What It Takes to Win Privacy Budget Approval 

Intro 0:01

Welcome to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast. Like any good marriage, we will debate, evaluate, and sometimes quarrel about how privacy and security impact business in the 21st century. Hi,

Jodi Daniels 0:21

Jodi Daniels here. I’m the founder and CEO of Red Clover Advisors, a certified women’s privacy consultancy. I’m a privacy consultant and certified informational privacy professional, providing practical privacy advice to overwhelmed companies. Hi,

Justin Daniels 0:36

I am Justin Daniels. I am a shareholder and corporate M&A and tech transaction lawyer at the law firm Baker Donelson, advising companies in the deployment and scaling of technology. Since data is critical to every transaction, I help clients make informed business decisions while managing data privacy and cybersecurity risk. And when needed, I lead the legal cyber data breach response brigade.

Jodi Daniels 1:01

And this episode is brought to you by. No one can hear you put a hand on my head like a dog, Red Clover Advisors. You just clearly miss Basil. We help companies to comply with data privacy laws and establish customer trust so that they can grow and nurture integrity. We work with companies in a variety of fields, including technology, e-commerce, professional services, and digital media. In short, we use data privacy to transform the way companies do business. Together, we’re creating a future where there’s greater trust between companies and consumers. To learn more and to check out our best-selling book, Data Reimagined: Building Trust One Byte at a Time, visit RedCloverAdvisors.com. Well, hello, hello,

Justin Daniels 1:42

hello.

Jodi Daniels 1:42

Very quiet today.

Justin Daniels 1:44

Oh, just I guess that’s what is today a Wednesday

Jodi Daniels 1:47

all day.

Justin Daniels 1:48

Okay.

Jodi Daniels 1:49

I hate when people used to do that joke to me all day. Now I do it all the time. Well, we’re very excited because we have Adam Binks, who is the CEO of Syrenis, a company that helps large data sensitive organizations turn consent and preference management into a commercial advantage-not a 20-page notice nobody reads, but a real preference architecture that improves retention, engagement, and audit readiness. Their customers include Fortune 500 brands across financial services, healthcare, insurance, publishing, and automotive, and they recently launched U.S. operations to support enterprise customers across North America. And Adam, we are so excited that you are here with us today.

Adam Binks 2:31

Well, thank you very much for for having me. And I just like to say that was a fantastic introduction. You packaged up the business way better than I do, and I’d like to invite you into every sales pitch moving forward,

Jodi Daniels 2:42

happy to come. All right, Justin, kick us off.

Justin Daniels 2:47

So, Adam, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your career journey?

Adam Binks 2:52

Well, how long have you got? Let’s let’s let’s take it back. So, I started off in in the world of tech with IT and telecoms back in in 2000, left school, joined a local internet service provider. I’d been into tech since I was about 12 years years of age, breaking the family computer, costing my mum and dad a fortune, getting it fixed, but found this this passion and love for technology. So I went, as I say, I went through my earlier career in in the world of of connectivity, building networks around the UK before I moved into software for a very short period of time. Went to work for an American software company. You know, really taking it back the the days of terminal emulation, bringing legacy systems into into modern day infrastructure. And I was actually probably a little bit too young at the time to understand what some of those systems were, like AS 400 VAX systems and whatnot, but got great exposure into into that world, and then I went back into into the ISP and telecoms world for for a bit before I decided it was time to to go and have a go and and build my own business. Um, so 2004 started my my own company, which actually we we grew quite successfully. It was in it was in the telecom space. It was all focused around actually content filtering and making the internet a safer place for for kids online, which believe it or not was a massive flop back at the time. the the the The world wasn’t ready for for what we’d produced. People actually, you know, one of the biggest things for for internet usage was was online gaming, you know, other stuff, and people people weren’t really into film. Through what was coming into the house until actually much later down the line, we really started to see a shift for that in about 2007, 2008, certainly in in the UK market, and we pivoted that business quite quickly, still in the in the telecom space, and and became a wholesale provider of of internet connectivity. You know, we built this great platform across the UK, and decided to sell it to other local internet service providers. So that was that was kind of my first success story, shall we say? I exited that business successfully in 2009, and then I kind of took a little bit of time out. Actually, my my wife has got a really big career as well in the technology space, and she was sort of coming through up her own journey at that point. So I I backed off a bit to to support her with the kids while while she accelerated her own career path. And before I got really bored of of school runs and stuff in In about 2012, 2013, I made an investment in in a listed business on the on the London Stock Exchange back then, and met some other great people, and we went in as a as a leadership team. We took control of that business, and that was that took me for away from the connectivity and and more into domain names, emails, web hosting, that kind of thing. But we took that business. It wasn’t doing very well, but it had a great institutional investment investor base. You know, it was kind of a stack it high, sell it cheap business model, which back in in those days, 2012, 2013, was almost a race to the bottom. You know, you had your big players on the market then with your your go daddies and your one on ones of the world, and that was really my break into managed services, IT managed services, and also a bit that I kind of skipped over a couple of other businesses that I worked for in in the interim period got me heavily into into M and A, so a bit of a crossover into into your world, Justin. So we decided that we were going to use the listed business to build a major contender for the UK managed services space and and take a load of market share. So I joined that business.

