Meet Our Founder

Best-selling author and veteran recently asked our founder Adam Roseman of the IT industry Jennifer Bleam to join her on the podcast IT Success Secrets.

Jennifer started by asking Adam about his origin story and how he found Rose IT Solutions.

“I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My mom recently started a business after being a fourth-grade teacher for 40 years; she finally decided to retire and is now doing education consulting. She’s just started her journey, and she’s actually quite busy helping districts develop curriculum development.

My grandfather started a dry-cleaning business in the late 60s working there until the mid-80s, and then my dad came into the picture with my mom; my dad learned the business and eventually brought it in the late 80s. And we’ve now celebrated our 57th year in business. So, we are very well known within the community, we are very active, and we have a multi-generational client base with very avid fans.

I grew up working in the cleaners, working out front checking clothes in, and working with computers.

Computers have always been a big part of my life.

I was a kid at six or seven years old taking apart our Apple. Always figuring out how things worked, and I was very inquisitive.

When I was a teenager, I did a little computer repair, it wasn’t an official business, but I would upgrade software and install memory for family and friends.

I went to a private high school away from home where I connected with someone who is still a mentor, the IT director at that school. And I became one of the local techs on campus helping with software installs, really anything that needed to be done. So, I learned a lot - server administration, managing groups of computers - all that kind of stuff. That prompted me to go to college and get my computer science degree, and I graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s in computer science.

And then I started my first job outside of working for my dad at a local IT shop, similar to what I do- similar clientele, similar services. I got hired in on their service desk. For about four years before being promoted into management, I did that running the service desk as their operations manager.

That company got bought out by a larger nationwide IT shop, and I worked there for about two years as a manager.

But I started butting heads with the bureaucracy of a large organization, I hated going to work and was not happy, but in the meantime, I’d met my wife, got married, and had my first two kids.

I decided to go out on my own. It was scary. I some money put aside, but if this didn’t work, it could potentially hit me and affect my family greatly. My parents invested a bunch of money, along with the money I had, to get me started. A couple of people I worked with at the big company came over with me, we started Rose IT Solutions, and the rest is history. We’ve been growing year after year and sit at about 25 employees, and we did about 10 million in sales. I’m very involved in the community and try to stay connected and give back to the business community.”

Jenifer then asked what struggles Adam faces leading the business.

“One of the struggles we have in our business, and other IT shops will have this as well, is keeping people and then the knowledge I called the knowledge tree. It would help if you had bodies to take somebody who doesn’t have a great experience. Still, you hope they learn fast - wants to learn, wants to increase their knowledge to make themselves better, but there are times when you take a risk, and they’re not that person, and eventually, you have to make the tough decision of moving on from people. That’s a constant struggle we deal with daily, especially in that area. Making sure we have competent, hard-working people that will treat a customer well when on the phone, that are efficient with their time getting onto the next call, so we don’t have long hold times - because we do have contractual obligations, SLAs, with service desk clients. As a business owner and my management team, I struggle with that's really a thing that I struggle with.

Balancing the employee's monetary value, how much you want to pay them the benefits and all that kind of stuff, to the output of what they do. I’m not the only IT shop in Metro Detroit, there are tons of shops smaller and larger than me, and we’re all trying to pull from the same pool. So, you’ll see people hop from place to place for whatever reason -more pay better benefits, a friend works there and says you should come here - and that something that I’ve struggled with not only as a business owner but as the manager at the two IT shops after school."

Towards the end of the interview, Jennifer asked what Adam and Rose IT Solutions were doing to help customers with the ever-growing cybercrime threat.

"In October, we launched our Security Division, we partnered with IBM with what they call the IRIS team as a Security Managed Services Provider, and we resell their services. That could be the security operation center working with the analysts managing the security infrastructure of a company’ interpreting that data and acting upon it based on the threat level, depending on how the client wants to handle it. It could be security consultancy such as developing an incident response plan. And if there is a breach, it’s us coming in with IBM to do a forensic audit to find out how the actor got in, what’s the biggest impact, and that kind of stuff - so there’s a wide range of different services we can offer.

Depending on the contract, we can bill, or IBM can bill directly to the customer depending on the customer's wants.

We have another organization that we work with that does proactive penetration testing networks from both inside and outside sources to see if we can break-in.

That’s what we’re doing, and we have conversations both with existing clients and new prospects every day. This is our hottest offering right now."

You can listen to the full interview below.