A stellar history filled with steady growth, a recent move into a 225,000-foot facility, and several awards — including a 2008 Parnelli for Best Regional Sound Company in North America — keep the people at Tour Tech East busy. Owner Peter Hendrickson knows he’s not gotten where he is by accident, and this affable Canadian keeps his sense of humor on at all times and his ego in check.
Hendrickson says the success of the company is based on two things: knowing what you can/can’t do and knowing when you reach your limit. His basic philosophy also includes the need to “hire people better than you and pay them well. And as you get bigger, more people start [gunning] for you. The tallest is always going to get his head shot off first!” he laughs.
Obviously, Hendrickson is doing something right. Years after founding the company, his head is still attached and, today, Tour Tech East is one of the largest live event companies in Canada, with 50 full-time employees and an inventory boasting more than 200 L-Acoustics V-DOSC, dV-DOSC and ARCS boxes, 300 Meyer MICA and MSL-4 boxes and some 150 Electro-Voice X-Array system cabinets. The company stocks DiGiCo and Yamaha digital boards and added Avid and Midas to the mix in the past few years. In 2001, Tour Tech East spread its talents southward, opening a U.S. office in Bangor, Maine.
Band Mates
Tour Tech was founded in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in 1984 by then-freelance lighting designer Hendrickson. At first, the company only offered lighting services, but as it evolved, Tour Tech East added sound, staging, power distribution, installations, sales and trucking to its base of business.
Hendrickson cites the 1990s as a highlight — about the time when many big tours stopped carrying production and started using local support for their tours. Seeing the opportunity, Tour Tech bulked up in terms of equipment and personnel. Rod Stewart, Def Leppard and Iron Maiden all came knocking. “That’s when we went from being a bar-type supplier to a regional supplier,” he says.
Tour Tech’s long client list includes The Eagles, Avril Lavigne, The Rolling Stones, Toby Keith, Dwight Yoakam and Randy Travis. The company has also provided audio support for Bon Jovi, INXS, The Black Eyed Peas and Wilco (among many others) at festivals.
“Peter and I started in a band together when we were teenagers in the late 1980s,” says Tour Tech East VP of sales Bruce Nelson. While Hendrickson worked the company in the early days, Nelson continued making music right up to 1996, when he was asked to join Tour Tech. Today, Nelson handles the sales side of design and installations in churches, universities, and arenas, recently completing a high-profile install at St. Francis Xavier University’s Gerald Schwartz School of Business. “We took a lot of different speakers to them, and it came down to E-V versus Meyer,” he says. They went with both, putting Meyer in the main lecture hall and Electro-Voice gear in the classroom. “We’ve been longtime dealers in both.” A lot of Sennheiser and Shure mics also went into the project.
Another big sound install was for the Full Gospel Church of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a church with a history going back to 1925 that expanded into a mega church in 2005. “I put a Meyer M’elodie rig in there with a Yamaha LS9 digital console,” Nelson says.
For the city’s Neptune Theatre — the largest professional theatre company in Atlantic Canada — Tour Tech East put in a Meyer system with a DiGiCo console. At the Theatre Savoy, on Cape Breton Island, an L-Acoustics system was installed. Tour Tech doesn’t forge too many allegiances with specific manufacturers of gear.
“Our philosophy is to find the right tool for the job — and I mean right, from the support from the distributor to the manufacturer. You know, there are tons of great speakers available today — to the point it’s hard to buy bad stuff — so it comes down to execution. Even if a speaker is great, you could put it in the wrong place. Just because you buy the best tools in the world doesn’t mean you can fix a car.
“If a customer is adamant about what he or she wants to buy, don’t try to sell them something else,” adds Hendrickson. “Not everyone wants to drive a Chevy. Some want to drive a Ford. So we put as many tools in the toolbox that are good quality tools.
“We still have that local company mentality,” Hendrickson explains. “We don’t just install and walk away. We think of things in the long-term. I’m the guy you call at 4:30 on Friday when something has hit the fan, and I’m the one that gets you what you need. Especially in the entertainment business, you have to support what you sell and stand up and honor it.”
The Trade Show
For years, every January, the company hosts a two-day trade show and charity event and party benefiting ACNS, the AIDS Coalition of Nova Scotia. Hendrickson’s brother Jamie was a lighting tech who succumbed to AIDS in 1998 when he was only 35. Held in his memory, the fundraiser supports ACNS.
With the new space afforded by the move into their larger home, this year’s event was even bigger than usual. “We had 30 booths from companies like Sennheiser Canada, Shure, QSC, E-V, Midas and others,” says Nelson. Hundreds of audio, lighting, video and production professionals turned out, and the event included of several educational seminars, covering broadcast, commercial AV, distribution, staging, lighting, audio, websites and social media.
While the Tour Tech East facility was hardly small before, it did get a bit cramped. Nelson says they now have room to test packaged systems, demo gear for clients and offer rehearsal space. “In the other building it was always a challenge to get access to everything, and quickly demo a set of speakers. Now we have ample space to hang a small line array and tweak it.”
The new building allows for even better opportunity to serve Tour Tech’s East mantra: “Do demos and be prepared.” Then there’s the second half… “When you’re taking a tour on the road, you have to take it out properly,” says Hendrickson. “This company has a good reputation on packaging. We put a lot of speakers in a small space and make sure the system integrates quickly and efficiently.”
Quest for Gear
Always on the hunt for new products to fill that expansive warehouse, Hendrickson is looking at several different speakers. “The L-Acoustics K-1 is the most interesting to us. We visited the factory, got a spectacular demo and were treated really well. It’s a great product and really stood out.” Other standouts they’ve been investigating are Meyer’s MILO and fellow Canadians’ Adamson Energia System.
Hendrickson is perpetually concerned about the interfacing issue. “One thing that has made life easier is the powered speaker box. Meyer is probably the leader in this with their MICA. You put a signal to it, and that’s it.”
As no one can own all the boxes, “we need something that integrates well so when you rent a speaker box, it’s more about your packaging. If it is a product that is manufactured, they should be identical. The key to a lot of these big outdoor events and festivals is choosing the right speakers and knowing it will all work together. That way you go in, nail it and leave.”
Looking forward, Hendrickson is pleased that gear is evolving toward global speakers that work in a variety of settings and countries with various voltage standards. “It’s great to carry a universal pack, something that you’re able to go to a festival somewhere in Europe and basically have it sound the same as it did in North America.”
But the success of any sound company is not just products, but people. And Tour Tech takes care of its employees. On the occasion of 10 years of Tour Tech East employment, each employee is greeted with a Rolex watch. “Yeah, these cost $5,000,” Hendrickson explains, “but when you break it down, that’s just an extra $500 for every year they’ve worked here. If you can put up with me for that long, you deserve it!” he laughs.
