Automation, the Human Touch, and Why Every Business Needs an Intern with Dondre Lawson

In this episode of The Breakout Moment, Christina May talks with technology entrepreneur Dondre Lawson about how AI, automation, and emerging talent are transforming the way businesses grow. From building lean, tech-enabled companies to creating opportunities through internship programs, Dondre shares practical insights on using technology strategically, developing future-ready teams, and finding scalable ways to drive growth in today's rapidly changing business landscape.

Christina May: Dondre. So happy to have you here.

Dondre Lawson: Thank you.

CM: Welcome to The Breakout Moment. So we were just talking about everything from Korean food trucks to business ownership, loneliness to what we're, you know, going to do when we retire. But I am so excited to talk about your story today. Especially in the space that you're in. And really dive into the business of tech. So, why don't you give us a little bit of background as far as you're starting out, and what that looked like in the beginning for you?

DL: Yeah, so I've been a nerd since day one.

CM: You've been a nerd? I love that.

DL: Since day one. I joined the Army at 18, right after high school, and I've been doing technology since that time. Everything that I know and touch and breathe my day to day is all about technology. Cyber security, on-premises or on premises issues. All the way down to your small mom and pop shops to very large government contracts. And that's what I've been doing for a while. I think we're in a very exciting time for technology. I think people can accelerate and grow businesses really fast with just technology and not people. So I'm excited to see where everything goes.

CM: Yeah, I know how I feel about tech right now and just kind of almost feel like I'm white knuckling it some days. I hate to admit it, but that's what it feels like. I can't imagine what that must feel like for you, being somebody that you know. It's something that I touch every day, but it's not a specialty. But when it's your actual business, what that velocity must feel like?

DL: Yeah. I think a lot for what you guys do in the marketing aspect is very powerful because marketing, at least for me, before, you know, could be comprised of there's a logo, there's a graphic design artist, there's someone, there's a website builder.

CM: Yep.

DL: You know, there's someone who's going to be able to do, you know, snail mail, right? Back in the day.

CM: Oh, yeah. Hey, that's still work sometimes.

DL: Right. And now it's changed to where if folks aren't familiar with Midjourney and Midjourney is one of the new popular AI tools, or people pushing out marketing campaigns, or you can run an entire marketing campaign. You can integrate that into MailChimp. For like, less than, you know, 50 bucks a month. You can constantly, on a schedule, send people updates about what you're doing. And so you know, being able to stand and build that out alone, to market your services, is kind of where everyone is going. I work for the government now.

CM: That's very different.

DL: 90% of our revenue comes from the government. And I think now with recent changes, the government, government contracts, people in those contracts, contractors are now also becoming abreast of some of these technologies as well. Because everyone, especially business owners, they want to do things as fast as they possibly can.

CM: Yes. Yes, they do. So, kind of digging into that a little bit. You know, yes, the government is definitely there. I've always to be like, oh, they always lag a little bit. You know, we work a lot, in traditional spaces. Same thing. There's a lag there, not bleeding edge. So manufacturers, distributors, and construction. But to your point, with the tech, I think it's an interesting space because, yes, you can do a lot of it, but you still need to know what you're doing. And I think that's the piece that gets missed so often in anything, is that they oversimplify. They make it seem like, oh, just buy this piece of software, and it will do it all for you. You still need to know who your audience is and what you want to say. Like you still have to project, right? And have that strategic thinking, on the front end for sure.

DL: Which you now have prompt engineering jobs.

CM: Yep. You do, that's a new one.

DL: I think I just saw someone advertising one that was like 120,000 a year.

CM: Yeah.

DL: Prompt engineering and for youth, which I'm big on. Which we'll talk about. Today's youth are in such a dynamic place to be able to grow and scale companies where they don't ever have to go into an office. You can drop ship political flags, and I'm not going to say which-

CM: Doesn't matter.

DL: You could drop ship political flags, and you could be living in Florida, and a house off the water, and you own a should be happening. The entire company is automated. I was talking to you earlier. There is a GLP. Drugs are super popular right now. The shots, everything is super popular. There's a guy. His name is slipping my mind right now, but he started a company called GLP drove, the pills. Two-person business, 2 billion plus in revenue. The next closest business is him as hims and hers. Similar revenue with 2,400 employees. So the person who constructed and built this business that's completely automated. The entire business is automated, right? Someone goes to the website, and they get hit with marketing, probably from Midjourney. Midjourney does marketing. It's that marketing funnel that turns that lead into a sale. And good marketers know. Yep. Marketing doesn't convert to sales and marketing. Conversion leads to sales. Leads convert to a meaning and maybe you make the sale. But now people are, and I think it was a change from Covid, right? Covid is over. It's still there. But the correlation between how someone interacts to buy things really drastically changed because of Covid. Now for me, I like my shoes. I'm a shoe guy, so I want to go to the store, put the shoes on. Some of my friends are like, we'll just order it. If it's wrong, we'll just send it back. And so people are ordering thousands of things off of Amazon and sending them back.

