Chris Grau

Chris Grau is the founder of Outshine Media LLC. He has been working with computers since 1988, starting on the 286 PCs of the era, and he has never stopped studying the field: hundreds of technical books, business coursework at St. Louis Community College, and formal study of networking, encryption, and data recovery. He has been self-employed since 2000, when he began a decade of contract IT consulting and server support in St. Louis, managing networks and hundreds of machines for clients up to large corporations, and to this day clients still call him first for advice on anything involving computers or the internet. A few years in mortgage lending and banking along the way left him fluent in the money side of small business. In 2008 he saw that many of his clients did not have strong websites, so he built them and ran the marketing on top of them, law firms among the first. The work grew almost entirely by referral, and in 2014 he established Outshine Media LLC in Jupiter, Florida. Many of the practices that signed on in the early 2010s are still clients today.

That history explains how Outshine works: Chris never separated the infrastructure from the marketing, so the firm owns both, from dedicated servers and edge security to performance-first builds, measurement, and the acquisition strategy on top. Over the years he refined the firm’s approach into its trademarked MatchMarketing™ and BoostMarketing™ programs, winning high-quality leads by positioning each practice as the trusted Match when ideal clients are searching, and its one-number reporting standard: unique lead acquisitions, counted once, delivered monthly. He remains the point of contact on every account.

The continuity is not just professional. Chris has been married since 2001, and his wife has worked alongside him in the business the whole way; Outshine is family-run in the plainest sense. Together they are raising four daughters in Jupiter, Florida, and he considers time with family the point of all of it. Off the clock: fishing, cigars, a lifelong run of games from Magic: The Gathering and poker to Halo and Minecraft, and a standing fascination with nature, space, and whatever comes next.