Jack Kelly, founder and president of distributor Group One Ltd., has been there from those humble beginnings. He earned his technical stripes as a nuclear missile technician in the Air Force, “which should frighten a lot of your readers!” The training and consequent work in his nuclear specialty steeped him in electronics theory, tools and devices.
When he got out of the Air Force in 1975, the country was in its post-Vietnam/oil crisis recession and employment drought. Kelly’s inspiration for getting into the sound and lighting business was perhaps the highest of callings. “It wasn’t that I’d ever worked in the field,” he explains. “It wasn’t that I was a band member or had ever worked as a sound or lighting person or in the A/V department at my high school. It was a job!” He went to work for a distributor of sound and lighting called Hammond Industries, while going to college, initially working as a technician for Revox tape recorders and Beyer mics.
By 1980, while pursuing an accounting degree, he was already establishing the U.S. office for the British firm Klark Teknik Research in Farmingdale, NY, and by 1983, helping to take the company public on the London Stock Exchange. Along the way, he picked up U.S. distribution for DDA, Midas, BSS and Turbosound. Thus, “the economic opportunity of staying in the business far outweighed any reason to get out of it,” he recalls, and a thriving career was born.
A Byzantine steeplechase of acquisitions, agreements, partnerships and divestments ensued. The owners of Celco distribution worldwide began renting space in the Farmingdale facility, leading Kelly to establish Celco, Inc. as the U.S. distributor for their lighting control consoles. In 1988, he bought Celco, Inc. on behalf of the Klark Teknik Group and began growing the lighting distribution side of the business, adding more European brands and developing its own brand for light fixtures and control called ElektraLite.
In 1990, Electro-Voice, then owned by Mark IV Industries, purchased the Klark Teknik Group, from which Norman Wright and Vincent Finnegan bought the Celco division in 1991, with Kelly joining in 1992. At the same time, Chris Fichera, sales manager for DDA Consoles, left the Klark Teknik aegis to start Group One with Kelly in the same Farmingdale facility that housed Celco.
“Eventually,” said Kelly, “we just decided it would make more sense to have one company rather than two, so we merged the companies in 1994. We felt, being distributors, that if we could collect the right talented individuals inside the right infrastructure that would handle marketing, financial, inventory, processing, etc., all working together. We’d have one group. I just flipped it and made it Group One and added ‘Ltd.’ because most of the business had been coming out of the U.K.”
Global Vision
“Limited” is hardly the word for global company that now represents some of the world’s top brands in audio and lighting through a network of independent sales representatives, calling on nearly a thousand different dealer and contractor accounts and growing at a pace of about 25 percent per year. Look under the hood of any major sound or lighting installation, and you’re likely to find that it gets its horsepower from one or more of the thoroughbreds in the Group One stable.
On the lighting side, the company distributes ElektraLite controllers and intelligent lighting, Pulsar LED Lighting and the recently added Avolites line of lighting consoles. Its sound division distributes Blue Sky near-field powered monitors, DiGiCo digital mixing consoles, MC2 amplifiers, RTW surround control and audio monitoring, XTA digital signal processing and Van Damme cables.
Group One brands have been a part of huge outdoor festivals (Glastonbury, Coachella, Summerfest), theme parks, concerts, corporate events, architectural features, Julliard productions, the Hollywood Bowl, the Newseum in Washington DC, and most of the current top Broadway musicals. They’ve been involved in everything from churches to battleships and concert events featuring performers ranging from the Black Keys to Pink Floyd to Blues Traveler and from Barbra Streisand to Lady Gaga, Aerosmith and ZZ Top.
“When choosing brands,” Kelly explains, “I look for two things. I first look for a product that stands out because it’s breaking new ground, or its performance is at the very top of its category. If we do mixing consoles, it’s going to be DiGiCo, because in our opinion, they’re at the top of the food chain. Same with XTA, MC2 or Van Damme. And it’s the same with the people who come with the products. Do they understand how to be successful in a market as huge, physically and economically, as the United States, regardless of their successes overseas? I spend as much time getting to know the people who are running the company — engineers, managers, salespeople — as I do having my team evaluate the product vis-à-vis the competition. It’s people and product. Our business is really about both of them.”
Kelly attributes the company’s ascendancy to its responsiveness to customers. “We don’t distribute products, we represent brands. We’re not simply bringing in boxes to ship out and make a little profit. We represent the brand as if we are the brand. We try to build the brand for long-term success, so we’re very involved in the marketing, putting a lot of effort and budget into trade shows, advertising and PR. We’re also involved in making sure that the manufacturers and engineers understand the actual product requirements, which might be slightly different in the U.S. than elsewhere.”
