Dashboard: What We Can Learn from CrowdStrike

[Music] welcome to another 21 hats dashboard brought to you by our sponsor the great game of business I'm Lauren Feldman and I'm here with Jean Marks welcome back Jean hey Lauren great to be back great to have you here we missed you I missed you I missed you Lauren just want you I talked about you a few times while I probably while you were in France and London you were thinking about me weren't you yeah you know just kind of gazing out at the mountains think I wonder what LA's doing right now I don't know I was I appreciate that I really do sure so what's going on Jade it's Monday morning you're back from traveling for a couple of weeks yes and I you know maybe I don't know if you heard about this while you were gone but while you were away a a company called crowd strike a cyber security company updated its software and caused a Global Tech outage did you hear about that yes I did it was huge news even in Fr I I just I just checked my notes France does have the internet Lauren so yeah I was pretty much glar yeah I was up to date with the news and what's going on luckily uh when I flew home uh which was a week ago Saturday right when the it was when the crowd strike thing was going on um I I was was unaffected by it I mean I flew America and it was fine but the Delta passengers got crushed and uh everybody seems to have stories or stories of friends that uh were delayed 19 hours in one airport and 14 hours somewhere else it was it really had um a far-reaching effects my my daughter who's a vet her whole vetenary practice was shut down uh they got blue screens of death everywhere I haven't said that phrase in like 10 years but they were getting them you know and then other people were it it was a uh it was really a serious outage it really was it tells you how vulnerable we are I don't know anybody but uh I saw plenty of stories about businesses that were shut down uh because of it what what happened with your daughter how did how long did that last it's interesting so um and and I'll get to her in just a second because just to build up to that I mean the crowd strike just for those of you guys that don't you know know it's it's a cyber security application okay you know when you like when you run a Microsoft Windows machine um there's all these services that are running in the background that you don't even know until something bad happens you know what I mean and a lot of these services are are are licensed by Microsoft they don't do it all the crowd strike was one of this this is like a like a service an application that runs on a lot of Windows and other devices uh interacts with Office 365 and it provides some type of you know security protection you know in the back end that we don't even you know know about you know like it helps to detect threats and whatever but it's an integral part and it's constantly being updated because these security issues are important so what crowd strike did is you know again it's a separate firm but it's crowd strike uh uh they they updated their application the application then gets automatically rolled out through the cloud to all of these applications and devices and cloud-based you know services and um the the update was screwed up and it just brought everything down um and then it just took you know days and days to recover from this so you know businesses that were using like Office 365 and um or cloud-based applications that were on Microsoft Azure like like Delta's trans you know ticketing system and and flight management system they they were just brought to a standstill because it was like this like core component of the software that just wasn't working and therefore all of the software just wasn't working and that was what the problem was and it was really yeah let me ask you why was this one so much worse I mean this is hardly the first time a faulty update has gone out why did this one cause such chaos it was the nature of what the application does I mean you know there there's faulty updates that have like a bug in it or or something that just just doesn't work uh the way it should but you know because security is so important Microsoft's operating system it's Windows systems really relied on it for its core operating capability you know it was literally like it's one thing if the air conditioner and your car goes down you can still operate the car you'll just be hot um but if like the alternator goes down you know that's like a core component of the engine um the engine doesn't run and your car just breaks down and that's that's the analogy got it so because of that that's why so many businesses were just you know they were stuck um you asked about my daughter's Veterinary practice I mean they went to paper you know and uh this auto dealership uh that's in Upstate New York that I just wrote about uh you know that you and I are going to talk about next week because it was an awesome story uh but anyway went you know to paper as well and and other um that's what business had to do now you know you you saw pictures on online of you know Airlines writing out paper you know tickets and you know and boarding passes uh for people but obviously when things are so automated and you're dealing with so many people um passengers or whatever they just the airlines themselves just couldn't you know even keep up and that's why everything just sort of broke down it is um so couple things just so we know and I hate to sound like um you know like I hate to sound like I don't know if you've ever been to that there's a group on Reddit called LinkedIn lunatics where you know they make they get made fun of for posting stuff on LinkedIn you know you know things and like I had not heard of it until you wrote about it recently and I was gonna we're gonna get to that on another story we're going to talk about yeah we should talk about it but I I only discovered that story and the only reason why I bring it up is because um uh they they always like call out people that like write like you know um oh uh you know a presidential candidate was assassinated here are three things you can learn about your business based on this like you