A few hours northeast of the metroplex, just past Texarkana, there’s a plowed field in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, where regular folks pay a small fee to dig for diamonds. Crater of Diamonds State Park is the only place in the country where you can do that and keep what you find.

Jack Pearadin has been digging there since 2013. He’s a Navy reservist who moved from Missouri to Murfreesboro so he could hunt more often, and over the years he’s pulled more than 300 gems out of that dirt. Earlier this year, on a livestream no less, he found the big one: a 6.03-carat yellow diamond he’s named the “American Dream.” It’s the largest stone found at the park this year, and Pearadin says collectors have told him it could be worth $1 million.

We love this story for a few reasons. Persistence pays off. A Navy guy named his diamond the American Dream. And truthfully, it’s a pretty good picture of what a solid IT assessment looks like from the inside.

Most of What You Find Is Small. That’s the Point.

According to park staff, visitors find somewhere between 400 and 800 diamonds a year, and most of them weigh about a quarter carat. Nobody makes the evening news for a quarter carat. But those small finds are why people keep coming back with buckets and screens.

IT assessments work the same way. Every so often we turn up something that makes a leadership team sit up straight. Most of the time, though, the findings are small and a little unglamorous:

  • a former employee’s account that never got disabled
  • multifactor authentication turned on for most people but not the ones with admin rights
  • backups that run every night and have never once been test-restored
  • a mailbox forwarding rule nobody remembers creating
  • firewall firmware that’s three versions behind
  • Microsoft 365 licenses being paid for by people who left last spring

None of those feels urgent on a Tuesday afternoon. That’s exactly why they linger. In our experience, the incident that eventually interrupts the business rarely starts with one dramatic failure. It starts with a handful of quarter-carat gaps that quietly stacked up while everyone was busy running the company.

The Appraiser Matters as Much as the Find

Here’s the part of the story we found most interesting. Pearadin says the stone could be worth $1 million. A certified gem appraiser in Little Rock quoted by the AP put a high-quality six-carat yellow diamond from the park closer to $250,000. The stone also hasn’t been cut yet, and cutting usually costs a natural diamond about a quarter of its weight.

Nobody’s wrong to be excited. But there’s a real difference between what something feels like it’s worth and what a trained eye says it’s worth.

We see that same gap in technology all the time. A lot of organizations we meet with are either more confident in their environment than they should be, or more worried than they need to be. Neither is a great place to make budget decisions from. A good assessment is the appraisal. It tells leadership what they actually have, what it’s worth protecting and what’s going to cost them if it’s left alone.

That’s also why we lean on recognized frameworks like CIS Controls v8.1 in our SPOT Shield cybersecurity assessments instead of gut feel. When a cyber insurance carrier, an auditor or your board asks how you know you’re covered, “we think so” isn’t much of an answer.

Persistence Beats Luck

Pearadin didn’t stumble into a six-carat stone on his first visit. He put in more than a decade of hot Arkansas summers, wet screens and sore backs. By his count, he’s been out there hundreds of times. The big find came because he kept showing up with a method.

Security works a lot like that. One assessment is useful. But the organizations that stay out of trouble around DFW are usually the ones that keep looking. They review their environment on a regular rhythm, they track what changed since last time and they treat findings as a running list instead of a one-time report that goes in a drawer.

That’s the thinking behind our STARLight lifecycle visibility and the Quarterly Success Reviews we hold with clients. The goal isn’t to find one dramatic problem and declare victory. It’s to keep sifting so the small stuff never has the chance to compound.

Finding It First Is the Whole Game

There’s one big difference between diamond hunting and vulnerability hunting. At Crater of Diamonds, if somebody else finds the stone first, you’re just out a nice afternoon. In IT, if somebody else finds the vulnerability first, they’re usually not the kind of somebody you’d want in your network.

That’s what makes early discovery so valuable. A gap you find on your own schedule gets fixed during a planned maintenance window, on a budget you set, with time to communicate to your team. A gap somebody else finds for you tends to show up during payroll week, right before a deadline or on the Friday before a long weekend. Murphy has excellent timing.

Frankly, an IT assessment isn’t going to land you on the evening news. Nobody’s livestreaming their firewall review. But discovering the vulnerability nobody knew existed, before it costs you anything, can be worth a whole lot more than it looks.

Where to Start

If it’s been a while since anyone took an honest look at your environment, our First Look assessment is a good place to start. We’ll review your infrastructure, security posture and Microsoft 365 setup, then sit down with leadership and walk through what we found in plain business language. No scare tactics. No IT jerks. Just a clear picture of what you have and what to do about it.

You don’t have to dig for 12 years. You just have to start digging.

Schedule a First Look with The Fulcrum Group →

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an IT assessment?
An IT assessment is a structured review of an organization’s technology environment, including security controls, user accounts, backups, network equipment, cloud services and licensing. The goal is to give leadership an accurate picture of risk and priorities so technology decisions can be planned instead of rushed.

How often should a small or midsize business have an IT assessment?
Most organizations benefit from a full assessment at least once a year, with lighter reviews quarterly. Changes like new compliance requirements, cyber insurance renewals, mergers, office moves or leadership turnover are good reasons to look again sooner.

What do IT assessments usually find?
The most common findings are small but meaningful: inactive accounts that were never disabled, gaps in multifactor authentication, untested backups, outdated firmware and unused software licenses. Individually they seem minor. Together they’re often where real security incidents begin.

Does The Fulcrum Group offer IT assessments in Dallas-Fort Worth?
Yes. The Fulcrum Group’s First Look assessment serves organizations across Dallas-Fort Worth and North Texas, including SMBs, municipalities, nonprofits, healthcare groups and professional services firms.

Story source: Associated Press coverage by Laura Turbay, “Gem hunter finds a diamond he claims could be worth $1 million,” Oct. 2, 2026, as published by WCSC Live 5 News.