Meet Keenan Cline of Lightbulb Networks in Anaheim

Today we’d like to introduce you to Keenan Cline.

Keenan, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
When I got my first IT job, it was on a help desk in a fairly large business. The reasons I had gotten into this field didn’t exist in this space. I had been excited by turning these old machines I found on the sidewalk every week on trash day into something cool and useful. That didn’t exist now with my career. If we needed a computer to do something we just bought one that would. I had to find something new to be happy about with my new career. I found that passion and happiness through helping individual people with their problems. When I moved further into my career into more of a Systems Administrator role, I no longer got that one on one personal interaction with people. It was more about running the stuff from behind the scenes. I had to find a new passion. I drew on my past experience in making those old machines super-efficient and pushing them to do things they were never meant to do.

I found passion in making the servers and systems run super well and organized. Then when I was promoted to Systems Engineer my role changed again. This time it was more of the overall view for the entire company. I got to draw on those past experiences and help all the people with my decisions. I was able to look at the entire system and network as a whole entity and make things more efficient or push them to do more. I used these skills on one of my first assigned clients as an engineer and in that first year I was able to save them 36 thousand dollars in licensing, increase their uptime, and reduce their monthly ticket count from 80 to 2 tickets per month. I got to see this business prosper because of my decisions. The quality of work-life for those employees improved greatly due to some of my decisions. I had found a new passion. This is my drive behind Lightbulb Networks. I built this company to find other people with this type of passion for others’ success and bring that to our clients.

Has it been a smooth road?
No, it really hasn’t been smooth at all. I had the concept for this business when I had just separated from my wife. I was in a rough place at the time and Looking forward to doing the business was something positive for me to dump myself into. I moved from Washington DC to Anaheim to be near my kids within six months of the separation. I was moving to a place I had never even visited and had to build a new life and so the business got put on hold. I met a guy and we became friends. He was new to the IT landscape but wanted to do a business. I told him about what I had been working on and we decided to partner up and start making it happen. Things were going well for a while but within six months he decided he was going to run off with all of our clients and leave me holding the bill for everything. That was a major setback obviously but emotionally I pretty deflated.

Within a few weeks, I was contacted by my ex-brother in law. He was trying to get a security training business off the ground and needed some quotes for IT services, installation and projected capabilities. Immediately I was excited and ready to go. I started bringing other people into the project as it grew larger, made some new friends, reconnected with old ones. We spent about four months virtually building out this project that was going to launch Lightbulb Networks. I got a call one day….the project fell through. They never got the funding and the project was done. Again, I was emotionally distraught. I kept working on this and brought in an old friend of mine to build this with me. I landed some side work for a company I could do after hours from my day job and eventually the owner wanted a proposal of services. The two companies he owned were almost enough to let me go full time if he were to accept the proposal. After leaving me hanging beyond the expiration of the proposal, he finally told me he thought it was too expensive and didn’t see the value in it. He did keep me on an as needed basis though.

Shortly after this one of the clients, my original partner ran off with called me up and wanted me back. Things were looking up. I kept working on the business and improving service. My old friend and I had a falling out from differences in what time commitment we both expected from and with each other. That was another big blow. I kept pushing through and eventually got the chance when the one client with two businesses got bought out by a larger entity. They really liked what I wanted to do for them but not the time frame I could do it in as I had a full-time job… so I jumped…I took that chance and quit my full-time job. It hasn’t been all downhill since but I have a great support structure and now have a great team working with me for the business. I know there will be more hurdles in the future but I feel I picked a great crew of employees that make every day a fantastic day.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Lightbulb Networks story. Tell us more about the business.
On paper, Lightbulb Networks is a Managed Services IT Company. In reality we are so much more than that. My experiences and passions throughout my career are driving this company to deliver much more value than a blank service. We don’t have clients, we have partners. Our top goal is the success of our partners. We specialize in small and medium businesses and deliver to them all the personal touches of IT staff they would hire directly. The obvious benefits are you get our entire team of level one, two, and three engineers for a fraction of the cost. With us, there is no stagnation of skills or exposure to new tech and services. The extra benefits are that we invest our time and efforts into making your goals a reality. We listen to your decision-makers and place you on a technology roadmap to make those goals come to fruition. We empower your staff through both organized and on the fly training. I think our staffs level of care and personal service is what sets us apart from other places. At the end of the day were a customer service company, we just happen to do IT. It’s our business to be your technology advisors. Our passion is your success.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
We’re already seeing the big shift. Malware, ransomware, security breaches, personally identifiable information gathering, phishing techniques, viruses are all increasing in frequency, sophistication, and availability. There are software companies out there that sell ransomware and other malicious software as a service. You can go buy this software complete with technical phone support and updates just like you would any other piece of legitimate software. With the skill level required to launch these attacks being so low, we have to react to the oncoming tidal wave of attacks.

Obviously, we do all the installation, maintenance, advisement of hardware and software systems both on premise and in the cloud but we are also driving towards IT Security as a major part of our platform. The conventional IT company was always separate from the Cyber Security space. I was told at a convention this year to think about Cyber Security as a swimming pool with a shallow end and a deep end. In this day and age, we HAVE to at least be in the pool. I think in the next 5-10 years we will see these two separate fields merge or at least overlap to the point where they almost occupy the same space.

Contact Info:

• Website: LightbulbNetworks.net
• Phone: 714-461-3619
• Email: info@lightbulbnetworks.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightbulb.20183/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lightbulbnetworks/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/LightbulbNetwrx

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