day that you're going to be down.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: Full stop, no matter who you are, no matter where you are. Even Amazon and at this point in ⁓ last week and a half, the entire internet exploded because Microsoft and AWS were down. ⁓ You're to be down no matter where your infrastructure is at some point in time. How do you be resilient for that and having that conversation with your customers? when you bake that into the cake of your with the customer, of your conversations with them,
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: That's when they're like, ⁓ this isn't, you know, these aren't sales tactics to sell products. These are people that really want to be successful. And these are the ways that I can be successful. So I hope that answers the question that you asked.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: It does, thank you. So what industry trends and or shifts are you seeing in the managed IT and cybersecurity services space?
Richard Avery: I see AI coming in hard and fast and loose. It's very much the Wild Wild West. Everybody has an AI that they're slapping on everything. And a problem because you're also not having the same conversation again from a operations resiliency compliance thoughtful process point. What I mean by that is you translate it to say, here's your employee handbook. These are the sites you're not allowed to go to. And these are the things you're not allowed to do with your computer or the information systems that we're providing you. X, Y, and Z, yada, yada, yada. You give people rules of the game working at your company and those rules of the game or the employee handbook. Where's your AI policy? Is there an AI policy? If you're a CPA and somebody is just taking customer records, and throwing them in the chat GPT, that's a problem. And that's going to be a problem for the foreseeable future because it took us this long to get to this point. It's going to take us another year or two or three before every company is like, man, I really need to have an AI policy. And I need to block all the other AI sites that are not sites that I've approved because I don't know what my employees are going to do with my customer data in those sites, regardless of how much function.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: or value that this AI tool can give me. So that's really where I'm seeing things going, not just with the explosion of AI tools, which are certainly great. And we use AI tools and build AI tools here at Titanium. But it also comes down to how are you managing and controlling the tools that your people are using? And if you're not, you're going to have a disaster. It's the equivalent of letting them click on everything that comes into their email. You're going to have a data breach. It's just going to be the data breach. They gave it to them willingly. So it's a problem and I see that growing until it starts to actually become solved.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, how is this problem of impacting your business, even though you are using AI and developing AI tools, but how is this industry shift impacting your business?
Richard Avery: The industry shift is benefiting my business, if anything else. you explain, because people say, I want this AI tool. I want that AI tool. And you help give them those tools. start saying, hey, you want to be using You want to be using Claude. You want to be using Anthropic, Claude code. ⁓ You to be using Grok. want to be using whatever the tool is that's best your situation. ⁓
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay.
Richard Avery: Using Chat GPT to write code is not the best AI tool out there. It can certainly do it. Using Cloud Code and Anthropic to write code for you is going be a much better experience, depending on what you're trying to do with it. delivering the tool to the right customer is critical. But at the same time, there's an of, need ⁓ I servers, need AI hardware, need AI video cards, I need to do X, Y, and Z. they have no idea how to do that. If you go to a construction company and say, I need to have an AI calculator that can take a look at some pictures and calculate and have an LLM, ⁓ language model, calculate how much concrete I'm going to need on this site, how much wood I'm going to need on this site, how much metal or sheet I'm going to need on the site. And I want to own it. I don't want to pay another company $1,000 a month to use their product. I want to own that product. So when they come to you and say, I want you to build me a solution, there's a lot of opportunity there. And it's not just like, build me a website. This stuff is way more complicated than that. And in some cases, you need to have $50,000 $100,000 of hardware to train a model.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: to then hand to the customer to actually use. So there's a lot of other stuff going on and most people have no clue how to get started. another whole scale of technical knowledge.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm. Okay, that's a lot. high impact. It's high, you most ⁓ people about the basic tools out there, but the more complex you get, especially with a Gentek AI now as well, creating agents, bots, et cetera, integrating into your business. And then of course, with the policies around them, are there any guardrails, security controls on ⁓ AI and data? et cetera, it's a massive opportunity and a challenge, think. what's going well in your business and what challenges might you be facing.
