Recorded in Washington D.C., CTA Board Member & McIntosh Group CEO Daniel Pidgeon recently chatted with fellow Board Member & ProSource President Jim Pearse on the distributor’s “What’s Up ProSource” Podcast.
The two covered topics such as the efforts the CTA to support technology and innovation in the political landscape, Pidgeon’s perspective on McIntosh Group’s latest audio solutions, and the ProSource x McIntosh Group partnership.
Here are some highlights for CE Pro readers, who can listen to the entire conversation at www.prosourceinfo.com/news/podcast/.
Jim Pearse: It’s crazy — we’re sitting here looking out the window at Washington, D.C. We spent the day walking around Capitol Hill, talking with senators about the some of the initiatives that CTA wants to put into place.
Daniel Pidgeon: Correct. Yeah, it’s a great day. This is an annual event and one that I think CTA loves the most because it brings everybody here, then they can actually walk into the offices of these Congress people with people from the district that they’re representing.
Lightapalooza took place in late February, and the growth of the event has mirrored the rapid ascension lighting fixtures and controls.
JP: Yeah, it’s interesting. You can just walk in and meet with a Senator. It feels so big, and all of a sudden, we’re walking around, going into committee meetings and things like that. Maybe talk about some of the initiatives. What’s your point of view on all of the different initiatives and some things that you’re interested in?
DP: More broadly, I think the power of Consumer Technology Association is the fact that they work to keep government from doing things that they shouldn’t do. I don’t know how much Gary [Shapiro, CEO of the CTA] talked about it, but it’s mainly an effort — we don’t come to D.C., and we don’t go there asking for handouts like a lot of people do. So, a lot of organizations come in there and they want this thing that gets them this money or this bill that gets them this.
JP: The CTA board, I just joined this year. You’ve been doing this for a while. You’re a previous Chair of the Board. Just talk about investing your time into this, and what it’s meant to you, and the relationships that you’ve built.
DP: Undoubtedly, it’s been the single greatest thing I’ve ever done for my career and I’ve never made a dime from doing it. But the relationships you built, the friendships that you build — when we’re here, we’re representing an industry, we’re not representing our own individual interests in our own individual businesses, and so you get to know people on a different level and that pays dividends. … But to see 1,200 companies that are bootstrapping something together to carve up enough money just to show up there, it’s amazing.
JP: Just the energy. A lot of weird stuff, but you know.
DP: 80%-90% of it probably isn’t going to ever see the light of day, but the pharmaceutical industry has the same thing. 80%-90% of the stuff they go after, that they try to cure or come up with a drug for fails, but you could try to save them.
JP: When I look at our upbringings in consumer electronics, when I was walking the show this year — as you know, at ProSource, we have a lot of Custom Integrators … and they’re now becoming the technology leader in the home, really gaining a seat at the table, along contractors, designers and architects. I’m walking through the healthcare area going, “we could do health rooms,” and we can make them uber secure, execute them really well, make sure that people feel comfortable in these rooms. We can do lighting, shading, all these different things, but now you can get that at CES.
DP: Right. Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. I would say if you show up and you don’t get anything out of it, it’s probably your own fault.
JP: You took over as CEO of McIntosh Group a couple of years ago. We’ve developed a pretty strong partnership right out of the shoots here. Talk about how you got involved in that, and then we’ll get to your vision and maybe some strategies that you’re thinking about for that group.
DP: To back up, McIntosh brand obviously is our flagship brand. There’s really five businesses, and the first business is McIntosh, as you point out. The second business is Sonus Faber, which is a speaker brand, which also it’s doing incredibly well right now. It’s really growing. It’s finding it’s place in the market. It’s been filling out. Then there’s Sumiko, which is part of our cartridges. Then we have our distribution company.
We distribute not only our lines, but we distribute other manufacturers around the world. … My retail, my integrator hat is always on, but it’s like, OK, we’ve got to get it demonstrated, but we also have to get people to understand what they are really buying and the quality of analog and what that really means. Not just from a pure performance standpoint, but just the idea of sitting down and really enjoying music and taking those moments of life that we enjoyed.
JP: You’re like, “Wow, I haven’t listened to this song in years.”
DP: Exactly, and you just you hear things out of music that you’ve never heard before, and even for me, I’ve been in this industry, call it all my life, certainly all my adult life, it’s like, even hearing the music and what that’s able to produce, I’ve never experienced anything quite like that. And I don’t know, maybe I just never looked at it that way or I never went to that level of audio, but it really is life changing. I mean, it changes your mood. It changes the way you feel. It changes everything when you hear music that is uncompressed, that is pure analog. You hear every bit of it.
I had a meeting with a very famous person in the industry a few weeks ago and he described it: “It’s sort of like that paragraph that you read that they take out all the vowels and you read it, but you’re still able to read it.But as compared to what that paragraph would be if it had all the vowels in it, your brain doesn’t have to work as hard, and it relaxes, and it doesn’t stress.”
JP: Smoother. That’s a great analogy.
DP: Thank you. I can tell you that the ProSource relationship … you will see a big dedication, particularly in the custom installation world, where we are continuing to add to that lineup. We have some amazing pieces, but we need to go beyond that. You know we coined a phrase, “CI-fi”.The idea behind that is: Can we introduce hi-fi sound into a custom installation environment?
JP: For sure.
DP: We really believe strongly, based not only on what we what we think, but based on the success we’re having right now in the CI space, that we need to continue down this road and we need to work on that. We need to support it. We have a lot of efforts in place to actually build out the teams that are going to be specific to custom integrators and that world, because that’s where the growth is. That’s where the younger consumer set is coming up, because many people don’t know what we do. More people think that I work for Apple than I think that actually recognize it, right?
I will say we were talking to Congress people today and when I said I was with McIntosh, one of the staffers says, “Oh my God, I love that stuff! We’ve got that audio at home,” and I’m thinking, “Alright, I like this guy.” He was in his early 20s and the younger generation knowing our product, frankly that’s what’s driving our business right now: the automotive engagements. Our goal is: how do we just get more people exposed to our brand in a positive way?
JP: Yeah, and I think that principal distribution obviously is part of your culture and has been part of the success, and I’m really glad to see that you’re maintaining that. You guys are doing a lot of amazing things. I really look forward to continuing our partnership.
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