35 GENIUS INTERVIEW David Ross
start doing things where you need other people and other skills you’re not an expert in. You may appreciate them, but you’re not an expert; you couldn’t jump in and do their job. It’s a transformative moment, going from a small company to a larger company and you start giving that up. FEED: You’re trying to be flexible, but bigger. You’re trying to listen to people, but still maintain your vision and integrity. How do you balance all that and keep on the right track? DAVID ROSS: There are two different parts to the answer. First, is the question about what I call the ‘long tail’ of the broadcast industry. The second is about decisions on how to grow the company. So, on the long tail of broadcast industry: we sold our last analogue switcher around 2005, which is not that long ago. We weren’t selling analogue switchers as a primary thing, but there were still people buying brand new ones, even then. You hear in the industry that it’s all IP now. And everything in the magazines and press releases says everything is IP. But you realise, no, there are still people, actually about a third of the world, still broadcasting in standard definition. You have standard definition (SD) out there, high definition (HD) and ultra-high definition (UHD). You’ve got people who want to do SDI, people who want to move to 12GB SDI, people who want to do IP, people who want to be able to use NDI – they want to use compressed real IP. You’ve got people who want HDR, but they want it in HD. The world is a lot more complicated than it was even ten years ago.
We made a decision to be customer- focused. We don’t want to lose customers who need the next HD product or the next UHD product or the next IP product. So, we’ve reorganised R&D to be able to say yes to everything. I know some companies have been... I would use the word ‘ideological’, saying ‘No, we’re only going to do the cool new thing’. And I think that’s gotten some of them into some big trouble. I think we’ve been more practical, recognising there’s a market out there and customers who have trusted us for a long time. Some people say the industry is consolidating and converging. We took the opposite view. From what we see, the industry is fragmenting, specifically around technology. The second part is knowing which area to move into next and what your strategy is. When you move into technologies that are not core to your company, the easiest thing to do is to buy a company that already knows how to do it. We’re a little different from a lot of the other companies out there – certainly the big ones. We have a rule we don’t buy a company more than 10% of our size. We see consolidation in the industry where big companies are merging together. That’s a business decision they’ve made – and certainly they add big dollars in sales and big swathes of customers all at once by doing that. But it’s not always a good news story, because you end up letting go a lot of sales people and senior people. You end up shutting down a bunch of manufacturing and obsoleting a lot of products. You make a lot of people unhappy. It’s not a good news story for the most part.
one or two things. I realised that if our customers had knowledge about such a breadth of technologies, even in the head of one person, companies could have a broad technology range as well. You just have to jump in there and find the right people to make it happen, whether you’re hiring them in or you’re buying a company. That was a really freeing moment. I’m an engineer; engineers are used to being specialists in something. It was like doing a trust fall, saying ‘now we’re going to do robots’, ‘we’re going to do cloud- based software processing’, ‘we’re going to do control systems’, ‘we’re going to do production’. But when you start aligning your company to the needs of your customers rather than sticking with the technology you know, you start building a Ross Video. FEED: So the growth of Ross Video is about the shift in going from what you do, to what your customers need you to do. It seems like there needs to be a letting go at some point? DAVID ROSS: Yeah, exactly. But it’s scary. One of the reasons my father wanted a small company is if his accountant left, he could still do the books. If an engineer left, he could finish the design. Suddenly, you
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