032 INTERVIEW
Sales & Marketing Manager at TM Audio, Rudolf Nagtzaam and MD of DiGiCo James Gordon with Marc at ISE 2011.
service and operation of the complete system. This way our relationship exceeds that of a supplier, we become a partner of the venue, and we can both guarantee optimum and maximum quality. For this reason it is very useful to have similar products in our rental fleet and distribution portfolio because we are better able to serve our customers and offer a complete rental and sales solutions,” said Marc. Although the sales and rental aspects often work hand in hand, Marc is under no illusion that this alone will see the company through difficult times, he knows that he and his team have to offer more. Over the last two years, it’s fair to say that the Ampco Flashlight companies - as well as others - have witnessed an economically slow period. In The Netherlands there are a lot of heavily subsidised theatres, but with the economic downfall the subsidising system is slowly vanishing. Ticket sales for independent production companies are declining. “Therefore we have to be smarter and be ahead of that,” explained Marc. “We have offered more and more services so we can sell, rent, service, and maintain everything and we do that under these numerous umbrellas of Ampco Flashlight Rental, TM Audio and LightCo, all the entities are working well together. To be ahead of this development we decided to restructure the back-office organisation of Ampco Flashlight Group in February this year. By cleverly combining these functions our organisation is now more lean and efficient.” To further enhance the skill set of the company, Marc feels that education is hugely important. When he first began working with DiGiCo eight years ago, he organised seminars and invited potential users of the equipment to learn how to use the desks. He said: “This led to a situation where we’d sold more than 250 DiGiCo consoles in The Netherlands and 90% of those consoles are owned by rental houses, which potentially are in competition with our rental company. So what we need to do is focus on the service level, get people educated and give people the best service possible, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Next to the service, we want to provide the best price possible too and we are focussed on this across the board,” Marc continued. “Every month we organise a two-day seminar for ETC Ion lighting consoles, which is free to all customers and each time there are between 10-15 users being trained on the console. This has led to a number of good sales to theatres and a growing user base. “We are doing the same for the new High End Systems Hog 4, we had some introductory seminars in November and we were very lucky to have a desk here as it had only just been released. We had more than 100 people attending, just to see
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ETC’s Pekka Sendstedt, Tommy Thorsen of Elektrik Solutions, ETC’s Steve Downs and Tim Stokholm of ETC, Marc, Bob Vanden Burgt of Link/ Eurocable and Mark Vassalo of ETC at the starting line at Vätternrundan, the world’s largest recreational bicycle ride.
“We’ve been dealing with Renkus- Heinz for maybe 25 years and XTA has been with us a long time too,
we’ve been involved from the start, we bought its first product.”
the new Hog 4. A couple of weeks later we did a second demo and hand-picked some of the key operators, designers, and rental companies and this has led to Hog 4’s being used on shows already. So the aim is to create a user base and from there we sell the products.” With quite a lot on his plate, it’s possibly hard to believe that Marc has time to participate in some sporting activities when he’s not at the office. He’s played field hockey from a young age and continues to play as an adult to keep fit and he’s also quite a keen cyclist. “I do stock car racing as well. Queen’s Day in The Netherlands is a special day and in the village where I live we do stock car racing that day. I bought a couple of cars with a couple of mates and we try to keep them on the dirt to race around in,” explained Marc. “I also like to sail, I participate in match racing about two to three times a year.” Although Marc is adamant he has nothing mapped out for his future, what he does feel is essential business wise, is the integration of the company’s rental and sales efforts towards theatres and end users more because that’s what he feels the market is asking for right now. And he is doing everything in his power to ensure this outlook for the future. Despite his earlier comment, at the end of the interview, I did manage to extract a personal future thought from Marc, he concluded: “Maybe in 10 years time I would like to be on a sailing boat, sailing the world, but still I’d like to work, I enjoy it, every single second.
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