Richard Avery: Education ⁓ ⁓ is going well. ⁓ We encourage certifications, encourage training, we encourage growth, we buy new toys and ⁓ for people to play with so that feel like they're up and coming. And those can get really, really enterprise very fast. Most companies still are in one gig
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: and there's no reason for them to leave 1 gig land the infrastructure that they're on doesn't need it right your internet connection is 500 meg by 500 meg ⁓ all of your device is talking at 1 gig is fine you know 1000 megs per second and when get into enterprise land do you see 10 gig infrastructure or multi gig infrastructure Multi-gig infrastructure is 2.5 or 5 gig per second, which prices have come down on that considerably. ⁓ now that we're doing AI everywhere, infrastructure is changing drastically. People are like, I need to get this data back and forth much faster. OK, so you need to have a 10 gig infrastructure. We just bought some pieces networking equipment just this week that are 100 gig infrastructure. So once you start building real AI systems, you need to have lots of communication bandwidth. And those require network upgrades, and those require network infrastructure scaling. And usually, the customer is not ready for that either. They're like, well, I don't want to do all of this infrastructure changes just to accommodate two or three people in my company. Then you can't do it. You've got to pick.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Thank
Richard Avery: AI is driving more than just video cards and more than just new tools. It's requiring infrastructure upgrades everywhere. And a lot of people typically aren't calculating that the costs. So that's also going well for us because we do infrastructure and we do cabling and we do all sorts of other things. not only are we doing the AI build-outs, but we're saying, hey, you don't have the infrastructure to support the AI tools that you want. So we got to have to go upgrade those things. So it's a double, triple dip at times.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay. And what's most frustrating in your business right now?
Richard Avery: People. right? And put ⁓ a point on that, like Windows 10 to Windows 11 migration, ⁓ we're ⁓ less a month away from the final drop dead date. No matter how long you warn people in advance, no matter how much you communicate to them in advance, they want to make their emergency your problem, even though you've told them over and over and over, hey, this is coming, this is coming, this is coming.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay.
Richard Avery: ⁓ now I finally got a pop-up on my computer that says I can't use this tool that I wanted to use, or I can't log into QuickBooks anymore, or I can't do this, or I can't do that. Then suddenly the world is ending. And ⁓ want that to be solved as quickly as possible. really, ⁓ communication ⁓ misunderstanding communication and how to communicate and why is my computer not Windows 11 compatible? And usually, ⁓ because it's what Windows decided. ⁓ This is really high-end machine, and you can't upgrade to when it's 11. Sorry. So that's probably the biggest challenge that we have at the exact moment, is while we're having this big AI explosion, ⁓ everybody's needing to replace their desktops.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Wonderful. Oh my gosh. So how far in advance do you actually start alerting these companies, these customers of yours that, you need to upgrade?
Richard Avery: A year, year and a half. ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: a year and a year and a half and they still wait till the last minute. I know that all too well, I recall. that's why I've been smiling as you were talking about, very familiar with this challenge. And so where do you hope to be in ⁓ six to months as titanium computing from a business and a business strategy, business growth perspective?
Richard Avery: Well, we've grown 20 to 40 % year over year. And I'm hoping that ⁓ next coming year is going to be another 20 to 40 % growth. We've our own infrastructure, our own offices. We've upgraded a bunch of things around us to be able to accommodate that. And we're going to be planning on more marketing and, pardon me, more marketing initiatives as we go forward, as we try to. ⁓ grow and our own company and our own challenges. We've got some ⁓ tools that we're building ⁓ AI in the background to us solve those problems as well as solve those problems for others.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, tools for ⁓ exactly?
Richard Avery: management like so for example a managed service provider typically has like 30 tools right and you're buying tools from this vendor and that vendor and this vendor and that vendor and that those vendors have bought all those tools and kind of swept them all together in a pile and they may or may not work well and that's that's a problem so if they don't work well that's a problem and if they work well great you don't really you don't really notice but there's there's usually some exaggerated costs around those things
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: So we've been building our own tools to replace almost all of those industry tools then we're gonna take that to market at some point in time and say hey, right? Here's the tools that we built to replace this $5,000 a month stack of tools and you can buy them from us for you know half that or even less
Umbereen R. Ahmed: I see. OK. And when do you think you'll be launching this?
