Almo Pro A/V’s Short Road to $200 Million Revenue

Celebrating 5 years in business at its E4 Philadelphia, the distributor reflects on competitive advantages that led to quick success.

Tom LeBlanc

On how Almo Pro A/V’s competitive advantages have changed …

Some haven’t changed. We have an outbound salesforce that’s got a lot of people who are CTS certified. When I brought over those folks they averaged over 10 years in the AV industry so we have a long tenured sales force. We’re still laser-focused on education through our E4s, webinars and Tech Tips. One of our marketing strategies is to be focused on education and to keep our sales force educated and certified as well.

We’ve stayed narrow. We’ve turned so many vendors down and kept it to about 35 vendors. We’ve added vendors here or there when it’s strategic. We just added Listen Technologies because they do the assisted listening and we didn’t have an assisted listening solution for our integrators …

We’re focused on the pro AV integrators. That’s kind of unique. Most distributors sell to a lot of different business segments, but we’re very focused on the pro market and that’s part of our strength.

On reaching $200 million milestone …

To grow to $200 million in five years is a real testament to the people that I brought over with me, to the company that we partnered with, Almo, and a testament to the vendors that we selected. We didn’t go wide. We could have had four times the vendors to try to drive that business, but we went narrow and I think that ultimately resulted in more revenue for us.

On almost immediate success …

For the first six months of our existence we were not profitable. By end of our first year we were more than profitable and had returned the losses within the first year. When you start with 22 people and no lines or inventory your first couple months of sales are pretty low. So it was a quick ramp up. Because our sales people had good relationships with customers from Electrograph we were able to quickly get customers on board.

I was sure from the beginning that it was going to be successful. I guess the first month getting the key vendors on board was stressful, but 90 to 95 percent of the vendors that we wanted we got within the first two months. Once we had those vendors set I knew it would work, and it was kind of fun to see the revenue make a straight line up all those months.

Watch Sam Taylor explain how Almo Pro A/V has helped integrators evolve with the changing market:

 

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About the Author

Tom LeBlanc
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Tom LeBlanc is the executive director of NSCA. Learn more about NSCA and how to become an NSCA member at NSCA.org.

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