0:00:02.9 Bailey Harmon: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Security Visionaries podcast. This is a podcast where thought leaders across the security and networking space share their incredible stories and advice from being on the front lines of the industry. I am your host, Bailey Harmon, and today I am joined by a wonderful guest, Danyel Bischof-Forsyth who is the CTO at 7 Brew Coffee. Welcome to the show, Danyel.
0:00:28.3 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
0:00:31.8 Bailey Harmon: Today, Danyel is going to share her views on aging infrastructure, how she is setting out to replace some systems without having the massive resources or the big budgets that she used to have once upon a time in her old role at a Fortune 100 company. So, Danyel, before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and 7 Brew for those that might not be aware?
0:00:54.6 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Absolutely. Thanks for asking. So, I have been 35 years in the tech space. Right now, I'm leading technology at 7 Brew, and before that, I started actually in technology at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City. I was there for 28 years, had a great career leading every space in the tech field for them. I moved my family from Kansas City to Northwest Arkansas for an opportunity at Tyson Foods. I was there a handful of years, and then now I am at 7 Brew Coffee. And just to tell you a little bit about 7 Brew Coffee, we are a drive-thru drink concept. It is more than just coffee. We have coffee, energy drinks, smoothies, lemonades, teas, and it's a great concept. And it's really more about the experience. So, 7 Brew is all about cultivating kindness, and it's just a fantastic mission and a growing company. The most growth I've ever seen with an organization. So, right now, we have over 400 locations across 33 states. We'll be at 39 states end of year, and we just keep adding a couple hundred every year and with no growth in sight. So, it's a very, very fun place to be.
0:02:09.7 Bailey Harmon: That's awesome. What a great company to be a part of. You're always caffeinated. You're always on the go. It keeps you fueled. [laughter]
0:02:17.7 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Absolutely.
0:02:19.8 Bailey Harmon: I guess my first question, what's your favorite 7 Brew flavor?
0:02:24.1 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: There are so many. Which one would I choose? Well, today I have a sugar-free peach tea. So, a little bit, probably not what you would expect. Our most popular drink is actually the Blondie, which is delicious. It's got vanilla, caramel, espresso. It's just a fantastic drink.
0:02:40.3 Bailey Harmon: Yum. That makes my pot coffee that I had for breakfast this morning kind of sad. Okay. So, just kind of diving right in. You've obviously inherited a lot of legacy infrastructure, maybe some brittle VPNs or some old aging firewalls. You don't have the headcount or necessarily the capital projects budget to work with like you did at your last company. How are you deciding what gets modernized first?
0:03:09.3 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: I'll share with you what the vision is for IT at 7 Brew and how it aligns to our corporate mission. So, our corporate mission is, like I said, it's cultivating kindness. It's creating a great experience for the consumer. And that doesn't just mean being nice to them and being kind. What it means is we deliver their product with speed. We make sure it's accurate. And we allow for that barista to have the exchange with the customer. I mean, that's what it's all about. From a technology standpoint, we also make sure that barista has the best job on the planet and has all the support they need. And then, of course, corporately here at headquarters, it's important that we have all the capabilities to continue to propel the brand. And so, when I think about that, I came in and we set a mission and a vision for the IT department to be driven based on delivering business capabilities, whether it be for the customer, for the barista, for the corporate employee. And so, it's all about business capabilities. But we need to do that in a way that is scalable based on that growth I mentioned, that's secure. That's really important.
0:04:09.9 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Our brand is one of our biggest assets. It needs to be supportable because we have to have it always be on and then resilient in case we run into a significant issue. And so, what we did was with this mission, we went through and looked at all the business capabilities that we would need from a company and made sure we were aligned to those capabilities that we need to have and created a roadmap from that. It's all about choices. And so, we laid out a roadmap for the next 24 months, the systems that we need in place and the capabilities that we need. And part of that is not only bringing in those new capabilities per our roadmap, but you mentioned it, I mean, eliminating some of the technical debt. So, if we had systems that we needed to replace or if we have, I never want to have two things that do, two platforms or solutions that do the same thing. So, as we put together that roadmap, bring in new capabilities, making sure we're eliminating tech debt on the way. And I'll add one more thing. And I always like to look at what's happening in the industry and what my peers are doing. And in our case, we have the wonderful position to have Blackstone as a partner with us and they have some nice frameworks too that we look at, especially in the cyber space to benchmark us and to help us set that strategy and our roadmap there. And so, I like to leverage everybody around me to help come up with that strategy and that roadmap to make things happen.