Richard Avery: Hopefully someday. We want to make sure that the... I don't believe in a minimum viable product. I want a product that is good when it goes to market and it's good at every level when it goes to market. Usually you have a product when somebody releases it it's good at this product tier and then everything else is kind of filler and really generic.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: didn't hear soon or a date. ⁓
Richard Avery: That's what we're trying not to do. We're trying to make sure that this product is good for us, good for all the things that we need at every level that we need it. Tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, cybersecurity, ownership, finance, operations, all of those things. So we're trying to make it be a fantastic tool for us and all the things that we do. ⁓ And our levels of requirements, we know that that'll be a fantastic tool for everybody else.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, all right. Well, thank you for this enjoyable conversation and learning about your business your challenges, and your I'd like to close off with ⁓ some ⁓ rapid questions Coffee before client calls or after morning systems check?
Richard Avery: energy drink before you leave the house
Umbereen R. Ahmed: One Booker mentor who's shaped your leadership style.
Richard Avery: Lately it's been Alex Hermosy.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: favorite tech gadget you cannot live without.
Richard Avery: that would be the flipper zero.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: finish this sentence. Leadership is... ⁓
Richard Avery: Accountability.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Wonderful. I agree. Thank you so much, Richard, for joining me. Your insights into scaling leadership and service-driven technology remind us that growth isn't just about systems. It's about relationship, trust, and vision.
Richard Avery: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the time.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: For listeners, can learn more about Richard's work at titaniumcomputing.com.
Richard Avery: and YouTube.
Richard Avery: Thank you so much for the introduction. really appreciate it.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: welcome. Well, let's get into it. Tell us about yourself and your role at Titanium Computing.
Richard Avery: Well I run a what is commonly called an MSP or an IT consulting company. We have got over a dozen people here that help provide support and technology knowledge. Most of them I've trained myself over the years. We've been in business for nine years. I left doing subcontracting work for the Department of Defense in 2016 and I decided for some crazy reason to go and start my own business and be an entrepreneur. I try to blame everyone else as people that were encouraging me and in fact they remind me no no this was your crazy idea. So that's just kind of where we at. I got into security early on. My father was a locksmith so I was drilling safes and picking locks before I was 10 and then eventually got into computers. I was born and raised in upstate New York and a New York birthplace of IBM. And one could argue the birthplace of cybersecurity. That adventure took me eventually to Lockheed Martin, as well as working at lots of other companies. Lockheed Martin got me my clearance. then from Lockheed Martin, I did a few more steps in the IT world and made it to Iraq and Afghanistan as a civilian contractor, doing cybersecurity network administration and a bunch of other things. Lots and lots of hats when you're in the desert. So. ⁓ That's kind of where we're at. you know, big and small, having supported small customers over the years and having supported Fortune One people over the years. that point in time, I was operating the largest supercomputer ever deployed to a war zone. It was the equivalent of three tractor trailers in size. So it was very large to just be sitting out in the middle of a desert base operating, you know, 10 terabytes plus a day of military intelligence reconnaissance. video. So yeah, that's kind of the adventure that I'm on and the kind of service that we try to give people is an understanding of low and high level security. Most companies don't really want to deal with cybersecurity, if apparently the password for the ⁓ museum video system was Louvre, right? We run into really crazy stuff like that all the time where people shouldn't have really, really easy passwords on stuff, but they do and eventually they regret it.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Well, thank you for that explanation and background sounds like you've done a lot you've built a tech firm that's both high performance and people centered. What's your daily rhythm as a CEO like?
Richard Avery: Lots of caffeine and encouragement for the team. You know, we do his daily stand-up. I still in the business as much as I want to be on the business. You know, it does come ⁓ with some challenges you know, I like to give back to younger technicians. I'd like to do things to assist people in their careers and in their roles going forward. So the day-to-day can be kind of crazy sometimes when somebody calls and says, hey, I my servers down, have some problems with this. least recently, we've breaking into personal people's laptops as they have been having all sorts personal issues that they've needed to have their accounts taken back over. So ⁓ one of the my father told me early on is ⁓ 2 thirds of calls are people wanting me to have them break them back into their own stuff. lock themselves out of their house, lock themselves out of their car, lock out of all sorts of things. So that's always been kind of the focus of my history in a lot of ways is that I know I need to know how to break people back into their stuff.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, I like that tagline, how to break people back into their stuff. What were the biggest growing pains in those early years and how did you overcome them?
