Like so many people who founded regional sound companies, twin brothers Anthony and James Cioffi – who run the very successful Boulevard Pro in northern New Jersey ("seven miles from Times Square," Anthony points out) – started out as musicians.
Anthony was a guitarist, James a bassist, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s they were in a variety of local groups, "and then my brother and I got the opportunity to tour with some artists in their bands – Gary U.S. Bonds, Mink DeVille," Anthony says. One day, they overheard Mink DeVille's tour manager saying he needed to find a couple of keyboards for their upcoming tour. He asked the brothers if they could help.
"My brother and I were always collectors of equipment; we never sold anything," Anthony says. "So we rented a B-3 and a [Yamaha] CP-70 as backline equipment for the tour, and that made more than we did!" The duo toured with Mink Deville between 1982 and 1985 but soon tired of being on the road so much. "We used to rehearse at the prominent places in Manhattan," Anthony recalls, "so my brother and I thought, ‘Let's try to do something where we're not traveling as much but we're still in the music business.' So the first thing we did was open a rehearsal studio in New Milford, N.J., with the equipment we already owned. And we were very successful – from the minute we opened, we had national acts. The very first day Phoebe Snow was the first act. And we had Joe Lynn Turner from Rainbow, too. Being in the New York metropolitan area, there were a lot of artists who needed a place to prep for tours without the hassle of NYC.
Rehearsals to Rentals
"Then, once we had the rehearsal studio," he continues, "people would say, ‘Hey, I need an amplifier for Friday night – can I rent an amplifier?' So we grew into the backline business and that grew into the production business, and now we also have a large installation business and do sales, too. My brother James is the pro audio guy here. He was a sales manager for Sam Ash on 48th St. [in Manhattan] for about 10 years. And I do more the production end and take care of rentals and all that. Between us, it's a good fit, so when we decided to open up the company [in 1986], we were very well-versed in a lot of different areas."
Cioffi says that Boulevard Pro has found a comfortable niche for itself when it comes to offering tour support and doing area gigs: "We mostly deal with theaters that are 1,000 to 4,000 seats; Boulevard is also very active in the outdoor festival market in the 5,000-15,000 seat range. We're happy to leave the big arenas to the Clairs and Sound Images of the world, as they are the kings of that market. What's been good for us is that with the economy slowing down, these smaller regional theaters are actually attracting bigger acts, because maybe they can't sell the 10,000 seats in an arena right now, but they can sell 3,000 twice. And that's helped our business because those bigger acts are asking us for more things. Some might just say, ‘We need a backline rental,' but now it's often a backline and monitoring and a console, because what they have in-house is not sufficient for what the higher level of act needs. With the current airline limitations, too, we've been asked for guitars and things we were never asked for before. So we've made a big investment in guitars.
"We're finding a number acts who, if they're traveling with guitars, are only traveling with their primaries and not backups. Some acts travel with nothing. They're really taking a leap of faith there. In our situation, we try to give people perfect instruments, but then they might go to the next place and not get what they ask for. ‘Can you send me a Stratocaster?' ‘No problem!' That's been a relatively new thing for us."
Time to Buy?
When it comes to making purchasing decisions for equipment, Anthony Cioffi notes, "I don't buy anything unless I see it on the riders a few times. It's pretty straightforward. When we went into the L-Acoustics network [Boulevard Pro has V-DOSC and other L-Acoustics gear], it's because we kept seeing it on so many riders. We want to buy stuff that's not refused by anybody. And that goes for the equipment we sell, too, so we're dealers for Yamaha Commercial Audio, Shure, L-Acoustics, Nexo, JBL, Lab.gruppen, and QSC. My brother's background in sales and rep'ing pro audio sales and installations has really helped us a lot." He also notes that sometimes rentals turn into sales: "We've done a lot of rentals with the Apollo Theater, but they also wanted to buy two [Yamaha] PM5Ds, so we were in the mix to bid and we ended up selling them those. That's happened many times – where theaters that we work with that we're renting backline and audio add-ons, say, ‘We're tired of renting this console all the time, we'd like to purchase one.'"
On the console front, Boulevard Pro went all-digital several years ago and boasts a nice selection of Yamaha PM5D, M7CL, LS9 and Avid Profile boards. "I think we got one analog must-have call in the last four years," Anthony says with a chuckle. "We also sold off racks and racks of our high-end outboard gear. As soon as we saw digital was coming around the corner, we sold everything we possibly could when the market was still strong for all that. We bit the bullet with the digital and then there was definitely a learning curve, but in the end we were a little ahead of a lot of people and it worked out really well for us."
BoWash Corridor
These days, Boulevard Pro's main office is in Oradell, NJ, adjacent to Hackensack, but the area they cover, and the types of jobs they do, are continually expanding. It's not at all unusual for them to handle parts of national tours that stretch from, say, Boston to Washington, D.C. At the same time, they might be called upon to outfit a New Jersey synagogue with a Nexo system, do a high-end home-theater install, or provide SR for Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes at a free pre-game rock concert outside the new billion-dollar stadium the New York Giants and Jets share in nearby East Rutherford – in the last case supplying a complete production package: audio, backline, staging and location power. The company's experienced crew – most of whom have been with Boulevard for many years – are trained in all facets of production and, as Anthony says, "they are really one of the company's greatest assets. Their experience, their attention to detail, is a very big a part of our success."
And that success keeps building, year after year. "Even in this slow economy, we're up maybe 20 percent in our business over last year. It's grown organically – it's word of mouth, it's reputation. In 2011 we'll be celebrating 25 years in this mayhem," he laughs. "When my brother and I started out, we had no idea what this would become. We didn't really have any expectations in terms of the business. But from our days as musicians, we knew that when you're playing a gig and the audio is terrible, there's nothing worse. So we had that perspective. We know what the artist expects from a production company. We have built Boulevard Pro on a simple goal to supply the best possible service to our clients and we bring that same attention and care to everything we do."
Contact the company at www.blvdpro.com.