CM: Yeah. And then returning them.

DL: And that's the space that we're in. So these guys are able to build a $2 billion company with one person for the longest time. And then he brought his brother in and he's one of the largest sales, has the largest sales for top drugs to people. And that is what the industry, at least in tech, is going towards. You see massive layoffs. You're seeing people that are just oh my job that I was working in and doing like, you know, marketing or I was a logo person. You got you got next. And people need to be very careful and creative about if you're a marketing agency or if you're a tech company or if you're doing something else.

CM: Especially if you're anything in that management space.

DL: Management spaces, operations.

CM: HR, accounting, legal,

DL: It can get automated.

CM: Yes it can.

DL: Right. And that's where I'm moving.

CM: Yeah. It is absolutely where we move in. You know, it's funny you should mention, I always remind everyone they're just like, “oh AI”, and I'm so sick of hearing that term. Everybody else is at this point, but I remind them we've had tools and automation like this for a very long time. It's just now advanced and became way more accessible. But we've been working with different versions of automation tools for years now. So it's not new. It's the acceleration and the advancement of it is really what we're what we're looking at.

DL: I don't remember what year it was, but Siri has been around for a long time.

CM: Yep.

DL: Very, very early age of artificial intelligence. Before just good software engineering. You know, if there's a voice talking to you and then based off of what you give it for the prompt, it’s then going into these database tables or these files. It will then present information to you. And it wasn't really changing anything on its own. So now it's where we are. You can open your phone, and to everyone out there, it seems like every conference we go to, it's like, “oh I need to use it for my business”. What is your use case? What do you want to use it for? Do you want to use AI for grant or proposal writing? Do you want to use ai, so you can learn about marketing? Do you want to use AI to write yourself a book? I am a big music guy. I like a bunch of different music. Some of my friends are artists, who are like I won't use AI, and I'm like, okay, I get it, that's fine. But, if you're having writer's block, you're having an issue, it's a tool that you can use to get ideas from. We did a seminar a couple of weeks ago, and someone said, “I want to use the AI for my business”, and I said, how? “Open Claude or ChatGPT or whatever you're using, and ask it.” Start talking to it like it's a person. Don't go to a marketing firm. Go to you.

CM: Thank you.

DL: Don't go to a marketing firm and say I need help with marketing. Ask the AI what tools are out there for you to automate marketing? I think where firms come into this is how fast you can do it versus how fast someone else can do it. And I think that is what's important.

CM: Yeah, I think there's a balance. You can tell me what your thoughts are. A lot of people are like, oh, there's not going to be any more lawyers. There's not going to be any more accountants, there's not gonna be any more HR professionals, or ops people or marketing people. and I'm like, no, that's not the case. We're not all just going to go to the wayside and become bots. That's going to shift. But we're not all going to go away.

DL: Yeah. I think, there's an early stage, or maybe they're at that early stage now, but there's a tool called Harvey. They named it, and it's supposed to be like your legal AI bot, your legal chatbot. The AI didn't go through the bar. AI didn't study and take the bar. What I can foresee is, let's say I get arrested and I'm before a judge, and I'm sitting in front of a judge, and the DEA or the district attorney or the prosecutor is like, hey, judge, here's a synopsis that AI wrote to give you cliff notes about the situation. You don't have to read through this entire law court document. Here's a synopsis. I think you'll start to see that more. Federal support systems. I think getting information faster is going to be better. I think, getting a synopsis on case files or, if a law firm is, or even for CPAs, they're saying, hey, I want to look at all of my financial data. I want to look at all of my legal case data. And depending on how the cybersecurity is built out as a separate it is it specifically to these people or this group of people or this company? And I want to be able to get that information as fast as I possibly can. We did a case for CTC back in 2022, what was that about? It spits it out for you instead of you going into the CAC file, figuring out the case. And no one wants to do that. So that is where it's headed.

