Integrators know that nothing sells home entertainment better than actually experiencing it. That's one reason CE Pro 100 integrator Maverick Integration built a new lavish showroom in Nashua, N.H. The showroom location also serves as the company's headquarters, with offices, warehouse, and a rack-building/staging/testing facility.
“The inspiration was to have a place where we could show clients some of these exotic materials and make it worth their while to drive an hour to see our showroom,” says president Dennis Jaques.
Among the “exotic materials” Jaques references are the various shade textures and colors from uber-high-end wall covering company Hartmann & Forbes. The entire showroom is surrounded by large windows, each of which has different types of motorized shade fabrics. In the adjacent conference room portion of the showroom there are specially made Lutron shades that show three different levels of light transmittance in a single shade, from blackout to translucent.
The conference room also has a speech privacy protection system from Cambridge Sound Management that enables a board room to emanate white noise outside the room to prevent others from hearing through the walls.
There is also a dedicated theater, which was transferred lock, stock and barrel from the Wisdom Audio booth at the CEDIA Expo 2014 to Nashua, then rebuilt in the Maverick showroom.
Other vignettes are a 2-channel listening area featuring Meridian speakers, a Bang & Olufsen section and a Millson Custom Solutions wall that shows customers how sleek and totally hidden a high-end A/V system can be.
Rack-Building Area
Showing off the rack-building area is often forgotten by many CE pros, but Maverick lets customers see the got a special tour of the new facility from Jaques.
“We try to set up every rack possible in the same way for consistency sake. The vertically oriented APC by Schneider power supply, Kaleidescape, TiVo, Lutron lighting control, Ruckus wireless home networking equipment … everything goes in the same location on a rack. When a technician services a rack, he immediately knows where everything goes,” says Jaques. “Customers don't always want to see this, but contractors always do. These are little things we do to make it better.”
That is also where the service department lives.
“One of the best things I ever had done was back in 2008 when I created a separate stand-alone service division. They are not part of sales. They are not part of installation. They manage all their own clients individually. Essentially, as we finish a project, it gets turned over to these guys to manage. We put a service computer on almost every job since the company started. I can open up our software and see 500 Dell service computers. We can quite a bit remotely using the Ruckus Flexmaster account as well as Ihiji,” says Jaques. The company does not do service contracts.
Check out the five-minute walkthrough video tour above or check out the photos to see how your showroom compares.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
