A Conversation with Ross Brouse of Continuous Networks

Founder Ross Brouse has grown Continuous Networks into a leading IT services company. We got some insights into how and why, along with Ross's view on culture, hiring, technology and the importance of candid conversations. Naturally we talk about email and real-time as well :-)

TRANSCRIPT

Matthew Dunn

This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. My guest today coming from the East Coast have i'm not mistaken Ross brows president of continuous networks. Hi, Ross. Hey, thanks for having me. Where am I? Where am I speaking to you from? Where are you speaking to me from or where am I speaking from? Where are you speaking from? Yeah.

Ross Brouse

I'm in northern jersey. So about 45 minutes outside of New York City.

Matthew Dunn

Okay. Okay. We had a had a guest on last week from from Jersey as well. He made a distinction. I said, New York said no. New Jersey? Yeah, we're in. We're in Bellingham, Washington, north of Seattle. So it's okay. Cross Country conversations here are like the complete opposite. And that's it. So okay. Hey, tell people a bit about about your company, if you don't mind.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, sure. So we are a technology support provider. We service New York, New Jersey, primarily. But we do have customers all over all over the US. You know, people have offices in different places. And so with the way things work today, it really can work wherever you are now. But we actually started as a web hosting company many, many years ago. So before they call it the cloud, they call it web hosting. Right?

Matthew Dunn

Right, right.

Ross Brouse

That was us. That's what we did you know, you you put servers online, and people bought them from you. And they hosted their websites, and they set up their own email accounts. Right. And it was it was great. And you pretty much just had to have enough money to put a server online and you could make money.

Matthew Dunn

Coca Cola, the days of Coca

Ross Brouse

Cola well, and it's funny, because that term, we still use that term. We actually still have a lot of colocation customers. But yeah, it was, you know, back in the day, it was absolutely fantastic. And you didn't have to have a degree and you didn't have to know sales and you didn't have to know marketing and you could just make a lot of money.

Matthew Dunn

Well, you you you like me are a refugee from other fields like your your background originally film a television, correct? Yeah,

Ross Brouse

yeah, that's right. I went to NYU film and TV. So everyone always asked me that, how come you're not making movies today? I'm like, Well, I am they're just on LinkedIn.

Matthew Dunn

That's right. You get a lot a lot of content out there. I always tell people in our you know, our art arts arts background is great for the for the world of tech, because increasingly, it's about clarity, explanation, connection, relationships. And yes, you have to learn the technical bits on but it was all invented last week. So even a guy with a comp side degree from 10 years ago, he's got to play keep up and learn like the rest of us, right?

Ross Brouse

Yeah, exactly. I think if you know how to tell a story, it's it's what really matters. Do you know how to tell a story? Do you have a story to tell? We all do? Yeah. But make it relatable to people. And that's that's what people want? Yeah,

Matthew Dunn

yeah, certainly, certainly, how they, how they can act and how they learn, um, was the pandemic a business boost for continuous networks. It was a huge business boost

Ross Brouse

for us. Funny, funny story, we actually we had an office that we were spending a ton of money on, and the lease was ending. And so we were moving into a new office or build this brand new, beautiful space. And they were having a lot of trouble getting permits through and getting it all done. And then all of a sudden, so we were all working remotely, I don't know, five months before the pandemic happened. Right? We have prepared to do that for I don't know, six to nine months. They came back to us. They said we don't know when we're going to facilitate on this space. So we said, Well, you know what, we don't need it. We don't need it. And so we went from we just agreed to stay completely virtual. We've been virtual for going on two years now. Yeah, we've got a team of 26 we've expanded from the last two years we expanded from 14 to 26. Wow. And it's been working really well.

Matthew Dunn

A good Anya and And you're probably a lot of your customers had to make the same kind of shift, maybe without less that lead time.

