When the father-son team of Jaygarick and Joe Stewart decided to go into business together, there was no doubt who was going to get the title of president, Jay jokes. At the same time, the duo wasn’t hung up on titles back then, and they are not now. After all, Dad is Dad.
Both Jay and Joe had been working in the music business for decades, each running a studio and helping artists from around their West Bloomfield, Mich., home base. The jump to live music came when Purity, one of the gospel artists Joe was working with, needed some help with a live show. “So, we would buy a piece of P.A. here and there,” Jay recalls, “like a mixing board, then a couple of speakers and some amps. In over a year, we had a small P.A. system.”
That small P.A.was pressed into service for a number of gigs, including performances by Purity and a handful of corporate events. In 2004, the two decided to incorporate as SR Audio. Then they started to look for a medium sized P.A. that would enable them to work with better-known acts in larger venues. That led them to purchase an assortment of JBL SRX boxes along with amps by Crown and a Midas console. “That system did a few thousand people very well,” Jay recalls.
A Growth Spurt
The business began to grow, and the SR Audio list of gear expanded right along with it. Picking gear was important, as it is for any developing regional company. The Stewarts made their choices after noticing what was appearing on riders. “It was a combination of what we were seeing that we could afford to buy and what we thought we needed to buy,” Jay says. “That’s how we prioritized, so as we got larger jobs, we got some of the more à la carte pieces on the riders. Once we got past affording things, then we were able to get a P.A. that was actually on riders, plus sounded good. That’s where we are now.”
These days, SR Audio boasts boxes by Meyer and EV, including the company’s X-Line line array as well as a number of XLC trap boxes. The systems are powered by a combination of Crown Macrotech and EV CP Series amps. The key is flexibility, since the company’s recent clients have included soul, rap and rock artists as well as corporate events. For any kind of speaker-on-a-pole job, SR Audio sends out EV QRx or Meyer UPA-1 boxes. “If we’re doing a larger arena or theatre stuff, we tend to go with XLCs,” Jay reports, “because they’re easy to put together pretty fast, and you add more boxes when you need to fill up the space.”
The Meyer and EV equipment was purchased, he explains, because it offered them coverage without having to buy a wide variety of boxes. “We tried to stay away from the line arrays where you had so many of these kinds of boxes for the long throw, and so many of these boxes in the middle, and then so many of these down fill boxes,” he says. “We needed to have stuff that was compact; once we bought it, we could stick with it.” At the same time, Jay reports that the company is currently looking into purchasing an L-Acoustics V-DOSC rig.
“Me and my father’s business model was to make sure that we could expand into a world-class company that could service super big tours all the way down to keeping in mind how we started, which was two speakers on a pole, and still service that customer with the same level of respect, knowing that the type of gear we are going to bring is excellent for those types of jobs,” he says.
Having that collection of gear has given SR Audio the means to provide a level of service that, Jay believes, has helped the company succeed. “Our thing, whether it’s a large job or a small job, has always been to do the very best we can as a company — where we give the customer more than what they paid for,” he says. “We give 110% so that our word of mouth is great.”
So much so that the company has expanded from Michigan to Florida with a satellite office in Miami that enables them to service clients as far south as the Bahamas. One of the company’s short-term goals is to build a strong client base through south Florida and Georgia. “There’s a lot of business down there that we hear about,” Jay says.
Quality Begins at Home
Even as he has his eyes on the south, Jay is aware of the fact that SR Audio has to tend the home fires while growing. The key, he says, is the split of responsibilities between father and son. “If I go out on the road, he’s able to keep things in the office going and vice versa. The key thing is for us to make sure we have great people to work with who will help us with our situation,” he explains. “When it comes down to it, we’re a small op-eration. We only have a handful of employees; my father and me pretty much run the day-to-day stuff. I don’t have an exact recipe for getting it all completed, but we seem to get jobs done.”
Currently, the SR Audio staff is comprised of five full-time staff and, given the job, a pool of 15 to 20 freelancers is available. Expanding into different regions is not the only type of expansion that SR has been undergoing over the years, since the company has added light-ing, staging, video and installation services.
The SR Audio team has used its talents on a collection of recent gigs, including an event that featured evangelist Juanita Bynum, a concert by The Whispers at the Opera House in Detroit, the House of Prayer’s annual concert and a corporate talking head event put on by developer Dave Bing while showcasing the Watermark condominiums project.
According to Jay, the plan is to continue to carefully grow the business. “We’d like to get to where we can take on multiple tours at the same time as the regional stuff,” Jay says. “We’d like to expand the audio more as far as physical size, but keeping in mind that we can do it only as fast as we can actually guarantee the quality.”
“We don’t have a big footprint,” he explains, “so we have to make sure that every job we do is going to get us five to six other jobs. That kind of model is what keeps us going.”
