How Our Start-Stop-Start Again Approach To Marketing Almost Put Us Out Of Business

Ross Brouse,
Continuous Networks
Stuck Between Growing Our Business And Saving It
It’s all perspective. From the outside looking in, our commodity cloud and server company seemed like a goldmine a few years back. We were climbing toward $8 million in annual revenue. We had 50 employees. But because we weren’t sure how to effectively lead, how to business plan and how to market, our business was not poised to weather a potential storm.
Over the next couple of years, the storm hit hard. We lost nearly HALF of our revenue and 60% of our team. With tons of debt and too much overhead, we were bleeding money. My business partner, Jason Silverglate, and I didn’t want the same fate for our IT services business, Continuous Networks. But things were not good within that company.
As the CEO, Jason was also in charge of sales and marketing. I was the COO, so I was running (trying and failing) operations. The culture we had built was starting to tank. Everybody was overworked, and it showed. There was stealing. There were physical fights. I was often working 18-hour days, seven days a week. To be blunt, we were stuck between GROWING our business and SAVING it. Read full article and comment →