Ross Brouse

Well, it was nice for us because while they made that shift, we were ready to do it. We had already done it ourselves. We were all we didn't have to make a big transitional change the way so many other companies did. Because we were already there. So yeah, we we leverage that we use that to their benefit to our benefit. And we had one of our best years ever last

Matthew Dunn

year. Wow. Congratulations, it. It's it's been hard on a lot of companies. But if you're in the digital space, in some ways, it's you felt like okay, you know, we jumped ahead a few years, maybe, but okay, we've been waiting for you guys to come join us over here.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, exactly. Well, and it's, you know, we also, it wasn't just that it wasn't just luck of the draw. We spent a lot of time on sales and marketing last year, we just figured out new ways to do it. I heard Marcus lemonis. You know, from NBC, CNBC is the Prophet. And he was speaking at an event early on in the year and he just said, My advice to you is double down on marketing, double down on marketing build when things are cheap, right. And we took that advice, and we did it and it paid it paid off.

Matthew Dunn

So So how do you how do you market? And how do you get the marketing that pays off? for a company in the niche that you're in?

Ross Brouse

Yeah, well, a lot of different ways. It's never just one thing. But what we found is that, you know, we had a lot of direct mail marketing that we were doing, and that worked really well when people are in their offices, but it didn't work so well, when everybody went home. Yeah, everyone's still had a phone and everyone's still had an email account. Alright, and everyone was on social media, right. So we just changed our strategy to that to be more of a digital focus. Now, we had already been doing email marketing for quite some time. We, I mean, we've been doing it for decades. But we really focused in that area, and then honing in the message that we wanted. We did a ton of telemarketing, we made 16,406 telemarketing dials last year, we sent 10s of 1000s of emails, not just to our customers, but to our marketing list. Yeah. And we continue to send them content, and that that resonated with them that caused so when we got on the phone, we made that phone call the fact that they'd seen the emails, the fact that they'd seen some content on social media, or heard about us in some other way. Cause that connection to take place. Right? Okay. It's always it's never just one thing.

Matthew Dunn

No, no, it's not, but it's a lot of work. And, and even adapting, you know, shifting channels or shifting your emphasis in terms of in terms of channel mix like that, that takes time, effort, focus, party, you know, at least part of your team. But with that, in that in front of their to do list, so yeah, good. Anya. What what websites social? Next, did you see a shift in in sort of patterns of how people learned about and engaged you? In in the pandemic versus pre pandemic period?

Ross Brouse

Um, I don't know if it necessarily changed. Well, it didn't change the conversation. The conversations were always the same. I think that we had more submissions on the website, there was more interest from social media. And, you know, people said, People aren't people aren't buying right now. And that just simply wasn't true. Now, maybe if you were catering to hospitality, or you were catering to restaurants, then yeah, that was absolutely the case. They were shut down. Right. But you know, even medical practices, they were shut down for a month, month and a half. And then there was that huge surge of people wanting to come in and buy. You know, it wasn't any different for manufacturing, manufacturing is a huge target market for us. And so we saw them hit there for a month, two months. And then by June of 2020, it was just like a boomerang coming back. Wow. And then they were Alright, but how do we do this? How do we do this? You know, we can't get a product we can't get, you know, our supply chain is constrained. Yeah. How do we do this, but at the same time, they were interested in talking with us having that conversation saying, well, maybe now's the time to look at security, how can we optimize technology? Right, that an impact?

Matthew Dunn

Right, right. And, and I don't get a sense from anybody I've conversed with, that they're planning on going back, you know, back to 1957. Back to the Future. It's like, like, no, this is like, this is where we are we're gonna have to operate this way. And I saw a lot of remarkable ingenuity from from him. Some of the smaller businesses in the town I live in like, Oh, we have to do curbside. You know, we can figure this out. Hang on a second. What if we, you know, call here and in a list, they're like, bam, they just got with it. Yeah. And adapted? Yep. Oh, I heard one school system say we had a 10 year plan for virtual classroom. We did it in two weeks instead.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, that reminds me of somebody said I forget what it was. But I was reading some article about Zoom and everything they were doing said we literally jumped forward 30 years into the future in a matter of a few months, with what we prove to ourselves that we can do that the whole thing. Now obviously, there's going to be a shift back to a certain extent people are missing that human connection. Yeah. But the fact is, we realized as businesses that we can operate, allowing people to have more integrated lifestyles, they don't have to be in the office. We don't have to be breathing down their necks. Yeah, all the time. Yeah, we need the human connection. We need that for sure. But we don't necessarily need to make people commute four hours a day.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, I've worked virtually for most of 20 years. So I was used to this. Yeah, um, but I'm always curious to talk to someone who's made the shift. And you've been at it for close to two years now. What do you miss about the live office, don't tell me you miss the commute, nobody misses a commute.

