What Makes Me Tick
Like many in the IT and Information Security fields, I started at a very young age. I took my first PC apart when I was eight because of a hungry curiosity about how things work. I wanted to know what each piece was and what its function was. I opened my first business as a break-fix operation in 1996 at the age of fourteen. In 2001, I converted that business into a Managed Services Provider and began offering security services, including penetration testing. Our clients covered healthcare, finance, education, industrial, retail, logistics, and local government.
By 2013, I had acquired several other businesses and the management time had begun to take its toll. I was doing less of the fun, hands-on IT and security work that I loved and more of the endless managerial paperwork that I had come to hate. After unrelated personal events, I sold the business and got back into the fight. In early 2014, I moved out of state to work for a large insurance company. At the end of 2014, I was offered a position with a large regional energy company supporting roughly 40,000 employees. It was a contract position and the health insurance was abysmal, so when I was offered another position with a small local municipality and excellent health benefits, I jumped at the chance.
As things go in government, everything changed after the 2016 election. New leadership came in, and five of the seven IT employees, myself included, moved on. Since November 2017, I have held several information-security positions for Hibbett Sports and JD Sports Group North America, supporting a retailer with thousands of stores and tens of thousands of employees. That is the professional story in broad strokes. I have been in this field professionally for nearly thirty-five years, and I am still only scratching the surface of what is out there to learn.
The name deserves an explanation. Neocount is a reference to one of my favorite characters from a book series I read as a child: The Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman. I have lost count of how many times I have read it. Phoenix has a more personal origin. The town where my business was located, Milledgeville, Georgia, lost factories, state prisons, the state mental hospital, and a power plant within a relatively short period. In a town of roughly 56,000 people, that was a major economic hit and one of the forces behind selling the business.
During that same period, I lost several close friends as well as my father. It was a dark time, and part of the reason I left the area. I burned down my old life and built a new one out of the ashes. That is where Phoenix comes from. It is a reminder that no matter how badly things go, you can reinvent yourself and come out better for it.
So there you have it. I am nobody special, just a guy with a passion for technology who keeps following that passion. When I say that I have played with a technology or product, I mean it literally. Some people consider it work. I consider it play. If you do not love what you do, you are doing something wrong. How can you give everything you are to something if you do not love it?