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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I'll tell you what, when it comes to our businesses, tech can either make us or break us.
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Hopefully, it is something that enables you to succeed and not something that holds you back from succeeding.
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In fact, before I even came on air here today, today's guest is in the tech space.
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This is obviously a bit of a teaser, and he pointed out to me Brian, one of your links is not working.
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These are the very important things that all of us need to stay on top of in all of our businesses, and that's why I'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Spencer Scherer.
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Spencer is the CEO and founder of Nuve Technology, which is a company that provides personalized, hands-on IT solutions to individuals who are looking to simplify and secure their digital lives.
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Gosh, what a mission that Spencer is on that all of us will benefit from.
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With over 10 years of IT operational experience and a passion for helping people feel confident in their technology, spencer specializes in cybersecurity and customized tech support for clients who often feel overwhelmed by the fast pace of digital advancements.
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When it comes to that we all know 2025, this is going to be the year that things progress faster than ever before.
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His commitment to building long-term, trusted relationships sets him apart, as he empowers clients to take control of their digital operations with ease.
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If you're hearing this and thinking nothing about tech is easy to me or maybe you do enjoy tech and you just want someone to look over your shoulder like Spencer had my back this morning with one of our broken links then that's why I'm excited about this episode.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Spencer Scher.
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All right, spencer, I am so very excited to have you here with us today.
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First things first welcome to the show, thank you for having me, Brian.
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Heck.
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Yes, I teased in the intro that you already personally helped me, Spencer, which I'm so appreciative about, but you've got to take us beyond the bio.
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Obviously, you love tech.
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You love helping others have tech, empower them, not hold them back.
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So take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Spencer?
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How'd you start doing all this cool stuff?
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Spencer's been tech savvy, tech curious, for years.
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I remember getting my first computer and, honestly, breaking it more times than I really should have.
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A couple trips to the Apple store, a couple reinstalls of an OS and many years of just playing around and seeing okay, what can this box with a keyboard in front of it do to make my life better?
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Give me access.
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And figuring out as I went along on my journey led me to building custom PCs throughout high school for my friends back when we actually had to lug them to play video games with each other Completely aging myself, but it's what we did.
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And then when you get a poli sci degree and you're working in smaller nonprofits, non-government organizations or NGOs and people realize you're a 20-smart-year-old tech savvy person, you become the IT person Brian.
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So got a degree in masters of science and information systems and been working for enterprise level IT organizations it's going on about 15 years total right now and started new technology to help individuals as kind of a side, but also small businesses who really don't know what they don't know.
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You know, know they're great at what they do, great at what the business they started, but technology is a lot of scared for a lot of people.
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So we kind of come in and help them be secure, compliant process automation and really view technology as a tool in the toolbox rather than a ball and chain.
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Yeah, I love that overview, especially because you hit on so many of the real life pain points that not only business owners I feel like this episode goes far beyond just business is that tech in general can harness people or hold people back, or they can enable us to grow.
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And one thing that I really appreciate about your story, spencer, is you talk about breaking things, and that's how you personally learned about the inner workings of computers and the inner workings of so many different parts of IT.
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I want to start there.
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I want to start with breaking things, because a lot of people get frustrated when they break things, whether it's my parents and something goes wrong on their iPhones, or whether it's any of us in our businesses and software's not working for us, or our computer's not working for us, or we're out of storage space and we've got to hop on Amazon to find that SSD that we need to plug in.
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All of these things can be frustrations to people.
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It seems to me like you take joy in the things breaking and finding those solutions.
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Talk to me about that problem-solving mind that you have.
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Yeah.
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So it's definitely part problem-solving and the other part, Brian, isn't just fixing, it's the customization about it.
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It's what could this do specifically for me that it's not out of the box supposed to do?
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So really kind of figuring out, okay, how can I optimize this?
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And really learning from mistakes.
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You click on a button and you get a buyer's, you go okay, I'm going to be more diligent next time.
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And really kind of learning from mistakes.
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When a lot of people my parents, your parents, you know, and I don't know why it always happens, but every executive I worked for before a major meeting, IT goes wrong.
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It's Murphy's law to an extreme that I haven't figured out yet and timing sucks.
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We can't control it.
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But just what do you do with it?
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How do you overcome the uh-oh?
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Basically take it from there.
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So, whether it's our panel to be like hey, keep your phone up to date, you know, maybe let's use some cloud storage to back up the family photos and everything else, or it's the executive being like hey, you have a presentation, we have it saved, it's backed up, let's worry about the computer crashing after your meeting.
