There’s never been a business account that comes close to these offers, this output, and this return.
Giovanni Bruno, Founder and Managing Director, fokus digital GmbH
Giovanni Bruno has been selling online since he was seventeen. He has run two companies, served eight years on the board of Germany’s largest PR association, and earned six Google certifications in digital recruiting. But ask him about the work he is proudest of, and he will tell you about the two weeks he spent last year on eight-hour shifts in a children’s nursing unit, caring for severely disabled kids. Every year since founding fokus digital, he has done a care internship of two to four weeks. “You walk out of there,” he says, “and you see everything from a completely different perspective.”
That instinct — to understand a world before trying to sell to it — is the through-line of an agency that has spent nine years digitizing one of Germany’s least digital industries, and that is now betting its entire future on software.
A living room, a notary, and a gap nobody was filling
fokus digital began the way many companies do: in a living room, with a few co-founders and a hunch. Bruno’s team came out of IT and marketing, and by 2015 they had picked up their first clients in medical technology and healthcare. What they found in the neighboring world of hospitals and care providers surprised them.
“In healthcare generally, people just weren’t set up digitally,” Bruno recalls. Internal communication, optimized websites, professional social channels, sound recruiting strategies — none of it was there. Nor were the vendors to supply it. “We realized there were no providers for this at all, not even for simple technologies these organizations could actually use themselves.”
The decision to focus on care and social work was not only strategic; it was personal. Bruno’s father needed care before he died. “I know this field as someone personally affected, as a relative,” he says. “But I also know the digital tools that exist in other industries. Why not bring the two together?” On April 25, 2017, he and his co-founders signed the notary papers for fokus digital GmbH.
There was a second reason he stayed. In care and social work, he found people who moved him. “It’s a profession done with so much heart,” he says. “You have to understand how to lead, how to value your people — all these psychological factors. And that’s a lot more rewarding than just staring at hard numbers and KPIs.”
“They’re not buying a product. They’re buying human care.”
Marketing for a care home is nothing like marketing a car or a consumer brand, and Bruno is quick to correct the common assumption. You do not simply run an ad, shoot a few nice photos, and wait for residents and staff to arrive.
These organizations aren’t buying a product — they’re buying human care. And that changes everything about how you sell to them.
Giovanni Bruno, Founder and Managing Director, fokus digital GmbH
The math of the sector is brutal. There are too few workers, employers are stretched thin, and a nurse who feels poorly onboarded or unappreciated simply leaves. So the message fokus digital builds for its clients is never a slogan; it is a claim an organization has to be able to back up. “What we broadcast is always this: we are a healthy organization, capable of caring for others — and we look after you, too.”
From the beginning, Bruno refused to make his clients dependent on him. The agency was founded on a principle he repeats like a mantra: Hilfe zur Selbsthilfe, help toward self-help. “We show organizations the strategy they can run in their region, the technologies they need. We set it up for them — but we also teach them how to operate it themselves.” A client can build its own career website in three or four days, post jobs, optimize listings — work that would otherwise cost thousands in agency fees.
He has strong opinions about why so many young companies fail, and they come from watching founders in his own networks. “They fixate on the product instead of the audience,” he says. “I’d look at the audience first — always.” And he is unsentimental about the cost of doing it right. Bootstrapping is fashionable, he acknowledges, “but let’s not kid ourselves — you simply need money.” A single congress ticket can run €1,500. “But there you meet a hundred entrepreneurs, and maybe one or two of them turn into a €50,000 contract.”
Sharing is caring
For someone who sells expertise, Bruno gives an unusual amount of it away. He runs seminars, workshops, and full-day conferences for audiences of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people, and posts free webinars every couple of months. He started teaching on YouTube back in 2008 with his first videos on SEO and digital marketing.
The people who show up leave grateful, and he is untroubled that he might be handing away billable secrets. “I always think, sharing is caring,” he says. Some of them come back years later — as paying clients who remember who taught them first.
The more transparent you are, the more openly people come into dialogue with you.