Richard Avery: Oh I don't even know if I've overcame them really. The biggest growing pains is that every customer is different. Every customer has a need and most customers want nothing to do with cybersecurity. They want the security of having a lock on their door but they'd like that lock to just automatically unlock when they go to touch it. There's a reason that high-end cars automatically sensor for your your key fob and automatically unlock if you come close to them. You know people don't want the tediousness ⁓ of to unlock a vehicle ⁓ or having to press a button sometimes. So understanding you need to marry cybersecurity with good practices an explanation of good business security and usually nowadays that's along with cybersecurity insurance. And some other things that people are saying, hey, if you want to have this level of cybersecurity insurance, you need to be able to check these boxes at a minimum. boxes need to get checked every year. And usually, they add a box every year. ⁓ ⁓ able to communicate that to customers and assist those customers with checking those boxes and meeting those requirements has helped push cybersecurity forward in lot of ways.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay. When did you realize titanium had become more than just a service provider, but a trusted strategic partner for clients?
Richard Avery: when they said that out loud ⁓ comes down to ⁓ most people are not compliance people. Most IT people are not cybersecurity people. Compliance people are often not cybersecurity people and none those people are usually business people. So it's very strange that all of those hats ⁓
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay.
Richard Avery: our hats that I've worn in over the years, having certificates in business administration from Notre Dame, having two MBAs, ⁓ having understanding and management understanding has constantly helped me in moving ⁓ the forward. So when a customer says, I didn't think of the ROI on that, or I didn't think of the long-term financial implications ⁓ or the The costs of that impact, know, usually when I'm talking to an executive, I'm talking to them in executive speak. I'm not talking about the blinky lights or the, ⁓ the, what the ⁓ new technology is. Cause they don't care about that. That's not their industry. Their industry is whatever they're focusing on bookkeeping or banking or ⁓ or being a law office or a medical office. They, they, they, the last thing they want is a ⁓ process that slows down their work. So when you meet them in their field and say this is going to help your workflow, or at least it's not going to slow it down, then they're very interested in implementing strategies that will assist them in keeping their company secure.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, so to piggyback on this then, how do you balance innovation with operational stability and client trust?
Richard Avery: Operational stability is a question that I push back on to the customer because it is an incident response plan kind of conversation and a continuity of operations plan kind of conversation. When you build out a proper incident response plan continuity of operations plan which is required for a CMMC or required for SOC or required for any form of major literally have a what is how long is this allowed to be down for and you start to have that conversation with your customer when they say when you ask them what's a critical system that we need to maintain for you and keep up and running and they say well all of it ⁓ it all has to be critical but ⁓ when you get down to it and you say can this be down for an hour yes ⁓ great can it be down for a whole day ⁓ no no no all right So eventually you walk a company to sometimes understanding their own operational resiliency and understanding what their own requirements are. When you say to a customer, how much money do you make during the day? One day of operation is $14,000. A secondary internet connection for you is $100 a month. Why aren't we getting you a secondary internet connection and a failover software defined wide area network?
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: so that it automatically detects that your primary internet connection failed and it automatically rolls you over the secondary internet connection. And when you spell that out for someone, they go, yeah, one day of operation being down, the internet service provider can't come and service me immediately. I to still be up and running. ⁓ So you offer them solutions that are ⁓ very conscious and you justify, like, hey, you're going to have one day that you're going to be down.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: Full stop, no matter who you are, no matter where you are. Even Amazon and at this point in ⁓ last week and a half, the entire internet exploded because Microsoft and AWS were down. ⁓ You're to be down no matter where your infrastructure is at some point in time. How do you be resilient for that and having that conversation with your customers? when you bake that into the cake of your with the customer, of your conversations with them,
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: That's when they're like, ⁓ this isn't, you know, these aren't sales tactics to sell products. These are people that really want to be successful. And these are the ways that I can be successful. So I hope that answers the question that you asked.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: It does, thank you. So what industry trends and or shifts are you seeing in the managed IT and cybersecurity services space?