CM: Oh, absolutely. We're able to optimize the way that we spend our time. You know, when people mentioned to us the velocity of technology and it's like, no, actually, you benefit greatly from it because we're using these tools. But our rule is it's yes, we use it for ideation. Yes, we use it to summarize information, but nothing goes out without that final human touch on it. And what you are getting is a better allocation of an ROI because we're able to spend that time now on being more strategic and less time writing out a post of some sort. We're able to spend and optimize that time and turn a lot faster than we've ever been able to before. Whereas a lot of our time before was just so heavy on the other side of it because, let's face it, we create a lot of data waste, and you have to weave through all of that. When you don't have a tool to help you do that, it eats up an incredible amount of time, and we're able to then really spend more time on the human side. Sales is a human interaction, especially in service businesses. Customer service is still, yes, you can optimize all of them, but we're humans. We still crave human interaction, just like you and I talking right now. We crave this.

DL: Yeah, I think sales will also change, right? Take the used car salesman analogy; before you buy a car, you have to go physically into the store. They're trying to upsell you, get the sport version, you're in a midlife crisis stage, you need this car. Now I can go to Carvana.

CM: Carvana? Yep, as soon as you said it, I thought Carvana.

DL: I could go to a different version of CarMax and purchase a car without ever talking to anyone.

CM: It's wonderful actually.

DL: You can do that. And so I think really the paradigm change for everybody started when Amazon got as good as they are. If you look at Amazon's operations and what they do inside of warehouses, their complex systems to get your $6 package to your house in a day. Like monolithic, ridiculous complex systems to say how fast that package is shipped to you. Like if I order something in my house it's there within a day. And I expect everything to be that way. Even with our employees and some of the work we do, unless it's, you know, something that's large for us to do, I'm like, hey, we should really, really get that done in a day or two. And it should be like a week. But my brain subconsciously is telling me that, hey, looking like this out.

CM: Well, we've been conditioned to that now. We're conditioned to immediacy. It's kind of what we see in the market. So, you mentioned earlier interns in the youth and technology. So talk to me a little bit about that program, and talk to me about how they're coming up with this right now. It's almost I feel like history kind of repeating itself where you have a differences of almost like an elder millennial. You remember the time before, not before the internet, but before you really had a workstation at home. You know, we had Oregon Trail, computer labs at school and then suddenly-

DL: Yeah, that's a throwback.

CM: Yeah. But, you know, you remember those things and then the technology, we didn't have cell phones in school, and then by the time you were in college, you had a cell phone. So I almost feel like this generation is very similar. They remember the kind of before AI, and now they're coming up with this technology. And so it's kind of in some ways history somewhat repeating itself.

DL: Yeah. I think that, again, youth are in a very dynamic, cool environment. We grew up in the .com boom. I'm a 90s baby, so I think the 90s and early 2000s were one of the best times anyone could have lived in. And we got to see the change between the industrial complex that you used to make money off, and you still can, but the amount of money and the amount of jobs that were in mining, manufacturing, hard labor, and construction. Right. Those were like, hey, those are the, you know, best paying jobs and you need to go to school so you can get into plumbing. You need to go to school so you can be an electrician. Still very relevant jobs.

CM: Yes.

DL: Even in the I.T. space, I can't build you out a complex data center without water, without electricity, without plumbing, without cooling, right?

CM: Without a building.

DL: Without the building, right. And so those people in those industries now are starting to change their marketing and how they're doing business, because they're like, well, we're an electrical company for data centers, or were construction business for data centers, because that's where money is right now. And so its how our program defense interns really started. We worked with Harford County Public Schools. I'm biased, I think Harford County Public Schools is the best public school system in Maryland. Some people would disagree.

CM: I'm not going to disagree with you. You can rep the hometown. I'm good with it.

DL: I’m really biased on that. There's there's some contenders in the state, but Harford County does a very good job at, at least from from what we've seen from a technical perspective on pushing students out of the schools where we have eighteen year olds with security plus network plus, going after cloud search,and going after public trust clearances and 18 graduating from, Harford Community College with degrees and associates degrees and technology. If you graduate from college with an associate's degree in I.T.,you got a high GPA and you have technical certs, you 95% of the time probably get a job. And the job is going to start you between 45 and 50k. If it's a clearance required, or if you know you're good at engineering, you’re good at software, if you're good at five coding, all these things are things that are becoming impressive for the youth. So, in defense terms, we rotate high school seniors and now college seniors through different defense contractors. The program just changed. We just reworked on the program a little bit. So you get six months at two different contractors. So they will work for me for six months then work for you for six months. And then at the end of the program, we try to make sure that someone in the consortium can hire some of those individuals, right? Especially for some of the bright students that we have coming through. And a few of them have been hired by defense contractors. For me, I don't really necessarily follow up on what happened. I'm like, hey, they got hired, that's great. I'm happy that we were able to hire, right now, in the state and Maryland, there's a big push on apprenticeships. Huge push on workforce development. There was a big push on the cyber AI workforce. And a bunch of people getting in front of a camera and they go, " We need an AI workforce.” Why? Why do you want an AI workforce. What is the point that you have an AI workforce? If I gave you one of Microsoft's biggest data centers and said this is the amount of processing power that you have to build out build agents, right, or build out a chat, you know, the Maryland chat bot. What are you using it for? What is your use case? And it works for large, complex items and then small, small business. So what are you doing it for? And so there's a big push right now in workforce development for making sure people can get the skills that they need to be successful. And the largest employers of that are defense contractors. Fort Meade, Aberdeen Proving Ground, you know, Harford County and Montgomery County area. There's defense contractors in that Owings Mills area space, the Reisterstown Owings Mills area space and other places throughout the state. And then we have neighboring, Virginia and D.C. And so, you know, there is a lot of need for people. There are tons of open jobs, but we always run into clearance issues. Or if a contract comes out and it goes, you know, we need junior people, but the junior people, only five years of experience, a bachelor's degree, and three certifications. Right. And like who?