Ross Brouse

going out to lunch with with peers and colleagues and clients and those lunches are, that's what I think I missed the most, because there's that social aspect, we're eating together, we're breaking bread together. And just being able to look at somebody directly in the eye and have a conversation, that connection is great. I missed the in person sales meetings, and I missed the in person, client meetings. Now we're starting to get out and do that. With people being vaccinated. This is happening. I spoke at a conference a couple of weeks ago with 2000 people that was fantastic. So there are things starting to happen again, which is great. And I miss those things, I really miss those things. And just I think there's a huge pent up need for people to get out. And do that again. So I think we're gonna see a huge shift in people wanting to have shared workspaces. Because that's one thing that I'm thinking about as well, you know, I would love to have a space where we can all just kind of go in a couple of days a week, be together and have some of our meetings together, bring a client over to the office, do things like that, I think we're gonna see a lot more focus on that from a business office space usage perspective, versus the way that it was with everybody in their private cubicles and sitting there. Yeah, you know, all day ever. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I've been reading up on, you know, large, large companies trying to figure out what to do. You know, how do they recalibrate? Well, one second, you know, the problem of the virtual workplaces. All those digital channels are like, hey, you're free. No, forgot to mute you. Second, you guys use slack? I'm not sure if

Ross Brouse

we were on slack for years, but we use Microsoft Teams. Yeah.

Matthew Dunn

Go away. They're sorry, but sorry about that. I mean, this is where we live now. Right now. We're saying Oh, as big, big corpse are looking at this. The consistent pattern to the stuff I've been reading is almost nobody is saying, Let's stay completely virtual unless they were already there. Yeah. Or unless they found some, like, resounding surprise about how it worked. And I and I think the motive is probably as you know, just aside from Gee, we've got real estate, in a lot of cases, is probably what what you already nailed there, like that human connection need. And I think what we're smarter when we get a chance to riff and interact and scribble on a whiteboard, throw darts. Yeah. Collaboration stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Ross Brouse

I'm more productive. We're definitely more productive working from home, but we're not as collaborative. And that's the part that that was put.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, yeah. And, um, and the relationship stuff, you're what you already alluded to, you know, you know, who is this guy? What makes him tick? zoom conversations. One to One I'm finding I'm getting I'm getting more used to them. Maybe everybody is, but you get more than a couple people on a zoom call. And it is not the same as three or four people in a room together. Yep. Body language cues, size of the size of the face. You're looking at. Shared audio shared physical reference, all those little things are big deal.

Ross Brouse

Yeah. absolutely huge. And you know, just the technical difficulties that can arise as well. What did you say? Can you repeat that? I missed it.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah. Or Wouldn't you like freezes and you're like,

Ross Brouse

you're frozen or you're on mute? You're on mute? Yes. Okay. I'm trying to figure out how to unmute my computer. My,

Matthew Dunn

my wife works for the school system here. And she's done a couple of classes and I walk by and I look over your shoulder and there's, you know, there's 24 people on the zoom screen, just thinking you're gonna be exhausted by the time you're done. You're trying to try to make sense of each of those in and just like a live meeting. different personalities can assert in different ways. On those big video conferences, it's, you know, pretty amusing to watch. Certainly can make be good for monitor sales, right? Yeah. I'm sure that it was gonna get more and bigger more and bigger, more faces. Great. They're all looking at me. Yeah. How do I rationalize a 43 inch curved screen again?

