We sat down with trailblazing leaders to learn about what they do, how they measure success, and what it means to be a leader today. Anne Genge is the CEO & Co-Founder of Alexio Corporation. Alexio makes the internet safer for small business owners and their clientele. With a focus on healthcare and small businesses, Alexio provides enterprise-class cyber-security to a segment of industry largely ignored and at risk due to lack of budget and solutions addressing their market. Read more interviews in this series here.
Why is now the time for your company to exist?
The security of personal information online is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Alexio makes the internet safer for small business owners and their clientele. There’s already over 1 billion stolen personal records for sale on the dark web, readily accessible to any cyber-criminal. With a focus on healthcare and small businesses, Alexio provides enterprise-class cyber-security to a segment of industry largely ignored and at risk, due to lack of budget. Delivered as a subscription, Alexio provides affordable protection for smaller networks and users, helping to safeguard them from risks like hacking, ransomware, data loss, and human error.
How do you measure success?
Most recently it’s been easy to measure success, as we just won a national business award for the work we are doing to protect sensitive health and business data and for making robust cyber-security affordable for all business sizes. On a personal level, I measure it by the number of people I can help ‘sleep at night’. Small businesses have enormous time and budgetary challenges, and they worry that every day there’s a new ‘horror story’ about a breached business or a business wiped out from ransomware. I value that I’m able to transfer to them a few easy strategies and tools to put the right protections in place. I love being able to demystify the subject and put it into terms they can understand so they can keep their business and their customers’, employees’ and personal information safer.
What does it mean to be a leader today?
To me, being a leader is about solving big problems. While doing that, it means gathering a team of people who believe in that too. I hire people to work ‘with’ me, not ‘for’ me and I try to be visible, accessible, and be a part of their growth, while also being open-minded to them being a part of mine. I am from a long line of entrepreneurs. I’ve seen others in my family succeed largely because they inspired people instead of managing them. It’s not something you can learn in school, it’s just a way of being. You must take the approach that ‘all ships rise together’ and that every person is valued.
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