Adam Binks 7:33

I joined the board of that business as chief operating officer, and then eventually took over as chief exec in in 2018, and that was I mean that’s now 10 year part of my career was a really really really big part of it. So we did nine or 10 acquisitions of of other businesses. Started off with kind of the infrastructure as a service business to give us the platform. Then we bought a consulting business to get the professional services side and the IT support desk. That gave us all the foundations for what we were trying to do. I took that business from from one and a half million sterling to 23 million over the course of of that. It was just just short a 10 year period, and I exited that business again quite successfully in June 2023. So just over three years ago, yeah, it feels like it was yesterday, but again, gave me huge exposure to to the world of M and A and institutional investor bases, kind of the end-to-end tech lifecycle from you know plugging it in, connecting it, and making it work, right through to the services that run on the platform, coupled into into SaaS, went through the transformation of on-prem infrastructure to to the cloud journey, and took many a large corporate organization on that journey, so yeah, it was great. And then fast forward to to being CEO of of a privacy tech business, that was a really interesting story. The investors of this business, one of whom who I who I know very very well, when I came out of my last company, he took me out for a lunch and sort of asked me, you know, what your plans for for moving forward. And I said, well, you know, I’ve done a couple of exec gigs. I’m probably done now. I’m I’m going to go and give back to the community and and take some advisory roles, non exec seats, help other businesses grow, and that was met with the Adam. You’re far too young for that. I’ve got your next gig for you. You know, my intention was to was to have quite a long period of time off from exact life. It’s it’s quite stressful running a a London Stock Exchange listed business for 10 years. It takes its toll on you. You don’t realize until you sort of come out the other end. And when I was introduced to Syrenis, I mean, my first thought coming from sort of fast-paced MSP land, what the hell do I know about privacy? And and it was nowhere near enough. You know, I was aware of GDPR. I was part of the team that implemented all our GDPR controls in the in the MSP world, but it kind of didn’t think that I knew enough about this space in order to to grow this business. But for 18 months, I went on a journey with the business to sort of understand what this market really looked like. You know, I didn’t get consent and preferences, until I really started to to dig deep and understand it. To me, preference was just a check box on a website. You know, send me the marketing newsletter and and don’t send me don’t send me your latest offers because I’m not interested and I’m never going to buy from you, kind of thing. And and make sure you honor that. But yeah, you know, you still get a bunch of junk email coming through every single day, and you know, I also I understood what cookie trackers did and all that stuff, and I just thought, yeah, you know, it’s really important for this stuff because marketeers need it in order to understand the attribution and and invest their marketing dollars in the right places, so you know you’re never going to really control that. However, fast forward to to today, after much research and really starting to understand that there’s a huge, huge market for for what we do as a business. I finally agreed to join the board of Syrenis in October 24, and then I took the chief exec seat in February 25.

Adam Binks 11:50

Again, that feels like it was just yesterday, but we’re we’re almost 18 months into that journey now, and that brings me here today as kind of becoming a known figure in this privacy world from a nobody that knew nothing about it, and you know, it’s it’s a decision that I look back on, and and I’m delighted that I made it, and delighted that I became part of this world, because it’s fantastic, and and actually, it’s really, really, really interesting.

Jodi Daniels 12:19

Well, some of the challenges that companies have is budget, especially for tech. So you’re a technology company. I am sure you’re you’re talking to companies all day long who really need the software for consent management, making sure they’re complying with various laws, and yet trying to get that budget is a little bit of a challenge. So I’m curious if you can share how do you think privacy leaders could connect what’s really a privacy technology investment to their company’s revenue and broader business goals?

