Steve Searles, Chief Technology Officer of Liberty Center One, joins us to explain what data centers actually do, how small businesses can make smarter technology decisions, and where AI fits into the picture. Steve also shares his unusual path from aviation into IT, including years flying hot air balloons for RE/MAX before moving deeper into technology.
We start with Liberty Center One’s Royal Oak facility and why its location made sense for a data center. The building began as a tool and die facility, giving it the heavy concrete construction needed for electrical systems, cooling equipment, batteries, and servers. Steve also explains that not every data center is the same. A local commercial data center serving manufacturers and automotive suppliers is very different from a massive hyperscale facility built for companies such as OpenAI, Google, or Meta. Liberty Center One focuses on efficiency, including cooling systems that can take advantage of Michigan’s cold winter air.
Steve also breaks down what "the cloud" actually means. Data stored in the cloud still lives on physical hardware somewhere. For businesses, the location of that hardware can matter. Manufacturing systems, quality control, and other latency sensitive applications may need servers physically close to the operation. Email and less time sensitive workloads can live farther away. This is one reason more companies are using a multi cloud approach rather than putting everything with one provider.
We also talk about AI and how small businesses should approach it. AI works best when there is a specific problem to solve. Steve points to business intelligence, marketing, image generation, and translation as useful applications. One automotive customer can translate large technical manuals almost instantly for teams around the world. At the same time, AI can become frustrating when businesses force it into customer service situations where a human would provide a better experience. Steve describes AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for everything people already do.
Cybersecurity is another key topic. Steve explains how ransomware enters a business, encrypts files, and demands payment for restoring access. The strongest defense is a clean backup that is separate from the infected production environment. Liberty Center One maintains out of band backups and replication so businesses can recover from a known good copy rather than depend on a ransom payment.
Ultimately, Steve comes back to customer service. Small technology companies often use similar hardware and platforms as much larger competitors. Their advantage is responsiveness, flexibility, and the ability for customers to reach an actual person when something goes wrong.
Bonus: You'll also hear about the charity work Liberty Center One's CEO and his wife are doing in Royal Oak.
(00:00) Intro
(00:32) Meet Steve Searles of Liberty Center One
(01:29) Cincinnati, Skyline Chili and Detroit
(02:07) From Aviation and Hot Air Balloons to IT
(04:44) Why Not All Data Centers Are the Same
(07:11) Making Data Centers More Efficient
(08:38) What “The Cloud” Actually Means
(11:06) Why the Physical Location of Your Data Matters
(12:25) Why Businesses Are Leaving Some Big Cloud Providers
(14:23) How Small Businesses Can Use AI
(18:17) Jon's Mom's Real World Scam and the Risks Facing Consumers
(19:28) How a Ransomware Attack Works
(24:09) Should a Business Ever Pay a Ransom?
(26:03) Liberty Center One and the Hand In Hand Foundation
(26:46) Fishbowl Question: Steve’s Favorite Teacher
(28:39) How to Contact Liberty Center One
ROCC Pod Steve Searles
Speakers: Jon Gay & Steve Searles
Steve Searles (00:00):
Customer service is what matters. How does a small business, any business in Royal Oak, compete with a national chain? How do we compete with AWS or Azure? It's through customer service. All of our technology is pretty much the same.
If you have to buy tires from a national tire company or from the guy down the street, why the guy down the street? And sometimes, people even pay more for it because they want to be able to call somebody. They want to be able to pick up the phone.
[Intro Playing]
Jon Gay (00:32):
Welcome back to the ROCC Pod. I'm Jon Gay from Jag Podcast Productions, joined today by Steve Searles. He's the Chief Technology Officer of Liberty Center One, with facilities right here in Royal Oak and also in Cincinnati, Ohio. How you doing, Steve?
Steve Searles (00:43):
Hey, Jon, how you doing today?
Jon Gay (00:45):
I'm good. So, first things first, you're a Cincinnati guy helping run a Michigan company. Coincidentally, we're recording this on August 13th, the day the Lions are down in Cincinnati to play the Bengals in the preseason opener. I got to ask, any divided loyalties? How are you feeling about these two teams?
Steve Searles (01:01):
Oh, well, being from Cincinnati, I have to be a Cincinnati guy. Don't hold it against me, but I'm physically sitting in Detroit right now, so I'm going to get it as soon as we're done here.
