And now we have an answer.
North American Sound Studio Monitors
North American Sound
You might say that Gregg Dodrill has always marched to a different drummer. Or maybe he just hears the drumbeats more clearly than the rest of us.
While Dodrill was growing up in Fort Worth, attending Arlington Heights High School, studying marketing and banking at North Texas State University, working as a salesman for SCM Corporation, getting married and fathering two sons, his world has been dominated by sound.
"I started out like any other stereo buff, " he says, "but it wasn’t long until I discovered that I was different. I kept working my way up to better and better sound systems, until I finally had the best system you could buy anywhere - but that still wasn’t enough. I wanted more, so I started building my own speakers, striving for more perfect designs. "
His quest for audio perfection led him into several off-beat business ventures. His first company, Entertainment Systems of Dallas, operated a sort of "portable disco, " featuring a $15, 000 sound system, a light system, and sometimes a live drummer, which performed at parties for $250 a night.
In 1974, Dodrill went into partnership with a friend in a second company called Beta Sound, Inc. But he decided after a year that he had acted prematurely, turned the business over to his friend, and went back to work on improving speaker designs. In 1976, he launched another company, North American Sound, in the garage of his North Dallas home -and this time he was in business to stay.
In sales volume, the growth of the company has been modest -from $84, 000 in speaker sales in 1976 to a projected $380, 000 for 1981-but that’s exactly the way Dodrill planned it, and exactly the way he intends to keep it. "We’re more goal-oriented toward quality than sales volume, " he says. "We’re selling about 90 speaker pairs a month right now, or about three times what we need to pay our bills, and that’s fine with us. We’ve been approached by several large organizations about handling the bulk of our production, but we’re not interested in get-rich-quick propositions. It’s too easy to go bust in situations like that. "
What Dodrill, 33, and his small staff (two full-time and three part-time employees) are looking for is the kind of slow but sustained growth that will allow North American Sound to keep its quality high while avoiding serious production crunches. But the firm recently moved into newly leased office-warehouse space in Addison and is now in the process of expanding the retail market for its six exclusive speaker system designs, which it builds from scratch. "We’re looking for only about one new top quality retail outlet per month to realize our goal of a 40 per cent annual growth rate in sales over the next three years, " says Dodrill. "What we want to do is pay our own way and grow through retained earnings."
Systems produced by North American Sound are currently being sold by some two dozen stores across the country. They range in price from $300 to $1000, but according to Dodrill, they compare in sound quality to speaker systems costing up to $7000 retail. "Normally, the retail price is about five times the manufacturing cost, " he explains, "so stores that deal with us can sell our $560 speakers for about $1500 and still offer a great value to their customers. "
Dodrill gives credit for the exceptional capabilities of the systems he produces and sells to input he has received from top experts in the field. "I’m in a unique position in that I’ve come in contact with several near-geniuses in audio engineering and have been able to utilize these people’s expertise in our products. That’s how we think we’re able to get 95 per cent of component capability out of our systems. Actually, that’s the reason we’re in business in the first place. "
Dodrill believes his company knows what retailers are looking for in quality stereo systems. The real boom in his sales, he predicts, will come if the buying public learns to look for these same features, instead of judging products by what they read about them. Other speaker manufacturers vehemently dislike Dodrill because he skips the middle steps, and sells his speakers for less. "One of our big problems so far has been credibility, " he says. "People say, ’How can something be that good at such a low price?’ Too many people buy speakers by how they look on paper instead of trusting their ears to determine performance. "
The sound people may then hear is that of a different drummer