Avolites Alights
The latest to join the Group is Avolites, the London-based manufacturer of lighting and media controllers, dimming systems and power distribution solutions for all aspects of professional stage lighting of any scale. Its products have earned renown for their combination of innovative technology and intuitive ease-of-operation.
Begun in the late 1970s as a small company producing dimmer racks for touring shows, its name comes from the amps, volts and ohms on multimeters, which in the U.K. are called avos. Avolites grew with the industry in the 1980s, when its control consoles kept company with such vaunted names as Celco, Leprecon, Hog and MA. It now has distributors in 65 countries and is employee-owned by people who care passionately about the science and the art of lighting.
About 22 years ago, Brad White, then an art major at the University of Tennessee, worked as a lighting designer using Avolites products almost exclusively. Eventually, Avolites America hired him as director of technical services for North and South America, a post he held for 12 years. He left Avolites for about six years to work in research and development. When Group One Ltd. added Avolites to its roster in June, it asked White to return as national sales manager, which allowed him to resurrect his nickname, “Mr. Avo.”
White sees as his main charge the establishing of a solid dealer network. “I believe wholeheartedly in a true distribution and dealer network,” he says,” one that supports the dealers who are out there pushing products, training people on the products, servicing the products and building a really solid support network. In reality, with a control console, you’re not just buying the console. You’re buying the support and the service. You’re buying the ability to call someone to ask a question and get through your programming day a lot faster. If you’re in a show situation with 30, 60 or 90 moving lights and you lose one of them, it’s not such a big deal, because the others will cover. But if you lose your lighting console, you’re dead in the water. Your show’s over. So service and support are a huge part of the package. We’re establishing and reinforcing our network all over the country so you never have to go more than an hour before you can have a service guy on the phone anywhere solving the problem for you.”
Like Kelly, he’s interested in the people who come with the products. “We want dealers who are dedicated to this product. We don’t want someone who sells 15 other consoles, and this is just one of them. We want someone who is as passionate as we are about the product, who cares about getting the show done and about the users, not just about the dollar.”
Avolites’ flagship console is the new Sapphire Touch, with 45 motorized faders, the most in the industry, and two 19-inch color touchscreens on the console. “We’ve just introduced Version 7 of our software,” White points out. “A big advantage is, as you move down the line to our Tiger Touch and Titan Mobile, they all run the same software, regardless of the physical size of the console. There are no limitations between the models, so you can run the same number of fixtures, attributes and lines on each one. They’re equally easy to adjust on the fly and each model can back up another model. We’ve evolved our software, expanded the processing and power of the consoles and built in functions to help the user deal with the new multi-cell LED fixtures, which are channel hogs. Our pixel mapper allows mapping of LED lights in combination with conventional lights, which pulls everything together and makes it very simple to program visually.”
Lighting designer Paula Trounce can vouch for the Sapphire Touch, which she road-tested on the main stage at the Lovebox multi-act musical extravaganza in East London’s Victoria Park this summer (she used the Tiger Touch on the second stage). “I have a lot of experience setting up desks for other people to use, and for busking shows,” she said. “Having two screens on the Sapphire was useful for both programming and quick access to fixtures and pallets. There were lots of ‘Oh, wow!’ moments with the pixel mapper — I would go to do something only to find out that the desk had done it for me. Simple, good design with plenty of faders and the dual screens mean you don’t have to hide things away on different pages. It’s all right there in front of you. And if you do want to use different pages, the motorized faders give you the confidence to do so live.”
Trounce has diligently kept pace with Avolites technology and software updates during the course of her career. “There has been a huge advance over the past few years with Avolites consoles,” she says. “The way people program and operate shows has had to change with new technology and fixtures. Desks have to be constantly evolving too, and the latest from Avolites shows they are taking that very seriously.”
White jokingly calls one new product, the Titan I, as the company’s “gateway drug.” It’s a single DMX USB dongle that allows the user to output one line of DMX with the full
functionality of Avolites Titan Software (Pixelmapper, Quicksketch, Media Clip Select, Attribute Control-Blades and Shape Generator) for fast and intuitive lighting and media control from one on-screen PC console. It’s particularly well suited for students, small production companies or someone who wants to learn how the software works and how it reacts in the real world without having to invest in a full-sized console.
Summing up, Jack Kelly called Group One “basically a conduit for other people’s greatness. We’re not the manufacturer, but I don’t think there’s any question that our brands have introduced significant, meaningful, groundbreaking solutions for sound and light designers. If we take credit for anything, it’s for being a good partner, for representing the brands well and for taking good care of the customers of those products.”
For more information on Group One Ltd., go to www.g1limited.com.