Unknown Speaker

Sure I really

Matthew Dunn

well, we're supposed to talk about email marketing. So we can do a little of that. And it sounds like you've been at that for a while as well.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, you know, it's funny, we, cuz we came from web hosting, we did a lot of emailing to our customers. Yeah. You know, we were buying banner advertisements on forums, and we'd, you know, create lists, and then we'd blast them with email. But it was always, like, the funny part about is we're always talking about our latest and greatest offer, what are we offering? 20%? discount? 30% discount? You know, we got a big special coming. It was always that, right? Yeah, we were sending out HTML emails. And you kind of you know, I mean, you attracted the best you could, but you never really knew what exactly it was doing. Yeah. And it's funny, as we've matured, and I think the markets matured, the way we look at email today is so very, very different. So, well, if you go back 1015 years, my Microsoft Outlook didn't have the focused inbox. Gmail didn't have the promotional tab, we didn't have this automatic artificial intelligence, you know, sorting of our email, you kind of take some of that stuff out of our view. So it's harder today to get in front of somebodies eyes with email. Now, it's one of the avenues like social media could be just as hard. But at least social media, I went to social media for a specific reason and email. So many people today are still using it as a communication forum for internal communication, we don't do that, like we keep all of our internal communication out of email, and only use it as an external communication tool. But I'm still missing things all the time. Now, every now and then something comes in and it grabs my attention, which is not unlike when you're looking at a newsfeed on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. Something has to grab your attention. So when you're creating your emails, you've got to say something that is different. And you know, most of the time I see the emails, I'm getting a ton of them, I'm getting a ton of calls, people are trying to solicit me there, it's always selling everything Selly. And it's always about what they can do, or what they are, what they have, or what they know. And nobody ever sends me something, it happens rarely, nobody ever sends me something that gets into my mind about what I'm struggling with or frustrated with today. But every now and then an email will trickle through, and there'll be a subject where I go, Hmm, that's exactly what I was thinking, alright, I'll read it. And that's the methodology behind any of these things, email is no different, you have to send a message, your subject line has to be very specific. And the content inside of it has to be very, very short. We do only text based email, I won't send HTML email anymore. It's always a link, usually, to a video, here's a video online, I'll say a couple of specific lines, just like you would in a social media newsfeed. And then here's the link and you you would be well served by watching this video. And I don't say those words exactly. But that's what I'm alluding to the verbiage that's in the actual email. So we keep it very, very short. Because we know that people are have to be sensitive to their time, they're trying to conserve calories in time, I only have so much time to spend on XYZ. And if you want to get my attention, you got a split second to do it. Right. Right. So I think email marketing today, I don't think it I don't personally believe it works as a standalone method. But I think it works extremely well. When you pair it with the other things you're doing. Whether that's webinars, events, social media, you know, direct mail marketing, whatever your other mediums are, you definitely have to be email marketing, there's no reason not to do and I think it's still extremely effective, because you have that opportunity to get in front of the, in front of the eyes of your buyer and in the mind of your buyer, but only if you say the right thing.

Matthew Dunn

Right, right. You mentioned that you done a ton of telemarketing last year, even do the number of calls on any experiments with MMS or SMS marketing.

