028 INTERVIEW
“However, even with Martin Audio,
a company where the management has changed, the relationship is still a very long one. In fact I think
we were one of the first companies outside the UK to purchase Martin
Audio equipment from Dave Martin at the time.”
As human beings we have a curious nature, the urge to spread our wings and visit different places and meet new people, as well as a craving to expand our minds. These attributes can definitely be applied to the preparation process of this interview. With Marc Kocks of Ampco Flashlight Group onboard as the subject of this issue’s interview, I booked my flights to Amsterdam, knowing I would travel to the headquarters in Utrecht, a facility I hadn’t visited before, and then attempted to research Marc in preparation. When you Google Marc Kocks of Ampco Flashlight Group or TM Audio, LightCo or even Atlantic Audio, the search engine returns very few informative results. At least nothing that offered an insight into Marc’s background, a brief career history on his LinkedIn page was potentially my only source. From my somewhat unsuccessful research, I began to wonder if this was a result of Marc being quite a private person, and felt quite privileged that he’d agreed to the interview...
As the beginning of Ampco Flashlight Group celebrates its 40th anniversary this year - Flashlight was founded in 1973, closely followed by Ampco in 1978 and the two merged in 2001 - Marc too is marking a milestone of working for the company for more than 20 years. “I started as a junior sales guy selling amplifiers, microphones and loudspeakers,” said Marc. At the time he was working for Ampco Audio Products, the sales side of Ampco. A couple of years later when Ampco Audio Products merged with TM Audio - another sales brand that was also under the Ampco umbrella - Marc quickly climbed the ladder to become Managing Director of TM Audio, as the company remains known to this day. But where did Marc’s love of audio first stem from? Born in 1967 to a loving mother and father, Marc spent his early childhood years being raised on the coast of The Netherlands in Den Haag. Aged nine, his family moved closer to the city of Utrecht, a more central location. Marc said: “When I started to think about things as a teenager I was interested in electronics. I tried to make my own mixing console, well actually I had a very old D&R mixing console that I used to solder and fix up to do recordings.
www.mondodr.com
“By 16 I was determined to do a technical course at middle school, and when I finished that, I did a higher level course as well. So I know electronics in detail, I can programme a Z-8080 microprocessor and I have knowledge of motor electronics. I’m a technician by training and a technician by thinking.” Marc remains close to his roots, still living in the village where he grew up, as do his parents, who live just 300 yards away. He shares his home with his wife and two children, a 14-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. “They are a handful, they take more management skills than running a company sometimes,” he laughed. Yet Marc continued to increase his responsibility at the company when a few years after taking the role of MD at TM Audio at the time when Ampco and Flashlight merged together and the decision was made to rename the sales company Flashlight Sales to LightCo, Marc was placed at the helm. LightCo is the supplier of high-end lighting technology stocking products for brands including ETC, Robert Juliat, Vari-Lite, City Theatrical, High End Systems and Clay Paky. Marc commented: “The lighting side is very inspiring. As an audio technician, everything you do you’re gaining more knowledge, I don’t think I know everything and I don’t think I know a lot, but I definitely know some. Everything you do in audio is just going deeper into one subject, it’s very focussed, very narrow. “In lighting everything is much broader, it’s a completely new perspective and I really like it. When I’m talking to customers and they really know about lighting, I can’t fool them, I can’t tell them I’m a lighting guy, they know I’m an audio guy. I find the whole lighting industry very inspiring, it’s a creative world, whereas audio guys are much more precise and logical in what they do.” The set up as it stands today is that Ampco Flashlight Group is the parent company, but each company within the group is an official entity too. There are three divisions to Ampco Flashlight Group; rental, sales and technology. The rental side consists of Ampco Flashlight Rental, one of the leading production rental companies on mainland Europe, while the sales side is split into three companies, TM Audio, LightCo and Atlantic Audio - based in Germany - which Marc is also responsible for. “The technology company started through people working here [at Ampco
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