Jon Gay (01:10):
Maybe you're in the same boat as me because I grew up in Boston, I came to Detroit 15 years ago. So, the way I look at it as the Patriots are my AFC team and the Lions are my NFC team. So, maybe we can get you on the Lions bandwagon as a second team?
Steve Searles (01:23):
Oh, maybe I have to masquerade it while I'm up here in Detroit. But yeah, I think we could probably work that.
Jon Gay (01:29):
So, I have to ask, Skyline Chili, explain this to me. And are you a fan?
Steve Searles (01:34):
Well, I'm not originally from Cincinnati, Jon, and everybody who's not from Cincinnati says the same thing. It's an acquired taste.
[Laughter]
It really is, it really was. I didn't like it at first, but after half a decade or so in city, you can't avoid it, so you better start to like it.
Jon Gay (01:50):
I feel like it's the equivalent of the Michigan coney dog. Have you had coney dogs up here?
Steve Searles (01:54):
Well, yeah, but I mean the coney dog spans the whole East Coast too. I mean, the Coney Islands go all the way out to New Jersey, so that's a little bit more socially accepted than putting chili on spaghetti.
Jon Gay (02:04):
(Laughs) Where are you from originally?
Steve Searles (02:06):
Chicago.
Jon Gay (02:07):
I want to talk all things, Liberty Center One, and IT with you, but I also have to ask you first, you were in aviation. Tell me about that, and then how you transitioned into the IT field.
Steve Searles (02:16):
You get in that situation where you're: what are you going to do with your life? And you have to pick a major, and rather than general studies, I said, "You know what, I like aviation. My dad was a pilot." I said, "We'll go into that field."
So, I went to the UC professional pilot program there in Cincinnati, flew for a little while, and I even got an extra commercial endorsement to fly lighter-than-air hot air balloons for RE/MAX.
Jon Gay (02:41):
Wow.
Steve Searles (02:42):
So, I flew for the RE/MAX Southern Ohio team for about 15 years. During that time, we were kind of transitioning, saying, you know what, there's not a whole lot of money in the aviation facility unless you're going to really go whole hog and go full airline. So, I said, "I guess I'll pursue this IT thing a little bit more." Started working down in Cincinnati, and then the rest is history.
Jon Gay (03:02):
How long have you been in the space?
Steve Searles (03:04):
Since I was about 19.
Jon Gay (03:06):
I won’t ask you how old you were, I learned a long time ago that's a rude thing to ask somebody, so I won't ask how long that is.
So, the data center here in Michigan in Royal Oak, explain how that came to be.
Steve Searles (03:16):
So, the data center in Royal Oak was founded by a group of gentlemen led by Rex Smith. They were in the advertising industry for the automotive industry here in Detroit, as you might imagine.
Jon Gay (03:27):
Shockingly.
Steve Searles (03:28):
Right, exactly. So, they were on a lot of different projects, and the commercial hosting space just started entering into the advertising and accounting fields. And there weren't a lot of providers at the time, and the ones that were there were not that great.
So, they said, "Hey, we're going to embark on this and we're going to do it ourselves. We can focus on customer service, we know what this industry needs, let's get started." So, they started looking around for different places to put this data center. There were about three or four different sites considered.
This one was chosen because of proximity to fiber. Kmart at the time was relatively close, paid for a lot of the fiber install in the area. So, a lot of that converged here at Delamere in Royal Oak, and this facility was chosen for that reason, and it was an old tool and die.
Tool and die shops of that era are built structurally sound. They're blocked buildings, a lot of concrete floors, exactly what you need when you're bringing in a lot of electrical equipment, HVAC equipment to handle a data center. So, it was about the ideal facility to do that with.
So, the machining rooms became the electric rooms, long, thick concrete floors to hold all the transformers and such, and battery equipment that we need to make a data center run.
Jon Gay (04:44):
The phrase data center seems to be kind of a charged word right around now. You go to any town meeting and we want to build the data center, and then the townspeople come out and say, "We don't want that in our backyard, but then we've got AI and all the need for data centers and the need to process all this high-end computing stuff."
Talk me through a little bit of where that balance is or if you can sort of assuage the fears of people who get their dander up when they hear the phrase "data center."
