CX Without the BS 5/28/26
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Danny Reeves walked into his print shop on a Tuesday morning, twenty-three years, same Tuesday morning routine, coffee in his left hand, keys in his right. He flipped on the lights, the big presses started their warm-up cycle, and he could smell the ink, hear the boiler kicking on in the back, and he looked at his order log.

Empty. Same as Monday. Same as the Friday before that. Same as the entire month of October. Twenty-three years of running Reeves Press and Sign in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Danny couldn't remember the last time his phone rang with a new customer. What Danny didn't know that morning was that the worst part of his Tuesday was still coming.

What Danny didn't know was that two completely different things had been killing his business for the last six months, both invisible, both already inside his shop. And by two o'clock that afternoon, everything Danny missed was going to be coming crashing in on him all at once. And this is the story of how it happened and why it's already happening to thousands of small businesses just like Danny's right

now 



Speaker: Welcome to CX [00:01:00] Without the BS. I'm Brian Nichols. And before we get back to Danny, we need to set the stage because what happened in Owensboro at Reeves Press & Sign, it's not unique. It's the common business story in America in 2026, and nobody's telling it the right way. See, the IT industry will tell you that Danny had a cybersecurity problem, and they'll say he should have bought better firewalls.

And marketing people will tell you that Danny had an SEO problem. They'll say he should have invested in AI tools. And both groups will sell you their fix. Neither group will tell you the truth. The truth: Danny had two problems, and they were connected. And the only way you don't end up like Danny is if you understand both of them together

so today, two experts, two angles from the same blind spot.

Dr. Tamara Patzer is going to explain why Danny's phone stopped ringing six months before he noticed, and Keith Erwood is going to explain what actually happened at 2:00 that Tuesday afternoon. And by the end of this episode, you're gonna know exactly what Danny missed and exactly what to do this week so you don't miss it [00:02:00] too.

This is CX Without the BS. Let's go



Speaker: So let me give you Danny. Danny's dad opened Reeves Press back in 2003. He started with one machine in a 1,200 square foot rental on the south side of Owensboro.

20 years later, Danny took over, and there were three presses, eight employees, 6,200 square feet on old Calhoun Road. Real customers, real reputation, real money in the bank. Business cards for the realtors, banners for the high school football team, restaurant menus for the place downtown that does the fried catfish, church bulletins.

The whole local economy ran through Danny's shop at some point or another. And Danny did everything right. He had a website. He had a Google business profile. He paid for SEO every month. Same $400 retainer his dad had been paying since 2014. He had insurance. He had backups. He had an MSP checking his network.

He paid for the compliance package. He thought he was covered.

And then in the spring [00:03:00] of 2025, his phone started ringing less. It wasn't dramatic, not all at once, just less. May was off about 10%, June by another 15, and by August, his order log had 30% fewer new customers than the same month the year before. So Danny did what any small business owner would do. He called his marketing guy, and the marketing guy ran a report.

Google rankings, solid. Top three for print shop Owensboro. Number one for business cards, Davies County. Everything looked fine on paper, so why wasn't his phone ringing? that's the first thing Danny didn't understand,

And here's where the industry got it wrong for Danny. Danny's marketing guy was running twenty nineteen's playbook in twenty twenty-six. The Google SEO ranking didn't matter anymore because Danny's future customers, they weren't on Google. They were on ChatGPT, they were on Claude, they were on Gemini.

They were asking AI assistants, "Who are the best print [00:04:00] shops in Owensboro?" And the AI had never heard of Reaves Press and Sign. Meanwhile, his MSP was running the security playbook from twenty twenty. Endpoint protection, patch management, compliance checkbox, done. Both vendors were doing their jobs, both vendors were getting paid every month, and both vendors were watching Danny's business die in slow motion and selling him solutions for problems he didn't have.

Sounds harsh, but stick with me, because this is what every SMB owner in America is dealing with right now. They just don't know it yet. So let me bring in Dr. , Tamara Patzer to explain the first half of what was killing Danny's business

Speaker 6: So for the past, , what? Oh my goodness, 26 years, I have been mashing traditional media with AI and social media, and right now, , we've had so many changes in artificial intelligence, [00:05:00] ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, all of them, and they are now the new gatekeeper.

They are the gatekeeper who will tell a person seeking information who is the expert and why you should choose one person. The blue links where you have 10 different choices are gone. Clickability has been reduced by more than 50%. People now will talk to their phone or device- And ask real questions and AI suggestibility, I actually coined the term in May of 2025 because when I was doing my research, I was going, "Well, that sounds like AI is suggesting."

And I wanna make a s- key distinction. AI suggests, it does not recommend. AI can only suggest because it's [00:06:00] using real information. It only sees entities and verifiable factual information, no emotional.

Speaker: Did you catch what she just said? AI is not a tool, it's the gatekeeper. And while Danny's marketing guy was celebrating his Google rankings every month, AI was quietly sending Danny's customers to competitors across the river in Evansville, a competitor that ranked worse than Danny on Google, but better in the only place that mattered now.