Adam Binks 12:54

I mean, you’ve just used the perfect word that I wish the whole market understood. This is an investment. It’s not a cost, and you know, part of my research coming into this space, as as as I say, the the the new guy on the block, shall we say, was what have we done in the past? How have we done it? How have we managed to achieve the success? But more importantly, why have we not won the deals that we probably should have won along the way? And one thing that I found very very quickly is that privacy teams in any scale of business, you know, Fortune 500 right down to sort of mid market SME kind of business, privacy teams are massively underfunded. They they don’t get the attention that they deserve from from the C suite. But if I look at that on the flip side, as to well, why do I think that is being being the CEO of of multiple other businesses prior to coming into this journey? Why would the C-suite not listen, not take it seriously? And you know, it’s it’s the same thing every time, right? You’re looking for you’re looking for return on investment. Every CEO, every CFO understands that every business has got a cost of doing business, and there is systems and platforms that you need to invest in, and they are usually decisions that are taken on on an annual budget review basis. Right, what can we afford to do this year? And then they’re they’re aligned with risk. What’s the risk profile that the business faces, and and why should we spend these dollars? You know that we could be investing in marketing dollars or or in sales growth or whatnot. Um. So, you know, the key thing for me is privacy teams need to adapt themselves in order to help the. C suite understand the value that privacy tech can bring to to a business to an organization, and the biggest transition for me in our own sales pitch, you know, and I’ve noticed our competitors starting to do similar things. It’s just take this away completely from a privacy cell, privacy tech is is enabling many other functions in in a business, usually marketing, right? And everybody wants to market to to their customers more. They want to talk to the customers more, and if you talk to your customers in in a fashion which a they understand and b information that they want to hear about because they’ve told you that you can start to translate that to return on investment. So $1 spent on privacy tech equals I’m going to make it up. Don’t quote me on this. $10 back through the through the sales funnel, so that was kind of the the biggest pivot for us as an organization in helping privacy leaders, chief privacy officers, you know, privacy office, helping them translate the investment into privacy tech into other areas of the business. How does this enable other parts of the business to do things better than than what they already do? How does it enable better communications with customers and prospects to make sure that you get more inflow of them? You know, we’ve all received an email that we didn’t want to receive and hit the unsubscribe button. That’s the last thing you want in this world.

Jodi Daniels 16:43

Yeah. So one of the things I really liked that you said, Adam, was also that you’re connecting to the different parts of the business and thinking about what are the risks of CFO, what is the risk of the marketing team, what is the risk of privacy. And I just wanted to really emphasize for our listeners that understanding each different group and how you can talk to what is most concerning to them will really help you get that buy-in for the investment that you need for your privacy technologies.

Adam Binks 17:10

So, if you take the three groups, marketing is is focused on ROI. I put $1 in. How many do I get back? The CFO is concerned about what is the provision that he needs to make on the balance sheet for risk, and risk can be many different things. But you know, in the in the scenario that we’re talking about now, we’ll talk that talk about it in terms of a fine for doing something wrong in breaching a regulation, and then privacy. Their whole thesis is is to manage and prevent that risk in the business. So I think once you start talking to those three functions in in language in which they can understand and relate to on a daily basis, that’s when you really start to get the buy in from from the C suite, and you bring those three personas together in a cohesive fashion to work together to achieve the same goal, right? So, your CPO they want to eliminate the risk from breaching regulation. Your CFO doesn’t want the financial impact of breaching regulation. Although, you know, I will caveat that with most CFOs, most businesses understand you’re always going to run with an element of risk that’s factored into your balance sheet. It’s just you want to quantify that cost, and if this chief privacy officer can help quantify that cost, you know, for example, if if we breach GDPR, we’re going to get hit with with a fine that’s equivalent to 4% of turnover, global turnover, which you know for Fortune 500 businesses is in the billions of dollars, but we can spend half a million, a million, $2 million to mitigate that risk. Then we’re really starting to talk about aligning our our thought processes there, and then you bring the chief marketing officer into that equation as well. You know they’re usually the ones with the budgets. They’re usually the ones with the with the biggest budgets and and some shall we say spur budget in there that can help fund these privacy initiatives. Look, I’m going to give you a platform that enables you to communicate with both existing customers and prospects with confidence, with trust, and on topics that they’re genuinely genuinely interested in. Then, actually, you’re going to get better opt-in rates. You’re going to get less opt-out. You’re going to market to a bigger base on on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, whatever it may be.

Jodi Daniels 20:08

That makes sense.

Justin Daniels 20:09

So, for a privacy leader preparing a budget request, what should they be measuring or communicating to demonstrate business value?