take like these ridiculous unconnected things and try to like make a business lesson out of it this there is a business lesson I mean think about how many things we all as business owners um rely on outsourced people and independent contractors and things to get our work done and then when something breaks down or they don't show up um not only does that disrupt your work but you're responsible and even though people got to know the name crowd strike nobody has ever heard of that firm before most people were pointing their fingers at Microsoft they were furious with Microsoft it was all Microsoft it was their fault and Microsoft stock dropped I mean they lost God knows how much in in Market valuation um and it really wasn't their fault it was just a component and a company that had been reliable in the past that just did a routine update except it broke and then Microsoft was the target so we all need to remember that I mean people in the construction business know this stuff all the time you know they they build something and they're relying on subcontractors but in the end if the goes down man it's they're they're the face of it and they're going to they're they're going to Bear the brunt of the liability you know how did your daughter's uh Veterinary uh practice recover did they just have to wait until uh things cleared up or was there something they could do I can confirm that all dogs and cats are completely fine and safe Lauren puppies lived it's complet all of them yeah that well you know what I don't want to say oh my my my daughter like euthanizes a 12 to 15 dogs and cats a week so they don't all live uh but but the ones that should they don't all get sent to the farm upstate yeah no they all they all go to Rainbow Bridge actually at least the ones that she euthanizes you know uh but the ones that didn't go and survived they survived just fine and they just did everything by paper and the employees themselves had to play she had to play catchup work uh for a few days afterwards just getting you know dat you know you know notes and stuff back into the computer people you know they they survived it you know and even though I wasn't affected by this um outage um so I I shouldn't say but you know there were people that were severely you know uh you know uh disrupted because of this but you know what they're fine they're home now it's in the end they they moved on so it was a giant giant inconvenience and it just certainly shows that we all as businesses need to have backup plans and disaster plans um for if something goes down because can go down you know well tell me about that what what is the lesson to be learned in terms of uh a backup plan what lunatics is that what you're saying so I should say this we'll post it to redit no I mean I'm afraid I'm already there I'm gonna have to go check and sear you could be you should go and search for yourself it be kind of funny um you're I'm sure you're not but let me tell you there a few people like that are definitely LinkedIn lunatics that are probably on there um what what do we learn as far as breaking away with this I mean you you have to trust and verify you have to know that ultimately you are uh you are ultimate responsible for stuff you you have to make sure that you've got good insurance to cover any business interruptions or potential liabilities that could come from stuff like this that's out of your control um and then you do have to think to yourself like what kind of backup systems you know you do have um to move things around and to get things done internets go down man you know and viruses happen and malware happens and their hurricanes strike and uh you know you there there are a lot of things that disrupt a business this is one of them and whenever you hear these business experts say you need to have a disaster recovery plan or whatever they're right you really do need to have one and think it through uh because these are the kinds of things that really uh can really screw things up if you don't have a plan where do you turn Chat GPT really yeah I you know I mean honestly if you're looking for a disaster recovery plan and you don't have one or even if you have one and you want some comments on it go to chat GPT and ask it to write you one um and you could tell it that please include uh you know please include things like hurricanes because I'm in a hurricane zone or Internet outages or you know you know ransomware attacks and it will include Clauses for it it will write it it will do a damn good job to about 80 to 90% And then take it to uh you know uh you you a business advisor an attorney a IT specialist if that's the case and ask them to review it and make comments on it but first place you should start as chat GPT or Google gemni or Claude uh you know one of those uh executive assistant AI tools are actually pretty good at writing disaster plans wow that's really interesting that's great advice all right next topic you wrote recently uh about the or upheaval in the real estate industry uh let me see if I can get this right uh there's big litigation that was settled um there were a bunch of cases the plaintiff accused Buyer Agents and seller agents essentially of colluding to raise their fees the upshot is that going forward and I I think starting in August y um it will be easier for people who buy homes to negotiate agent fees uh because the the Buyer Agents fee won't be automatically included is that basically right yeah so it's kind of I don't know well you've been living in your house for ages I guess right so I haven't bought a house 15 years 15 years okay so you know listen when you when you move into your nursing home maybe you'll you know you'll you'll worry about it then but uh when you buy a house you know we all know this this is it's an American thing you buy your house there's like the 6% realtor fee right it's like the standard 6% 6% 6% and oh you know if if your realtor is if it's a different person on the listing you have to share the realtor's Fe you know so you've got your realtor and then the sellers realtor or vice versa and they split the 6% fee and that's the way it's like just always been out the window