Giovanni Bruno, Founder and Managing Director, fokus digital GmbH
His frustration is with the parts of the training industry that operate the other way. Too many programs, he argues, dump a pile of information on people and leave them without a plan, or withhold the useful part until the invoice is paid. “That’s how the whole space stays a bit dubious,” he says. His own seminars try to send people out with one feeling above all: that this is not as complicated as it looks. You do not repair your own car if you can’t, he notes, and you certainly don’t perform your own heart surgery — but everyone deserves the bird’s-eye view first.
The whiteboard is gone
For years, the walls of the agency were covered in whiteboards, four meters by two, filled every day with bubbles and ideas. “Today,” Bruno says, “forget it. That’s over.” The work that used to happen at the whiteboard now happens with AI — building the structure, running the data analysis, mapping what a target audience is searching for and where the competitive gaps are.
But he draws a firm line around what AI is for. “I give AI the role of structure,” he says. The authenticity — the part that actually moves someone in the care sector — has to come from a person. AI surfaces the insight; a real staff member, a real story, carries it.
That distinction is now reshaping his view of what agencies are. In the age of AI, he believes, agencies will become architects — strategic advisors who help organizations implement AI models, stay compliant with data protection and the EU AI Act, and navigate the new labeling rules for AI-generated content. He has watched agency-owner friends shrink from 140 employees to 70 in two years while holding revenue flat. His own team is leaner too, at the same turnover as before.
Then, about nine months ago, he saw a video on TikTok: someone had built an app using AI and a $20-a-month tool. It set off a chain reaction. His team started building their own AI — for marketing, data aggregation, surveys, and interpretation — and it has become the thing the entire business now revolves around.
I’ve completely replaced myself with an AI. The only thing people still need us for is operating it.
Giovanni Bruno, Founder and Managing Director, fokus digital GmbH
He says it with obvious delight, not dread. A client once teased him: now that you’ve built this software, what exactly do you still do? He joked that he’d be on Tenerife — come visit. The real answer is the one that closes the loop back to his founding principle. “People say: Bruno, we’ll take it — but help us take it on.” The software does the heavy lifting; the human helps them own it. Help toward self-help, now running on a machine.
Money that isn’t allowed to sit still
Bruno found Vivid the way he finds most things: through his own research. The agency opened its first account at a conventional bank, but he has always been drawn to newer models — daily interest, cashback, multiple IBANs. “A lot of providers just don’t have that,” he says. When his research turned up Vivid, he tried it privately first, as a personal pocket. Then it clicked that it made sense for the GmbH, too. That was a few years ago.
His reasoning is the reasoning of an operator who hates waste. A company that has been around nearly a decade tends to accumulate reserves — money set aside for tax payments, for future distributions. “That money just sits there dead,” he says. “It has to work.” Vivid credits interest daily and pays cashback on spending, and Bruno runs everything through the cards, right down to five-figure Google Ads bills. The cashback alone, he says, adds up to several thousand euros a year, and the daily interest effectively covers his monthly bookkeeping. He sets up separate virtual cards for each channel — one for Google, one for Meta — and pays under €100 a month for the whole package.
I can run my entire finances with one thumb — a transfer, inviting people, creating pockets. It’s completely relaxed, and that’s what wins me over.
Giovanni Bruno, Founder and Managing Director, fokus digital GmbH
What he keeps coming back to, though, is the support. He has a direct mobile contact on the support side and says he has never had a problem with a transfer or a transaction. It was support, in fact, that nudged him to move idle cash into the Interest Account when his balances grew, and that flags new features and better-fitting plans as they arrive.
It’s like having an advisor who actually knows what you do — and that’s something a lot of financial providers no longer offer.
Giovanni Bruno, Founder and Managing Director, fokus digital GmbH
He is not uncritical, which is its own kind of endorsement. Pressed on what Vivid could do better, he points to shared access: he would like to bring family members or colleagues into a pocket without each of them having to run through the full registration process. It is a small thing, he concedes — but for the way real teams and families handle money together, he’d like it smoother.
The interest lands daily, the cashback adds up, and the reserves he once called dead money are finally doing something. For an operator who can’t stand waste, that is reason enough to stay.
Note: This article reflects the individual experience of a Vivid customer and is provided for general information only. It is not legal, financial, investment, or tax advice, and is not a guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of capital, and values can go up as well as down. Product availability, rates, and conditions depend on your plan and may change. Information is current as of July 2026. For decisions about your own business, please seek qualified professional advice.
