I’ve walked down this road, and had success...
As the entire world is connected these days, standing up a decent website becomes the obvious first step. From there, focus on audio shows and the day to day interactions that build relationships with customers / end users, the high-end audio media (both print and online), suppliers, and other manufacturers. Represent yourself honestly, professionally, in a caring and passionate manner, as a person who follows through on things and requests for reviews will follow by the bucketful. Many you view as competitors will become your biggest facilitators, helpers, fans, and friends. Act and react strategically in terms of the long-term viability of your business, as opposed to trying to have the business pay for itself before it’s mature enough to do so. Success depends more on you than the product you offer.
While I established a mushrooming dealer network in one of the roughest times, I don’t recommend taking that route. With a few exceptions, dealers today offer little in the way of value to a manufacturer. That’s as much a statement about the consumer as the dealer, and how the past two decades have hollowed out that business. Only a handful of viable dealers remain, and are a shadow of what once existed considering overall services (including technical / product knowledge and awareness, delivery, setup, replacement, repairs) on offer. Beyond that, handling the infighting and bad blood created by selling the product around each other took me as one of the most unexpected realities of supporting the dealer network. After the lessons learned through a couple of iterations, I finally got that right, and in time became one of the biggest reasons dealers came looking for me.
Home dealers generally have little to no business acumen, ability, stake, commitment, or desire toward their business or actually representing the lines they carry. Most of the time, they’re people looking to buy equipment at a discount. I’ve watched companies make some short-term money from that model, but it always cannibalizes a business.
Manufacturers once possessed the technical, business, sales, customer service, and product support / service people to adequately cover most of the bases, along with obtaining a lot of overlap of same from their dealer network. With pricing dramatically rising in the past generation, customer expectation in those areas of sales and service have obviously not lessened even if the infrastructure and abilities to provide it has. In fact, the overall abilities in the aforementioned skills of 95+% of high-end audio manufacturers has reached an all-time low, but that’s a topic for another post or thread.
Like so many fields, a husband and wife or their children run a viable company. An outfit sharing the technical, business, sales, service, and advice giver hats once spread around to the internal, external, and dealer resources real industries maintain but no longer exist in high-end audio increases effectiveness as the typical person does well with one or two. However, these entities collapse once the driving force of the company comes to the point in life where they no longer provide what they used to.
It’s a tough business that’s only become tougher. Like the dealers, there are very few manufacturers who actually make the sort of income that would displace a day job. Wishing you the best of luck, and offering myself if you ever want to talk things over.
Finally, I leave you with the well worn adage, want to know how to make a small fortune in the high-end audio business? Start with a large fortune...