0:05:36.6 Bailey Harmon: You said something that made me think, when it comes specifically to your network and your security stack, what were some of those big system pain points that you inherited and kind of what are the ones that you're prioritizing first moving forward to try to fix?
0:05:52.7 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Right. Well, you know, so, and you've mentioned it a couple of times, I mean, it's a big difference to come from... My most recent job was a Fortune 100 company. Hallmark's, you know, large also and very well established, both of them have been around over 100 years. So coming to 7 Brew, it truly is a startup. You know, it's my first experience in this space where it's such great energy, such... This whole idea of significant growth and starting from nothing and making it to what it is today is just phenomenal. And so it's just a different situation. And so, the problem I faced here is that we were missing, there was a lot of gaps in what we needed from a cyber space. Let's be honest, you know, again, a startup is focused on opening stands and getting things out there. And unlike my previous roles at those other companies where I inherited a large footprint in the cyber space here, it was a matter of how fast can we possibly get that built and really improve on that. It's really, you know, upping our game and making sure that we continue to improve in that space.
0:06:53.8 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: We just took on a list of things that we knew we needed to tackle. And we just started tackling them almost all at once, which is unheard of, but it was necessary considering the urgency in that space and the risk involved. And so we literally went from a startup to, I would say we are really best in class in the solutions and the partners we brought in across the board with the capabilities there to get us where we're at today. And now it's a matter of, you know, keeping our eye on the ball and make sure we're maintaining that and doing the best we can to keep the 7 Brew brand secure.
0:07:24.4 Bailey Harmon: You have a smaller team, but you have a small but mighty team. [chuckle] I can imagine it's hard to keep up with patches and outages and even point products for all. Are you looking at platform consolidation as a way to kind of climb out of that ops rabbit hole or what's your strategy there?
0:07:44.6 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Oh, absolutely. For me, it is, 'cause it is a lean team and I want to keep it lean. I want us to stay focused and be well connected and aligned on what we're after. But it's definitely consolidation is incredibly important. Fewer vendor partners and fewer platforms is better for me. As long as I pick the best platform to do the primary job and if it does additional jobs for me too, and they're good enough, that works for me. And so this idea, and you mentioned it, I mean, the idea of making sure we don't have sprawl and keeping it tight and bringing those vendor partners, multiple capabilities within a partner together, that's better. And then I can, you know, continue to focus on fewer relationships and really make those be true partnerships with the vendors and making sure that we're picking partners that are keeping current in the industry, that are bringing great technology and advancements and strategic thinking to the table. I love that too. And then, I think it is important for me to keep the team lean so that we can be incredibly agile. And so I'm looking at options like outsourcing some of the support that we do so that that doesn't take the eye off the ball for the team that continue focusing on delivery. And then from a support standpoint for those things that are, you know, maybe tier two applications for us or ones that have high demand overnight from a support standpoint, making sure that I look for alternatives to outsource that type of support.
0:09:08.0 Bailey Harmon: Absolutely. I thought what was interesting is your whole 7 Brew crew, all your employees are actually in-house, which is awesome. Everyone's together. I think that camaraderie is great. And it's funny 'cause I think a lot of times we talk about hybrid employees and hybrid work, but what is hybrid are your franchises. Your franchises are everywhere and they're dispersed. So when you think about giving them fast, secure access to positive user experience, how are you making their experience and the customer experience like you talked about earlier, seamless without adding complexity or risk or latency issues?
0:09:50.5 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Right, right. No, that's of top support to us. I mean, we're here at 7 Brew because of our franchisees. That is the model. They're the ones that continue to open new locations and continue to drive growth within each of their franchise operations. So you are absolutely right. I mean, they are who we serve. They're our key partners. So when I think, what are we doing to make sure we serve their needs in an efficient, fast, secure way? We just rolled out a franchise portal. It took us several months to build, but we built a portal that was one-stop shopping for those franchise owners and their support staff to be able to go and find everything they need in one location. And we built it on a new platform that we had brought and implemented here in-house. And then we built that on top of the content management system platform. And so what that does for us, it's not just one-stop shopping. It's, you know, we keep it current. It is their business tool to anything that they need. So I have commitment throughout this building with all of my business partners that if they have new information to share, they share it on the portal.
0:10:49.5 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: It is our communication vehicle for the franchisees. You know, we leverage it for announcements. We share any type of artifact. If they need to see a standard operating procedure or tip sheets on how to do something or know who to call if they need help with something, we keep all of that information extremely current. And then, I think one of the most important pieces, and you alluded to it, is around secure access and how we maintain, that's a large number of users within each of those franchise organizations. And so, we actually stood up a platform that allowed them to maintain the users within their organizations. And then, we maintain the security on our side. We have an entire data and analytics environment with a reporting platform on top of that so that they can access their data. And so we use the secure platform to let them set up their users and to access the data analytics. And then we have security within the data analytics to ensure that each franchisee can only access data that is theirs. So they only look at their locations. And we maintain that very tightly to ensure that one franchisee cannot see what another franchisee, their business.
