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026 INTERVIEW Dave Keller of Furman Sound presents WMA’s Francis


and Julian Young with the International Manufacturers Rep of the Year Award


“This was pre-mobile phones,” Williams recalls, “so I went to a pay phone and called the Russian Embassy to arrange an interpreter for him. I later found out that his own personal interpreter had never left Moscow after mixing a bottle of vodka with the steering wheel of his car, so my act of mercy was never forgotten.”


don’t understand that you’ve got to keep doing it to maintain the momentum. If you hired someone full time it would cost too much, so it’s very cost effective to keep a rep going. We’ve been doing Symetrix for over 20 years now.”


EASTERN PROMISE Williams is particularly well known in Eastern Europe and Russia, where risk-taking has a special frisson. In the early ‘90s, just when Boris Yeltsin was uncorking an unstoppable tide of vodka-fuelled enterprise, Williams began to represent Crest - reaching the parts very few other brands could usually reach. It proved to be a masterstroke, providing Russian operators with exactly the kind of reliable contact they craved and confirming the view that a popular rep is worth more than a pocket employee. “I felt sure that Crest would fire me if the business reached so many millions of dollars, but they didn’t,” Williams recounts. “Their belief was that if you could achieve that sort of turnover they would never find anybody in-house to match it. It was a very American philosophy, rewarding enterprise without getting hung up on ownership. That is the precept. European manufacturers soon begin to suspect that they should be hiring their own guy if these are the numbers, without realising that the numbers could soon fall away in the wrong hands. It’s a different mindset. That’s why we work for American brands, with one major exception: Nexo.” Williams regards perestroika as a lucky break, but not many in the West had the courage and the vision to make themselves its benefactors. Enter Vitaly Bogdanov, probably the first man to buy equipment into Russia on a strictly legal basis. Bogdanov bought Carver from Williams and they met at a tradeshow in New York, Bogdanov speaking not one word of English. “This was pre-mobile phones,” Williams recalls, “so I went to a pay phone and called the Russian Embassy to arrange an interpreter for him. I later found out that his own personal interpreter had never left Moscow after mixing a bottle of vodka with the steering wheel of his car, so my act of mercy was never forgotten. It was his first ever connection with anybody from the West.” Later the nascent trade associations of Moscow came to rely on Williams as a trusted confidante, with the leading distribution players such as MS-Max, ISPA Engineering and A&T Trade - whose best-known principal Sasha Sitkovetsky (interviewed in mondo*dr issue 16.2) became a lifelong friend - often turning to him as they built a new order of free enterprise literally from scratch. Sometimes it calls for discretion of the highest magnitude - leading, he freely admits, to that Dark Angel epithet in some Russian quarters. “The Russian audio business is still outside the norm in many ways,” he says. “Sometimes you might find that a decision has been made on your behalf before


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you’ve been consulted, shall we say, in the traditional way. There was a stage when all the distributors began appointing manufacturing brands as a fait accomplis, rather than the other way round! But on the other hand it has created a balanced representation of all the key brands across the market, which needed to happen at the time.”


WORLD MARKETING Still the free-running individual, Williams has created a rather grand-sounding umbrella organisation called World Marketing Associates (WMA). It does exactly what it says on the tin, with a global brief and a loose network of trusted operators, but there’s also a touching brace of family values at the core. Wife Sue is a quietly effective fulcrum, while daughter Angela and ex-son-in-law Julian Young are involved in several avenues of enterprise not all of which are audio-related by any means. Young has become an expert in Middle East AV channels, but there is also a spa skincare line called 100% Organics and a unique, sky’s-the-limit real estate angle that needs special dispensation - more of that later. “WMA coincided with a surge of new brands that had so much potential,” Williams explains. “For example, we met the guys behind Waves, the Israeli software plug-in pioneer, and it was immediately obvious that this technology was a conduit to so many other opportunities. We were on a salary from Carver, but I recognised that the ‘rep’ idea could really stand on its own two feet. So we decided to branch out on our own, also picking up Symetrix, and we were so lucky because just at that moment both brands really started to take off. “There is a syndrome by which the reps can begin to earn more than the directors of the company. I remember Greg Mackie giving 10% of every sale to his first international representative... can you imagine? So it’s understandable if sometimes they let you go. But on the other hand we take a lot of risks, and some territories are very expensive. Our biggest earner is Peavey in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, which Julian and I do between us, but we have to cover a lot of ground and it costs. I was recently in Moscow for two nights, having travelled from here in the south of France, just for one meeting that Hartley Peavey requested. It cost me two grand. Nobody else is going to pick up those expenses for you, so it’s that sort of commitment.” In a world where most companies have distributors, sales and marketing managers and field engineers, it may seem slightly anachronistic to expect a commission-only existence that slips between corporate roles increasingly carved in stone. But for Williams the reality remains sufficiently flexible. “Crest is a good example,” he says. “Before Jochen Frohn left for L-Acoustics, Crest had its own operation in Europe doing millions of dollars. They employed Jochen and a secretary and that was it,


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