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Just focus on what you need to do and we'll deal with the weeds afterwards.
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Yeah, it's funny hearing you say that there's so many different launch points that I want to go into, spencer.
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So we're going to try to go in all the directions in today's conversation.
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But you bring up cloud storage, for example, and it kills me, anytime I'm interacting with an entrepreneur, if I meet them in a coffee shop or at a conference or even just on the city streets, and they they say, oh my gosh, I'm in the middle of a rebrand.
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I'd love to show you the files, but I don't have them on my phone.
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And the truth is for me I mean, I've got everything in Dropbox and Google Drive.
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I've got so many different places that all of these things are stored.
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I find that a lot of business owners, spencer, they don't even know what they don't know, and so, for the the topic of cloud storage, they don't even realize they could have all their files in all the places without any extra work for them.
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It can all sink in the background.
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How do you even begin to approach a sound IT infrastructure for people who don't know what they don't know?
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Is it an audit that you do for them first?
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Is it there a checklist that you have of how you take inventory of their tech stack.
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I'd love to hear behind the scenes, yeah, so basically walking in.
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You know every environment is completely different, even within the same industry, but at the end of the day, it is from a very high level.
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Can I connect to the outside world?
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Am I getting emails?
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Am I getting my file and am I keeping people who shouldn't be in my network out of it?
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So security.
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And then from there we do what I call an IT assessment.
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Or, you know, with January coming up and me being a political science major tech state of the union, what do you have?
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What are you doing and you know it's not always bad what are you doing right?
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What can you do better?
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You know, and then really sitting down with these entrepreneurs, these business leaders, and taking what I found and really seeing what they want their company to be and kind of merging the two.
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Okay, you want to be lean and mean and remote and hire the best people, no matter where they are?
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Okay, that's cloud storage, that's laptops, that's VPN or, for some construction companies with huge files, how do you access them?
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How do you share them?
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How do you co-work with cities and bid on contracts and that.
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So really understanding the business needs and their dreams of where they see a company in three to five years and really merging that together to build a roadmap that works for them and what they need.
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Not everyone needs everything, but everyone needs something.
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A roadmap that works for them and what they need.
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Not everyone needs everything, but everyone needs something.
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But also touching on all these industries makes me kind of a perfect cocktail party, brian.
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I could talk about basically any industry for about five to 10 minutes.
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Yeah, I love that, Spencer.
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I do think that's one of the unique positions that people in your place have is you've seen behind the scenes of large companies, small companies, and you just teased us with quite a few different industries.
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Which leads me to this question, because I find that a lot of times, when it comes to small businesses, for example, they look at Fortune 500 companies and they think, well, of course they have IT departments because they have all these employees and they need somebody who's going to look out for all these things.
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Spencer, you've worked with companies, both big and small.
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What are some of those small business needs that people probably don't realize?
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I guess it's twofold.
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One, I actually do have those needs as a small business owner and two, it actually is attainable.
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Maybe I don't have a full on IT department like huge businesses have, but I can reach out to people like Spencer to get their help and have their eyes on my side when it comes to my business.
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Yeah, without getting too much on the soapbox.
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I think a lot of small business owners see, you know the 500s, these huge companies with everything being done in-house, and they try to go after that when in reality having a managed service provider so outsource IT is an easier and obtainable solution.
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You don't need a CTO, a help desk, a sysadmin, in-house developers when a company like mine or other MSPs kind of round you out.
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But what a lot of small business owners don't seem to think about and it's a very hard story to tell unless people have been in it and even then they're not worried about it again is cybersecurity.
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Just because you are the small mom-and-pop restaurant or the smaller hotel chain or something regional doesn't mean you're not on a threat actor's radar for ransomware and anything else that they may do.
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Radar for ransomware and anything else that they may do.
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You know, for a personal antidote I've had a national construction company get hit with ransomware and then I hopped on and joined them and kind of saw this back end of what happens after the fact.
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And then I had a family member's small hotel get hit with it and it's the same thing and it's the same problem, it's the same solution, but really having that perimeter defense, no matter your size, is invaluable.
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As people say, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
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Yeah, I want you to go deeper there, because you call it the soapbox, spencer.
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That's the whole purpose of this show is we want to be on a soapbox and get ahead of people's problems and help them grow their businesses.
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And so that point that you made at the end there about prevention so many people, yeah, we know what cybersecurity is and we know that we need it, but most people don't take action on it, of course, until something bad has happened.
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Talk to us about those preventative measures, because a lot of people one probably don't realize what they can do.