0:11:58.5 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: But yet we also provide benchmarks that go across all so that they can have an overall comparison of their performance. But yeah, security is very, very important in that environment. And we made sure that we got that right before we rolled that out.
0:12:10.5 Bailey Harmon: And at the scale that you're rolling out globally too. [chuckle]
0:12:14.7 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Without a doubt, without a doubt. All very, very important.
0:12:18.0 Bailey Harmon: Are you thinking of AI and automation within all of those processes across security and networking? If so, I'd be curious to get your thoughts.
0:12:27.4 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: We have, we have. And like I said, we're still startup. We're still shoring up our foundation. We're still cranking away at the cyber space and new business capabilities. But AI is definitely a part of that. We're leveraging the AI capability, and especially Gen AI within a lot of these platforms we're putting in place. We're standing up other tools and platforms that have robust capabilities within the platform. And so we're starting there. At the same time, my team has put in place not only an AI policy, but some of the tools and safeguards around what we do here at corporate as well. And so we've set up secure locations where our data is located and we can use tools, especially Gen AI tools on top of that to ask questions so that the people at corporate can use that to do queries and ask for information through there. We also use some, my development team uses some AI tools as well for the development. We're crawling before we even walk. And so we're trying to figure out where the best use cases are for that. So it's not Gen AI for Gen AI sake or just AI because it's a buzzword.
0:13:32.0 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: We're really trying to make sure that we can use it in the best possible way. Another example is we're putting in some call center software new with our customer service team here. Calls for each location come into corporate and just ways that it can learn, like what are the most common questions and be able to have some more automated ways in which we can answer the questions with our consumers still in the 7 Brew way. We don't want to take away kind of our culture and how we interact, but maybe do some triage upfront and we're using AI to help with some of that as well. So it's almost every place, but it's just, I would say we're starting to crawl first almost across the board.
0:14:10.4 Bailey Harmon: Yeah, it's a vast space. That's for sure. And you're training your team, but you're also training the technology at the same time.
0:14:19.9 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Exactly. Yeah. Or even... It's really great. I love it. Our owner and CEO, he makes comments all the time that we're not gonna be some robotic scripted company in general, whether it's dealing with our consumers at the frontline or when they call the 1800 number. And so, or whether they apply for a job with us, even though a lot of those platforms have a lot of that automation and the whole chat bot and all of that built in, we're being very, very choiceful about where we use tools like that because we wanna stay true to our culture and our personality and that experience we want to have. And so we're really, really trying to make smart decisions there.
0:14:58.6 Bailey Harmon: When you're looking at the security and networking landscape overall, because you span both of them, there can be trade-offs, not having to trade security for performance when it comes to, yeah, what do those mean to you?
0:15:13.8 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Yeah, I will go back to what the IT mission is for us here. So it is, again, it's delivery business capabilities in a way that is scalable, secure, supportable, and resilient. And so for me, those four are non-negotiables, actually. And so, I'm not going to trade off those for a business capability that does not provide those things. Now, to answer your question even a little more deeply, the whole idea of performance trade-offs with security, I just think, again, I think that you've gotta make sure that security, again, is a non-negotiable. And so, I think continuing to work with partners that can help you ensure the performance there, continuing to keep focused on that. Don't just put something in or implement something or put a policy in or put a platform in and then walk away. Continue to go in and optimize and ensure you have performance 'cause you also need performance as well.
0:16:06.9 Bailey Harmon: Absolutely. What are some of the lessons that you've learned across Hallmark and Tyson and even your personal experiences that are helping you coach your new team and deliver on your new goals and mission at 7 Brew?
0:16:21.3 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: A lot of learning is what I would say applies. I think at the end of the day, I've learned technology, even from a card industry, card and gifts, to Tyson and the meat industry, to 7 Brew, which is drinks, drive-thru drinks. Technology delivery, there's a whole lot of similarity, actually. I mean, sure, there's some differences, but I think there's more similarities in delivering tech, because, I mean, delivering technology is delivering technology. I think about when I came to 7 Brew, it's important to develop relationships, especially with key stakeholders. It's important to know the business, even though it's a new business or a new industry for you, making sure that you dig in and you learn that. You learn the business, you learn what's needed, and then you learn what IT capabilities enable their business strategy. I think that doesn't change from company to company or industry to industry. I think, regardless of where you're at, I think coming up with a clear vision of where you're headed that's aligned to the business vision, and then setting a roadmap so you can see where you're going, and then executing on projects.
