Zorus CEO: ‘People Are Losing Sight Of What Matters To MSPs, And That Is Partnership’

‘It’s listening to the MSPs, what’s going on, what’s hard for them, how can we make it easier for them, how do we make it easier for them to make more money and how do we make better business values for them so that they can have better conversations with their customers,’ new Zorus CEO Brett Cheloff tells CRN.

Although already operating in multiple facets of the business, Brett Cheloff is ready for the challenge as CEO of Zorus.

“I would say a lot of the functions I was doing already, [I’m doing now],” he told CRN in an exclusive interview. “I was heavily involved with the sales team, I was heavily involved with marketing, I was on the road a lot.”

Cheloff replaced CEO Ian McChord at the Norwalk, Conn.-based cybersecurity vendor, which caters to MSPs, as McChord departed “the company to pursue new interests after helping lead the company for the past three years,” according to a news release.

Cheloff, who took over as CEO on Sept. 5, has been CTO of Zorus since March 2022. Prior to that, he worked at ConnectWise for 12 years as vice president of product at Automate.

He joined Zorus, which was founded in 2017 and currently has about 20 employees, to help mature the product, the product team and the engineering team. Eighteen months later, he’s now been tapped as the company’s next CEO.

“It’s time to execute. It’s time to create and go,” he said. “It’s going to be at the level of generating more valuable product and creating more for the space.”

Going forward, he’s focused on getting the Zorus name further out into the market and zeroing in on helping MSPs grow their business.

“I’ve seen how RMM tools lack when it comes to data for MSPs to prove their worth,” he said. “I think every vendor in the space should do a better job. If an MSP is paying for your product, you should give value to your MSP partners to pass down value to their customers. MSPs spend a lot of money on a lot of different vendors and the customers themselves say, ‘Why do I pay you so much money?’”

Check out CRN’s exclusive interview with Cheloff about the future of Zorus, leadership and why helping MSPs is his priority.

Did you ever see yourself running the company?

No I didn’t, but I would say a lot of the functions I was doing already [I’m doing now]. … I was heavily involved with the sales team, I was heavily involved with marketing, I was on the road a lot and the more that kept changing for the positive I think Ian [McChord, former CEO] and the board said, ‘Whoa man, you just kind of took over the show, so maybe we should tap you to do this because you seem to be pretty good at it.’

I learned a lot at ConnectWise in the sense of how to run a product line, but I’ve never really learned a lot about how to motivate salespeople and stuff like that. That part of it is really fun. I get to learn a lot of that side of the business to allow for further growth and my own personal development.

How would you describe your leadership style?

I look for really passionate, driven people that fill my weaknesses and let them loose. I’m definitely not a micromanager, but at the same time I want to make sure we’re sharing a passion together, we’re all on the same page, rowing in the same boat, we know what our vision is and what we’re trying to attack. I was pretty inspired working with Arnie [Bellini, co-founder and former CEO of ConnectWise] in seeing what he did at ConnectwWise and growing that company. He treated everyone like family. He taught me this concept to “always be Mickey Mouse.” When you go to Disney World or Disneyland odds are pretty high you’re going to see Mickey Mouse because they have like six different Mickey Mouses all over the park. Mickey Mouse is always out shaking hands, kissing babies, doing that whole thing. He basically just told me to always be visible. So that’s my leadership style—always be available, always be visible, genuinely care about people and they’ll genuinely care about you and do great things for you.

What’s your plan for growing the Zorus brand?

I want people to really look at Zorus and say, ‘Wow, this company understands this market so well, it listens to us, takes the feedback, adapts the road map and really pioneers a new way.’ Not even a new way, I almost call it an ‘old way.’ I think the MSP channel has been flooded with private equity. Everyone’s being bought and people are losing sight of truly what matters to MSPs, and that is partnership. It’s listening to the MSPs, what’s going on, what’s hard for them, how can we make it easier for them, how do we make it easier for them to make more money and how do we make better business values for them so that they can have better conversations with their customers. I want Zorus to be seen as one of those vendors that MSPs say, ‘Wow, these people understand us, they get us, they listen to us, they’re adapting, they’re innovating and we can see constant change.’

What are some initial tasks you want to hit as CEO?

What I’m really looking to do is create a top-level vision for the business that everyone rallies behind, which I believe we’re at the state for. But I also need the market to know it. I still don’t think a lot of people really know Zorus even though we’ve been around since 2017. I don’t think we’ve gotten a lot of traction up until recently. I want the market to know what our vision is, what we’re doing and be buzzing about us, that’s probably my No. 1 goal—to really be involved.

