Dianne Avery
John Maier held senior management positions at TC Group Americas and Blue Microphones before taking helm as CEO of Bose Professional.
One of the biggest stories in all of pro audio this year is the separation of the Bose Professional from the company’s consumer division, through the sale of Bose Professional Division to Transom Capital Group. Finding out what impact that change will have on house of worship customers is a question for its leadership.
The incoming CEO of the brand-new Bose Professional is John Maier who says this job was a perfect fit for him. His diverse and rich career has spanned successive roles in the professional audio industry, from sales and product development to CEO positions at Blue Microphones and TC Group Americas; and has spent the past several years as an operating partner for Transom. He is a long-time admirer of Bose Professional products and now says he’s excited to help build what the new Bose Professional will become. First he addresses the question of which products came with the sale.
“It’s a great question because all of the commercial installation product is now part of Bose Professional,” Maier explains. “The portable stuff, which is the L1 and S1 Pro, those products remain at Bose Corporate because Bose saw those as more of a prosumer (pro/consumer) kind of product.” The good news for churches, he says, is Bose Professional remains the exclusive worldwide distributor for Bose portable into the commercial channel. “So, for instance if we sell a system into a church campus where they’re building multiple facilities and they want some portable equipment to do things like sunrise services outside, that still comes through us. So, it’s really no change to our channel partners.”
As for the pro audio market, Maier says the impact is two-fold. “The first bucket is no disruption to the business. Becoming a separate company was official on April 1 of this year. Our number one goal was no business interruption so everyone still had access to the products needed — no issues with how to order products or get product into the channel or how to spec it and design systems. And we’ve achieved that. For the most part we really had a smooth transition with the help of Bose Corporate.” The second part, as to what the new Bose Professional will become, he says, doesn’t have to align with Bose Corporate’s strategy. “Even though we’re owned by a private equity, we really see it as a newly independent stand-alone business that can drive its own strategy and really drive its own future.”
Maier says a lot of work is going on behind the scenes right now around the core or middle markets – houses of worship, corporate, small campuses etc. “We really want to focus in on that and find out what are we providing now that’s great and where do we have opportunities where we could fill out more products and offer more complete solutions than we offer today.”
Long term, Maier says it’s about offering great audio environments that help those organizations achieve their goals. “For house of worship, they want to spread the message more clearly and have more members join the church. We want to have them accomplish their goals because they went with us for their solutions at least from the audio standpoint. We have some pretty cool stuff working down the road a couple of years like complete solutions that allow for some really great user interface, ease of use stuff that we will land on more in the future. And I can’t really tell you more than that. (laughs)”
Maier says the house of worship market has been a part of Bose Professional’s business in the past and will continue to be a focus moving forward. He says they’ve offered some solutions that work really well in those environments and have made relationships that will continue as a core focus. “I think now being sort of unshackled from the parent company, we can really focus in on these core verticals and that means we start to really dig in a little bit and understand more about what the challenges are that we aren’t addressing yet.”
The plan to accomplish this involves something Maier is calling a stakeholder council or channel partners, people in the industry to help them to look at what they’re doing on a quarterly basis. “We’ll look at roadmaps, look at challenges that are happening out there and see if we’re finding the right solutions for those things. So, I think what you’ll see is more attention to a deeper understanding and therefore providing better solutions to the house of worship market,” he says.
The process of the divestiture from Bose Corporate lasted longer than expected and Maier says there’s a lot of excitement and relief for the team to be on the other side of it. “The team has some heavy lifting to do because anytime you’re establishing your own individual or independent business you have to bring in finance and human resources, these are functions that don’t go with us, they stay at corporate. So, as we do that I want to reach out to the team and thank them for powering through this and getting to the other side and really being passionate and caring a lot about the brand and the customers.”
