Most small businesses and nonprofits don’t have an IT department, let alone a cybersecurity team. Chase Carlton built Fenix Cyber to fill that gap. In this episode of the Founded in FoCo Podcast, Chase, CEO and founder of the Fort Collins managed cybersecurity provider, talks with host Nick Armstrong about protecting your organization, using AI without leaking your data, and keeping a human in charge of every critical process.
Prefer to listen? The episode is also on Spotify.
About the Guest
Chase Carlton is the CEO and founder of Fenix Cyber, a Fort Collins managed cybersecurity and IT provider serving small businesses and nonprofits along Colorado’s Front Range. Fenix Cyber helps organizations without a full IT or security department handle monitoring, compliance, governance, and secure AI and automation workflows. You can often find Chase at 1 Million Cups Fort Collins and local cybersecurity meetups.
Security That Starts with Questions
Fenix Cyber works with small businesses, with a focus on nonprofits, manufacturing, accounting, and general services. Every engagement starts with a conversation about the organization’s processes, goals, and compliance requirements. From there, the team installs software, runs an audit, keeps machines updated, and monitors identities and devices around the clock. Their approach draws on NIST and ISO standards, condensed into roughly 40 core practices.
“We do all the cybersecurity so that you can sleep at night and not worry about the guys across the planet.”
Chase Carlton
The work covers the people side too: finding wasted spending (like paying for three storage providers when one would do), and building the policies and procedures that hold everything together.
Keep Your AI Inside the Walls You Already Have
Everyone uses AI differently, and that creates risk. Leadership may not know which tools line-level staff are running customer invoices through. Chase’s advice is to start with the platform you already pay for, most often Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and use the tools built into it. Your existing logins, multi-factor authentication, and permissions carry over, so an AI tool can only reach the files that user already has access to. Chase compares it to bumpers in a bowling lane: your team can experiment freely and still stay safe.
Map the Workflow, Then Automate It
“Humans should remain in the loop when you’re dealing with AI processes.”
Chase Carlton
AI tools are non-deterministic, so the same request won’t produce the same result every time. Chase recommends flowcharting a process and building it in a low-code automation tool such as Power Automate, Azure Logic Apps, Zapier, IFTTT, or n8n, then calling AI only for the specific steps that need it, like pulling structured data from an invoice.
The payoff: consistent output, a clear audit trail, lower costs (a narrow task can run on a smaller, cheaper model), and a workflow that certified professionals can maintain long after the person who built it has moved on. When something does break, Chase wants to hear about it:
“I would rather it break than the AI try and fix it in the background and get some sort of odd output.”
Chase Carlton
Where to Start
The easiest wins are approval workflows: time-off requests, travel authorizations, anything that needs a sign-off. Fenix Cyber has automated multi-layer travel approvals for local and tribal government clients, complete with routing, audit trails, and reminders for the manager who forgot to approve that Friday-afternoon PTO request.
Know Where You Stand
Chase’s biggest wish is that every business owner knew their security posture. Fenix Cyber offers a free cyber risk assessment: an hour-long conversation covering your people, technology, and processes, followed by a report of gaps and vendor-agnostic recommendations you can act on yourself or with their help.
Key Takeaways
- Keep humans in the loop on any AI-driven process.
- Map your workflow first, then automate it with low-code tools like Power Automate, Zapier, or n8n, and call AI only for the steps that need it.
- Building inside the platform you already use (often Microsoft 365) keeps AI behind the logins and permissions you already have.
- Structured workflows are cheaper to run, easier to audit, and easier to fix than handing a whole process to an AI agent.
- Approval workflows like time-off and travel requests are some of the easiest processes to automate first.
- Knowing your security posture can be uncomfortable, and it beats not knowing.
Learn more about Fenix Cyber and request a free cyber risk assessment at fenixcyber.com/benchmark.
The Founded in FoCo Podcast is hosted by Nick Armstrong, Lead Organizer of Founded in FoCo and Geek-in-Chief of WTF Marketing. Watch more interviews with founders in and around Fort Collins on YouTube or listen on Spotify.