MEET RANDY MASSEY
Job: Owner and CEO of Electronic Home Inc.
Age: 57
Hometown: College Station, Texas
Education: B.S., Texas A&M
Lives: Stone Mountain
Family: Married with two adult boys
Hobbies: Motorcycles, scuba diving, boating, traveling
Coming to a home near you — a theater screen, maybe a giant one.
Not one of those puny 65-inch models you can buy at big-box retailers, but a huge screen, perhaps 13 feet wide. Plus rows of comfortable seats, from 10 or 12 to 40. And state of the art sound systems. Even popcorn machines.
Such theaters are the bread and butter of Randy Massey, owner and CEO of Atlanta-based Electronic Home Inc. He installs home theaters all over the country and sees his business as a barometer of the health of the overall economy, even though most customers are well-heeled.
Right now, he’s busy installing home theaters that range in price from $30,000 to over $1 million.
Q: Just what is a home theater?
A: I consider a home theater being a dedicated room with a projection system and a surround sound system. And it's not all about the movies. You can go to a concert, sports events, movies from cable or satellite. You can watch first-run movies.
Projection TV is actually easier on your eyes. We have the acoustics of an opera house. In an action movie with our systems, you can feel every cannon shot.
Q: What is the biggest, smallest and average size of the screens in home theaters?
A: The biggest, 13 feet wide and 5.5 feet tall; smallest, 89 inches wide and 47 inches tall. The average is 106 inches wide and 60 inches tall.
Q: You had revenue last year of $3 million. What do you expect this year?
A: Slightly higher, maybe 5 percent or so. We expect our business to be fairly stable across all of the segments. However, we have added a few other categories that should give us a boost, such as LED light fixtures.
Q: How was your business affected by the recession and where is it now?
A: We saw a definite slowdown at the end of 2008 and our traditional core business is just now recovering somewhat, but is not back to the early 2008 levels.
If we had not responded by changing our business model, we would not still be here. Several of our competitors are gone. As with many industries, a lot of our business is tied to the construction industry.
Q: How did you survive when so many homeowners were tightening their belts?
A: By going out to existing client bases, offering updates, expanding product offerings to hit more ranges.
Also, others went out of business and their customers needed service. Before the recession, if you didn’t buy from us, we didn’t service it. We adapted that or we’d be out of business, too.
Q: When did you start feeling the downturn?
A: At the end of 2008. We were specialized to the higher end demographic. Now, it's not just millionaires. A guy in Cobb put about $400,000 into a theater and the homes in his neighborhood are selling $150,000 to $200,000.
Q: So there’s really no average?
A: With the wide range of offerings, our average is all over the place. Our customers now range from first-time homeowners to dream home mansions.
Q: Why do people want home theaters when TVs are so big and clear these days?
A: A properly designed and implemented home theater will immerse you and allow you to be a participant instead of just a TV viewer.
A big screen TV is often used in a home theater, but we feel that quality front projection systems with a larger projection screen is more movie-like and stands a much better chance of drawing you in.
Q: Where do most of your customers live?
A: We have clients all over the country, but the majority are in metro Atlanta.
Q: What is the typical size of a home theater?
A: Typical is eight to 12 seats. We have done up to 40 seats. We have rows of three to five or six seats, and one or two or three step-ups.
Q: How many employees do you have?
A: We are in the Atlanta Decorative Arts Center and have been for 18 years. Five full-time employees, three independent salesmen and four outsourced programmers.
Q: What else do you do besides build home theaters?
A: We started out as a home automation company that dealt mainly with lighting, heating and air conditioning, pool and sprinkler control, and motorized window covering and TV lifts. We then branched out into whole house audio-video distribution and home theaters, and that took over for a while.
Q: Do you have much competition?
A: When we first started this, only a few companies knew what it was. Now there are hundreds, though a lot of those are one-man shops without a showroom. We have $1 million dollars invested in our showroom.
Q: Your website indicates a home theater can be purchased for $10,000. What does that include and exclude?
A: That is a home theater electronic package and includes a front projection system, surround sound receiver, speakers, a Blu-ray player, all cabling, surge protection, installation and calibration.
It does not include our standardized control system, equipment rack, room design, acoustical treatments, seating, floor or wall coverings or lighting and lighting control, as in our complete room packages.
Q: Where did you learn to do all this?
A: Not in college. A lot of the work I did for Hewlett Packard, where I worked 15 years as an engineer. I like to fix problems and make things easy that may seem hard.
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