Wired for Sound

Chad Gillenwater ’72 Takes His Business Global, Big Time

Around 70 million people attended an event wired for sound by alumnus Chad Gillenwater’s company last year. If you visited Nationals Stadium, or Oriole Park at Camden Yards, or Yankees Stadium, or any major casino in Las Vegas, you were probably one of them.

Chad Gillenwater ’72 is vice chairman of AVI-SPL, a leading provider of audio-visual technology, and was founder and president of SPL. His company is big-time now, but his entrepreneurial journey began when he was an undergraduate at the Smith School.

Gillenwater, liked many of us, worked his way through college. His primary job involved convincing restaurants to accept credit cards as a means of payment—not so easy to do in the late 1960s, when credit cards were still a relatively new and untried technology. While doing that, he noticed that the restaurants he was wooing needed soft-shell crabs, and Gillenwater had connections with fishermen on Smith Island. So he started buying soft-shells for 50 cents each, trucking them into the District, and selling them to high-end restaurants for $1. It was his first business, and he never got over the thrill of creating a new enterprise out of his own wits and hard work.

It would be a while before Gillenwater launched his own company again. He worked for a number of years as CFO of DynArabia, a subsidiary of DyneCorp, in the Middle East; the organization built hospitals, phone systems, and media support. Gillenwater was based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but spent a great deal of time traveling—so much that his infant son’s pediatrician suggested putting a picture of Gillenwater in the baby’s bed so he would recognize his father’s face. That was when Gillenwater decided to come home to the U.S. He found a new home with Maryland Sound, a company that supplied speakers and sound equipment to entertainers. A few years later Gillenwater took the knowledge about audio-visual technology gained from the rock-and-roll world, combined it with his expertise from the world of construction, and struck out on his own, forming SPL in 1992 with a couple friends.

And you know how most start-ups start small? Gillenwater started big. SPL began wiring large projects in amusement parks owned by Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Corp. and moved on to even larger projects—stadiums and casinos.

In 1998, Gillenwater sold the company. The infusion of cash allowed Gillenwater to expand nationally, and to begin offering services to Fortune 500 companies and other corporate clients. It was a fast ride from startup to the world’s biggest provider of audio-visual technology, but Gillenwater is quick to point out how much work was invested into the project from the get-go.

“When we started this company I would stay up and do an income statement every night,” said Gillenwater. “We knew where we were, what our cash flow was—we were very plan-oriented. That was important in keeping everybody focused and having a clear vision on where we were going, and what the process was for getting there.”

Entering the private equity world had its own trials and complications. “When you’re in a private equity situation, there is more short-term thinking, more emphasis on targets both realistic and unrealistic,” says Gillenwater. “Everything is more focused on an exit plan, instead of the continuity of ownership that comes with a privately owned company. You’re always focused on the financial impact of your actions.”

Gillenwater learned how to manage both expectations and his employees. Today AVI-SPL has 1,500 employees in 40 U.S. offices, and locations or staff in 70 other countries around the world. The management of his international employees has been teaching Gillenwater lessons about working across cultures with virtual teams.

The biggest obstacles he faces now are common for many companies expanding globally. “Communication, culture and the ability to have everyone on the same page at the same time,” says Gillenwater. “When you’re doing a system with five or six locations that have to work together via video-conference, the key is understanding the method and the process of communication directed toward the objectives you’re trying to achieve.”

So are entrepreneurs like Gillenwater born, or made? In Gillenwater’s case, it may be a little of both. He obviously came hard-wired with plenty of drive and determination, but he credits the business school with teaching him how to “plan your work and work your plan,” a piece of advice that had a huge impact on the development of his career. Gillenwater believes the most important value the Smith School is inculcating in today’s budding entrepreneurs is creativity. His daughter graduated from the Smith School recently, and Gillenwater was beyond impressed with the education she received and the ambition and enthusiasm of her classmates.

“If you look around and talk to these kids, they get it,” Gillenwater said. “I see a lot of programs in the business school that are really geared toward teaching kids how to be creative. They’re having fun, they’re enjoying becoming entrepreneurs. That’s important. An entrepreneur’s life is so tough that you have to really like it to stick with it.”

Get in Touch! Gillenwater lives in Ellicott City, Md., with his wife Mary Ellen. He has three children, Chad, Lindsay and Heather, and two grandchildren, Max and Lexie. Contact information is available through the eAlumni Network.

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© 2009 Robert H. Smith School of Business