Ross Brouse

We haven't done that. That's, you know, and it's really funny. We all have a personal relationship with each one of our communication mediums. So I'll get 1000 emails a day from so many different places. There's automated emails, there's promotions, there's, you know, customers, vendors, whatever. But I don't get that in my iMessage feed on my iPhone. And so that's kind of that way where you know, if you want to get my attention, you're going to get it real quick because I'm expecting most of the time these are important messages, in my mind still prioritizes that and so I'm actually kind of against it because I don't want that to be ruined. I don't want that really special communication medium to be heard. Because it's a way for my family or my friends, or my clients to get my attention immediately I the phone dings lights up. I see it. And it just draws me right in.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, yeah, you can't cut an emergent look at it.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, it's something really important emails, like, I'm gonna check emails if you know, I'm batch processing to an extent. Yeah, a little bit here in the morning, a little bit in the afternoon and a little bit in the evening and not sitting there and constantly looking at email all day.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, yeah. And and what what you just said, is it reasonably consistent with the majority of people I've, I've asked him about the same question, like, my messaging app of choice and leave commercial messaging platforms out of the mix for a second. Like that's personal. And it tends to be known people no names, I, you know, a text from somebody I don't know is a great big. Don't ever do that again. Yeah. Kind of a thing. And I can't think of a single business that I want to get text messages from, like, they're just not that important. Now, I did say when I got when I got vaccinated. COVID vaccinated. Sorry, let's take this thing. I filled in the form and did the paperwork for the follow up survey from the CDC, which was done for me at least via text. Yeah. And it was it was well done. And it was actually very effective. And, and I know it's a short window. So when I get the ping when now it's done to weekly, I get the ping, and it's the CDC and I click on the link and it ding ding, ding, ding, you No, No, I'm fine. No, I'm fine. Don't bother me. Thanks. Bye. Like I'm adding to their data set. As a really constrained use of that of that channel. I was okay with it. But I was in control of saying, Yeah, right.

Ross Brouse

Yeah. Correct. And you did, it didn't come on solicited, you asked for it. And it's giving you some piece of information that you want. Similarly, we could do that. We don't. But we could do that with our clients. If there was a network problem or something that could impact their service. They want to know about that right away, we can jump into that personal channel, because it's they know that it's important, but they asked for it. They said I do want to know. And that's the way to get my attention very quickly.

Matthew Dunn

Oh, actually. Yeah. Great. And actually, you're right. There are a couple of technical services underneath campaign genius, where I signed up for the text alert if it goes down. Why? Because I really want to know if something's not working. Yeah, yep. So more, much more time, much more time sensitive stuff, I suppose. Yet all fi's were almost nothing else does. And that the archive save, read later. mechanisms are quite different. Yep. Email the text. You know, some people save their text messages, some don't. Email, it seems like everybody hangs on to it.

Ross Brouse

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very few people delete email. The only people I've seen that are really effective at deleting email are salespeople. They're really good at sorting and deleting email. I'm terrible at it, I, I would completely close out of my email client and never use it if I could. So at some point, I will I will be big enough in my business where I'll have somebody manage that for me, and I will respond to not have my own email. Because I don't want any part of it. But

Matthew Dunn

we'll see. We'll see. It's an interesting habit to give up. And we're now talking about, you know, 2025 plus years, for a lot of people. Yeah, that being a predominant form of communication, particularly business communication. But obviously,

Ross Brouse

as well, oh, asked me again in three years, and I'll probably still be doing it.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, and probably still have the same. I'm not sure that the pattern of challenges in email is actually going to shift that much. You know, too much stuff in the inbox too many messages coming in. You know, will there be more AI assistance as you as you mentioned? Yeah, probably will I trust it completely? Never know, right? Never. Because I the one thing that slips through the cracks that I really wanted to get, yeah, justifies the kind of attention suck of Yeah, of skimming, skimming, almost everything at least. Yeah. Now the world fast at that. Yeah. What do you think? Do you think people actually read emails in any depth? Like, what's your what's your guess about the psychology of how they engage the messages that they're going through? Well,

Ross Brouse

so for example, speaking of unsolicited email, I received one last week to one last week and the one of the week prior, and the person who is soliciting me wrote me a novel. I mean, this was, I would have had to have scrolled four times. And I have a high resolution screen, I would have had to have scrolled four times just to read this entire email. And my immediate thought was, I mean, I saw the email and I forget what maybe it was some kind of subject that that did attract me a little bit, but then I was like, Are you serious? Like there's no compassion for my time there whatsoever. Yeah, you You really think that I'm going to spend all of this time reading your email? I don't know you? I don't you, you're clearly trying to take some of my time. And you're giving me nothing. Like, another email that I that I received just this week. The guy's asking me to, you know, take some time do you want to take my time, he's given me nothing. He's giving me no understanding. He's given me no value. He's given me no education. I have nothing from him, but he wants to take my time. Because his product or his service is so good. It's going to do something for me that I just really need. Well, listen, that's fine. If I'm actually in the pain point where I would respond to that, and you happen to catch me in that one split second. But that's so unbelievably rare, you've got to give me something you have to help me out in some way and get into my mind, if you want me to pay attention to it. I don't care if it's one sentence or 1000 sentences. I'm not paying attention if you don't take that approach. And nobody does it.