Steve Searles (05:11):
It's a charged term now, but we've been around since 2006, so it's taken on different new legs now, let's say. But you have a distinction between a commercial data center, which was typically used to — I'll give you an example. Here in Royal Oak, we host a lot of data for the tier one auto suppliers, for heavy manufacturing, for the things that make Detroit's heartbeat. Not necessarily AI.
While we do have AI in our data center, it's really custom or purpose-built AI for those businesses. The data centers that everybody's referring to in the news are hyperscale data centers. So, think Anthropic, OpenAI, Facebook, Google, those guys. And those are more consumer AI, and everybody has a phone in their pocket.
ChatGPT seems to be integrating with everything. And that drives up the need, as you very succinctly brought up, the ever-expanding need to have this compute, what we refer to as inference scalability in the industry. So, you start to see these million square foot data centers out there that are purpose-built just for that.
Our facility is a mere shadow of them. I was driving and I saw one in Wilmington, Ohio. It's a million 200 square feet. I think it's got its own substation. We're 20,000 square feet by comparison. So, those are really purpose-built facilities for that consumer AI or even those big three AI companies.
They're large, they're just the newest thing going right now. There's a lot of concerns, and I'm sure that those concerns will be addressed just like anything else. So, I think that the term data center is kind of a generic term. It's like saying car. Are you describing a Mustang or a Prius? They're two different cars, or an F-350.
I know it's a lot of concern that people are having. We are incredibly environmentally friendly around here. One of the tenants of our buildings, we use the best crack units that we can. And to expand on that, a crack unit is an air conditioning unit inside of a data center.
Jon Gay (07:11):
Wasn’t sure where you were going with that term for a second (chuckles).
Steve Searles (07:11):
Yeah, right. It's a chiller inside the data center, and we use the newest ones that we can that allow us to recycle ambient air during the wintertime so that we can save power consumption. Obviously, why are you paying to cool air that's already cool? You just need to condition it a little bit to put it in the data center because we're a small business.
As things go, the more efficient that we can be and the less power we can use, the more profit we can make. So, it doesn't behoove us to use copious amounts of electricity for no reason or any of those things. So, we've made the investments that are necessary into the equipment that we run here to make it not only quiet — nobody knows that we're here. I was talking to somebody like, “There's a data center on Delamere?”
Yeah, I mean you wouldn't really even know it. Our generators are quiet. When we do a generator test, nobody knows it because there's a lot of sound dampening technology in there. However, if you did have a million square foot data center here, I think people would notice.
Jon Gay (08:06):
(Laughs) I love the car analogy, one, because you really kind of elucidated it for me. If that's the right word. You clarified it for me.
Steve Searles (08:12):
A little bit.
Jon Gay (08:13):
And two, look at this, I think you're becoming a bit of an adopted Detroiter with that, making an automobile analogy. So, well done.
Steve Searles (08:19):
Well, most of us like cars. I mean, you can't fight that.
Jon Gay (08:23):
Again, recording this a couple days before the Dream Cruise, so there we go.
Steve Searles (08:26):
I was out there last night, Jon, and there was some pre-Dream Cruise activity going on at night. I saw some '30s Roadsters. I saw a couple 57 Chevys. I mean, they're out there, but it's really going to be hot this weekend.
Jon Gay (08:38):
Yeah. Well, just an amazing event. So, I'm glad you cleared that up about data centers. And I think that leads us to another point, which is everybody talks about: the cloud. It's all stored in the cloud, everything's in the cloud. Well, yes and no, from our conversation offline. Because yes, you say the cloud and that it's not on your physical computer in your home or your office, but that data has to live somewhere, right?
Steve Searles (09:00):
It does, it does. So, that's funny that you bring that up. I was actually talking to a woman who's a realtor, sells houses for a living, and this has come up. There's a lot of terms in IT that get reused over the years and just have meanings that are undefinable. And I said to her, "What is the cloud to you?"
And she said, "Oh, well, that's easy. It's a place where you can put your data and it can never be deleted." And I'm like, "Great." So, that couldn't be farther from the truth, but it is the perception that people have of what cloud is. And we use that information in our business to generate our products and services and make them reflect what people are actually expecting out of a cloud provider.
