Chief Listening Officer, John A. Smith, founded Conversant Group in July of 2009 as an outgrowth of his passion to cultivate people-focused business.

Engaged on numerous projects and consultations with companies both large and small throughout his 24-year career, John understands the unique challenges of conducting business on a human-centric level — its strategy, quality, and process.  He especially understands the practice of law, as he has served law firms’ technological and business needs since 1998.

John started his IT career in 1994, at the age of 14, at Thompson Machinery Commerce Corporation of Lavergne, TN. While working with Thompson Machinery, John was involved with the initial rollout of multiple industry-leading technologies including: Citrix Winframe, IBM NetStation, Window NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows NT Terminal Services Edition, remote access via Shiva, ISDN Internet, and WebSense.

During his time at Thompson Machinery, John founded his first company, Computech, in 1996. In 2002, he founded his second company, NetAlliant Technologies, which he sold in 2008.

In 2009, he founded Conversant Group, a technology conglomerate based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, serving clients across North America.

John studied Computer Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and holds a degree in Organizational Management from Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

President Mark Grazman is a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist with a track record of launching, scaling, and leading successful companies. Most recently, Mark was the CEO of an email security company named MessageControl where he led the organization through a successful exit to Mimecast (NASDAQ: MIME).

Mark’s commitment to driving growth as a leader, board member, and advisor has given him the experience (and grey hair) to build a culture of excellence while rapidly scaling companies. From his transformational tenure leading strategy and technology for CBIZ (NYSE: CBIZ), launching Banque Nationale de Paris’s emerging markets private equity group to his entrepreneurial success as the founder of an internet company in Europe – Mark has an impressive track record of success and innovation.

Mark first met John Anthony and the Conversant Group during his tenure at MessageControl where John was an early adopter, reseller, and eventually an investor. John made it clear back then he was investing in Mark and started recruiting him almost immediately to join him in leading Conversant Group to drive growth, strategy, and culture. If you get them both in a meeting, be careful – they both have a lot to say!

Mark graduated in 1994 from Duke University and was invited back as an adjunct lecturer in the Public Policy Department years later. Throughout his distinguished career, Mark most prides himself on giving great opportunities to the people he has worked with, the teams he has built, and the leaders that have emerged from his mentorship.

As Chief Technology Officer, Brandon is centrally responsible for ensuring the delivery of all consulting and managed services on-time, in-budget, and to the satisfaction of the customer.

Brandon started his professional career in 2003, after receiving a Business Administration degree with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. Upon graduation, Brandon accepted a network administration post at a Japanese automotive parts manufacturer in the Nashville area.

Shortly after meeting John Anthony Smith in 2006, Brandon signed on with NetAlliant Technologies, LLC, as a Network Engineer with a focus on network infrastructure design and implementation. In this role, Brandon performed an array of storage, networking, remote access, Exchange, and data center projects. 
After starting with NetAlliant, Brandon began delivering industry-leading consultation to companies large and small using Terminal Services, Citrix XenServer, Citrix Provisioning Services, Citrix XenApp (Metaframe/Presentation Server), and other core infrastructure products.

In 2012, Brandon joined Willis, a Nashville-based company, as a Citrix Administrator for the IT Infrastructure Platforms team. In this role, Brandon supported IT infrastructures across the globe — one of which included a global Citrix XenApp farm for approximately 13,000 users virtualized with VMware on Cisco UCS blade servers.

His Citrix support role led to Brandon and John crossing paths once again in early 2015 at a Citrix conference in Orlando, FL. Later that year, Brandon joined Conversant Group. He has led technical services for us ever since.

Heath Renfrow, is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading cyber security experts. He has more than two decades of experience as a high-level information security specialist, much of it as a chief information security officer (CISO) in the United States Department of Defense, where he addressed some of the nation’s most significant cyber challenges. In 2017 he was named Global CISO of the Year by EC-Council, the largest cyber- training organization in the world.

Heath was the vCISO as The Crypsis Group most recently, one of the leading incident response firms in the country, and who was recently acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

He served as the first CISO for U.S. Army Healthcare, the largest Healthcare organization within the Department of Defense and one of the largest providers globally, where he developed a long-term strategic roadmap for addressing cybersecurity risks to the Healthcare environment. The program he established there became the cybersecurity gold standard for all of DoD and many private Healthcare organizations.

Prior to that he was CISO at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where he established the Corps’ first comprehensive cybersecurity program, providing critical infrastructure to support hundreds of locations throughout the United States. While there, he led a team of more than 500 IT and operational technology personnel in an overhaul of security architecture that ended up reducing cybersecurity risk by 75 percent to the critical infrastructure locations.

Heath has also served as CISO at the U.S. Army Installation Management Command and as chief joint security officer at the Defense Information Systems Agency, as well as chief security officer at the military’s Global Cyberspace Integration Center. He began his career as a cyber interface control officer with the U.S. Navy.

A frequent public speaker on cyber security matters, Heath serves on a number of boards, including the National CyberWatch Center Foundation, the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security, the University of Indiana Cyber Advisory Council, and the Cyber Patriot Program Advisory Council. He earned his master’s degree in cyber studies at the American Public University System and is bachelor’s in information technology from the University of Management and Technology.