So it was heartening to see the flurry of activity that’s been taking place at A.C.T Lighting in recent months, where Bob Gordon has significantly broadened the company’s strategic path. Since the beginning of the year, A.C.T has taken on North American distribution of Italy-based Clay Paky, U.K.-based LED maker GDS and German xenon and LED luminaire maker A&O/alpha one. In that same time frame, Gordon also hired former Tim Hunter Design president Bill Groener to fill the newly created position of vice president of business development. In his previous role, Groener helped develop lighting and environmental designs for a broad range of applications including corporate headquarters, retail centers, cultural institutions, hospitality venues, houses of worship, public spaces, private homes, theme parks, and theatrical venues. These are all doors he’ll now be knocking on for A.C.T.
Archi-tainment
In short, in a few strokes, A.C.T has positioned itself for what Gordon says is going to be more active future, the economy notwithstanding. The new product lines are a fit with Groener’s extensive relationships in the evolving archi-tainment universe, where retail and restaurants meet theme parks and theaters. The plan is to take A.C.T beyond its comfort zone as a leading distributor of lighting control systems — the company is the exclusive North American distributor of grandMA consoles — and related products and into the paradigm of full service across various markets, from the live performance sectors that A.C.T is well entrenched into what Groener calls “the Holy Grail of lighting,” the architectural and other permanent installation venues.
But there’s more caution that characterizes this new initiative than meets the eye initially. “We’ve been seeing companies adding products almost gratuitously — that’s not us,” says Gordon bluntly. He says others are using the economic uncertainty as an opportunity to expand, but adds that he wanted to do that by keeping with his longtime strategy of a limited and carefully-chosen slate of products. “Before we did anything, I wanted to grow the company to be able to support any expansion,” he says, noting that this included several new hires (pointing out that A.C.T also did not lay off any workers during the recession) in addition to Groener and preparing support and training infrastructure for the new brands, all of which were chosen based on creating a mutually supportive palette of products and capabilities. “We picked products that go well together, that have a certain amount of technical and sales overlap. GDS, for instance, has products that fit well with out theatrical markets, like its backstage cue lighting systems, but also lend themselves to the new architectural markets we want to go after.”
Clay Paky is new jewel in the crown. Gordon says the Italian manufacturer has long been “grossly” under-represented in the U.S. market. “Around the world, they’re a leading product — they outsell Vari-Lite in Europe,” he states. “Our goal is to make them number-one in this country.” But all of the new and existing products — Gordon says console sales continue to do well — are matched in various ways. “There’s an art to building this metaphorical basket of goods,” he says. “The art is to pick products where someone who chooses one of those products sees others that they also like, and to make all of them leading in their categories.”
Support and Training
Bill Groener says that’s exactly what he likes about being there. “One of the things that impresses me about A.C.T is that they take a lot of care in taking on the responsibilities for what they distribute — they’re not in it for the volume but rather for what’s in the basket. Bob has a strong philosophy: if you take on the role of the distributor, you also take on the de facto responsibilities of the manufacturer, which means you bring over inventory and bring on the staff necessary to provide support and training. That limits what you can take on and support properly. So it seems like A.C.T has taken on a lot here, but what they’re taking on has been well thought out.”
Groener says the archi-tainment market is a good match for the newly enhanced product range. “Architecture has been though a pretty rough patch,” he concedes. “A lot of the budget for that kind of lighting project was moved to the discretionary side of the ledger, if not postponed or cancelled altogether. But we believe we’re emerging from that — people’s appetite for live entertainment has not diminished.”
Gordon and Groener are of one mind about the future potential of the archi-tainment market, though Gordon remains unsurprisingly grouchy about the granular aspects of expanding a business on the lip of economic turmoil. “It would be nice if the Euro was a little bit cheaper,” he complains. But he says attention to those same kinds of details is what irons them out, such as finding ways of cost-effectively containerizing inbound freight to reduce transportation costs from multiple European sources. The new strategy has already increased revenue by 50 percent, year over year, in the first half, he says.
I hope we can all say the same for the second half.