So, if you're expecting that your data is going to be protected, we do that automatically. So, we do that instead of a line item, an upcharge, that sort of thing. In the past, I mean, I can tell you how we got there, but it might bore your listeners to death.
I think that we've built our service offerings around what people expect that they're going to get as a cloud provider, and we haven't always been a cloud provider. We were an MSP or a services company prior to that. So, we built our offerings around what we would have consumed in that field, and now we support that industry.
Jon Gay (10:16):
To circle back, it doesn't exist in this cirrus, cumulonimbus entity. It may not be on your physical computer, but you upload stuff to iCloud on your phone, you upload stuff on an Android, you upload stuff at Microsoft, whatever it is, that data physically lives somewhere.
Steve Searles (10:35):
Absolutely. It lives in one of the many data centers across the country or multiple data centers across the country. Ours is in multiple, for instance. But yes, at some point, that data from your phone and everything else is going to wind up on some sort of medium, some sort of storage device somewhere.
And that's going to physically live either here in Detroit or in Virginia or Oregon or somewhere throughout the country. The cloud is just a culmination of other people's computers that you're using at that time.
Jon Gay (11:06):
That actually is really helpful to have it explained that way. You talked about having data in multiple locations. Why does the zip code of where your data is stored matter?
Steve Searles (11:16):
Well, it matters for a couple different reasons. Where your data is local to you, that matters for a business, especially a latency sensitive business like an automotive manufacturing facility, Q&A, production lines. Think about a production line here in Detroit where automotive parts are going through that production line and a picture is being taken for quality assurance.
That picture has to be analyzed and then returned to know if the production line needs to stop. As you increase distance between where the servers are that are storing and processing that data to where the action is actually happening, as that distance increases, latency increases, and that's a matter of physics.
Jon Gay (11:55):
Makes sense.
Steve Searles (11:56):
But right, but you have to wait for the response to come back. So, the further away that data is from where the action's taking place, the longer the action has to wait. So, it's a speed limit. It's essentially a governor of how fast that data can be processed and run.
So, if you have a manufacturing facility or you have a latency sensitive application, it's very important that that data is very close physically to where the action is happening. The counterbalance to that would be something like email. It doesn't matter if your email comes three seconds late or not.
Jon Gay (12:25):
Right. No, that makes sense. And with you having the two locations in Royal Oak and in Cincinnati, it leads me to my next question, which is why are people getting away from some of these big-name cloud providers and getting to more of a tailored, smaller solution?
Steve Searles (12:39):
We call that cloud repatriation. And quite frankly, it's support that comes around it. Cloud as it hit the scene in 2012 was pretty much deemed as the fit-all for everything. So, there was a big rush to the cloud early, but there weren't the appropriate guardrails put around it to say, are people going to support it?
Who's going to support this data that I've now put out there? Who's going to manage it? Is it going to go stale? Who's going to manage security? And in a lot of these offerings, infrastructure providers don't offer that services. So, somebody has to bring in a third party, and then that third party has to manage that data for them in somebody else's cloud. So, now, you're dealing with three vendors all at once.
The other reason is small business itself, I mean, everybody hears the story, my cloud bill goes up and up and up and up. Well, that's kind of a misnomer too, because in theory, your data usage is going to go up over time if your company is growing, so of course, your bill's going to go up.
If I consume more electricity, my electric bill goes up. That's not necessarily a problem. Really, a lot of the repatriation is around support and the flexibility that you have with a local provider for certain workloads.
Now, other workloads make sense, and what's really becoming the predominant deployment is a multi-cloud setup where you have some of the large, big three cloud providers to do your data that can be out somewhere else, and maybe it can be done cheaper, and a local presence for the more latency sensitive data, the ERP systems, the manufacturing systems and such.
Jon Gay (14:14):
When you say the big three, who are those big three that you mentioned?
Steve Searles (14:17):
That would be Google Cloud Compute (GCP), AWS, which is Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.
Jon Gay (14:23):
Got it, okay. So, as a small business owner, as many of our Royal Oak Chamber members are, what are some of the challenges you're seeing small business owners face in this new AI era where everything is AI, AI, AI?
Steve Searles (14:37):
Well, that's exactly it. It's how do I utilize AI? It's easy to sit around and say AI, AI, but how does it fit in my business? And if I give you a chatbot, how does that help you? How are you utilizing the AI? How is it going to benefit your business?
