From the ground up

If you’ve attended an industry exhibition in recent years, there’s high chance you’ve seen a troupe of distinctive blue shirts meandering the aisles. It could be a case of acute tradeshow fatigue, but they also seem to multiply as the show days draw on. It’s a familiar story away from the exhibition halls, and in particular in Dubai, where the number of blue shirts bearing the AVI-SPL name has risen to over 100 in a short space of time.

The region has been a key growth market for the American company in recent years, and a large amount of the credit resides with Middle East managing director Phil Marlowe. He has not only grown the team you see today since he transferred to Dubai back in 2008, but has led his team to success with some of the biggest and most prestigious AV projects around. Marlowe himself has also become a key industry player and regional figurehead.

As Pro AVL MEA finds him on a crowded show floor in Las Vegas at a booth once again swimming in blue shirts, Marlowe recalls how it was in fact here, under the lights of the Las Vegas strip, where he got his first taste of the world of AV. “I started with SPL in Las Vegas in the pre-AVI-SPL merger days when I was hired as a contractor, basically as a tech pulling cable in casinos. I slowly worked my way up from there and, in 2006, was brought in as a full-time employee,” he reveals. “I was admittedly very young and ambitious, so I was the one they could call on a Sunday night at 5pm to be told I’d need to be in New Orleans tomorrow by lunchtime. I was a bit of a firefighter. At the same time, I had an unbelievably supportive leadership group at SPL who was very interested in empowering younger, newer people into the industry. I was handed many opportunities by the CEO at the time, Chad Gillenwater, and then subsequently under our current leadership with John Zettel, to constantly push and grow.”

Beginning life in Florida in 1979 as Audio Visual Innovations selling Kroy lettering machines, the company has evolved into a truly global entity that designs, deploys, manages and supports digital workplace communications and collaboration technology for some of the world’s largest brands. Come 2008, a merger between Audio Visual Innovations (AVI) and fellow systems integrator Signal Perfection Ltd (SPL) would not only make the resulting company AVI-SPL the largest AV integrator in the US, but also send Marlowe looking East.

At the time, AVL-SPL had just secured the tender for a large digital signage project inside Dubai Mall but had next-to-no local resources on the ground. “I actually said no to going out originally, and then said no three more times, all within the span of a 30-minute call,” the managing director smiles. “If I’m being honest, I couldn’t even tell you then where the UAE was on a map, and I’d never flown overseas. Eventually, I said I’d go for two weeks and see how things went.”

Half a year before an unexpected global financial crisis would wreak havoc on Dubai, the city was a hive of opportunity. “It was crazy here when I arrived, and at the same time, AVI and SPL were still going through this massive merger. It was me and two contractors who were essentially ‘AVI-SPL Dubai’.” Having completed the mall project some months later, the contractors moved onto other jobs, leaving Marlowe as a one-man band. “It was a surreal time. At the end of the project the entire planet was in the middle of a huge financial mess. However, I decided that if there were still opportunities here, we should stay. Slowly, we started to bring on more staff as client demand increased. At first, we didn’t plan to make a big investment here, or to really target this market. Everything was a bit unknown.”

Wading through a particularly tricky period, Marlowe came out the other side with a core team of dependable staff and some key projects on the horizon. “We landed a few massive key projects all within the span of several years, and we really started to go big,” he says. Moving to the branch’s current home in DIP in 2014, business was largely plain sailing, until another unexpected global emergency came calling. With a now significant foothold in the local market, AVI-SPL Middle East was able to weather the pandemic unscathed.

“During Covid, we didn’t shrink at all. We kept servicing our customers and their needs throughout the pandemic,” notes Marlowe. “Since everything opened back up, the business has been in overdrive. Just 18 months ago, when I hired Alex Fenech, our new sales director, he was employee number 61. Today, we’re 110-strong and that’s all based on client demand.”

To what does Marlowe predominantly credit this unexpected success? “I was given some great advice by a mentor a long time ago, and it’s always stuck with me,” he shares. “Don’t just worry about the first engagement. Care equally as much about the next 1,000 engagements with that customer too. They’ll quickly drop you if they lose trust. Trust is earned, and in the Middle East, it is very hard to earn. It’s a closed and insular market where people’s senses are constantly on high alert.

“Our premise, however, is simple and has remained unchanged throughout all of these uncertainties – to do the project right, you need to treat the customer right,” Marlowe explains. “If you take care of the customer, they’ll continue coming back. We’ve brought the AVI-SPL model of doing business to the Middle East, and it’s been a huge success. We don’t have a product or commodity we’re selling, and the equipment in our projects can be bought globally, so why would you choose to work with us? You do so because you want the job done right, from design to completion, ensuring it is managed properly and serviced efficiently.”

This is where the ever-increasing sea of blue shirts starts to make sense. “It’s no secret – you want to (and need to) stay engaged with your customers,” Marlowe explains. “I find it kind of crazy that many of our competitors are happy to just do a job and walk away. We’re engaged in long-term relationships with every single one, whether it’s an onsite managed service engagement where we have 20+ people that report to the customer site every day to operate complex systems, a licensing engagement or using our Symphony product in the background to manage everything remotely. We’re involved with customers throughout the entire lifecycle of their technology system.”

At a time when many Dubai-based companies are looking to neighbouring Saudi, it’s refreshing to hear Marlowe commit tothe UAE. “We still have a big focus in the UAE, it is our home. We’re not the biggest in the UAE yet and we’ve plans to keep growing here and expand our offerings. Of course, Saudi is still on our minds, as is the greater Middle East and North Africa. “Overall, right now is a very exciting time,” he concludes.

“There’s a lot of opportunity here. However, what we don’t want is what has happened to others before who have jumped in the deep end and quickly realised they’re in over their heads. We’ll leap – but only when all signals point to go and we know we can deliver on customers’ promises the same way we have here for all these years.” As AVI-SPL Dubai continues to innovate and evolve, its dedication to client relationships ensures a promising future for both the company and its customers.