Our Story

How Frustration, Purpose, and a Few Too Many Post-It Notes Turned Into a Mission to Fix Cybersecurity

Most cybersecurity companies were built to sell a product.

Gray Beard Cybersecurity was built to solve a problem.

Before Gray Beard, I founded a managed service provider with a simple goal: help small businesses stay secure and avoid the kinds of attacks I was constantly getting called in to clean up. I'd seen it too many times, organizations devastated by ransomware or data breaches that could have been prevented with just a little basic cyber hygiene. Not advanced tools. Not million-dollar budgets. Just the fundamentals, done right.

But that wasn't the only thing driving me. I also knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of bad technology. Years earlier, while working in hospitality, I had to use a contract management system so slow and painful that the staff bypassed it altogether. They used post-it notes instead. Updating a single field took 30 seconds... then another 30 seconds to save. What should've taken 10 minutes took an hour, and it wasn't a tech problem. It was a people problem. A leadership problem. A systems problem.

I knew there had to be a better way.
So I built one.

Why Gray Beard

In engineering, a "gray beard" is someone with experience. Someone who's been through the hard problems and knows how to solve them. They don't bluff. They don't guess. They've seen what works and what doesn't.

That's the company I wanted to build.
A cybersecurity partner that knows how to secure complex systems, solve real problems, and stay calm when things go sideways.

What We Saw and Wanted to Fix

As we spent more time in the MSP and compliance space, a pattern became hard to ignore. A lot of providers were offering identical "solutions" with identical language, claiming deep expertise in areas they'd barely touched. Many of them were well-meaning, but their depth of training and experience often stopped at the surface. For most businesses, that's just inconvenient. For government contractors, it's dangerous.

We also noticed how common it was for providers to lean on quick online searches for fixes, sometimes even copying answers from public forums, without realizing those same resources can be manipulated or poisoned. That's not exactly the level of diligence a federal contract deserves.

At the same time, more and more MSPs began advertising "CMMC services" without ever having navigated DFARS, federal frameworks, or the realities of government contracting. The intent may have been good, but the execution left clients thinking they were protected when they weren't.

We believed our clients deserved more than surface-level service and vendor hand-offs. So we built the company we wished existed.

Where We Started

Like most good things, Gray Beard didn't come out of nowhere. Our early clients were small businesses who needed help, trusted us to provide it, and gave us room to grow.

But we always had our eye on the federal space. I knew CMMC was coming, and we positioned ourselves early. By the time the rule finalized, we weren't scrambling. We were ready.

Working alongside the team at isiFederal, helping contractors navigate the rules of federal engagement, was a huge early win, and showed us there was a real hunger for clarity, for strategy, and for cybersecurity that actually worked.

Why We Still Show Up

Gray Beard Cybersecurity exists to make cybersecurity and technology simple, understandable, and real. We're here to push back against the fear-mongering, the overpromising, and the vendor snake oil that has plagued this industry for years.

We've seen clients who thought they were protected and were told they were protected, get compromised because their provider didn't know what they were doing. That makes us furious. Because the damage is real. The trust lost is real.

We don't want to scare you.
We want you to sleep better at night, knowing your business, your systems, and your future are secure.

Who We Are

I founded Gray Beard in 2024 after nearly 20 years in cybersecurity, spanning military service, federal government work, and private-sector roles with companies like Raytheon and AWS. I've worked in network engineering, systems administration, compliance, and security operations. I've built MSPs from the ground up and taken organizations through their first audits.

We hire people who are wired the same way. Technically sharp. Curious. Service-minded. People who can troubleshoot a network, explain a compliance framework, and still care enough to make sure the client actually understands what's happening.

Our clients tell us we're different, and we take that seriously.

Where We're Going

We're building toward a future where federal contractors don't fear compliance, they own it.

That means investing in automation, self-service tools, and AI-assisted workflows that help clients stay on top of their risk and their obligations without needing a 12-person security team.

We're expanding our footprint in the federal space, growing into a full-spectrum security company serving not just contractors, but enterprises with elevated security needs. But we'll never lose our focus on doing the work right, explaining it clearly, and making sure our clients don't just survive audits... they pass with confidence.

Because national security doesn't just happen in classified rooms. It happens on laptops, in vendor networks, and inside the systems no one's looked at in five years.

We're here to protect all of it.