IAM1131- Co-founder Offers Content Writing Services

Jack Pittas is the president & co-founder of PK Cyber Solutions Inc. He and his business partner initially founded the company to provide cybersecurity and other technology consulting services to small businesses. Later on, they began offering content writing services, specifically on more complex, technical topics, which is now their exclusive service offering. Before starting his business, Jack had worked as a commercial lines insurance producer at a locally owned insurance agency, where he developed many small business management skills that he utilizes today.

• CEO Hack: My support network
• CEO Nugget: (i) Have long-term revenue-generating contracts (ii) Work in commercial line insurance for exposure
• CEO Defined: Leader of an initiative

Website: https://www.pkcybersolutions.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pk-cyber-solutions-inc/

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00:28 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, You've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:56 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jack Pittas of PK Cyber Solutions, Inc. Jack, it's great to have you on the show.

01:06 – Jack Pittas

Thank you for having me, Gresham.

01:08 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Jack so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jack is the president and co-founder of PK Cyber Solutions, Inc. He and his business partner initially founded the company to provide cybersecurity and other technology consulting services to small businesses. Later on, they began offering content writing services specifically on more complex technical topics, which is now their exclusive service offering. Before starting his business, Jack had worked as a commercial line, insurance producer at a locally owned insurance agency, where he developed many small business management skills that he utilizes today. Jack, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:49 – Jack Pittas

Oh, I'm ready to speak.

01:51 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, well, let's do it then. So I love everything that you do especially to be able to take the complex that I imagine a lot of people don't understand from the technology standpoint and be able to translate that. But I guess before we get into that, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I like to call your CEO story.

02:07 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, so as you had said, I'd worked in insurance before this, doing commercial lines. It's a commercialized producer was the title. And a lot of what I sold was cyber insurance, cyber and data breach insurance. So what I was finding was there were a lot of small businesses and smaller nonprofits that were struggling to procure cyber insurance because of just the lack of basic controls. So I talked to a friend of mine who had been working for 1 of the big 4 doing a lot of systems architecture, software development, and information security solutions.

And we decided to just start this business and see where we can fill in the security gaps for these small businesses. We then ended up pivoting, adding on other services, other tech consulting services like cloud implementation, and then software development. You and I have had this conversation privately before, but I mentioned that it's very difficult to sell risk management to the risk-tolerant. What I had meant by that was, since we're targeting all these small business owners, by nature, they're risk-tolerant and probably aren't going to be as enthusiastic about their cybersecurity, especially if they think that their IT management company was handling it. So that's where we made the pivot into offering other technology services as well.

And then just, I guess it would have been probably March, when we saw all these opportunities come up with content writing for cybersecurity and tech topics. And these contracts were popping up. We were like, we should go for these. We already know the stuff very well. We enjoy writing content writing. It's a passion of mine. I love doing it. So we extended into that and then recently made it the exclusive service offering.

03:52 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate that. And I always say like a true sign of excellence and a true sign of maybe, you know, being excellent at what it is that you do is to be able to communicate that. And I think so many times, I think, and I don't know if you would find this, like especially a lot of the tech companies and the people that are doing the work, sometimes they can't communicate that to the end users, potentially to the risk-tolerant as well too. So to be able to bridge that gap through your services, I imagine is huge.

04:20 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, I always like to say that the difference between a consultant and an engineer is the consultant can communicate it. That's the difference. That's how I always like to look at it. So Yeah, for sure. Another thing too is that a lot of our clients are IT management companies that might have a blog on their website or whatnot, and just all the ones I've talked to or currently assigned to work with. 1 of the biggest issues was finding freelance writers who could do this topic intelligently, right, and who had a baseline knowledge to be able to write about it. It's a recurring issue and there seems to be a shortage right now of content writers in this space, even though it's, super needed for people to be able to broadcast these complex topics to non-technical audiences. That's the big thing.

05:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And it's necessary, as you mentioned when you were talking when you were looking from an insurance standpoint, just the number of like, I imagine cyber breaches and cybersecurity issues are probably on the increase. And so being able to get that information out there for these companies is so huge. So I love that you're able to kind of do that.