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And two and this is, I guess I'm tapping a little bit into your salesman brain as well, because you are the owner of your business and you have these conversations all the time with clients and potential clients is how do we justify the cost of that?
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How do we justify us putting time, resources, money, efforts into preventative measures that hopefully stop something that may or may not happen in the future, measures that hopefully stop something that may or may not happen in the future.
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So to I'll kind of go backwards first to kind of sell it it's.
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I use the insurance analogy.
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We have healthcare, we have a car insurance, otherwise we can't drive, and we have homeowners or renters to live where we do.
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Hopefully we never get sick, hopefully we never get into a car accident and hopefully we pay our annual premium for insurance and then after that we don't even think about it.
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So you know, again, to use the phrase, an ounce of surgery is the example and I think everyone can relate to it and that's something that, in my position, I'm pretty well versed.
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That is, taking these IT ideas and putting them into everyday layman's terms and other scenarios that people are familiar with.
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So security, it's insurance, and for that it may also be getting cybersecurity insurance.
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I've been with firms who couldn't get that protection, which means they're going to lose clients because clients require it and vendors need it and everything is kind of tied together now because of the interconnection of businesses and really saying like you're not getting this, that means this client isn't renewing and they're your big ones.
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So just kind of really showing the trickle effect of the cost of doing nothing.
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And then you know, start off easy, start off small, use a password manager, something like OnePass, which I use personally and I put my entire family onto it, with shared vaults and being able to manage passwords and not think about it.
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Two-factor or multi-factor authentication, getting those authenticator codes.
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The example everyone is used to is your debit card.
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I could take your debit card to an ATM, but if I don't know your PIN, I'm not taking any money out of your account.
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So using things like that to kind of initially secure the perimeter.
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I was talking with a founder of a longboard company and he's like this is the type of person I am, spencer, I don't lock my car, I don't lock my house, but I understand I need to secure my business.
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I'm like, okay, what car can I steal from you?
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And it wasn't anything worth stealing, but it was there and just kind of going from there and really building out what they need in government and business organizations.
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So ABA for law, hipaa for medical, pci for payments are really driving a standard that people need to meet.
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Yeah, spencer, when you talk about those things, I mean you're introducing password managers, for example, which that I would also argue I'm going to interject really quick is.
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It's also quality of life improvement.
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Holy cow.
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It makes life so much easier when something else is remembering all of your passwords and they're all completely random and completely different.
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It has radically revolutionized the way that I have my accounts across the entire internet.
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Just like you, spencer I'm sure that you're this in your family is I forced my parents, I forced everybody I know to get on it, because we shouldn't be storing these passwords in our heads or, even worse, writing them down.
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So I love the fact that you introduced that, but I think it also shows how many different points of exposure that we have that we may not realize.
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You've talked about both software and hardware already here in today's conversation.
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Talk to us about your focus on both of those, not just in the realm of cybersecurity.
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But it sounds to me like you look at a business's hardware and you say, hey, here's the laptops that you need.
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I would imagine you and I haven't talked about this off the air, but I would imagine for certain companies you walk in and you say, oh, you do heavy video editing.
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This is the ideal setup for you.
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You need this much RAM, you need this much of a hard drive, and so a lot of people don't understand those options when they walk into a Best Buy or go to Applecom.
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Talk to us about how much you focus on both that hardware and software side of the world.
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Yes, I think hardware, especially for businesses, is the base.
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You know to use video editing, to use heavy finance for Excel or engineers using CAD those are resource intensive tools or engineers using CAD those are resource intensive tools.
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So somebody could come in and say this is the best software for what you need or for finance.
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Here's the Bloomberg terminal or here is the video editing for Adobe and the files you're doing and making for YouTube.
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But if your computer can't handle it, it doesn't matter what you put in front of it.
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And for businesses specifically, people are a bit harder on their business devices.
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They're being used 40 plus hours a week, almost 365 days a year.
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You know weekends and vacations excluding.
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So we're looking about 50 weeks a year.
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They should last three to four years.
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And if you have a good financial department that understands you know the depreciation and the capital expenses, let them handle it or find an accountant to do it for you.
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But if you're using it for business, you know three to four.
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I've seen companies push it to five and kind of do a trickle down of okay, the power users get it every three and this becomes a conference room computer just to share slides.
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So really having what you need that's appropriate is paramount.
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I had a client who is an investment banker who used to go into Staples every school year and be like, oh, I'm going to buy a thousand dollar computer and it's equivalent of leasing it for $300 a year.