Matthew Dunn

Not I tend to agree with you there. It's It's It's It's way too rare. And I mean, you mentioned content marketing, which philosophically at least tipped over into, you know, what add value to the universe, and, and then the conversation where someone actually needs it engages it is much richer, much better, because you've kind of used you've kind of let them make that decision, right? Yep. Yeah, I got a solicitation Gothic was this morning, like pre coffee, which is always dangerous. Phone rings, I don't know the number of like, okay, you know, hi, Matthew Dunn. And, and the lady on the other end went boombah bump distributor. Hi, would you bet it took a breath and it said, Do you have a calendar? Oh, and I said, you didn't actually ask me whether the answer was yes. I'm interested. Yeah. Right. Click by bozo filter for the rest of your life. Yeah. And yeah, I find LinkedIn noise noisy as heck these days for the same reason. Yeah, like so much selling like, hey, we've got a great pitch, stop. I don't even know you. But clearly got the name wrong. So I don't think this is going to go very far. Oh, yes.

Ross Brouse

Oh, that's true. I mean, in the surveys lately, I will tell you that people still overwhelmingly use that platform as a way to find a job. There are 700 million people on the platform every single day. And only 3 million of them actually create content. Now I'm one of those content creators on LinkedIn. Yeah. And I would say I'm a video content creator. So I would guess it's probably only in the 1000s of the people that are creating video content. But I will when I go and connect with somebody, I will specifically say to them, I would love to connect with you, I have no interest in selling you anything. So if you think that's what's going to happen here, you can breathe a sigh of relief, because I won't do it. It drives me crazy. Yeah, and I don't. And that'll be the note that we'll send along. When we go to connect with them, I really just am growing my network and providing value because I understand that I've got to give them something before I can ask them for something. And that's what content marketing is all about giving that away, letting other people become interested in you as an authority. And establishing that trust. Email is exactly the same thing. If you want people to trust you, then you have to start giving them something that's interesting. It could be white papers, it could be a video of, you know, something that I'm struggling with, I don't know one business where we don't worry about margins, you could literally just talk about margins, if you understand who my vendors are, and how I worry about my margins, and you hit on that pain point, I'm going to listen, because I care about that. Yeah, and it's no different for a manufacturer, you know, if you're talking to medical practices, they worry about their patients. And they worry about their medical malpractice insurance and the rising costs of that. So it's really not that complicated. I mean, you can do 30 minutes of research on the internet and find out some of the big pain points that anybody in their specific industry has. And you can cater your specific content marketing that way. And whether it's email or in social media, whatever it is, that's what you got to do. And so nobody does it. And everyone's trying to make a sale, everything's an ad, everything's an offer. There's nothing wrong with an offer offers are great. But there's a time and a place to make the offer. And it certainly isn't over a cold email.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, well put. And I like that you get a little little riled at this because so why and on. The other thing you want to come back to because you mentioned how relatively small the number of content creators on LinkedIn at least proportionally, and I think draw on other channels as well, on good content is work. And, and you've got the background to do it. So you know, you'd like you know how to do it, you know, know, to put the work in it. But I find myself irked by pretend content. That's just a sales pitch masquerading as something substantive. Any reaction to that? Well,

