Heath Adams is a military veteran in Albuquerque who started posting ethical hacking videos on YouTube under the handle The Cyber Mentor. The videos found a large audience, consulting clients started showing up, and he launched TCM Security as a penetration testing shop. Then he put a course on Udemy in December and it did six figures in its first week.
TCM became a training company quickly. By the time he sold TCM, it had 30-plus courses, around 10 hands-on certifications with a proprietary exam platform, and 30 employees. Revenue was low eight figures, split roughly 33-40% education, 30% certifications, and 20-30% services. The YouTube channel passed a million subscribers, over 100,000 students bought courses, and more than 10,000 were paying subscribers. No outside funding, ever.
He sold to Educate 360 in 2024 and exited in 2025. He spent two to three years deliberately unwinding his own YouTube centrality so the company could be sold without him: hiring a marketing team, handing off social media, putting other people on the videos, until customers stopped equating TCM Security with Heath Adams. He now runs Breach Point, a defensive security company built to scale from day one.
Key Takeaways
- Affordable Pricing — $30 subscriptions opened a global audience nobody else in cyber training was serving.
- Revenue Share — Splitting revenue with expert instructors bought quality he could never have afforded to hire.
- Platform Lock-In — Teachable worked fine at five courses and became a trap at thirty.
- M&A Advisor — A million dollars in deal costs doubled the offer, and he'd pay it again.
- Track Data Early — Accrual accounting and a real CRM from day one, not spreadsheets and intuition.
Quote from Heath Adams, Founder and CEO of TCM Security
"We spent many years getting rid of founder dependency in our marketing, and that was a big thing to prepare for. If I ever wanted to get out of here, if I wanted to exit, I had to get rid of the founder dependency with me as the face of the company.
"So it was a two, three year plan way before then. We started hiring people in to be the face. Stopped posting on social media as much about the person and only about the the company.
"We got to a point where they don't say TCM Security is Heath Adams. They just say that guy maybe works at TCM Security, or they don't even know who I am. Getting to that point was hard to achieve, but we did get there eventually."
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