AV Integrator Spotlight: Chapel-Romanoff Technologies (CRT)

Tell me about your company and career

[MC] So, I started working for Chapel Romanov Technologies (CRT) nine years ago now. The company is part of a family of companies that are employee owned and include Chapel Electric and Romanov Electric. CRT originally started with a focus on infrastructure, mobile, voice and data cabling but we have slowly grown over the last number of years and expanding both our capabilities and our manufacturer partners.

When I think back to ten years ago, we had to sub-contract some services, but now there’s very few occasions when we need to do that and we can pretty much cover everything that a company might need inside a facility, from the electrical, cabling, commercial audio, audio visuals, conferencing, mass notification, wireless access control or cameras.

How did you get started in the industry?

[MC] I started in the industry working in programming and production in a church for about 10 years until I decided I needed to make a career change. From there I got involved in audio visual systems which has been my main line of work for the past 21 years.

What is the most challenging project you have worked on?

[MC] It is really difficult to pinpoint one project; every project is different. For me it’s not so much that the technology may be challenging it’s managing high-demand customers and ensuring we are as responsive as possible.

There are areas that maybe five years ago, we weren’t as strong at as we are now but so far there hasn’t been a project that we couldn’t tackle.

What is the hardest part of your job? What can manufacturers do to make it easier?

[MC] I’d say the biggest challenge is building strong relationships with manufacturers. Companies like LEA Professional embody the kind of relationships that we want. Some of the bigger, larger companies are doing a lot of acquisitions and they’re buying companies because they’re missing an expertise or a product mix and when they bring on those lines, they don’t really understand them. We appreciate a good close relationship directly with the manufacturer and the support and knowledge that comes with that.

Another big challenge we have is aligning customer’s expectation of cost. When customers go to Home Depot for example, they can think that the cost-effective small home stereo surround system is what they’re going to get in their conference room, so it can come as a shock when they realize it takes a lot more to do that commercially.

How do you measure success?

[MC] I mean it’s a little cliched, but we always want to say—did the bottom line look right? One thing that is unique about our company, at least form my experience in this market, is that we will never walk away from a project, even if a problem wasn’t our direct issue. We stay throughout the whole project and we really value our customer relationships. We surely want the projects to be profitable, but more than anything we want to make sure our customers are happy with us in the solutions.

Do you have a favorite song for system testing?

[MC] That’s probably on a tech-by-tech basis. Personally, I would play either Lyle Lovett or Van Morrison or some classical music. I think everyone carries their own personal preference of music and they play it over the system to see how it sounds. When it’s a piece you’re familiar with, you know when it sounds right or not.