How this family’s video-tech firm balances explosive growth with fiscal caution

Ross Video might not be a household name, but chances are you’ve seen its work.

The family-owned video-production company 80 kilometres south of Ottawa makes innovative technology that sits behind the scenes of major live broadcasts and events – from the control rooms of network newsrooms to packed stadiums around the world. The Emmy Award-winning business has been an unseen force in Olympics coverage, for instance, and helps power large-scale productions at venues such as SoFi Stadium in California, including the massive concerts for blockbuster pop star Taylor Swift’s 2023-2024 Eras Tour.

As Ross Video has grown into a heavyweight in its field over the course of more than half a century, the company has balanced two generations of stewardship: from a founder who built cautiously to a son who pushed for scale.

Today, the enterprise occupies a unique space as a family-owned business that for three decades has averaged about 17 per cent annual growth – all without outside investment. It employs roughly 1,500 people and its global network of offices serves more than 10,000 customers across dozens of countries.

“There [are] not many companies in Canada that could survive for 52 years, growing like we have, without an external investment,” CEO David Ross, 60, says.

A combination of confidence in the next generation and navigating divergent approaches to expansion has fuelled the company’s explosive progress.

David says his father John Ross, who founded the business in 1974, “didn’t like the idea of having any debt at all. We’d do the budget for the year, and I’d have to figure out where he’d hide all the buffers. He’d tweak the margins, lower the revenue numbers – I’d be saying, ‘We can’t grow like this.’”

At the same time, John knew his son would hit the ground running when David joined Ross Video in 1991, shortly after graduating from an engineering program at the University of Waterloo. John immediately made him responsible for a core part of the business while shifting his own focus to developing new product lines.

David, after all, grew up immersed in the enterprise – he was 9 when the company launched. Work had been a constant topic of conversation at home. As a teenager, David wrote computer code to build the firm’s inventory control systems and product software.

But in his youth David had aspired to work for Microsoft or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, not the family enterprise. It was only when John considered selling Ross Video that the business’s future became more personal for his son. “It was a bit of a, ‘Oh, it’s not always going to be there in the background while I go off and live my life,’” David says.

It was the push David needed to officially join Ross Video. At the time, it had about 35 staff, which was already a leap for an enterprise that had started 17 years earlier with a product that John had built by hand: a user-friendly video switcher that allowed live production crews to flip between multiple camera feeds in real time. Without video switchers, a show can look flat, being stuck on one camera angle and missing split-second moments such as a goal or a reaction shot.

John founded his business with $7,500 in savings and a passion for broadcast technology. He’d been in the industry since age 14, when he worked as a transmitter operator at a Winnipeg radio station. He later spent 13 years at a video production equipment firm before starting Ross Video.

David credits part of the company’s success to its approach to client and employee relationships. “If you can’t solve it on the phone, you put a person on the plane,” John says of the enterprise’s philosophy on customer service. David adds that when it comes to staff, “hire smart people” and treat them well.

Regardless of their disagreements on spending, John knew the company was in good hands when he retired about two decades ago. He gave the majority of his shares to David, who became president in 2004. “I leave the future to David at this point,” says John, now in his 90s.

Ross Video’s shares have grown so significantly in value that the sale of stock requires institutional – not individual – investors; it is targeting $1-billion in revenue by 2030. It once considered going public, but David says the current priority is finding institutional partners for a “private secondary transaction” that can provide liquidity to current shareholders while preserving the company’s culture and independence.

Another leadership transition is far off in the future, he adds. His children, both in their 20s, are pursuing their own careers and he does not expect them to join the family business. With a company that’s at the scale of Ross Video, “installing your kid because they’re your kid is a little irresponsible and maybe narcissistic,” David says.

Chris Gandhu, a partner and family office leader in Calgary at accounting firm KPMG, says that even when transition seems distant, planning for it is “not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘when,’” regardless of whether potential successors will come from inside or outside the family.

The first step, Mr. Gandhu says, is accepting that succession is inevitable, and then plan for it years in advance. This includes doing formal governance work: clarifying the business’s values and defining roles and decision‑making rules that will protect it through a leadership change.

Ross Video does have both succession and emergency contingency plans, which its human resources department and its board review regularly. But David doesn’t expect to put those into action any time soon: “I’m having fun. … I’m more energized in the company than I’ve ever been.”

His focus is on making the business as strong as possible and supporting his employees and customers. “After that, I hopefully have set things up for the future, but that’s it.”