Adam Binks 20:19

So, I’ll come back to To return on investment, and and this is where it really helps bring in the other stakeholders that can help answer this question, right? And it’s different for every business, you know. You you see plenty of of things out there where you can build an ROI calculator, but it’s it’s really generic. I think for a business case to be successful is you’ve got to translate that into what you do and and how you do it. So you might want to bring sales into that. You’re going to want to bring finance into that. You’re going to want to bring marketing into it. Um, you want to spend some money, and you’ve got to look at the outcomes. You know, I touched earlier on in my previous answer about if I can communicate with a customer or a prospect better than than I did yesterday without this this privacy tech, what does that mean for me? What does the outcome look like? So you know, if I talk to a specific audience on a specific topic, who’ve all told me they want to receive that information. You know they’re genuinely interested in in knowing about that topic, and they’ve they’ve opted in to say I’m quite happy to receive weekly communications on this topic. Then you’ve got to go back and use the data, right? You’ve got to look at the historical performance of when a customer who is communicated with, let’s say, three times a month on a specific subject matter that they have told us they’re interested in, we typically get 7% higher spend from that user base in that period of of marketing activity, and if you build out that data, and you know, look, I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put it in there. I’m gonna talk about AI because if we didn’t talk about AI, it wouldn’t be 2026. Um, you can, you can use the AI to really help enable that business case and analyze the data. I mean, this is a great thing, right? Data is the new gold, and every business is sitting on on gold mines of data. But you you feed that data, you use the AI to to analyze the data with the use case that you’re talking about, coupled with the investment that you that you want to make, and hopefully that number that comes out at the top is in the green. You know, if you have this this technology enabled and you can increase opt in rates or spend rates by X percent just through clearer, better, more structured communications and data that you know you can Use confidently. That really helps build the business case. And when that goes into the budget approver, be it CFO, CEO, C-suite, whoever it may be, you talk to them in their own language. You give them a set of numbers. We’re going to spend X amount of dollars, but actually, we’re going to bring 10x that back in on the top line. It makes the business case so much easier.

Jodi Daniels 23:25

Knowing what you know, having been now in this privacy landscape for several years, we always like to ask, “What is your best personal privacy or security tip?

Adam Binks 23:40

This might be a bit geeky, however, I’m going to shoot my shot, and it’s one thing that I do myself: always use a unique email address for stuff that you subscribe to. You know, and I’m talking TV subscriptions, your Amazon subscription, your food takeaway subscription. because look, one of the things that none of us want is spam. The other thing that we don’t want to be part of is a data breach, and we have to be honest with ourselves. Data breaches happen day in, day out. They’re going to continue to do so. You know, businesses do everything they possibly can to prevent them most of the time, but nobody wants their inbox full of of junk. No one wants the the crazy emails coming through that some bot has picked up on from from a leaked data source. So you know you can find out where that data was leaked if you’re doing company X at your own personaldomain. com, and you can switch it off quite easily, change it to a new one. You know, it just makes it really well. I think it makes it really easy to keep on top of of your your inbox and and prevent the junk coming through. There’s loads of services out there that you can that you. Buy to help with that, you know, probably cost like $60 a year. Or we all know Gmails are free. You can sign up a Gmail for everything. I look, I get it. It sounds sounds a bit complicated, but I’ve over. I mean, I’ve done it for 20 plus years, I think, and I’ve found that really, really useful to to keep my keep my inbox clean and and keep my data protected because you know I’ve found myself in situations where emails have been leaked and they’ve ended up in the wrong place. You just switch it off and you spin up a new one.

Jodi Daniels 25:31

I’m curious: is there one of those paid services? I imagine some people might be interested. There may be two names that you might suggest people look into beyond just Gmail.

Adam Binks 25:41

I’m going to say Google it. I because I just do it myself with my own domain name. Yeah, you put me on the spot there. I wasn’t ready to promote anyone. That’s okay.

Jodi Daniels 25:50

Everyone, go and Google. We have heard that suggestion before.

Adam Binks 25:54

Damn, I thought it was going to be original. It’s

Jodi Daniels 25:57

okay. It’s not as common.

Adam Binks 25:59

Good.

Justin Daniels 26:00

So when you’re not doing all this great work in privacy, what do you like to do for fun?

Adam Binks 26:07

When I’m not doing all of this, I mean, look, I’m I’m CEO of a privacy tech growth business. You know, what more could I be doing for fun than than this? This this is this is my life at the moment, and I know that sounds really, really sad, but I do enjoy it. I enjoy business. I enjoy growing businesses. The the expansion into the U.S. market has been fantastic. You know, we’ve come a really long way in a in a very short space of time. But I suppose outside of that, when I get time, not as much as I used to. I’ve got a private pilot’s license, so I like to get out and fly the plane every now and again, but really don’t get enough time to to do it these days.

Jodi Daniels 26:48

Well, Adam, we’re really grateful that you came to join us. If people would like to connect with you and also learn more about Syrenis, where should they go?

Adam Binks 26:57

Hit me up on LinkedIn. Just type in Adam Binks. I’m one of the only ones on there. It’s not a very common name, but yeah, just LinkedIn. No other social media networks.

Jodi Daniels 27:07

Amazing. Well, thank you again for joining. We really appreciate it.

Adam Binks 27:11

Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Outro 27:17

Thanks for listening to the She Said Privacy/He Said Security podcast. If you haven’t already, be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes and check us out on LinkedIn. See you next time.