05:26 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, definitely. And even in insurance, Insurance isn't the most intuitive topic to understand either. And I was doing a lot of content writing on the side for insurance topics back when I was working as a producer. So I've just kind of extended that into the new business. And we also actually will write on other business and finance topics. I have a couple of contracts, so I'm writing about commercial insurance, small business management, and B2B marketing. So we've expanded our writing capabilities outside the tech realm, but we're mostly the tech realm where we see the biggest need right now.

06:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you for sharing that. And I know you touched on a little bit on how you work with your clients to serve. Is there anything additional on how that process goes, what that looks like for clients that you work with?

06:11 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, so in terms of how we work with them, It just depends on their needs. So I'll have clients that will just send me topics that they want to be completed with keywords because a lot of it's done for SEO, right? So they have these keywords that they want in there and I'll draft it up for them, send it to them, and let them look through it. If they want to make any kind of revisions, they can make the comments there and I'll revise it. I've had some clients, well they'll write something themselves and they want me to edit it or finish it. That's fine too.

And then we have some clients that don't even know what topic they want to talk about. So we'll send them the topic idea and we'll start from square 1. So all of it is fine no matter how they want to go. But yeah, I see us as almost industry advisors who just happen to communicate it through content writing. That's how I see us.

07:00 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Love that. And I love especially how it sounds like meeting people where they are. As you mentioned, maybe they have something written, that needs editing. Maybe they have no idea where to get started or they're somewhere in between and all around and looking for that, that helping hand, and that advice.

07:14 – Jack Pittas

Yeah.  You have to just adapt to what they want, right? You got to you're trying to help them solve problems. So yeah, help them to help others.

07:20 – Gresham Harkless

So that's awesome that you were able to do that. So would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? And I like to call this the thing that you feel sets you individually apart or the business or a combination of both, but is it that ability to bridge that gap and also have that technical knowledge as well as the ability to communicate that?

07:41 –  Jack Pittas

I would, I would say that our big differentiating factor is that we have the industry experience, which allows us to produce better content. But another thing too is our ability to communicate these technical topics to non-technical audiences is another thing I say, more specifically to the writing, not necessarily the business. But Yeah, I definitely would, that helps us. And also just the service itself, there's not too many of them out there. You have a lot of marketing consultants and SEO consultants, but then actually trying to find someone to do the content writing part, I'm finding that it's not a very saturated space, which makes it a lot easier to sell.

08:19 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Because I don't have the statistics or everything in front of me, but I imagine more people are starting those cybersecurity spaces, like you mentioned the SEO, the people that want to market, but again, you don't have people that are doing and have that knowledge in addition to doing it to be able to help those organizations be able to connect with their potential clients.

08:39 – Jack Pittas

Exactly. I mean, aside from the knowledge part, it's just the content writing can take a while, and a lot of companies, don't want to sit down and have someone internally doing it because it's just so time-consuming, it's better just to contract it out. So that's why it's much easier to sell than cybersecurity, for example, right?

08:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah because you have to teach people about all those different things. So I love that you've been able to kind of bridge into that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:12 – Jack Pittas

I would say it's nothing tangible. I would say it's my support network. It's the people kind of around me. I've only worked for small businesses even before working at the insurance agency. I had worked at, or I interned, I guess you say, at a local financial advisory firm. And then 1 summer I worked at a small construction company. I've only been in the small business space. So I'm used to that environment. We have to wear a lot of hats all the time. And that's probably my favorite part about being an entrepreneur you get to wear all the hats.

You're not stuck to 1 task all day. So definitely the support network. I mean, my parents are emotionally supportive. I think especially when you're starting, your weeks, it's a roller coaster of emotion, right? You have crazy highs and you might have some pretty low lows. So it's always good to have your parents supporting you. My brother brings out a competitive drive in me. So I think that helps with just being motivated every day to wake up and just try to make you and your business better. So yeah, I think it's just the supportive network is the hack, I would say that I have.