Ross Brouse

I think it depends upon what your purpose is. With what it is you're doing. So that would bleed through into everything that you do. And I see this a lot from software vendors, I see this a lot from other service providers, maybe SAS service providers, because to them, it's a numbers game. If I've got a low margin or a low dollar value type service, that I just need to have an mass to be able to be profitable, then I'm just gonna spray and pray. It's all about it's all about that mentality. But if you offer a, you know, a service with substance, if you offer a product with substance that is actually designed to help somebody in some way, you can't go out and do that. In my business. I know I have 40,000, there's 40,000 companies that do what I do at it at our core 40,000 companies that do what we do across the United States. Now I'm very different because I position myself different from a marketing perspective. But if you look down deep, you peel back all the layers we all do at our core, the same thing. So you have to differentiate yourself against every single one of those people. And I think what happens with those people that are just creating that content, that is a thinly disguised sales pitch, is that it's becoming more and more apparent, people know what this is, okay, this is an ad, this is an ad and I see it, they tell they want to tell their story. I struggle with this. And I struggle with that, put out some empathy, empathy and compassion are different. put out some empathy. And then here it is, if you want to know how to fix that problem. Here's my five step process. Here's my 10 step process. And it's like, there it is. Yeah, there it is. Right there. And you did it all. In one thing. You didn't even give me like a series of three or four pieces of content. Before you pitched me. You pitch me right there. Yeah. And now I don't really want to talk. No.

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a it's a battle for attention these days, isn't it? It is like Absolutely. The one commodity that we're not getting more of. Right. Well, we're getting less of right on, who is George George Gilder said? The two things we can't change at the speed of light in the span of life? Yeah. Yeah. Although I think we're probably working on the ladder. But you know, that's treated as finite. Nonetheless, well, where we're from here for for your company. And and, you know, your aims for what you do?

Ross Brouse

Yeah, well, you know, like I said, differentiation is key into any business that is becoming commoditized. In my specific industry, while it didn't used to be the case has become very commoditized. I think everybody, people are trying to offer it in a box. People are trying to you know what, we'll just go hire a $30,000 a year guy, because that's good enough, right. And that's our fault. That's our fault. We made it that way. We turned ourselves into the volunteer firefighters instead of the functional business associate consultant that really helps you drive a better business result. So we're working to change that. But you can't change that by going out and saying, Well, listen, I'll give you faster response. Listen, I'll guarantee always pick up the phone, Listen, I'll guarantee that I'll keep your, your machines, your computers online all the time, you've got to go after something that's different. So the way we're looking at this, and we're working on a book, right now, we're going to be publishing a book next year, on this specific topic. We're working on this for all of our messaging, we focus on manufacturing, construction, wholesale distribution companies, we also work very heavily in the healthcare space, but we don't spend a lot of marketing dollars in the healthcare space. So from a marketing perspective, it's those other four things that I mentioned. Okay? And we know that they are notoriously bad at understanding how to spend money on technology. And why would they be good at it, that's not their business. And even when they hire it, people, they hire people who understand how to fix a computer, or maybe even how to build a network. But that doesn't mean that those people have 20 years of running a business understanding margin, understanding profitability, they just understand technology. And what you need is the bridge between the two. And so our positioning is listen, we're going to come in, we're going to take a look at how you spend money on technology today, and what specific results it's driving for your business. And what we'll do is reorganize how you do that, and we'll drive a higher business result, which means increasing employee productivity, making things work better, increasing your margins, because you know that every critical employee in your business relies on technology for as long as they're working. And just as an example, if you if your payroll is $100,000 a month, and the statistic says the average employees 35% efficient at their job 35% efficient with their time, your payroll isn't actually 100,000 it's 285,000. Or if you look at it in the reverse, and you made your employees twice as productive, right you need half as many to actually keep the company running. Now, that's not to suggest you go out and fire everybody. But imagine your growth potential, imagine the ceiling from a labor efficiency perspective grows dramatically. And the problem is nobody has somebody inside of their company that's telling them how to do that, that's showing them how to do that, so that they can drive the result that they need. And when they come in every day, they're worried about their supply chain, they're worried about their vendors and rising prices, and their customers don't want to pay more and more and their margins are shrinking. They don't, they want to be able to compete in the marketplace and have things like e commerce, and be able to distribute their product farther, farther and wider and easier. And oftentimes, they just don't relate that back to technology. And so that's what we do bring in that playback playbook, show them how to do it now. It still takes care of their computer support, it still takes care of their cybersecurity, it's still take takes care of their backup and disaster recovery. But those are functional things. That's like saying my accountant files my tax return. Well, of course he does. But that doesn't mean he can't be strategic at other things. Yeah, it doesn't mean he can't understand your business and guide you how to make better decisions with your money.