I think ever since Arnie’s departure there’s this visionary person missing that just gets up and inspires thousands and thousands of people. I don’t want to be that, but I want to help facilitate stuff like that, be a part of the community and really be a driver on what is good for MSPs. It doesn’t have to be Zorus’ product, that’s just me personally trying to get involved in, helping MSPs grow and helping the channel grow in any way I possibly can. Getting Zorus’ name out there is probably No. 1 as CEO, but ultimately there’s a bigger play here. In general, any CEO of the channel should be doing that and helping the MSP space grow.

What’s your vision for Zorus?

DNS filtering may seem like a boring concept, but it’s absolutely essential and has been well known for a long time in the MSP channel. But DNS filtering hasn’t really evolved or innovated in a long time. Reports out of DNS filters aren’t valuable to the MSP’s customers. On top of that, traditional DNS filters require you to have DNS setting changes, behind certain firewalls or using a VPN to accomplish the task. That becomes more complex with the hybrid workforce we now know is pretty much permanent. Also altering DNS or just messing with DNS in general has caused just about every tech in the industry frustrations at some point.

How do we make DNS filtering easier to deal with while also providing additional value to the MSP’s customers? At Zorus we don’t mess with your DNS settings at all, we are pre-DNS and filter all traffic before the OS and network get to touch it, allowing for the network settings to be left alone. We also can provide rich behavioral data across the MSP’s customers. Traditional DNS reporting revolves around the number of hits to a particular domain. At Zorus we can say, ‘10 employees spent 100 hours on Facebook, would you like that to be part of your filtering policy?’ MSPs can sit down with a global look at the business and navigate where time is going whether on SaaS apps or thick client activity, guiding their customers in positive directions around time management, license management, educational opportunities, product adoptions, shadow IT and much more. On top of that, in the horrible case of a breach, Zorus partners can quickly see what exactly the user was doing on that machine leading up to, during and after the time frame to see if the user was actually involved with the event or can be ruled out as a bad actor.

Our long-term vision is to extend filtering and behavioral insights into a model where we can help prevent or reduce insider threats and isolate down those machines as quickly as possible.

What cybersecurity trends are you watching right now?

Privileged user access is climbing, meaning your user that is allowed to do what you’re doing, but should you be doing that? It’s incredibly common for salespeople to steal the company list before they exit. This is something that whether it’s your company list, whether it’s just data records that they’re allowed to see … these things shouldn’t leave the company, but they need to be able to do their job at the same time. That’s one of the bigger things that we need to be keeping track of for SMB customers that MSPs are managing. Outside of that, it’s getting pretty scary what AI can do with voice, and it’s getting to the point where video is going to look like us. I think five years from now, it’s something where we’re going to have to have some kind of detection. I don’t know how we’re going to solve that problem, but that scares the living daylights out of me. Beyond that I think the biggest threat is around employees and just making sure social engineering or just compromised, upset employees are something to keep an eye on. There’s just EDR tools for days on tracking weird process behavior, but no one’s really tracking the brain of a person sitting at a computer.

What can we expect to see from Zorus in 2024?

For us, 2024 is expanding on innovation around the DNS filtering and going beyond just DNS. Callback attacks that skip DNS and go straight to IP, I think that’s something that we need to make sure that we’re covering in 2024. Being able to isolate devices off the internet if compromised you’ll see in 2024 as well as some level of AI-based learning of people’s behavior.

Also just being very involved with the community and getting in front of people and helping them out in whatever way possible. That’s mostly me trying to get out there and helping them out to see what I can do. I’ve seen how RMM tools lack when it comes to data for MSPs to prove their worth. I think every vendor in the space should do a better job. If an MSP is paying for your product, you should give value to your MSP partners to pass down value to their customers. MSPs spend a lot of money on a lot of different vendors and the customer themselves say, ‘Why do I pay you so much money?’

MSPs are stuck in this ‘justify your worth’ mode all the time with their customers, and prices keep going up. We want to bring that value through the security data, that’s why I talked about having better conversations with the customers.

What’s your message to partners about you taking over the company and what they should expect from Zorus?

I don’t think we’re not doing this but I’m definitely going to make it more profound inhelping MSPs have better conversations with their customers that help them justify their worth every given day of the week, and potentially even charge more. I also know that with MSPs, the best ones have great business-to-business relationships with the owners that they’re doing work for. It’s not just about your service. Obviously service is important there, but relationships is how they continue to grow. I want those relationships that thrive. You’ll see a lot of that through blogs we write, our products and the ability to deliver better reporting for them going forward.