Richard Avery: I see AI coming in hard and fast and loose. It's very much the Wild Wild West. Everybody has an AI that they're slapping on everything. And a problem because you're also not having the same conversation again from a operations resiliency compliance thoughtful process point. What I mean by that is you translate it to say, here's your employee handbook. These are the sites you're not allowed to go to. And these are the things you're not allowed to do with your computer or the information systems that we're providing you. X, Y, and Z, yada, yada, yada. You give people rules of the game working at your company and those rules of the game or the employee handbook. Where's your AI policy? Is there an AI policy? If you're a CPA and somebody is just taking customer records, and throwing them in the chat GPT, that's a problem. And that's going to be a problem for the foreseeable future because it took us this long to get to this point. It's going to take us another year or two or three before every company is like, man, I really need to have an AI policy. And I need to block all the other AI sites that are not sites that I've approved because I don't know what my employees are going to do with my customer data in those sites, regardless of how much function.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: or value that this AI tool can give me. So that's really where I'm seeing things going, not just with the explosion of AI tools, which are certainly great. And we use AI tools and build AI tools here at Titanium. But it also comes down to how are you managing and controlling the tools that your people are using? And if you're not, you're going to have a disaster. It's the equivalent of letting them click on everything that comes into their email. You're going to have a data breach. It's just going to be the data breach. They gave it to them willingly. So it's a problem and I see that growing until it starts to actually become solved.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, how is this problem of impacting your business, even though you are using AI and developing AI tools, but how is this industry shift impacting your business?
Richard Avery: The industry shift is benefiting my business, if anything else. you explain, because people say, I want this AI tool. I want that AI tool. And you help give them those tools. start saying, hey, you want to be using You want to be using Claude. You want to be using Anthropic, Claude code. ⁓ You to be using Grok. want to be using whatever the tool is that's best your situation. ⁓
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay.
Richard Avery: Using Chat GPT to write code is not the best AI tool out there. It can certainly do it. Using Cloud Code and Anthropic to write code for you is going be a much better experience, depending on what you're trying to do with it. delivering the tool to the right customer is critical. But at the same time, there's an of, need ⁓ I servers, need AI hardware, need AI video cards, I need to do X, Y, and Z. they have no idea how to do that. If you go to a construction company and say, I need to have an AI calculator that can take a look at some pictures and calculate and have an LLM, ⁓ language model, calculate how much concrete I'm going to need on this site, how much wood I'm going to need on this site, how much metal or sheet I'm going to need on the site. And I want to own it. I don't want to pay another company $1,000 a month to use their product. I want to own that product. So when they come to you and say, I want you to build me a solution, there's a lot of opportunity there. And it's not just like, build me a website. This stuff is way more complicated than that. And in some cases, you need to have $50,000 $100,000 of hardware to train a model.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: to then hand to the customer to actually use. So there's a lot of other stuff going on and most people have no clue how to get started. another whole scale of technical knowledge.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm. Okay, that's a lot. high impact. It's high, you most ⁓ people about the basic tools out there, but the more complex you get, especially with a Gentek AI now as well, creating agents, bots, et cetera, integrating into your business. And then of course, with the policies around them, are there any guardrails, security controls on ⁓ AI and data? et cetera, it's a massive opportunity and a challenge, think. what's going well in your business and what challenges might you be facing.
Richard Avery: Education ⁓ ⁓ is going well. ⁓ We encourage certifications, encourage training, we encourage growth, we buy new toys and ⁓ for people to play with so that feel like they're up and coming. And those can get really, really enterprise very fast. Most companies still are in one gig
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: and there's no reason for them to leave 1 gig land the infrastructure that they're on doesn't need it right your internet connection is 500 meg by 500 meg ⁓ all of your device is talking at 1 gig is fine you know 1000 megs per second and when get into enterprise land do you see 10 gig infrastructure or multi gig infrastructure Multi-gig infrastructure is 2.5 or 5 gig per second, which prices have come down on that considerably. ⁓ now that we're doing AI everywhere, infrastructure is changing drastically. People are like, I need to get this data back and forth much faster. OK, so you need to have a 10 gig infrastructure. We just bought some pieces networking equipment just this week that are 100 gig infrastructure. So once you start building real AI systems, you need to have lots of communication bandwidth. And those require network upgrades, and those require network infrastructure scaling. And usually, the customer is not ready for that either. They're like, well, I don't want to do all of this infrastructure changes just to accommodate two or three people in my company. Then you can't do it. You've got to pick.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Thank
Richard Avery: AI is driving more than just video cards and more than just new tools. It's requiring infrastructure upgrades everywhere. And a lot of people typically aren't calculating that the costs. So that's also going well for us because we do infrastructure and we do cabling and we do all sorts of other things. not only are we doing the AI build-outs, but we're saying, hey, you don't have the infrastructure to support the AI tools that you want. So we got to have to go upgrade those things. So it's a double, triple dip at times.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay. And what's most frustrating in your business right now?