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And I finally got them out of their finance brain after the second call of a blue screen for Windows and I'm like spend the money, get something that's gonna last and it's gonna work.
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Just put the money up front because you won't have a headache two months in.
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Yeah.
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Spencer, I love that attitude.
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I've always loved that quote of buy once, cry once, because it is a difficult lesson to learn, but, gosh, it pays off.
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I mean huge kudos.
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I'm a big fan of Apple full disclaimer.
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You talk about the blue screen of death.
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Not seen a blue screen since I was in college, thank goodness.
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And so my Apple products have a sense of working for almost a decade.
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If you buy the latest and greatest which, yeah, it's more upfront cost, but, to your point, it saves you money over time.
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So, listeners, I hope that Spencer is pushing you to start investing in this stuff, because it's going to set you up for success.
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Spencer, I want to put you on the spot here.
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You didn't know that I would do this in today's episode, but you bring up the State of the Union.
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Here we are in 2025.
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A lot of people are going to see tech moving at the fastest pace we've ever seen before.
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What is the state of the IT union here today?
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and in a new year.
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Okay, when you brought up state of the union and that, I was glad you pivoted back to IT and other things.
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But honestly, you know there's been stuff of technology rapidly advancing for years Chips getting doubly as fast in every 18 months it's called Moore's Law, and with AI and software, that is every six months and I think for businesses, a lot of companies don't like getting caught up in the buzzwords or for technology that bleeding edge, but it's here it works, it does it and I think understanding where you can leverage the latest and greatest, like AI and let's just use something kind of low level.
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Grammarly has an AI for editing and copywriting and proofreading.
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Use it, try it out personally.
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Try it out professionally.
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You know chat, gpt, gemini for Google.
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You know Meta has their own as well for Facebook with Lama and different other ones.
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Try it out, see what it works.
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Try it out personally, be a champion of it professionally, because the people who understand it and can use it and get the technology are going to be the light years ahead as it continues to take off and just be there and be ingrained in apps and features and software and in business processes.
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Yeah, you brought it up, Spencer, so I'm going to go there with you.
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What is the impact of AI going to be within the world of IT?
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I hope I've seen some behind the scenes features of ChatGPT that they're beginning to roll out, where you can screen share with it and if you're in Photoshop, you can say, hey, I don't know how to blend these two layers together and it can see your screen.
00:19:13.598 --> 00:19:16.643
So it says, oh, see this button in the lower left, click that.
00:19:16.643 --> 00:19:18.826
And then when you click it, it can see everything that you're doing.
00:19:18.826 --> 00:19:20.189
It's looking over your shoulder.
00:19:20.189 --> 00:19:23.442
That's one cool example that I'm excited to roll out with my parents.
00:19:23.501 --> 00:19:28.605
I keep throwing them under the bus in today's episode, but it's because this is tech support at a whole new level.
00:19:28.605 --> 00:19:31.960
What's your view on the direction of AI, how it can assist us?
00:19:31.960 --> 00:19:38.830
And I'm going to interject this because I want to give you one super loaded question, and that is is it going to complicate things for business owners?
00:19:38.830 --> 00:19:49.006
Because I've already seen and talking to our listeners and our guests and all the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs that I just know as part of daily life is that it almost feels like paralysis by analysis.
00:19:49.006 --> 00:19:57.963
We have so many resources and things at our fingertips right now that people don't know when to turn to these, how to use them, how to have it talk to their other systems.
00:19:57.963 --> 00:20:01.913
What the heck are you doing to make sense of all this stuff for people when it comes to AI?
00:20:03.497 --> 00:20:11.869
I think, first and foremost it's understanding what you want and where you want your company to be, before you even consider the technology.
00:20:11.869 --> 00:20:13.777
I'll use a former client of mine, client of mine.
00:20:13.777 --> 00:20:23.067
They were a New York City law firm and the COO wanted to go cloud-based remote work if possible.
00:20:23.807 --> 00:20:35.042
So you kind of have to understand where you want your business to be, what tools you have, how you can train the models, use the models, automate stuff, like you said with the screen sharing.
00:20:35.042 --> 00:20:36.988
I do something similar for my own stuff.
00:20:36.988 --> 00:20:42.804
If I'm not an expert in it, explain this to me, or if I you know, just use it for questioning and bouncing as a sounding board.
00:20:42.804 --> 00:21:01.843
I think the analysis by paralysis is way too true for technology and also people being scared by change because and it is a proven phenomenon with technology you are slower in the beginning, but then you'll be exponentially quicker on the newer technology than you were on the old one, no matter how long you've been using it.
