Keith: Mackie and its companies span so many markets, and numerous sub-segments that comprise each of these markets. How do you effectively manage and serve them all to the high degree you’re shooting for?

Jamie: That’s where we’ve re-aligned, to have staff that addresses specific sub-markets, and we will certainly add people as needed. The market managers all have P & L (profit and loss) responsibility, and if they see an opportunity to address a market that will result in good yield, we will add more staff to handle it.

Right now, we already have folks in place, who are specialists, to address sub-segments. Some are more product specific, such as digital products, while others are more market specific, such as church. The key is that the teams are cross-functional; instead of walls between departments – product is conceived, then handed off to engineering and then passed along to manufacturing – each team includes members from all company departments, and they all communicate freely and support each other.

When we go out and talk with the church market, for example, the manufacturing people know what we’re saying and committing to, and they understand what they need to be able to deliver. Same with engineering, sales, finance – you name it. The goal is for customers to understand that there is a team handling their needs, and there is no mystery as to whom they talk to when they have a question.

Keith: Branding is always a tough issue. How do you manage the various brands of Mackie so that they retain their positive connotation to customers in a vast, varied assortment of markets and levels of strata? And, how do you decide what brand to use with a particular product?

Jamie: It can be a difficult thing to manage, because obviously, there’s a legacy issue and a previous impression issue, where Mackie might mean one thing to one group of customers and something totally different to another group. One of the reasons we’ve gone to this three market approach, rather than focusing on a brand approach, is to manage that very thing. It’s very easy for people to say all of our products should be branded “Mackie” and that’s that, but look outside of our industry and you see there are many approaches that seem to work.

Swatch, for instance, is a parent company that owns several high-end watch brands. Overall, however, the company is known as Swatch, while the individual brands have distinctive meanings to customers. But then look at Sony, which sells Sony-branded clock radios for $19.95 and Sony-branded broadcast production consoles that cost $150,000, and that works as well.

So there is no pat answer, such as “well, if it’s black it’s got to be Mackie and if it’s blue it’s got to be EAW,” or “if it’s for live sound, it’s EAW, and if it’s for recording, it’s
Mackie.”

For example, if we decided to make a power amplifier for concert touring, should it be branded EAW? I couldn’t tell you the best answer. My gut tells me the decision would largely come down to the amp’s feature set, and by definition, what the product really does and what customers it’s primarily intended for.

If we make an amplifier, say, for a KF750 or KF760, then logic would tell you it could be EAW branded. But if it’s a more generic touring amp to go against the leading brands, powering a wide range of concert loudspeakers, then it could be more of a Mackie-branded product. But that’s why you don’t want to have hard rules, because it depends on the market, application, customer and the logic that goes with each particular case.

Rather than spending too much energy on branding issues, again, what we’re saying is “what does the market need?” Once the crucial processes and issues to achieve this are defined and completed, branding takes care of itself for the most part, often from the outset or along the way.

Keith: How’s the integration of the Mackie companies coming along? Has it progressed as you expected?

Jamie: Managing a merger, an acquisition, whatever you want to call it, is the most difficult thing in business. It all starts with the people. You need to get the people working together as one, thinking as a group. That means you must be willing to make changes. No matter what you do to integrate new companies, some of it will work and some of it won’t, and you have to be willing and able to make changes at any point.

One of the major changes that we’ve made in the past four to five months that has really accelerated this, for example, is centralization of key processes such as product development and management. Stephen Siegel of EAW in Whitinsville is now our vice president of engineering for all Mackie acoustic products, whether they be RCF transducers, Mackie powered speakers, EAW concert speakers, you name it. This is all Stephen’s domain, and it makes sense in producing the best acoustic products in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

Continuing this example, there’s also an EAW engineer – Zack Cobb – working with RCF in Italy. Kenton Forsythe is also spending a good deal of time in Italy, which is very helpful. RCF is spending a lot of time making products for EAW, and it was pointed out by Jeff Rocha (EAW engineer) that it’s almost as if EAW has its own dedicated speaker lab. There’s a group of engineers at RCF working on exactly what EAW wants and needs. So product development is timelier, and there’s better response, communication and coordination between the two entities.

Progress on issues like this have been working well and things are coming together, but it took a lot longer that we had hoped. You’ve got to try a lot of different things, and I think we’ve been lucky enough to find the right road to take in an increasing number of cases.

The second half of this particular equation is bringing the software/digital people from various Mackie divisions into the fold with EAW, and this has really picked up steam in the last couple of months. We’re building another cross-functional engineering team, which is a good way to go because these types products typically take longer to develop.

It will probably be another nine months or so until the debut of the first really significant products to come out of the blending of all the Mackie technologies – new RCF transducers, new EAW loudspeaker design, and potentially new power and DSP, all within the same box. But it’s one of the great synergies a lot of us could see when the acquisitions were initially made, and we’re making good progress.

It never seems fast enough and you always want to do it quicker, but it’s simply not that simple.

Keith: It’s a tough balancing act - the desire to get a product out to market versus the desire to get the product right.

Jamie: That’s always a tough call. You never want to say a product is “good enough,” but at the same time, especially with speakers, you can continue to refine and refine and refine in the pursuit of incremental improvements. But this path can lead to never bringing anything new to market.

EAW is pretty good at this type of thing, likely as good as anyone in the market, because they’ve done so much build-to-order through the years. They’ve listened to customers for so long, and they’ve learned how to quickly translate that input into just what the customer is indeed looking for.

Mackie, on the other hand, has been known for going the incremental route, taking a longer time to actually introduce products, sometimes way past when they’ve been announced. This is due to trying to make it a little bit better, and a little bit better, and… at some point, all of these little bits add up to a notable delay.

So we’ve changed two things. First, we’re not announcing products until we know they’re done. Second, a firm release date is attached. We’ll always strive to make products better, but there has to be clear decision about the point where a product is ready to benefit the market. And there must be confidence in that decision.