Aveo Systems’ Craig Richardson joins the Commercial Integrator #AVLivingLegends family this week as our 39th inductee. Richardson, current CEO at Aveo Systems, richly deserves this recognition. The Commercial Integrator #AVLivingLegends initiative is meant to celebrate and honor our industry’s biggest contributors. With this series, we thus hope to spotlight the difference-makers and world-changers who move among us.
Here, we present a detailed conversation with Richardson as he reflects on various achievements in his career. He traces his career back to Atlanta Signal Processors, Inc. (ASPI), while also imparting words of wisdom on the art of problem solving.
Enjoy this in-depth conversation with Aveo Systems’ Craig Richardson.
And if you’d like to read even more coverage relating to our #AVLivingLegends, like Aveo Systems’ Craig Richardson, check out our hub page. It includes direct links to every living legend!
Commercial Integrator: What motivated you to join the commercial AV industry? What has kept you motivated and engaged in the decades that followed?
Craig Richardson: As a graduate student and then later as a full-time employee, I worked for Atlanta Signal Processors (ASPI) building digital signal processing (DSP) development boards and digital-filter design tools for real-time signal processing applications, starting in technical support and then real-time algorithm development.
As a technical support person, I liked helping people be successful designing and implementing DSP in their larger systems. I learned to troubleshoot in real-time and liked when the aha moment arrived for customers as we solved issues. This naturally led to more aha moments for me too, as internalizing DSP theory from different perspectives made DSP more much familiar, making it easier to communicate with, and educate, our customers.
In the late nineties, I focused the company’s development resources on building audioconferencing products using our acoustic and line echo cancellation algorithms and real-time DSP expertise. The resulting EchoFree EF400 and EF200 conferencing products were our first entries into the AV industry for conference-room applications.
Gradual Development
Craig Richardson: We learned so much from our integration partners and end customers about the types of features they would like to see on future products that we just kept going and developing the next generations of Vortex and then SoundStructure products during the subsequent 10-plus years. Ultimately, we became part of Polycom, extending their conference phones and videoconferencing solutions with high-performance, customizable audioconferencing solutions.
What’s kept me engaged has been working with extremely talented and motivated people at ASPI, Polycom and now, Aveo Systems, along with having the opportunity to teach and train our partners about our solutions while listening to their feedback as we extend our solutions. Our teams have always had a shared passion for finding ways to make complicated products and technologies easier for partners and customers. I enjoy solving problems and helping our partners be successful with our solutions. With the broad range of AV applications and products, there’s always another challenge to take on.
Commercial Integrator: Reflect on your role as both a mentee early in your career and as a mentor later in your career. Who helped shape the trajectory of your professional life, and how have you tried to help shape others’ careers?
Craig Richardson: As a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology and then at ASPI, I was fortunate enough to work closely with professors and DSP pioneers Drs. Ron Schafer, Tom Barnwell and Russ Mersereau. They are an amazing group with different areas of expertise, solution approaches and caring personalities. As role models, they inspired me to be a life-long learner, to look for multiple ways to solve problems, to communicate honestly and clearly, to act with integrity, to be collaborative and supportive and to ask clarifying questions — even the occasional dumb ones, as sometimes, you just have to say something out loud to better understand it.
In my career, I’ve tried to use these same principles to help our local and extended teams clarify problems, find solutions, communicate clearly and experience the joy of solving problems. I’ve become an active listener and ‘brainstormer’ to provide different perspectives and encourage my team’s personal success. While it seems obvious, highlighting peoples’ accomplishments and giving them the credit they deserve is very important as it builds trust and confidence, strengthens teamwork as well as increases ownership and commitment.
Recognizing people’s skills and providing opportunities for them to grow with more challenges and responsibilities has been my goal.
Commercial Integrator: What’s the most memorable story/anecdote of your career in commercial AV?
Craig Richardson: Once we started selling our Vortex multi-channel acoustic echo canceller/automixer/matrix devices, we had an order that we suspected was being purchased on behalf of one of our competitors. Before shipping the product, the entire team signed the inside of the product’s metal cover and took a group photo to capture the moment. Years later, I learned that our competitor had indeed received and disassembled the product, and had been impressed that we signed every product!
Commercial Integrator: What has been your greatest professional accomplishment to date?
Craig Richardson: I’ve been fortunate to lead a number of exciting product development projects including the EchoFree, Vortex, and SoundStructure product families. However, starting Aveo Systems nine years ago and building an AV control system platform from zero, to supporting thousands of products where partners can build control systems without programming. are both, the highlights of my career and the hardest things I’ve ever done.
Fortunately, I have an amazing set of partners and teammates with complementary skill sets that not only make success possible every day but, even during the tough times, have made it worthwhile and enjoyable.
Commercial Integrator: What has been your biggest professional regret to date?
Craig Richardson: There were several times in my career where, in hindsight, I wished I had pushed back more on decisions that came down from above. In some companies, spreadsheet-based management leads to business and human-resource decisions that, from my perspective at the time, didn’t make any sense in the larger or longer-term view of the business. This factored into why I started Aveo Systems, so my team and I would have the opportunity and responsibility to not repeat these types of decisions.
What I learned is to not be afraid, even if it might mean risking your job, and to ask thoughtful questions and propose alternative solutions to decisions that appear to have already been made. While there will always be difficult decisions that you don’t agree with, they must be made for the business to survive, knowing that you explored alternatives with different ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ is important for all involved. If your company’s leadership can’t handle thoughtful questions and alternative proposals with the best interests of the organization in mind, it may be time to work elsewhere.
Commercial Integrator: What’s the best advice or pearl of wisdom you either received during your career or came to realize on your own?
Craig Richardson: I learned over the years to separate the ‘what’ from the ‘how’ when approaching and solving problems. The ‘what’ is the problem you want to solve, and the ‘how’ is the way you are going to solve it. Too often, the two concepts are jumbled together in the original problem statement, increasing complexity and adding constraints too early in the process.
This separation makes it much easier to focus on defining the problem well before having to worry about how to solve it. To make this easier, I like to imagine that I can wave a magic wand to make the ‘how’ part of the problem disappear, leaving more time to understand the ‘what.’
In my experience, once you have a good definition of the ‘what,’ the ‘how’ usually becomes very clear. The fun and interesting part is you often find the problem you need to solve is not quite what you thought it was initially, leading to a ‘how’ that is totally different, and often, more impactful.
Would you also like to nominate a peer or colleague — or perhaps yourself! — in this #AVLivingLegends series just like Aveo Systems’ Craig Richardson? If so, just email Dan Ferrisi, group editor, commercial and security, Emerald, at [email protected].