00:21:01.843 --> 00:21:10.996
So, like I said, rip off the bandaid and try it, figure it out, see what you want, see how this can be a process automation.
00:21:10.996 --> 00:21:18.642
You know, if you're trying to get data out of spreadsheets feed, chat, gpt one, you know, maybe anonymize the data, maybe.
00:21:18.642 --> 00:21:29.709
Just, you know, make it up but say what trends are you seeing and maybe really use it for process automation, business intelligence, really analyzing and getting that deeper data.
00:21:30.556 --> 00:21:36.604
My dad used to tell me in high school and college that if he couldn't get a book, he couldn't write the report.
00:21:36.604 --> 00:22:00.249
And we have the internet, so there isn't an excuse not to have that information and I think, with AI and everything that ChatGPT and everyone else is rolling out with image creation, how to the understanding, the times and the specific ones for specific businesses, it's going to be a game changer for people who know how to use it and how to talk to it correctly.
00:22:00.249 --> 00:22:07.282
And the best piece of advice I can give people is, when you're done talking to an AI, ask how could I have gotten that result quicker?
00:22:07.282 --> 00:22:14.046
Because it will tell you oh, this is the question, this is really what you wanted, or this is how we could have done it, and it does it for everything.
00:22:14.994 --> 00:22:18.115
Boom, spencer, I have never heard that advice.
00:22:18.234 --> 00:22:31.323
When it comes to asking AI, that very question, I feel like one way that I've upped my AI game recently is by asking it what would be the correct way for me to ask an AI this question, and it phrases it so much better than I could have.
00:22:31.394 --> 00:22:40.007
But even looking at it in retrospect, that tip that you just dropped on us is huge because, again, it's going to pay off over time, the better and better that we get at using it.
00:22:40.335 --> 00:23:00.048
But I'm going to go even beyond that, spencer, because I think you're showcasing for us in real time here today what makes your approach to IT very special is that when I asked you a question about technology, you went straight to what are your business goals and it just seems to me like doing the research ahead of today's episode is you love IT, but you love it for what it does for businesses.
00:23:00.048 --> 00:23:03.152
You understand operations, you understand growth.
00:23:03.152 --> 00:23:08.307
You understand the things that matter to real life businesses, not just from a tech perspective.
00:23:08.307 --> 00:23:22.659
Talk to me about that approach, because a lot of people probably think, yeah, if someone comes into my business from an IT perspective, all they're going to care about is my IT, is my technical infrastructure.
00:23:22.659 --> 00:23:29.486
Talk to me about that balanced business approach, because I don't think most people realize that when someone like you walks in, it's not to make your tech better, it is to make your business better.
00:23:30.974 --> 00:23:33.681
Yes, I would definitely say there is a tech side.
00:23:33.681 --> 00:23:39.734
Any IT professional will look at Security, hardware, software, keeping up to date on things.
00:23:39.734 --> 00:23:47.106
So yes, there is always a lens and those are easy things for any IT professional to do and to understand.
00:23:47.106 --> 00:23:58.182
But to really go into that business process, that's like that next layer of IT professional that really understands how are things interconnected, how are business processes working.
00:23:58.182 --> 00:24:00.220
You know it's not just silent departments.
00:24:00.220 --> 00:24:05.200
A sales team brings something in, it goes to finance, finance approves it or whoever needs to approve it.
00:24:05.200 --> 00:24:09.982
It then goes to customer onboarding and then it goes to support and then it goes back to sales to renew.
00:24:09.982 --> 00:24:18.335
So to really understand the flows within a business and what they're doing and how they do it and how they serve their own clients.
00:24:18.756 --> 00:24:21.845
Because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what industry you're in.
00:24:21.845 --> 00:24:28.267
It's customer service, tech, legal, financial, professional services, whatever it may be.
00:24:28.267 --> 00:24:38.832
You're serving a customer, whether that's internal or external, and knowing how everyone plays nice in the sandbox Allows you to kind of oversee and think, ok, this is what we can do.
00:24:38.832 --> 00:24:41.818
Or, you know, for business savings.
00:24:41.818 --> 00:24:47.837
Do you know you're paying for four different Adobe licenses because your departments don't talk to one another and finance just approves it.
00:24:47.837 --> 00:24:50.067
So really kind of understanding and knowing.
00:24:50.067 --> 00:24:53.615
That is the next level on top of.
00:24:53.615 --> 00:24:55.699
Is your hardware up to date?
00:24:55.699 --> 00:24:56.808
Is your software up to date?