A small business owner is typically not going to go out and build their own inference servers. They're going to be using Anthropic or ChatGPT or OpenAI, that type of thing. The question is what is the use case?
So, there are a lot of application developers out there who have solved this problem. They'll say, okay, this system that you're using today, whatever it might be, it's your customer management system. We're going to add some AI features into there to produce a report for you of the customers that contacted you in the last three months or have answered a mailer.
A lot of it is around marketing, but a lot of it's around BI and just generation of business intelligence. So, that's generally handled inside of an application by an application developer. Image generation is another use case for AI. We're seeing that in publishing houses, are using a lot of AI-generated images that you're seeing out on the internet.
There's a lot of grey area there around intellectual property rights for creators and things. So, that's become a big issue. One of the best use cases I saw for AI is the translation of manuals.
Jon Gay (15:57):
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Steve Searles (15:58):
AI is excellent at translation. And we have a customer that is a large automotive, as you might imagine, and their services department are all over the world, so they're global. You have some in the Philippines, you have some in Mexico. Most of their manuals and technical manuals are written in English.
So, they have an AI system which translates those on the fly as they come in for their service departments and other regions that they control. So, that takes a lot of overhead. It takes about two seconds for AI to translate a 500-page manual from one language to another. So, that allows them to be more accurate as well. So, you're not paying a translator to sit there and recopy the entire thing. So, that's one good use of it that I've seen.
Bad uses of AI that I've seen. Recently, I called a roofer the other day and I had a nice chat with an AI assistant. It was frustrating. I called another roofer; they answered their phone. They're the ones that get the business.
There's an overuse of AI in some places, but AI is a great tool to optimize your business, get some great ideas, and move projects forward that tend to be stuck in the mud. So, it does have its uses. It's a great tool, but it's not the answer to everything. So, I look at it as a force multiplier, Jon.
Jon Gay (17:18):
I think that's a great way to look at it. And just as a case in point, my business as a podcast producer, AI claims it can edit podcasts on its own. I'm going to edit this podcast by hand, but then once I get the transcript back, and I actually have a service I use to get the transcript, I'm going to upload the transcript into ChatGPT and it's going to write the show notes for the podcast, it's going to give me the keywords. It's going to give me probably the title of the podcast and suggestions for clips for me to post on social media.
So, it's a matter of figuring out where the AI can help you without relying on it where it's going to not do well. And then my other rule I always have is anything done by AI, I have to check with human eyes. It's not something that's set and forget it.
Steve Searles (17:59):
Absolutely, I agree with that too. And what it's done is it's created three Jons. Jon and an assistant, a producer, to sit there and go through all of that information and create that for then you to do the final edits. So, now, it's increased your capacity of what you can do on your own, giving you more of your free time back.
Jon Gay (18:17):
Exactly. I want to talk about ransomware. And funny, we're having this conversation today because I give my mom a lot of credit. She is 72 years old, and she called me in a panic yesterday (true story). This was wild.
She had got a new modem from the cable company because her modem was old. She lives out of state. And she got a call claiming to be the cable company saying they've been running tests on the modem and if something doesn't add up, can she log in and provide some information.
Which to me, sounds like kind of a brilliant move on the hacker's part. I don't know how they figured out that she just got a modem from the cable company. And next thing you know, he's trying to demand 600 bucks from her or he is going to empty her bank account. And fortunately, she hung up.
She called her bank and everything was still in her account. And luckily, she was not out any money. But I'm like, "Now, Mom, you're 72, you're pretty with it. You figured it out and stopped it. But imagine if you were a 95-year-old widow and you had this person screaming at you on the other end of the phone and putting all this high pressure on you, maybe the result would've been different."
So, talk to me about ransomware and what kind of happens in a ransomware attack. I know this wasn't specifically ransomware, but it got me thinking along those lines.
Steve Searles (19:28):
Yeah, no worries. I mean, the attack that you described is a typical cold call attack, and there might've been some intelligence along with it, like maybe a compromised email account or even the provider's email account being compromised, you never know.
But an email that a modem went out or a shipping notification could have been intercepted and said, okay, we're going to call and we're going to work this lead. It could have also just been a cold call one, and said, "Hey, did you get a new modem from your cable company?" If you call 100 people, you might get 10 that say yeah, or one that says yes and move on from there. So, that's a traditional telemarketing scam that she was dealing with.
