Keith Brunson:
Well, hello, I'm Keith Brunson and welcome to The Voice Choice. The Voice Choice is a show about the voiceover artistry business. It's a huge industry. You may not be a aware of that involves not only the voiceover artist, but engineers and producers and a whole industry of people who produce the voices that you never see, but that you hear. So to kick off this inaugural episode, we have invited the chairman of the board of Shure Microphones, Christine Schyvinck to join us. And Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris:
Thank you, Keith. It's nice to be here.
Keith Brunson:
Nice to have you. Let me ask you this right off the bat. How does a woman who is a Mac engineer and an entirely dominated male profession become the chairman of the board of an audio manufacturer, which is entirely male dominated. Tell us your story. How did you get where you are?
Chris:
Well, interestingly, Keith, I have been at Shure for quite a long time. I started with the company in June of 1989 and I was a graduated student just out of college. And to be honest with you, I did not know that much about sure. It just so happened that the company came on campus where I was graduating. And it was one of a few offers that I ended up getting when I was getting that mechanical engineering degree. And I did have a background interest in music. And so it seemed like I could maybe kind of combine the best of both worlds, leverage my engineering degree, but go to a company that had an affinity toward musicians and involved in the music industry. So, that's how it started. As I worked through the years in the company, I had a lot of different roles, and ultimately I ended up getting onto the executive staff as Shure's vice president of quality in 1997.
So I was a fairly young executive at that point. But in 1995, the founder of the company Mr. Shure had passed away and his wife took over as chairman and leader of the company. She started grooming her own management team at that point. I under her tenure took on more and more responsibility over time. And eventually at some point she and my predecessor did ask if I would eventually take this role that I did. So I had a very long runway to get to this point. And I had the advantage of being able to experience a lot of different roles that they gave me. I left engineering and went into different functions in the company, including sales and marketing. So I got a pretty well rounded view of the company. And when Mr. Shure passed in 2016 and my predecessor retired that year, then I felt like I was very well prepared to take on the role. So under the tutelage of another female leader is the short answer to your question as to, as to how I got into this role.
Keith Brunson:
How big is the company it's international. Now it's a global business. Just how much business do you do because of this wonderful microphone that I'm using, which is a Shure product, by the way. How big is it?
Chris:
Well, we are squarely in the midsize manufacturing know realm in terms of size of company. We have 35 different locations around the world and we have around 3000 employees. So that gives you kind of a little bit of a size and scale of the company. I can tell you that's a remarkable change That I've seen in over three decades, being with the company. When I started with the company, you could probably count the number of people in hundreds that were employed by Shure at that point. And we were predominantly a North American company. All of our locations were either in the United States or Mexico at that point. So a lot of the growth of the company has really come about over the last 30 years.
Keith Brunson:
Are you surprised at the advent and the innovation of the in-home studio? It's really, really big now. The format that I learned voiceover in, in the seventies pretty much no longer exists. It's very much unless you're doing motion pictures. Are you surprised at what's happened?
Chris:
Well, yes and no. I think we got a little bit of accelerant put into that phenomenon over the last 18 months because of everybody being forced to figure out how to do a lot more things out of their home. However, we were seeing that trend in content creation and people wanting to do this kind of work well before the pandemic happened. Some of our best selling microphones that are used for podcasting content creation, we were having a hard time keeping up with some of those production needs before the pandemic started. Then, like I said, then it was just an accelerant. We did some research recently with an outside research firm and they came up with the statistic that says that two out of every five people in the world consider themselves to be a content creator in one form or another. So that's been a huge business for us really, over the last three to four years.
Keith Brunson:
You have commented before. I thought this was very interesting. Your philosophy is only the paranoid survive in business. Would you like to articulate that just a little bit, because I thought it was fascinating?
Chris:
Maybe it's just because I'm a little, little bit of a paranoid person by nature, but I don't think anybody can ever really rest on their laurels. It's wonderful when we do have successes and we bring products to market and people like them, and we're able to sell a lot of them. But every day, especially with a piece of technology changing, you have to be looking around you. You have to be keeping a pulse on what's happening, not just on the technology side of the equation, but what's happening with all of our end users out there.
We certainly saw the phenomena I just talked about with content creation, like I said, happening probably a decade ago. So if you're not keeping your ear to the ground with those end user and understanding what's happening with technology evolution, you can very quickly become antiquated and pretty irrelevant. So I think it's okay to celebrate your successes once in a while, but you always have to be understanding what's happening outside of your own four walls. You can't be too internally focused.
Keith Brunson:
Oh, it's see. Do you have in lab, so to speak at this particular time, a new innovation that's going to come out in the microphone or are you corporately pretty much settled in with the equipment that you have?
Chris:
We're never settled in. We do have a part of our engineering team that we call advanced development. That group looks at technologies that we may not even, at the time that we start looking at them, quite understand how they're going to be relevant to our markets. Right now, we're doing a lot of investigation into things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, technology, internet of things. Technologies that you may not really see a direct correlation for needing today, but things that will need be needed in the future. So we're always looking at that kind of stuff.
Keith Brunson:
So in other words, you are not comfortable. You continue to innovate and continue to plan for whatever the next phase of audio is. Correct?
Chris:
Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. Again, I think that it goes back when you look at the history of the company. The company started as a one man show in terms of Mr. Shure selling radio kit components out of an office on [inaudible 00:09:03] street in Chicago, because you could not buy a factory made radio at that point. He went from that quickly into distributing microphones. Once he started microphones, he wondered if he couldn't make microphones himself. Eventually, that brought Shure to where we are today, but a lot of twists and turns were taken in the meantime. Lots of different products were tried out.
