Brian Murphy couldn’t have started his company at a worse time.
And despite “turmoil for nine years,” he didn’t throw in the towel—he doubled down on his belief that a growing digital age would cause a cyber explosion.
“At some point, you’re far enough away from shore. You’ve already burned the lifeboats that you know swimming back isn’t really possible, so let’s just keep moving forward,” Murphy tells Fortune.
Along the way, Murphy was forced to take out a second mortgage on his house, max out his credit cards, and eliminate his own salary.
“It just shows you, sometimes luck is undefeated,” Murphy tells Fortune.
And while the 48-year-old may call it luck, others may call it hard work. The next stop? An IPO.
“It taught me the customer,” he says. “And that idea that you don’t point the customer to the ketchup aisle, you walk them over there, and you show them the five or six different kinds.”
But Murphy’s sights were not always set on the tech industry. In fact, he studied accounting and finance at Florida State University before starting what he imagined would be a long career as an auditor. It wasn’t until he was drawn into tech consulting and learned to program that he recognized the industry’s potential.
Now, as a founder and CEO, the biggest challenge to overcome is accepting that failure is inevitable and pleasing everyone can be an impossible task.
“It doesn’t matter how good you are or how much you work, or how diligent you are on ‘the grind.’ You’re always failing someone,” Murphy says.
“It’s the most out-of-balance journey—ever.”
“You’re not always going to be right, but if you say nothing, you’re always going to be wrong,” Murphy says. “As you get older, you learn that sometimes the best thing to do is shut up, but when you’re young, you want to stand up and talk as much as you can to get that experience.”
“He’s got a drive that is very hard to match in terms of his dedication to the business and to his people, and the intensity around which he built the business,” Shoukry, who also is a member of ReliaQuest’s board, tells Fortune.
“He’s just very real, and tells you like it is,” he adds. “Whenever you ask him a question, he’s never going to beat it around the bush. He’s never going to give you a polished answer. For better, for worse, he’s just a really authentic person.”
