Editor’s Note: This article explores why Millennium Waves, an AV and technology specialist, chooses to design and deploy Just Add Power systems for its high-end hospitality client base. It examines a support-based relationship, product reliability and the capacity to stand up to the rigors of zero tolerance for failure.
It was a Monday morning. The hotel was fully booked, and Ken White, owner-operator of Millennium Waves, had a 9:05 a.m. deadline to have the screens back up. He’d spent the entire weekend fighting a configuration issue that he couldn’t crack. So, Ken called Just Add Power’s support line.
They remoted in, Ken recalls, “…and in 30 seconds, he had the screens up and running.”
That single call — that small moment — helps to illuminate a much longer relationship. And it helps to explain why Ken has stuck with Just Add Power for well over a decade.
Five Decades in the Trade
Ken’s path into AV integration began in 1979, when he graduated from a trade high school as an electrician. He later returned to school for a degree in computer repair, giving him a blend of technical backgrounds long before that combination became an aspirational standard.
Ken founded Millennium Waves in 2006, and he initially focused on high-end residential work. When the residential market crashed during The Great Recession, Ken pivoted the company toward commercial work, drawing on an earlier background in hotel installations. Soon, the pivot became a specialty.
Since then, Millennium Waves has built hospitality AV and network-based systems across the country and across the world, including installations in the Caribbean and Bermuda. Ken and his team can handle everything from Wi-Fi retrofits to full-property rebuilds with technology in every room.
That range of work, spanning nearly five decades, is part of why Ken’s insights into vendor relationship carry weight: He has plenty of experience with alternative suppliers to form a basis for comparison. What’s more, as a Control4 dealer since 2006, Ken has a highly nuanced view of how AV ecosystems have matured around integration and interoperability.
Just Add Power: A Relationship Built on Support
When asked what makes a vendor worth that kind of loyalty he has shown Just Add Power over the last 13 years, Ken doesn’t hesitate. “Support, support, support, support,” he declares. “That is the key. As you get older, you realize that price is not everything.”
Ken points out that plenty of AV-over-IP alternatives exist, and some of them — especially those coming from overseas — might have a lower sticker price. What they don’t offer, however, is a support team that works on Ken’s clock.
“I can call Just Add Power on my timeframe,” he explains. And that’s a meaningful distinction for an integrator managing live installations across time zones, where a lack of real-time support can turn a same-day fix into an unacceptable multi-day delay.
But access to support shouldn’t only be about troubleshooting; it should also be about proactive partnership. To wit, Ken describes sending Just Add Power’s support team literal napkin sketches from the field.
“I have sent them napkin drawings,” he recalls. “The standard dealer thing: You’re sitting in a bar at 9 o’clock at night because you’re out of town, and you’re drawing this thing out on a napkin in the bar with your bourbon sitting there. [Then you] take a picture and send it to somebody in support going, ‘Will this work?’”
More often than not, Ken says, someone gets back to him with an answer by the next day — sometimes with a solution or refinement that he hadn’t considered.
And Just Add Power’s dealer support isn’t just by phone or by email. The company holds free training sessions at its facility, enabling integrators to go deeper with its solutions.
“If you really want to delve into what this stuff can do, it’s nice to have that ability,” Ken enthuses.
Based in central Florida, Ken is close enough to make the trip worthwhile. “I can drive an hour-and-a-half, and I’m in their yard,” he says. It’s close enough to bring a system idea in on paper and prototype it on the bench the very same day.
Just Add Power: Reliability and Interoperability in Practice
Product longevity is another clear differentiator for Ken. Recently, he sunsetted a Just Add Power system that had been running for 11 years. “[I] never had any problem with their equipment,” he says. “Had more problems with the switch!” The Just Add Power gear, in other words, proved more durable than the network hardware around it.
Another pillar in Ken’s case for partnering closely with Just Add Power is the company’s commitment to interoperability. Just Add Power’s integration with Control4 has been central to Millennium Waves’ hospitality projects for years, and its compatibility with GameView — a mobile-device-based audiovisual control system for sports bars — opened the door to larger installations built around dozens of screens and multiple video sources. Indeed, GameView’s software lets an installer lay out a building’s floor plan and assign dozens of TVs to it, all routed back through Just Add Power’s system on the back end.
