I've been reading the threads on here for a little while now, and it seems some of you are undertaking projects way above and beyond what my company is doing. Especially in terms of designing home theater rooms from the ground up.

We install home theaters, but we never get to the level of actually custom-designing the actual room, we always end up wiring a room that's already been designed.

I'm wondering what locations in the country have a big market for people who are willing to pay for acoustically designed rooms, complete home integration, etc.

It's a market we're trying to create in our part of Virginia, but it seems all the money is with retiring couples, who are more interested in golf than TV, and therefore are hard to convince they need more than a 4:3 CRT in the corner. A typical home theater for us is no more than $10,000 in total, which I know is peanuts to a lot of you.

Any ideas on a market we're missing, marketing strategies we might use, or areas of the country that have more lucrative contracts?

You have to build the market by taking your work up a notch with the few clients that are willing to go there with you. As you do better jobs, the word of mouth will bring more to you.

Don't forget to take the time to learn everything you can about more advanced techniques and equipment. After you are trained to do something, you will feel confident in selling it.

I bet there are people in your market that want better systems but don't know how to ask for it.

Most important! Don't sell more system than you can reliably integrate. A difficult system to use will generate more bad word of mouth than a great system will build good.

I know you'll get better posts than mine, but I do know where you are at right now.

Good luck!

Right. It looks like you are not lucky enough or pushy enough to get a client when they are in the planning stages. Sometimes you won't have any choice in new construction, as general contractors often have a company that prewires and does not allow other contractors in until after escrow...that is, until it is too late to do it inexpensively.

I would start by making contacts with builders, engineers, and interior decorators. These are some of the people that get contacted long before we usually do. Hold seminars with these types of people to teach them just how beneficial it is to be able to design a room for acoustics.

One thing to keep in mind, large systems may sound great when you're just doing $10k systems. But...given the choice I would do five $20k systems before I would do one $100k system. You can easily knock out a $20k system in a couple days and have almost no return calls to find the bugs in the system. A $100k system will take quite a bit of planning and expect to take a couple trips after the fact to take care of those "bugs".

Just my .02

Matt

Ditto diesel

I have been involved in $5k cut and pastes home theaters to high six figure commercial and residential jobs in my professional life.
My company now focuses on what I call mid-fi, the huge niche between box store hack jobs and gucci installs.

I would much rather do $10k-$20K theaters all day over geeked out homes. Sure they are more sexy and have bragging rights, but my pride as I get older is not as strong, keeping the "bugs" down keeps alot of free time for skiing and other interests. I just got back from Winter Park as I write this, see I still like to brag.

As stated before do get to know interior designers and architects, enlightened builders (good luck on that one), and design multiple sales presentations that will always hit a notch above what they think is possible. And get in front as many peole as possible.

There is money in Virginia, I suprise myself everyday how close good clients are to my 'hood.

Good luck.

Ok, good advice.

I think the problem has been in the way we market ourselves, we ae involved with quite a few builders, but they expect to contact us once the house is framed - not in the planning stages. So maybe we need to promote our services a little better.

I can understand the money aspect probably isn't much better, but it makes a good showcase for what we can do, plus in the end I'm in this field because I love the stuff I install - and I'm just not getting any Crestron action right now... :)

That's an interesting post. Another exampl of the growing trend of home audio and pro audio crossing over. In the pro audio industry, there are specialized firms that deal with acoustical consulting and room treatment. Any of them will tell you that before you design a sound system, you address the room acoustics. They are right. It's really not a lot different with home audio. The reality of course is that there are only a very few clients in the home audio industry that will actually take this advice seriously, or have the headroom in the budget over and above the expensive toys to impelement the acoustical design considerations. it's not that these clients don't exist, they do, but I'll be they are a very small exlcusive number. The ones that opt for the room consideration will no doubt be spending a lot of money on some very high end gear.

The challenge is making the room acoustics issue as vital to any prospective client as it actually is.