10:19 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And so you might have already touched on this, but I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be around content writing, or it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

10:34 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, so actually the first thing that comes to my mind, and that I wish I had known early on, is that this is only applicable to consulting-type businesses. So any type of function of a business that someone's trying to contract out will all that consulting, right? Web developers, cybersecurity consultants, IT management companies, and anything like that. And 1 thing I wish we had known earlier was, that a lot of these contract jobs that you can apply for that are long-term and good paying and stuff and consistent, you can apply for just job sites as if you're applying for a regular job. So you just go there, you filter out to the contract jobs only, and then a lot of them will allow you to do it through your business as an independent contractor.

And that's something I wish we, you know, we had known early on because a good chunk of our revenue is from contract jobs, these longer term commitments. And I think it's good both for financial reasons, but also moral reasons, or what's the morale reasons early on to have those long term revenue generating contracts. So that's 1. Another thing too, I had known I wanted to start a business but wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, especially when I was in college. I had known I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And what I would tell young people who know they want to start a business but don't quite know what works in commercial lines insurance.

And the reason I say that is because you're exposed to all these different businesses, you get to see all the risk exposures, how their operation is run, price points, you see what common revenue estimates might look like from especially startup businesses. And then you can figure out where's the best fit for you. That's exactly what I did because we had worked with a lot of tech companies when I was there in cybersecurity companies and I realized like, Okay, so this is how they do it. This is how they get clients. This is how they do quality control with their services, all that stuff. And I think it's just interesting when I was working, I was like, yeah I would encourage anyone who wants to start a business and they're young, but they don't know what they want to start, start in insurance first. I think it's a great environment to be in to learn what type of business you might want to start.

12:37 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that. And now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Jack, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:48 – Jack Pittas

Being a CEO? I guess it would be. It's interesting, because like, I consider I guess I'm kind of putting them together with business owners or entrepreneurs. And I think that the CEO is just the leader who does the problem-solving, right? So an entrepreneur is a problem solver who monetizes it, right, who knows how to make money off of it. The CEO doesn't necessarily have to be the entrepreneur, but it's no matter what is the leader of that initiative, regardless of whether they were the founder of the company or if they did come on later, later down the road. So I would say it's the face and leader of the problem-solving initiative.

13:28 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I love that definition. I love how you distinguish both of those as well too, being able to see the problem and whether it's leadership creating the solution for the problem or a combination of both, it might be. But I love that holistic definition because I think so many times we get caught in the title, but I think it's probably even more important to know what we're doing in the business and what the business needs and be able to fulfill that.

13:49 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, exactly. I mean, some companies start where the actual people starting the company aren't the ones who end up managing it, right? They end up hiring someone from the outside with more experience to manage the company. So that's why you do kind of have to make that distinction. But ultimately, yeah, it's going to be the face of the problem initiative, problem-solving initiative.

14:07 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Well, Jack, truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

14:22 – Jack Pittas

Yeah, so I guess the way to get a hold of you is to email us at info at pksybersolutions.com or you can call us at 571-295-7738. Our website is www.pksybersolutions.com and I guess the 1 thing I would add I do want to emphasize especially for the people, the younger people who wanna start a business, is a business can come out of everything.

If you look at where this gig economy and this freelance economy are going, we're at the point now where I know people who start a business doing administrative work only. They are their own business at their administrative assistance as a business. So I think we're moving in a direction where pretty much anything can be contracted out, anything can be a company. And anyone can start a business if they have that skill set. So that's kind of the last little nugget I would throw in there.

15:12 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate that, Jack. We will have the links and information in the show notes. I love that last piece because I think that's, I loved how you talked about entrepreneurship and being problem-solving because I think, especially during a disruptive time like now, things are completely different, and seeing that there is a problem, seeing how you can solve your problem and that's how you can build a business from there. So as you said so well, anything can be a business if you can find that problem and be the solution for that problem or at least create it. So truly appreciate you for doing that. And of course, reminding us of that. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:44 – Outro