this is right I mean now uh it was considered to be uh you know price fixing and monopolistic and whatever there's the big lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors the the N AR settled and in August it all gets thrown out the window which basically means you don't have to pay a 6% fee anymore um you can you know you can and you will negotiate it and not only that there is no splitting of fees this is not between the buyer realtor and the Sellers realtor you know now um you know if you look to buy a house and uh you're going to you know involve a realtor to do that they're not going to come to you and make you sign an agreement to agree on a fee upfront and um it's going to be the wild west uh some people are going to you know you you work out their own kind of fee arrangements with their Realtors some may offer special deals well if you sell this property within this period of time I'll give you even more than what the stated fee is um it's just going to make it a lot more complicated to buy a house because there will be more agreements involved and more negotiations but for the Savvy buyer and the Savvy seller I mean they they can negotiate um less of a commission now much easier and you might want to say like you know oh wasn't this always the case you know couldn't you have negotiated a lower commission and you know I think technically it it was always the case but God forbid if you would bring up a lower commission to your realtor right they'd be like no it's 6% everybody knows that you know like it was like you could even bring it up so you either paid a realtor or you just sold your house on your own you know I mean for sale by owner anyway all that's going to be throwing it out so disruption I think disruption is good for business I think it creates opportunities I think there will be a lot of shitty realtors that will complain about this and fall off the game but some of the ones that I interviewed for this Philly inquire piece I did last week I mean they're embracing it they're going to be educating their their buyers a lot more they're going to be you know working to prove value over the other guy uh they'll be flexible with their commissions to get the deal you know what I mean it gives them some some way to get a new customer because they they'll be like hey I'll give you a 5% commission instead of that character giving you demanding six you know what I mean so I think for the smart Realtors if you're in that industry and in that business um I think that that disruption will bring some opportunities for you and if you're a smart buyer or seller um I think this change in fees will give you the opportunity potentially you know reduce your costs we'll see it'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out over the next couple years I think your piece also suggested that it could flush out a lot of Realtors as well that many will leave the industry didn't you hear me I said the shitty ones you know they're the ones right shitty they're going to drop out I mean they're you know it always used to be like you could selling real estate um it is such an easy industry to get into it's a very low bar I mean I think to get your realtor's license you basically have to have a pulse so you know it's it's not that tough and then you get this automatic 6% commission and sometimes you just stumble onto deals and you get your commission obviously like any industry there there are people that are really good at what they do and crush it but you know I I think it is going to it's going to cause some of the lousier Realtors to just drop out because the ones that are smarter and negotiate fees better and you know are providing more value I think they're going to they're the ones that are really going to capitalize all right next topic this going to get back to to LinkedIn lunatics here you wrote another piece um in which you wrote about the CEO of a company uh called ltis that has an HR platform and you wrote about how the CEO learned the hard way that the world is not quite ready for digital workers uh you seem pretty sympathetic to her but explain what happened yeah well first of all I think you you and I had this argument well we don't argue we we debate right we you know you and I professionally Converse about different things but you had this like ridiculous premise that you thought that like companies are going to be run by AI CEOs remember how stupid you sounded when you said that you know and I was like there's no way like companies are going to be run by digital CEOs or whatever and uh uh you know as it turns out uh I think this kind of proves my point and so let me get to this so This Lattis is a very it's a very good HR platform I've heard you know I've worked with them before uh it's an HR platform you know so it helps with onboarding and offboarding and performance reviews and compensation strategies and all that so the CEO of Lis is like she's got her competition her name is Sarah Franklin by the way and she's like all right I'm gonna take advantage of this stuff this AI stuff and you know what we're going to do we're going to introduce a new feature so we're gonna we're going to teach digital employees we're going to treat them the same as real employes now you might say what is a digital employee and she's respond to the fact that some companies like Salesforce and companies like cognition and qualified and there are others out there you that are introducing these digital sales assistants and digital developers and digital service people you know like these AI you know you know Bots that sort of perform this work you can literally sign up with these companies and they do this work on behalf of you as a as a digital employee and she's like this is cool we're going to we're going to treat them as a real employee going to you can put your digital employee in as an employee and uh uh you know treat them the same way onboard them and offboard them whatever that means uh for a digital employee like you know you're treating them like a human employee and it just blew up yeah Jean yeah what what does that mean h how do you treat a a digital assistant as a a real employee I mean are