“It was all voodoo magic,” Ken says. “It just happened.”
Indeed, the two platforms mesh so closely that “it looks like it’s one package,” Ken observes, “even though it’s two vendors.” And when something needs troubleshooting on the GameView side, the Just Add Power support team often knows the fix as well as the GameView team does.
“You can’t beat that with a stick!” Ken quips.
Taking the Opposite Approach
But that openness isn’t limited to just one control ecosystem. Some vendors, Ken says, effectively operate as closed shops, telling integrators, in his words, “We only work with Bob.” Just Add Power, by contrast, takes the opposite approach.
“We work with Bob, Tom, Fred [and] Nancy,” he says of Just Add Power. “We don’t care who!” And for integrators not on any other vendor’s platform, Just Add Power offers its own app and web interface as a fallback.
“They’ve tried to cover all their bases…,” Ken states. “You go out there and it’s like, ‘Here’s the drivers. Boom, boom, boom. That’s it, you’re done.’”
These days, that flexibility isn’t just about video routing. Ken has extended Just Add Power’s control layer into lighting, folding 220-volt pole lighting and, soon, DMX pool lighting into the same single interface that his clients already use for video. The result? One app instead of a stack of disconnected ones.
Logistical support — especially on a tight deadline — is another key strength for Just Add Power. When a local distributor doesn’t have an in-stock part that Ken needs, Just Add Power’s team will track it down elsewhere within its network.
“They’ll say, ‘Well, so-and-so over here has it in Pompano, or so-and-so in Atlanta has it. Give them a call, [and] tell them we said so.’” On more than one occasion, that logistical support has meant the difference between a project stalling and a part arriving on time.
Real-World Stakes
Some of Ken’s Just Add Power installations run in environments where failure carries a direct financial cost. Indeed, he describes a prominent hospitality property, Orlando World Center Marriott, where an eight-by-eight HDMI matrix switch — state-of-the-art when installed 13 years ago — has since grown into a system spanning 16 sources and 10 screens, including four large jumbotrons and a bank of screens at a poolside bar. Everything is routed over fiber through Just Add Power. Orlando World Center Marriott’s expectations are entirely non-negotiable: Several of those screens must stay lit from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., every day.
Equally stringent standards show up in Ken’s highest-profile work. For example, he’s handled AV and connectivity for Formula One Miami, an event where, as he puts it, “You’re not changing the date. It’s going to run tomorrow.”
For projects at the level of those two, Just Add Power offers something that Ken says few suppliers ever would: an engineer in the bullpen, ready on standby. “We’ll have a guy on call,” he says, quoting what Just Add Power has told him in conversations. “Here’s his number.”
Millennium Waves Maintains Excellent Relationships
Ken has built his career on maintaining excellent relationships with Millennium Waves’ clients so that they never have to look anywhere else for integration and consulting services. And when clients are happy, word gets around.
For example, one referral from an existing hospitality client led, through that client’s corporate ownership group, to a new account that has since grown to 10 properties. Two have been completed so far, with more in the pipeline.
“It’s easier to retain a customer than buy a new one,” Ken says, citing a tested business truism. And once an integrator finds the right supplier — just as when a client finds the right integrator — they don’t need to go shopping for a new one.
Just Add Power Support Not Conditioned on Massive Orders
Perhaps most refreshingly, Just Add Power’s support isn’t conditioned on making massive orders, either. “Whether you’re buying one piece or you’re buying 100 pieces, it’s the same level of support and acknowledgement of your business,” Ken declares.
With years of in-the-trenches experience, Ken White and Millennium Waves have settled on a simple formula: reliable hardware, responsive people and supplier partners that treat a small integrator’s Monday-morning emergency as a call to serve. Just Add Power hits all the marks, keeping the systems working and integrators’ clients coming back.