Richard Avery: People. right? And put ⁓ a point on that, like Windows 10 to Windows 11 migration, ⁓ we're ⁓ less a month away from the final drop dead date. No matter how long you warn people in advance, no matter how much you communicate to them in advance, they want to make their emergency your problem, even though you've told them over and over and over, hey, this is coming, this is coming, this is coming.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay.
Richard Avery: ⁓ now I finally got a pop-up on my computer that says I can't use this tool that I wanted to use, or I can't log into QuickBooks anymore, or I can't do this, or I can't do that. Then suddenly the world is ending. And ⁓ want that to be solved as quickly as possible. really, ⁓ communication ⁓ misunderstanding communication and how to communicate and why is my computer not Windows 11 compatible? And usually, ⁓ because it's what Windows decided. ⁓ This is really high-end machine, and you can't upgrade to when it's 11. Sorry. So that's probably the biggest challenge that we have at the exact moment, is while we're having this big AI explosion, ⁓ everybody's needing to replace their desktops.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Wonderful. Oh my gosh. So how far in advance do you actually start alerting these companies, these customers of yours that, you need to upgrade?
Richard Avery: A year, year and a half. ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: a year and a year and a half and they still wait till the last minute. I know that all too well, I recall. that's why I've been smiling as you were talking about, very familiar with this challenge. And so where do you hope to be in ⁓ six to months as titanium computing from a business and a business strategy, business growth perspective?
Richard Avery: Well, we've grown 20 to 40 % year over year. And I'm hoping that ⁓ next coming year is going to be another 20 to 40 % growth. We've our own infrastructure, our own offices. We've upgraded a bunch of things around us to be able to accommodate that. And we're going to be planning on more marketing and, pardon me, more marketing initiatives as we go forward, as we try to. ⁓ grow and our own company and our own challenges. We've got some ⁓ tools that we're building ⁓ AI in the background to us solve those problems as well as solve those problems for others.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, tools for ⁓ exactly?
Richard Avery: management like so for example a managed service provider typically has like 30 tools right and you're buying tools from this vendor and that vendor and this vendor and that vendor and that those vendors have bought all those tools and kind of swept them all together in a pile and they may or may not work well and that's that's a problem so if they don't work well that's a problem and if they work well great you don't really you don't really notice but there's there's usually some exaggerated costs around those things
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Mm-hmm.
Richard Avery: So we've been building our own tools to replace almost all of those industry tools then we're gonna take that to market at some point in time and say hey, right? Here's the tools that we built to replace this $5,000 a month stack of tools and you can buy them from us for you know half that or even less
Umbereen R. Ahmed: I see. OK. And when do you think you'll be launching this?
Richard Avery: Hopefully someday. We want to make sure that the... I don't believe in a minimum viable product. I want a product that is good when it goes to market and it's good at every level when it goes to market. Usually you have a product when somebody releases it it's good at this product tier and then everything else is kind of filler and really generic.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: didn't hear soon or a date. ⁓
Richard Avery: That's what we're trying not to do. We're trying to make sure that this product is good for us, good for all the things that we need at every level that we need it. Tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, cybersecurity, ownership, finance, operations, all of those things. So we're trying to make it be a fantastic tool for us and all the things that we do. ⁓ And our levels of requirements, we know that that'll be a fantastic tool for everybody else.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Okay, all right. Well, thank you for this enjoyable conversation and learning about your business your challenges, and your I'd like to close off with ⁓ some ⁓ rapid questions Coffee before client calls or after morning systems check?
Richard Avery: energy drink before you leave the house
Umbereen R. Ahmed: One Booker mentor who's shaped your leadership style.
Richard Avery: Lately it's been Alex Hermosy.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: favorite tech gadget you cannot live without.
Richard Avery: that would be the flipper zero.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: finish this sentence. Leadership is... ⁓
Richard Avery: Accountability.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: Wonderful. I agree. Thank you so much, Richard, for joining me. Your insights into scaling leadership and service-driven technology remind us that growth isn't just about systems. It's about relationship, trust, and vision.
Richard Avery: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the time.
Umbereen R. Ahmed: For listeners, can learn more about Richard's work at titaniumcomputing.com.
Richard Avery: and YouTube.