And it gets worse for Danny because the AI didn't just stop sending him customers, it started telling people who did ask about him that Reeves Press in Owensboro was a sign repair company, or that they were closed on Saturdays when they weren't, or worse, it would surface a different business with a similar name in Tennessee and recommend that one instead.

And this is what Tammy calls identity collision

Speaker 6: Nobody could ever take your identity from you because that's a big issue, identity collision, where AI will go out and mismatch you [00:07:00] with somebody else, say that you have credentials you don't have, put your credentials with somebody else, all based on your name.

AI, said I was a engineer with a degree from some Florida university based on my first name. I don't have an engineering degree. I have a mass communications degree. 

Speaker: Identity collision. That phrase is going to age really well over the next few years because right now, an AI somewhere is pulling up the wrong version of you, crediting your work to a stranger, sending your customers somewhere else, and you have no idea it's happening.

That's what was happening to Danny for six straight months. Slow disappearance, invisible to his own town. But here's the thing about Danny's story. If AI invisibility was the only problem he had, the print shop might have survived. Slowly bleeding customers is bad, but it's survivable. The reason Reeves Press and Sign isn't open anymore is what happened at two o'clock that Tuesday afternoon



Speaker: Danny was in his office and the shop foreman [00:08:00] walked in, his face white as a ghost, saying, "Sir, all the presses are down." All three machines at the same time in the middle of a job? Danny ran out to the floor and every press control panel had the same screen. It was a black background, red text, a ransomware demand, forty-seven thousand dollars in Bitcoin or the machines stay locked forever.

Yeah. Danny called his MSP and the MSP confirmed. The attack came in through a vendor portal that Danny used to order ink, a vendor portal his MSP had told him was secure. So Danny did what you'd do. He called his insurance agent, and the insurance agent put him on hold for two hours. And while that was happening, his customers started calling.

The ones with orders due that week, the ones whose business cards, their banners, restaurant menus, church bulletins, all in queue, all locked behind ransomware. And Danny tried to answer his phones, but his phones ran through the same network that his presses ran [00:09:00] through and the same network that the attack ran through.

It was the same network the MSP took offline to contain the breach. So now eight employees are standing on the shop floor, three machines down, phones down, insurance on hold, customers calling other print shops because Reeves wasn't picking up. And the part most people miss, because I see it firsthand on the unified communication side, is that the disaster isn't always the cyber attack itself.

The disaster is being unreachable while the cyber attack is being handled.

See, for the day job, that's why at Level 365 we built a platform so your phones don't share a fate with your network. Month-to-month contracts, disaster tolerant architecture because when the Tuesday afternoon hits, your customers don't care about your problem, they just need to reach you.

So with all that landing on Danny at once, here's Keith Erwood, business continuity expert on what was actually killing Danny's chances of recovery

Speaker 3: Yeah, that's really everywhere and almost, everybody [00:10:00] from the small business, it's like, "I don't have to worry about that. It's never gonna happen to me," all the way through the really big companies where, it's a different mindset in the fact that, "Well, we're prepared enough that we don't need to, we don't need to do these extra things, and we don't need to worry about that."

So it's kind of- It's in, across entire business sizes, across all sectors, whether you're a small mom and pop all the way to Fortune 100 companies. like I won't say who it was. I, I interviewed for, like a contracting job in, in cybersecurity, many years ago, and it was a company that had a previous breach, and they were looking to shore up their cybersecurity, initiatives.

And one of the things... they didn't hire me. Wanna be, state that up front. But they didn't really like my approach in that I believe in going beyond what the standards say you should. and you, with the background you have, you might agree with this also, is basically if you [00:11:00] just do what just the standards, like just check the box, it's basically a roadmap on how the bad guys can get into your company, right?

Exactly. It's like it's obvious, but, they didn't wanna do that. and then sure enough, within two or three months after that, they were breached again. 

Speaker: Danny was running a small business with a small business security budget, but mentally he had the same mindset as a Fortune 500 CISO. He checked the boxes, he paid the retainers, and he thought that was enough. But Keith just told you good enough isn't good enough.

And once the attack hits, the clock that matters isn't the ransomware deadline, it's the cash flow

Speaker 3: Because- As you mentioned, right? So like a disruption can hit, or there could be a technology outage, right? That happens and could knock stuff offline for a couple hours, a day or two. But once you're out for three days, a week, or even longer, and especially small businesses, like once they're, once they have a disruption for about a [00:12:00] week, they're really facing hard times because their cash flow is completely disrupted.

And once that happens, they don't really have necessarily all the tools in place to survive beyond that. 

Speaker 2: One week. That's how long Danny had. His insurance claim took 15 days to be reviewed. The ransomware payment wasn't covered. Exclusion in the policy he renewed in 2024 and never read. Page 11. The press downtime cost him $73,000 in lost orders that first week alone. Three of his eight employees walked because their paychecks were going to be late, and they had bills too. By the second Tuesday, Reeves Press and Sign was technically still open, but by the third Tuesday, the doors, they were locked for the last time

Speaker: and this is where things get weird. See, I've been looking at this for the past few weeks. I had two interviews, two experts, two completely different worlds, AI gatekeeping over here, and then disaster recovery over there, and then it hit me. What happened to Danny wasn't two [00:13:00] worlds, it was one thing.