Matthew Dunn

Nice. Wow. That's a that's exciting. And well makes a tenant makes a ton of sense, right? fixing the bits and the bytes without re examining what they do. from, you know, the business purpose, the business function of the bits and bytes, particularly when it comes to enabling people to do more to do different to do better. Yeah, so very different ballgame. Much more consultative. as well.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And that's the problem. It doesn't come and go, it is always there. You need to have people that are thinking this way involved in your business all the time. This is why the title CIO became a thing. This is why the title ci SOC CIO, chief information security officer became a thing. And they're expanding upon this. There's more and more of them popping up because customers are starting to get clients businesses are starting to get more aware of this. I mean, the the pipeline hack was huge. You know, you tell somebody, well, you need cybersecurity. They go, Oh, you know, I've never really been hacked. So it's not a big deal. But it became real when you couldn't get gas. Yeah, yeah. And now you have major news outlets that are talking about ransomware. You know, like, ransomware it's becoming a buzzword. People actually know what this is. Now you can walk up to your average person goes, Oh, yeah, that's why I couldn't get gas. Yeah. Okay. So you get that it's important.

Matthew Dunn

You get that preventing it is important. Yeah. And it's no longer the, you know, the the the digital layer of the digital layer of civilization is no longer sort of new and novel and an externality to how things really work right now. It's actually how things really work now. Yep. Man, if it's, if this if this COVID bug had had busted loose five years earlier, 10 years earlier, it would have been a very different ballgame. Like, you know, I feel like in a funny way we we lucked out. Yep. Yeah. When this actually hits, like we'd matured a lot of pieces of Oh, I can work from home. Good. Yeah. Okay. Shortly, like, let's let's keep on things go in there. Well, let's, uh, let's wrap it up. Boy, you got the you got the energy. I think you're gonna do stuff.

Ross Brouse

Yeah, they Some people say that to me. So I guess that must be true.

Matthew Dunn

It seems like you I mean, going to a, you know, 24 person company like that. That's a lot of responsibility and headaches and things like that. But you still seem super engaged in it? Oh,

Ross Brouse

yeah. Well, you know, it's purpose driven. It gets me up every day. And I just have a blast doing it. And, you know, we've gotten to the point now where I don't have to wear seven hats in the business. We've right great team that has taken I've delegated to they've taken those things off my shoulders. Yeah. And now I have the ability to focus more on how do we grow this business? How do we provide better customer service? How do we get better results? Because the big questions any founder or CEO president should be asking and working on every day?

Matthew Dunn

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it does. It does take some some effort to get to up on the step. is a boater would say where, you know, we've got a wave carrying you forward in your book. Yeah, you're looking beyond that. Well, cool. Thank you for for making the time for this conversation. I figured it'd be interesting when I was looking up your background, and it certainly turned out to be the case. On my guest today has been Ross brows. President of continuous networks. Where does someone find you? If they're just listening to this? Where does someone find your company? If they say, Oh, I want to talk with him?

Ross Brouse

Yeah, so I mean, if you're on LinkedIn, you can look me up I'm linkedin.com slash n slash Ross brouse. So rssb ro USC. got tons of information there. You can read about my company. You can also link to continuous dotnet c o n ti n you owe us dotnet? Is our website. Read all about what it is we do. You know, if you're on LinkedIn, connect with me, you know, direct message me We'd love to have a conversation.

Matthew Dunn

Terrific. Thanks, Ross. We'll hit end the recording and we're out. Boom. Cool, man. So how are you managing to find time for book writing in the middle of this?

Ross Brouse

Well, it's all about being good at hiring. Okay, that's what I always say. And I didn't I didn't get to really mention it. But what I always say is, if I'm good at nothing else, I just need to be good at hiring.