Ransomware is kind of a bit of a different issue, but they can dovetail together. So, if that person was able to gain access to your mom's computer, probably would've installed a piece of software that may or may not have contained ransomware and encrypted her data.
So, a ransomware attack starts, typically they target small businesses. It's not often targeted to individuals, but it doesn't really discriminate that much. But the best ransomware attacks target small businesses, and it kind of manifests itself like this.
They come into the office in the morning. Nothing's specifically down, but things don't work properly. Files don't open; you get weird error messages you've never seen before. That generally generates a call to IT. IT starts looking into it, and then panic ensues because now, you're going to find out if the backup data that you have is any good. That's usually where this culminates from.
So, the moment the ransomware hits your machines, a timer starts, that timer dictates how much money it will take to decrypt the files. So, to go backwards a little bit, what ransomware is, is it is a payload that is delivered typically via email or some other medium, USB drives, those types of things.
I've even seen attacks where people will just leave random USB drives in a parking lot hoping the sales guy or an executive will pick it up, walk it into the building and plug it into a computer to see what's on it, that kind of thing.
Jon Gay (21:30):
Brilliant. Horrible, but brilliant.
Steve Searles (21:33):
However you can get it in the system. Email's probably by far the most common vector of attacks. So, somebody opens an infected email, it hits a file server, and what it does is it encrypts or encodes the files from their native format. So, now they're no longer readable. And that spreads through the system and throughout the computers that are on that network in that organization.
Now, usually, what'll happen is there'll be a message that goes along with it that says, "Hey, your files have been encrypted. Pay me X dollars in Bitcoin and we'll give you the key to decrypt all of your files." And that when the timer starts, that number keeps increasing.
So, if the attack is detected early, that number might be a few thousand dollars. It also scales by the quantity of data that's being encrypted. So, if it's a larger organization, that number becomes larger and you start to see it out into the millions.
Jon Gay (22:27):
That also makes sense on the timing too, because I'm thinking that you're going to have your IT company work on it, try to fix it, try to get around it, and the longer you try to fix it that you're unsuccessful, that ransom goes up. That actually makes a lot of sense.
Steve Searles (22:39):
And the only way to be a hundred percent successful in defense against ransomware is to have a good backup, a copy of the unmolested files somewhere. In the industry, we call that out of band or cold or anything like that, which means that it's not tied to the system that has currently been infected.
So, think cold backups from 2005. They're called out of band or air gapped is another word that they like to use now. But it just means a backup that is not tied to the production system. That is really the only 100% protection to deal with ransomware.
And the way we do that in our cloud environment is that we provide 30 days of backup and replication to our secondary data center out of band. So, it is not tied. It cannot be encrypted in that manner. So, that's really the only method of protection.
Jon Gay (23:29):
So, in an ideal world, you have the backup that's out of band. The ransomware says, "We have your files, pay us." And you say, "Go pound sand. I'm going to delete all this and go get everything I need from my backup."
Steve Searles (23:38):
Pretty much. Exactly. So, while you can't protect against all ransomware attacks, what we can do as a provider is we can give a customer options that says, okay, we can stop now and quit trying to fix this, and we can roll it back to a known good state, figure out the vector of entry, preserve the infected machines.
You preserve them because you have to determine the vector of entry and close that hole or else it's just going to happen again. So, you work through that, but having unmolested copies of your data is the only way to protect against it.
Jon Gay (24:09):
It’s almost like healthcare; the best care is proactive and not reactive. But what happens if you do get attacked and you don't have the backup? I have heard conflicting reports as to whether you should or shouldn't pay the ransomware, or is that dependent on the case?
Steve Searles (24:24):
I would never pay the ransomware, but that's really easy to say because we always have backups. So, if your business is at a standstill, if you're stuck and you have to do something, the FBI will advise against paying ransomware, because ransomware is typically paid in Bitcoin. Those funds are typically used for all kinds of nefarious activity, and they're not recommending, obviously, funding that sort of thing.
But here you are as a business owner sitting going, "My files are encrypted, my business is at a standstill. What do I do?" And what you find is a lot of these ransoms are actually paid and never broadcast. They don't talk about it.
