“They understand the value of what we do and the value of AV, so it’s easier to get a meeting of the minds,” says Bowie.
“Every company has to make a decision about who they are,” he says. “Are they focused on giving the lowest price or are they about providing the best quality?
“We’re a quality provider. This industry needs to provide a much clearer idea of what they’re doing. ‘One-size-fits-all’ can be poisonous. We need a system like Yelp in this industry.”
Remaining Focused on Service
About 30 percent of Electrosonic’s worldwide revenue is tied to service and maintenance, including roughly 75 percent of that coming from existing customers.
“Every project we do and every person with ‘Electrosonic’ on their bag is part of our marketing,” says Bowie. “I think we have a brand that’s very specific.”
“One of our major skills is project management. We know how to do very large projects over a long period of time in very difficult places. This job is about integrating different components and having a happy client at the end,” he says.
One of the biggest challenges Bowie deals with even today is helping customers understand that projects take time to complete and rushing them doesn’t usually make sense. He wonders why clients don’t go more general with their scheduled opening days to ensure the best quality of the project.
“Nine mothers don’t make a baby in a month,” he says.
Well Ahead of AV/IT Convergence
Bowie understands there’s been a lot of talk in the past few years about the convergence of AV and IT, whether it’s happened yet, whether it will ever happen, whether it should happen and more.
From his perspective, though, it happened a long time ago. Electrosonic wrote an IP-based control system about 15 years ago, says Bowie.
“For the past 20 years, IT has been a part of a lot of what we’ve done,” he says. “We don’t see it as a separate entity. It’s been a part of our world for a long time. Younger people expect things to be more interconnected. They expect information to be part of their workflow.
“We see the expectations of intelligent systems growing, in what we deliver and how we work. It’s an incremental growing and learning process,” says Bowie, who calls IT and unified communication “the natural evolution.”
“People want to be able to buy from a quality company that can deliver what they need,” he says.
And delivering on that simple mantra is something that has helped CI’s Integrator of the Year achieve success for 50 years, with no signs of slowing down.
