Legrand buys Milestone AV – Gary Kayye from Rave Publications gives his opinion

Having worked with Milestone AV in various capacities over the past 10 years, Gary Kayye from Rave Publications offers his opinion on the merger of these two giant companies and can see nothing but fantastic things about this acquisition

“First off, Milestone AV is well run. Scott Gill, the CEO of Milestone, is one of the smartest people I have ever met. And, he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of savvy and detail-oriented winners in Laurie Englert, Troy Peifer and Karen Smidt. And in case you haven’t noticed, they have the best system of integrated brands (behind the scenes with its ERP system) of any of the multi-brand companies. The company’s website, CMS and relationship-management systems are all connected — across brands — as is its order processing infrastructure. This was intentional. I remember the week Milestone started this project — I happened to be there at the headquarters in Minnestoa then helping start a social media marketing plan — and the plan was flawless. Even Legrand doesn’t have this, so in reality, Legrand is “buying-up.” Yes, all the brands that Milestone AV has — companies like Da-Lite, Vaddio, Sanus, Projecta and Chief — are great brands but the back-end systems that Milestone AV has set-up could very well be THE REASON that Legrand purchased them.

The announcement specifically mentioned that Legrand planned to put all the Milestone AV companies under the Middle Atlantic umbrella. As you may know, many of the Legrand brands are HomeAV-oriented while Milestone AV does well in excess of 80 percent of its business in the ProAV market, so the Middle Atlantic connection seems like a good decision.

Congrats to the people of Legrand as they acquired one of the best run companies in the AV market — let’s just hope they keep those four top-tier people I mentioned above. Oh, and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it employs one of the best salespeople in AV in Mark Coxon and one of the best content marketing people in AV too in Joel Hagen. Legrand needs to hold on to these two superstars as well.”

You can read the original article here and here’s a link to the breaking news story.

About the author: Gary Kayye, CTS, Founder of rAVe Publications

Gary Kayye, founder of rAVe Publications, is one of the most prominent personalities in the audiovisual industry. He has been a contributor to WIRED magazine and a technical advisor and columnist for Sound & Communications magazine as well as an opinionated columnist for rAVe [Publications] since 2003. In addition to his writing and market analysis, Gary has been a product, marketing and business operations consultant to dozens of AV companies in the U.S. and overseas. Clients have included companies such as Sony, Sharp, Epson, Lutron, InFocus, Sanyo, Mitsubishi, NEC and Philips. Gary and his team at rAVe Publications are also key partners of Integrate.