CM: No one has all that.

DL: No one has that. And so for the federal government, both as government employees and then also as contractors, there has to be a little bit of lag station on requirements for entry-level roles. Because if I'm like, hey, I have an 18-year-old that has all this stuff, they're still not eligible for a job, right? But they're in their house coding Google plug-ins, they're building out entire infrastructures. They have their own cyber tools in their building. And to me, it's like, I feel like I really get more excited about the intern piece than the final piece. Sorry, I'm real people. But, it's cool when you can see, I had to go join the army in order to get a clearance, right? I had to go through getting screamed at by drill sergeants and I.T. and all of these different things and training and getting deployed to do all the stuff in order for me to probably be the person I am today. Now it's right at people's fingertips.

CM: It is.

DL: You can go out, get educated and for free, right? You can graduate from high school with an associate's degree for free and not have any debt, and then go straight into work. And then that's when our, our financial people come in and go, hey, you know, again, not a finance person, but 401K, hey, all right. Your raw savings where how much do you put in the 12,000 bucks or where like how much money you invest in like all these things and that's when you're like, okay, now I'm 25 with this amount of money assets in the bank, and I haven't really gotten into my career yet.

CM: That's such an opportunity. That can be such a paradigm shift for someone.

DL: I think for some of the students, too, they're so serious. When they come into the program, I want you to talk to us like we're not your boss, right? Because it's not that type of environment. It's a learning environment. And so, my defense contractors and for the defense contractors that will see this, it is a learning environment. When you bring that person in. Right. If it's a young DeAndre and I'm coming in and I want to learn or people just want to learn as much as they possibly can, learn and learn, run free.

CM: Yep.

DL: And they're going to work probably harder than your seniors because those people already have predetermined mindsets. On their job, they already have predetermined, you know, mindsets on the customer. And, you know, they might have a family, they might have other obligations, mortgages.

CM: All the things.

DL: Right, but the 18 or 19-year-old that's there-

CM: I got nothing to lose.

DL: Nothing.

CM: Right.

DL: And so they are some of the most hungry people that I have seen. I'll give you one more example. I've had one of our employees who's our LSP manager, who has been with us since he was 15.

CM: Wow.

DL: He knows everything about our commercial side of the business. Everything. He graduates from Towson in May or this month. I think next week he graduates.

CM: Okay.

DL: Full-time job, he can't go anywhere.

CM: He can't?

DL: He cannot leave.

CM: It's on record.

DL: Yes. He cannot leave because, as we grow, he gets to grow. And then when I was his age working, I was not making that amount of money that we pay him for. He's so good at his job that we're like, it doesn't matter what age is. You have the experience you got now. You have six years of experience on paper, and you know the process of how we do things here. Here you go.

CM: Some of my best employees, we have an internship to hire program, and some of my best employees, what I call my alumni have been through that because they come in, they're eager to learn. They don't have a set mindset. You know, anything you got to overcome, they get to learn your way of doing business. They bring this eagerness and energy into your organization. So I think question I would have to close it out if you could, two things. One, if you were to pinpoint or recommend to someone who is a little hesitant towards bringing in whether it's in technology or not. You know, someone who's 18, 19, you know, 20 into their, into their organization. What piece of advice would you give them to set them up for success?

DL: For the business?

CM: For the business? Yep.

DL: So minimum wage in the state of Maryland is 15 dollars. Chick-Fil-A starts people at $18.

CM: Yep. Target is pretty high, too.

DL: Targets is high as well.