See, the attackers who hit Danny and his presses, they didn't pick him out of the phone book. They didn't randomly hit Owensboro. They used AI to find businesses that were already weakened. They scraped review sites, social signals, content publication patterns, vendor portal exposure.

They built lists of small businesses whose digital footprint was decaying. Translation: businesses that were going invisible to AI were suddenly becoming very visible to attackers. The same blind spot that was killing Danny's customer pipeline was painting a target on his back for ransomware crews.

These weren't two threats. They were the same threat exploiting the same blind spot bad actors have already figured this part out, and they're using AI to fake credentials, to clone authority figures, to build fake doctor accounts to push supplements, write spear-phishing emails that read like an actual CFO, your CFO, research your business and craft attacks that bypass every checkbox that you bought.

[00:14:00] Meanwhile, your competitors are using AI to out-position you in search. They out-publish you in content, outrank you in the AI suggestions that route customers away from you and towards them. The threat surface didn't just expand, it mutated. And your existing vendors, the ones who were watching Danny's business die in real time, most of them are selling you yesterday's playbook for tomorrow's problem.

So how do you make sure you're not Danny?.



Speaker: Five questions. Doesn't matter if you're a technology advisor, an IT director, a small business owner, it's the same five questions, and these are the five questions that Danny didn't ask, the ones his vendors didn't volunteer. Question one: Does AI know I exist, and does it know who I actually am? Google yourself and look at the results.

Do they look right? That's nothing. Ask Claude or ChatGPT, "Who's the best blank in your city?" and see if you come up. If you [00:15:00] don't, you got Danny's problem. Question two: If my business stops operating for one week, do I have the cash flow to survive? Not, "Will my insurance pay out?" Will the bills get paid while the claim is being processed?

Different question, asked Danny. Question three: What's my single point of failure, and who profits when it fires? Danny's was the network. His presses and phones on the same backbone. One attack took both down. So find yours, name it, and plan for it. Question four: Have I read my own insurance policy in the last twelve months?

Not, have I paid it. Read it cover to cover. The exclusion that killed Danny was on page eleven. Question five: If a bad actor used AI to impersonate me to my best customer right now, would my customer be able to tell? And if the answer is no, you've got a brand integrity problem AI just created, and you haven't priced it into your risk model.

See those five questions, if you can answer them honestly, they'll tell you exactly where you're [00:16:00] exposed. And if you can't answer them, or worse, if you don't like the answer, that's the conversation you have to have with your vendors or your advisors this week, not next quarter. Because Danny had three quarters of warning,

and he didn't see any of this coming



Speaker: So \what do you do if you're a small business owner, run those five questions. Take an hour, and don't outsource the thinking. Do it yourself first, then bring in help. If you're an IT director, stop selling your CFO AI productivity. Start selling resilience. The C-suite question isn't how do we use AI?

It's how do we survive being invisible to AI and being attacked by AI at the same time? If you're a technology advisor, this is your moment. Your clients are sitting in Danny's chair right now, and they don't need another vendor pitch. They need a translator, someone who can tell them what's coming and what to actually do about it.

That's the relationship that survives the next ten years.

And if you're none of [00:17:00] the above, if you're just an end customer trying to figure out who to trust, ask folks selling to you, " Hey, what happens to my business if both of these threats hit at once?" And if they can't answer, well, find someone who can



Speaker: So whatever happened to Danny Reeves? you can probably guess. Reeves Press and Sign is closed. The building on old Calhoun Road has been having a for sale sign out front for the past few months. Danny's working a sales job for a regional packaging company now. 23 years of family business gone in three Tuesdays.

But see, Danny's story isn't unique.

Right now in America, the next Danny is sitting in his office looking at an empty order log on a Tuesday morning thinking it's just a slow week. It's not a slow week. It's the start of a clock, and the only question is whether you can hear it ticking. And if this episode hits, share it with one person who needs to hear it.

Send it to a technology advisor who's been pitching you stuff that doesn't quite fit. [00:18:00] Send it to the small business owner you're worried about. Send it to the IT director who's been quietly told to figure out AI.



Speaker: And here's the biggest piece of BS that I see in the industry right now, and that's the same AI that made Danny invisible, well, it could have saved him. Same tool. It could have told him his pipeline was drying up six months early. It could have flagged that vendor portal before the attack came through.

It could have watched his cash flow and screamed at him in May. AI isn't the villain in Danny's story, and it isn't the hero either. It's a tool. That's it. A hammer doesn't care if you build a house or smash your thumb, but every vendor out there right now is selling you AI like it's PFM, pure effing magic.

Buy this, plug it in, and watch your problems disappear. No. Anybody selling AI as a magic to-do everything fix is selling you the exact lie Danny's marketing guy was selling him. AI is a tool. [00:19:00] Treat it like one, and it'll work for you. Treat it like magic, and you'll end up looking at an empty order log on Tuesday morning wondering what happened.

All right. This is CX Without the BS. I'm Brian Nichols, and we'll see you next time