![]() ![]() ![]() He received his first patent, shared with his father, for the innovative Downstream Multi-Keyer used on the company’s previous line of analogue production switchers. While still at high school, he won three major engineering competitions at the national level, while early work at Ross Video during University saw him develop inventory control software, manufacturing test software, production switcher hardware and software. When you own your own company, you get to do the things that make you feel like you’re doing the right thing.”ĭavid Ross has a background in innovation. So when we do the expansion, we will hopefully be more 100% carbon-free. One of the things in the budget is to put solar panels on the roof. “Next year we’re planning a factory expansion that will pretty much double its size. “One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is what about that last six per cent? ![]() “Before all that, our factory is already in a region where 94% of the electricity that comes into the factory comes from a combination of nuclear and renewables, so our carbon footprint is 94% carbon-free, he continues. Combine that with the lack of travel during lockdown, and the lack of driving trucks and production people around and so on, I think that it’s been really green. “Necessity is the mother in event of invention, they say. “We’ve worked with a number of customers in many different ways to help them do remote production - and in an awful hurry as well,” he says. Across the board, the industry has seen increased demand for remote production, and well-placed Ross Video was no different. Ross also talks about a responsibility for the environment, already facing a crisis before the pandemic. “It’s a healthcare crisis, it’s an economic disaster, but it’s also all about people taking care of other people.” “The pandemic in a way, has been an exercise in social responsibility almost more than anything else,” he explains. “I get a lot of people saying that that was one of the most significant things that they’ve seen Ross Video ever do. The people who got it definitely appreciated it, but the people who were most proud of it were the people who were not impacted. So it was a really neat day that we announced that we’re making sure that 100 families at Ross Video were going to be guaranteed above living wage. It turned out we impacted exactly 100 employees out of our nearly 900. I asked human resources to figure out how many people that would apply to, and as for the people that were already at $20, we needed to bump them up a little bit too. I worked out that to get everybody above the living wage significantly to twenty bucks an hour, only cost point three per cent of our overall payroll. “We didn’t have anybody who’s paid minimum wage in the whole company, but we did have some people who were paid around the living wage, some above, some below. “The minimum wage in Ontario, where we’re located is $14 an hour, and the living wage in the area is around $18 an hour,” he says. We have had the most profitable year in the company’s history…it’s time to go twice as fast and take advantage of that.” “I want to give our development teams extra rocket fuel this year. David Ross also decided to give back to those on the front line and establish a minimum wage of $20 an hour across the company. “So that was two and a half million dollars that we gave unexpectedly to our employees - in the middle of a pandemic.” “So we paid them all back we gave everybody basically what was a bonus for a couple of months of four day weeks,” he continues. Whitepaper How to Virtualize Live ProductionĪ couple of months into that bounce back, Ross decided he wanted to say thank you to the employees, “because they did that for us and for each other”. Then government subsidies and things like that started to kick in and we actually forecasted that there was no way we were not going to have a good year this year. ”As that started, we went from that 30% down back up to level again. “However, even though we told them we were only expecting four days’ work, a lot of people worked five days anyway. “They could see some of the other companies in our industry and elsewhere doing layoffs immediately,” he recalls. ![]() “We said, we know each other, let’s take care of each other,” explains Ross. The first initiative was four days’ pay for four days’ work a move Ross says the employees took very positively. Then the concept of ‘Lifeboat Ross’ emerged. “We actually shut down manufacturing for two weeks and rearranged it for the pandemic.” “We saw that business was way down, and we decided to be really cautious,” he continues. I think in our worst month we were down about 30% year over year. “We were having an absolutely spectacular first quarter, we were up about 30% year over year,” recalls Ross. ![]()
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