Making the move from bars to corporates
Bill Robison started the Great Lakes Sound and Lighting empire in the early ‘80s out of a garage, renting PA gear to bar bands. It was a different time, he recalls. “In those days, bar bands wanted sound men and 24-light light shows. What they wanted was relatively elaborate. I started with one band, then [worked with] more bands, and I reached a point where I wanted to get some legitimacy going.”
Then Robison pauses and adds with a laugh, “In the bar band business, I wouldn’t say that everything is altogether above board.” He laughs. “We’ll just put it that way.”
So, in 1985, Robison launched Great Lakes Sound with the bar band base. Shortly thereafter, he added DJs to the business and the expansion was on. The company added new gear and soon found itself fielding calls from promoters around the Toledo, Ohio, area. “We really outgrew the bar bands in many ways and their market evolved away from having big production rigs,” he reports. “Bands used to be able to make a pretty good living working in a nightclub, but today they make about the same amount of money they made in the ‘80s. Also, technology has improved where they are mixing on stage and don’t need a sound man and don’t need near as much stuff.”
Widening the Range
In addition to fielding calls from local music promoters, Robison started looking for corporate, civic and social work. In fact, the Great Lakes book of business runs the gamut from corporate events at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis to a performance by jazz musician Earl Klugh at a local theatre to a number of political rallies that have taken place in town.
“We really try to do a real wide range of clients,” he says. “If you had asked me 15 years ago where our customer base was, it would have been centered around a much smaller number of clients, and a much higher percentage of our business relied on individual clients. Today, I would like to say that maybe our largest client is somewhere around 10 percent of our business, which is, I think, pretty comfortable. I mean, I value all of my clients, but I certainly don’t want to feel that if I lose one client, I am going to go out of business.”
Procuring and servicing new business is one thing, dealing with the inherent government regulations has been quite another for Robison and Great Lakes. As an example, he points to trucking rules that regulate how many miles and hours a driver can handle in a day and demand an accounting of where fuel is purchased and used to make sure taxes are distributed equitably. “Everything just requires more paperwork,” he explains. “It is a nightmare, it is an absolute nightmare. The paperwork that we are presented with, the rules and the regulations that are put down, just make it very difficult.”
At the same time, Robison is not throwing in the towel. In fact, he continues to look for more opportunities and bolster the company’s gear choices. When it comes to gear, the company’s president points out that he lets customers dictate what they bring in. “If our customer asks for it once and we don’t have it, we wonder if we need to get it. By the third or fourth time they ask, we incorporate it into our inventory,” he says.
That said, the Great Lakes list of PAs has grown to include 32 boxes of Adamson Y-Axis Y10s, Adamson 200s, EAW SM200s and SB100s along with Electro-Voice and Apogee boxes. Power comes via Crest, Crown and Audio Pro amplifiers, and consoles include Yamaha PM 3500, M7, LS9, M3000 and Crest LMX.
Keeping Current
Making sure that Great Lakes has the correct gear in inventory is an issue that keeps Robison up at nights. Indeed, a handful of years ago he decided to purchase a Midas H3000 console. “We probably shouldn’t have bought it,” Robison admits now. “It was an investment of $87,500, but we probably should have gotten a couple of Yamaha PM5Ds. It was a great console, but we had to sell it because it wasn’t going to be worth anything if we didn’t. In 20/20 hindsight, I wish we hadn’t done that.”
He continues, “But what are you going to do? Technology is very scary. Unless you are a really big boy with an awful lot of dollars, you are going to wait and see what the big boys do. When you see them moving in a direction, you are going to go in that general direction, but cautiously. We have to spend our dollars extremely carefully.”
Yet, Robison has seen that lighting is a different animal altogether. “I guess the realization that I made perhaps 15 years ago was that I could make more money with a given investment on lighting than I could with sound,” he reports. “The sound stuff is not nearly as cost effective as lighting, so it was a logical direction to add lighting. It made good sense from a dollar standpoint.”
He started offering lighting back in the bar days. Of course, back then all it took was “a couple of PAR cans, a couple of dimmer packs, a very simple two-scene controller for a great light show. We introduced the area to intelligent lights,” he says. And now the company is taking the lead in bringing in LEDs and other lighting hardware that continues to make them a regional leader.
Robison has also added staging, trussing and rigging to his services menu and is looking forward to expanding into the media business. “We don’t own video because everybody and their brother has video projectors, but media servers are a pretty hot ticket right now,” he says. “That is a product that we are looking at very closely. What excites me right now is finding new ways of doing old things more efficiently. I think that is the future.”
Although he has heard from the skeptics who say that it is impossible to wear that many hats, Robison is undeterred. “I think in some markets that would be difficult. I think in a smaller market likes ours, it is almost essential,” he says. “You want to be turnkey. You don’t want to send your customer elsewhere. Your customer is always going to like best if you can serve all of their needs.”
