Audio Research Dog

The first photo captured perfectly the eyes/look on my wife’s face when Fedex/UPS rings our doorbell. LOL.

Audio Research will survive and thrive. No offense intended to Trent Suggs but he is a sales guy. Sales guys are rarely finance guys. Unfortunate because he probably bet the farm and leveraged himself into a financial tight spot. Nobody can plan for Covid or supply chain woes but you can plan financially for the future so that your business can handle a stress test/calamity test. I get accused all the time of being too conservative but in my 40 year professional career I’ve only had to lay off people during the first five years of my career. You have to hate the idea of being on the wrong side of a financial crisis….and I’ll admit that Covid and 2008-2010 were opportunities because we were prepared.

Someone, maybe even Paragon, will buy an exceptional halo company with exceptional products for pennies on the dollar and ARC will thrive. I’ve owned a fair bit of ARC gear through the years and its exceptional. I do not currently. For all of those who seemingly find joy in reading about ARC’s current situation who are drawing correlations to the economy or as some other canary in a coalmine metaphor, you werent ARC’s target market anyway.

There is kind of a mantra in the tech world about business that goes like this:

Original inventor comes up with a brilliant product.

Makes a few and they are spectacular hits with his friends.

Decides to make more of them and sell them. Doesn't know much about manufacturing, so hires a specialist who sets it up and off they go.

Product is selling very well and a marketing dept is formed and they start to drive the business--"Here's what the customers are asking for.  Can you do that?"

Yes, says the original inventor, and off he/she goes.

Marketing says that there are more orders than he can manage, so they hire a sales person.

Sales person and marketing person get together and decide what is needed next.  They tell the original inventor and things start getting made.  Sales and marketing take over the company and hire people to build more and more stuff and so it goes.

Original inventor is now out of the loop and is told to keep inventing and leave the rest to marketing and sales.

Company has problems.

Not inevitable, but it happens more than you would think.

ARC makes the best stuff out there, IMO.  They will continue in some form.

Cheers!

@campoly

Thank you for you comments on my non-audio photography.

I hadn’t realized you can easily navigate to my Flickr albums… but great for anyone wishing to see my photos. One of my passions. I have over 120,000 photos from my travels around the world… a few on Flickr.

Used to be one of my passions as well. My brother and I had a photo processing business back in the day. Had a camera around my neck everywhere I went. You certainly have a good eye.

@campoly 

Thank you so much.