0:17:27.9 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Execution's number one, regardless of where you're at. So I think those would be key learnings. One other thing I'll throw in there, again, it doesn't matter what company or industry, with my team, making sure that we do the basics well, making sure that we respond quickly to issues, that everything is running, that people always have the tech that they need, and it's kind of like water or electricity, it's just there when they need it, is incredibly important. And then, I'd say at the end of the day, it's about the people and leading the team and coming together as a group with solving common problems together. I think that's also transferable in the learning that would take here. So I guess bottom line to answer your question, I think a lot of the learning and experience is transferable.
0:18:11.5 Bailey Harmon: The relationship building never goes away, it only continues. You don't wanna burn any bridges from where you were because it always comes back. [laughter]
0:18:20.4 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Absolutely.
0:18:22.6 Bailey Harmon: And I love that North Star that delivering IT is delivering IT, regardless of where you are. I think that's a really important learning and thing to keep in mind, especially as others that are listening might be looking to make pivots into different industries, and your proof that you can do it.
0:18:38.5 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Absolutely. It's just a matter, I think the biggest thing is probably learning agility. And so just knowing, okay, it's a different industry or a different company, it's a different group of people, it's a different business, and just jump in and learn, do a lot of learning. And I do talk a lot too, but I try to listen. So coming in and asking questions and listening as you learn is absolutely, anybody can do that.
0:19:02.8 Bailey Harmon: Is there a project that you're working on or something that you're really excited about right now at 7 Brew that you'd wanna share, or cast?
0:19:11.1 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Oh, that's a great question. We have so many. I think I'm gonna go back to something that I do talk about a lot, and the reason why I'm gonna talk about it is because it's probably the least sexy part of what we do. So I can talk about these flashy projects that I talk about on social media and we get accolades for, but I think what I'm most proud of with this team is when I came here last year, we got to build the team, and what we put in place is a lot of the foundation and the infrastructure that was absolutely needed for us to build on. We would not be able to be building the really fun, flashy things on top of that if we wouldn't have come in and done the foundation right. You don't get a lot of recognition. A lot of people don't notice that, but I think the way we methodically went through and said, is our foundation secure? Is our foundation solid for us to be able to move forward with? And we brought in a number of processes, a number of governing principles, a number of tools and platforms to do the foundation right.
0:20:17.3 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: And where we had things in place that were not going to grow with us, we made hard decisions to say, you know what? We're gonna walk away from that and we're gonna bring in a whole new tool set there, whether it's how we handle IT service management or ticket management or our software development lifecycle and all the tools on how we deliver projects. We took a hard look at the whole foundation first, made some tough choices and put that, even though you have to pause because everybody's yelling for everything they want that is more consumer facing and here in the building. But I'm most proud of what we... And we continue to shore that up and work on that. And I'm just so proud we've kept our eye on that ball while we've done, started to lay things on top of the foundation. So I'm gonna go back to that one because it's probably, like I said, the least sexy answer, but probably the most important for us here. And what helps me sleep good at night is that we're doing that now. Because if we would build on top of something that was going to crumble, that would be a disaster. And so, shoring the foundation is what I would say is what I'm most proud of right now.
0:21:17.8 Bailey Harmon: Architecture matters at the end of the day. That is the biggest piece to the puzzle. If you don't have the architecture, you don't have anywhere to go. You don't have anywhere to build.
0:21:27.9 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Right. I agree wholeheartedly.
0:21:29.8 Bailey Harmon: Yeah, absolutely. Plus, you don't want your phone going off when you're in St. Lucia trying to enjoy a nice vacation next week.
0:21:38.1 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: I agree with you.
0:21:38.8 Bailey Harmon: Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wanted to talk about today?
0:21:42.7 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: I think you had very thoughtful questions. I think it helps paint a picture for what we're doing here. And at the end of the day, it's all about leadership and leading the team and delivering on business capabilities. I think that came out.
0:21:58.1 Bailey Harmon: Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Danyel, for joining us. It has been wonderful having you as a guest. We've learned a lot. I am crossing my fingers for when the 7 Brew opens up in Chicago so I can go get one.
0:22:12.6 Danyel Bischof-Forsyth: Very soon, Bailey.
0:22:13.0 Bailey Harmon: Yes. [chuckle] You have been listening to the Security Visionaries podcast. I have been your host, Bailey Harmon. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to share it and spread the word. E will catch you next time.
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