are we talking about PTO and 401ks and Casual Friday what how does an HR plat platform treat one of these things as a real employee that is exactly the point that so many people brought up when she made this post and this is why it made it into that LinkedIn lunatics Reddit you know you feed because you know she posts this and people are like but what was she thinking what did she think it meant it meant that if you had Salesforce Einstein and Einstein was going to be your customer service or perform customer service duties um with whatever the capabilities of Einstein is you're literally going to add them to your HR System as an employee and you're you're bringing it on so if you have to onboard Einstein don't please don't judge me here if you have to unboard Einstein I guess there's a process of configuring it and getting it trained and what that's part of the onboarding process and then you can give performance reviews to your digital employee is it really performing as you expected it to perform maybe the compensation that's included is the the fee that you're paying Salesforce Lauren I don't know I really I'm grasping it straws here it's there're supposed to be like a digital worker so and by the way these like everything with AI it's all right now it's all overhype all these digital workers are nonsense we're way too early in the AI process I mean List maybe five or 10 years from now um there will literally be your robots and Bots that are literally replacing workers but we are nowhere near there yet so she was just way ahead of of where this is going too far ahead and people went nuts on her but what what's the vision what it if if that if that actually happens as you describe it right what is an HR platform going to do for a digital worker yeah I mean well theoretically future digital workers are supposed to perform the same way as human workers so you would be treating them the same in your HR platform and you would be measuring them and you know seeing their performance reviews and compensating them in a certain way whatever you're paying you know you're paying for the digital service I know it's crazy so listen so the reason why I was sympathetic to her even though the people in the you know her LinkedIn comments were not very sympathetic and by the way LinkedIn is like a professional platform like people are pretty nice and not on this one they're pretty pretty brutal one guy was like this is terrifying you know these people are crazy it's disrespects Humanity you know that kind of thing I I give her hats off because she's trying to she's trying to think out of the box so she's trying to come up with a new way to Market her HR platform do you know what I mean and she's trying to jump on the AR the AI Trend and be like hey man we are like cutting edge with AI you can not only have human employees but now you can have your digital employees on our system as well we support that too look how far you know far you reaching that we are um but it just blew up back in her face and like three days later she was like okay never mind I'm taking it back was she just stopped it and the takeaway is it gets back to the whole you know AI can your company be run by you know an AI bot or something like that I mean I don't know man like maybe 10 years from now we might be in that situ I mean we are nowhere near that right now and this is perfect evidence why we're nowhere near that because this woman tries to introduce something like this and people just roasted her on LinkedIn um so she learned the lesson and we all I think we all need to be a little bit patient with AI okay it's just everybody calm down and just wait for it to evolve as it will evolve so that was the takeaway all right um I want to ask you what you're working on but I think you already told me you got a piece coming out about uh a car dealership yeah the you know what it is just to give you a little heads up and you know what I submitted it should be in the guardian so I got to uh uh double check to see that it's it's on track for publishing but it is uh uh did you hear about this it was a car dealership in uh Upstate New York and a a woman was hired nine months out of college this young woman and she has a takeoff it's called the dealership on Tik Tok and it is a takeoff on the office and it's got like six million views there are nine episodes wow it's awesome so we'll talk about that next week when my it is and she did an amazing job with it and the videos are hilarious and they're just like episodes of the office they're like three minute 4minute episodes um but it's she did an amazing job and you're like this this woman is like she's great so anyway you'll that that's that's a piece I've already submitted and hopefully that'll be out shortly that sounds great I look forward to reading it and to discussing it with you next week the reason why I brought that up is because one of the episodes was when their dealership went down because of the crowd strike thing and how everybody was dealing with it you know what I mean so that was like that was one of the fun no actually it wasn't the crowd thing I take it back it was when a couple weeks ago there was that ransomware attack on all the auto dealership platforms and all these auto dealerships were rendered right right right right I remember which by the way they paid a $25 million Ransom that which is unreal so uh so they were dealing with that and she made an episode out of it it was it was just hilarious it was she was it it's really really good so more on that when we speak next week sounds great Gene marks is a CPA who writes weekly on small business for the guardian the hill the Philadelphia inquire the Washington Times the Chicago Daily Herald Forbes an entrepreneur you can also hear him on ABC radio's ey on the world with John Bachelor Jean hosts two small business podcast with paychecks Corporation and the Hartford and this episode was brought to you by the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to help build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com sl21 hats Jean thank you have a great week laen thank you take care the rest of you have a great week too