CM: Well, not high, but, you know.

DL: If you can't afford 30,000 bucks, 30 to 40,000 bucks, even on a part-time basis, look at your PNL, and look at the money you're spending for marketing. Look at the money that you're spending for advertising. Look at the money on the PNL that you're spending for technology. If you need to implement, and this is the kind of leads into like CMC, which is the Cybersecurity Maturation Model certification, which all federal defense contractors if they're processing CUI which is controlled by classified information, they need to go through a certification process, which is fairly long and difficult in order to continue to work on federal contracts. Which is going to go and really full effect, on the 10th of November of this year, and people are freaking out. They're losing their mind over it. I'm like, this is ridiculous. Hire an intern. Look for someone in college that has security. Start advertising. Find people that want to get into the space and utilize those people. It will be the best, especially for small businesses. It will be the best thing you've ever done, because if you give that person a problem, set right and say, I need you to go try on these controls for us, technically, there's another piece of it which is like policy driven, how you guys operate, how you hire people, what your process, what your training process look like.

Where are you keeping this documentation and data? There's other things to it, but the technical control piece, someone can turn those controls on for you at $20 an hour on a part-time basis. And if your executives, if you have a project timeline, however you guys are building a project timeline. What was a CRM like HubSpot? Or if it's a project for a Microsoft product, say, hey, where could we be in six months? Right? Because six months from now we'll be in November, We’re close to it. So where can this person fit into this process to help you turn these things on.

And then it's going to be cheaper for someone to go and check them. Or you guys are having biweekly sets about what was done during that time. That is the most single, most important thing, at least an accountant's space right now that someone could do.

Imagine this, Maryland is graduating thousands of I.T. and cybersecurity professionals from our big colleges. This massive, massive group of software engineering students, right? UMBC, another group of high-value software engineering students. Stevenson university cyber security program, Towson university. I'm a product of Towson, Go Tigers. Towson has a wonderful IT program. I mean, an extraordinary IT program that the same intern I was talking about is graduating from. And so look at the colleges. The colleges want you to come talk to their students because, yes, they do have employers.

Small businesses absolutely, positively must start working with school systems. You don't have a choice. If you're upset about, and we're expensive. If we kind of do assessments or prepare you, we are expensive because we've been doing it for such a long time. I have people on my staff, and they're very expensive. They are tenured cybersecurity professionals. That is why it is expensive. But if you've got someone from college, even if you said 25 bucks an hour full-time, that's 50 grand a year, roughly 40,000, 48,000 change. That person is going; the ROI on you seeking out people from colleges, even from high schools, is extraordinary.

I can't stress it enough that everyone complains. Even if you start a CPA firm or a law firm and you're like, man, we need help with this IT stuff. Go to colleges, go to schools and grab two people because you guys just want a big case law firm, just want a massive case. You're seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars come in.

Internship. And now on top of that, you're also doing community stuff, right? That we're all business owners, like, I'm in the community, we've donated money. Now you have a direct impact on the community and what is happening in the community. That's my biggest piece of advice, because that defense interns program, we have had people, we have one contractor in particular. They had the interns build them a chatbot. The chatbot goes to Sam.gov which is the largest place, one of the large places that we go and look for solicitations, it will scrape sam.gov. It will then come back to them every Friday with a list of things that they can go bid on, similar to some of the other larger programs you can buy to do that.

An intern built it and they're like, now the intern is having us look at the solicitations that came back with and started to write the proposal to it. And for the Red team, there's different phases of a proposal. And the red team phase we wrote it's like the first draft, right? You got a first draft from an AI chatbot, and they're giving you 5 to 10 opportunities you can look at on a week on a weekly basis. And it's writing to and they'll ask you questions about what you wrote. That came from an intern. And that person's like this is great,

CM: This is great.

DL: And they took one of those, they submitted and won the $3 million contract.

CM: And that's the ROI. That's ROI, right?

DL: Right, ROI. I think people are like, oh the intern is going to get coffee.

CM: And now those days are long, long, long, long, long gone.

DL: That's my biggest piece of advice. And for me, it's very close to not being able to get moved to where it is today by utilizing a ton of interns at our front office to just do little, little my new tasks and things in May last year, or really just don't have time to do right now.

CM: There are those controlled projects. I think that's a wonderful takeaway for everybody. Just even and even just the thoughts on, you know, just sparking idea of if you're not, what's your use case for AI. So D'Andre, thank you so much for being on today. I think everybody's going to come away with a whole bunch of ideas and probably more questions, which is a wonderful thing to have. Thanks so much.

DL: Thank you for having me.

CM: Absolutely.