Because I've heard a lot of X, Y, Z company got ransomware, they paid the ransom, and sometimes upwards of several million dollars, but it's just not publicized. I mean, you're not going to put that on the front cover of your blog saying, "Hey, guess what? We got ransomed and we paid $5 million to get our data back."
Jon Gay (25:20):
You may as well paint a bullseye on your face.
Steve Searles (25:21):
Exactly, because now you're a known payer. And that's another thing that we gained out of the FBI training course for this stuff. Once you've paid once, you become on the list of targets a little bit higher.
The next piece of that is can you really trust the data once it's unencrypted? Is it 100% fully unencrypted? So, once that data has been played with or somebody has been in a system or a system has been infiltrated, could you ever trust that system again?
A lot of the old school guys in our world, Root is a super user account. And the saying goes once Root, always Root. Means once somebody's gotten to your system, you should probably build a new system because you can never ensure that that has been completely exfiltrated out of that box.
Jon Gay (26:03):
That makes a lot of sense. I'd be remiss, Steve, if I didn't mention that your CEO and his wife are pretty active here in the Royal Oak community.
Steve Searles (26:11):
He and his wife, Sue, founded a charity called the Hand In Hand Foundation.
Jon Gay (26:15):
Tell me about that.
Steve Searles (26:16):
So, the Hand in Hand Foundation distributes winter coats and works with local churches and other organizations around Royal Oak during the wintertime. They'll go out and they'll purchase these coats and they'll set up drives to give away the coats at local churches and charities.
They've been doing that for many, many years now. Rex and Sue are fairly private people, so they're not really broadcasting this sort of thing, but they're involved in the Royal Oak community pretty extensively.
Jon Gay (26:46):
Steve, before I ask for your contact info and let you go, we have a tradition here, we call it our Fishbowl Question of the Day where we ask you a totally random question. And today's random question is: who was your favorite teacher and why?
Steve Searles (27:02):
I will say that I had a science teacher probably somewhere around the seventh or eighth grade, I can't quite recall. It's been such a long time, Jon. But I remember going into his class on the first day, and we've all done this. This happened in elementary school or junior high school, but you've had it in college.
You go into that class, and you sit down for the first moment and you say, "What am I doing here?" This guy, his name was Rash Trakutas. And he's even got a mean sounding name, doesn't he? So, you sit down in his class and this guy sat down and he pretty much berated the entire classroom into saying, "This is what you're going to do, this is how you're going to do it. You're going to do it my way." And I'm like, "You know what, I got to figure a way to get out of this class."
Turns out he was using some of the oldest psychological tricks in the book, and everybody in the school loved this teacher, but not on the first day. I learned more about science and physics from this guy than many of the 200-300 level classes I've had in school. So, it was just really interesting. It's like going into a full metal jacket on the first day as an eighth grader. I mean, you get blasted with this.
Up to that point in your schooling, you have teachers that are nice and they're saying, "This is where this is, this is where that is." And then you've got R. Lee Ermey in there. So, that's one that hit me. And many years later, here we are, 20-some-odd years later, and I still think about this guy and how much I learned from him, but how awful it was on the first day and how I would've traded my soul to get out of his class.
Jon Gay (28:34):
Glad you stuck with it, and I'm sure he'd be thrilled to see where you are now, Steve.
Steve Searles (28:38):
Yes.
Jon Gay (28:39):
So, if someone is interested in talking to you and your team at Liberty Center One about the services you provide, which obviously we've talked about how important they are today in 2026, what are the best ways to reach the company?
Steve Searles (28:50):
The best way to reach a company is through our website at libertycenterone.com or via sales@libertycenterone.com, goes to a list and somebody will reach out to you.
Jon Gay (29:00):
We’ll put that email and your website in the show notes. I want to thank you for joining us today, Steve. My name is Jon Gay. I am the CEO and founder of Jag Podcast Productions. If you like the way this show sounds and need help starting or improving your existing podcast, you can find me online at jagpodcastproductions.com.
[Outro Playing]
And thank you for listening to this episode of the ROCC Pod, it is produced for the Royal Oak Michigan Chamber of Commerce. For more information about the chamber or chamber events, you can visit royaloakchamber.com. Thanks, everyone.
Steve Searles (29:27):
Thank you, Jon.