At one point, he was branching into trying to see if microphones were needed in the medical field, which of course they are, but it wasn't quite the right fit for Shure. But certainly something that should have been tried and was tried. So I think, if you're not continuing trying new things, thinking about new markets, like I said, you can become pretty irrelevant pretty fast. So I think it's just kind of a tradition of the company throughout all of these decades to always be looking for new ways to employ the knowledge that we have around audio, how to enhance audio, make audio sound better, and where can we be applying that technology in different markets.
Keith Brunson:
In terms of the revenue that you're created prior to the pandemic versus during the pandemic, a lot of us get tired of talking about the coronavirus and its effect on business. We all know that it's had a lot of effect. How much did it affect you?
Chris:
Well, as I was just kind of giving you a little bit of the history story of Shure there, I was thinking about when I started with the company in '89. Pretty much most of the company's focus was on the professional audio arena. So, products that are used for large concerts, things that you see maybe in the broadcast industry, things that you see in your world as well. In the 30 years that I've been with the company, we've branched out into other segments. So we look at musicians, consumer audio. We have earphones and headphones and products like that. We play in video conferencing. So if somebody is in a meeting room and they need a better sounding way of video conferencing with somebody that's halfway around the world, what kind of solutions can we bring there?
So the company is diversified into different vertical markets now. Had the pandemic happened when I started with the company and we were just really strictly focused on that professional audio, I can safely say the company's business would've plummeted by about 80%, if not more, because as you know, all the shows stopped happening. There was no live performances, theaters were shuttered around the world. That business segment for us did drop by about that amount. April of 2020, it was down 80%, but we had other segments to lift us up. We had people suddenly needing to communicate with each other in business settings, more video conferencing started happening.
I think before the pandemic, I would maybe have a video conference twice a year. There was audio conferences that were happening, but video conferences became so prevalent. As we discussed earlier, people started doing more content creation at home. More development work started happening at home. So those business segments in the conferencing realm, the business arena, as well as personal use at home made up for what was lost in professional audio. So while one business was down by dramatic amounts, the other two businesses lifted us up and we were able to remain very whole through the last 18 months. In fact, saw some growth in many segments as well.
Keith Brunson:
How many countries are you in?
Chris:
We're completely international. So we do ultimately distribute into about 140 countries around the world.
Keith Brunson:
140 countries?
Chris:
Yes, our products end up in that many countries around the world. I do think Mr. Shure was quite ahead of his time when it came to international distribution. He set up his first distributor in Israel, in the 1930s. So imagine that. When I started with the company 30 years ago, the company had a very healthy international business for the size of company that we were back then. As a person involved heavily in manufacturing, back in the day, I went to a lot of different many manufacturing sort of engineering network different activities. So many companies at that point were talking about, well, how do we take our business that we have in the United States and export that into other parts of the world. At that point, Shure already was splitting its business almost evenly in some cases between that, which was going outside the United States versus that which stayed in the states.
So very much ahead of its time. He set up a network of distributors globally very, very early on compared to other companies. So we've always had an international footprint. Now it's not just a matter of setting up partners that import our products countries, but we have feet on the ground in a lot of the different places where we want to do more business, because you can get so much done by going through a third party and having them help you put a foot head into that country. But until you have your own people on the ground, and you really understand customer behaviors, customer conventions, what kind of things are really unique about this country compared to maybe what we do in the United States, you can't grow your business there. You might be able to export a little bit, but you can't grow until you have your own people there.
Keith Brunson:
Speaking of growth, how many countries are you implanted in right now? It's not just America.
Chris:
About 35 different places around the world. Some of that is manufacturing, but the lions share of it really is the type of office that I just described. That which tries to get closer to end users, customers, does a little bit of on the ground research in terms of what kind of product needs are there and is responsible for some of the marketing activities that we do locally as well. Sometimes what plays well marketing wise in the US, as you know, doesn't well in other countries. So we need that expertise on the ground.
Keith Brunson:
I remember when I was a front of house sound engineer in 1978, I went to buy a needle for my record player. Was that a Shure? I believe that it said Shure.
Chris:
Yes, yeah. Were in that business for several decades. That's actually another story of transformation. Well before I started with the company, probably 80% of Shure's business at one point was those phonograph needles that you're talking about. Somebody has told me a story about a factory that we had in Arizona at the time, which is long since gone, that would be pumping out like 10,000 phonograph cartridges per day. It was just, that was the heyday of it.
Keith Brunson:
It was important. I remember that I was told to get this particular needle from the person I was working with. So I went and wrote it down, and I went and got it. It said Shure on it. I believe that it was a diamond needle, if I'm not mistaken.
Chris:
Yes. It was diamond, and from a very specific supplier that sure had in Japan that would make those diamond tip needles. Exactly. So that was a huge ... The lion's share of Shure's business, especially in the seventies heading into the early eighties. However, CD player came onto the market. You talk about why it's important to be paranoid and prepared. That was not seen coming in. That was definitely a rocket ship that hit the company and the phono business pretty much tanked overnight within about an 18 month period. Business had dramatically plummeted and the company had to go through a reinvention point.
When I started with the company in '89 was when that was kind of the company coming out of that darkness. The focus on microphones had come back again. The focus on professional audio had come back again. We were just starting to talk about things like wireless microphones instead of wired microphones only. But that was a rebuilding. That was a definite rebuilding in the eighties into the nineties, because like I said, the business had gone down by, from what I've heard, about 80%. People had to be let go. They shuttered up that plant in Phoenix and the company had to stop and figure out what are we going to do at this point? It was a pretty devastating period.
Keith Brunson:
Explain, if you can, the digital revolution, I'm an analog guy. I started in the analog years. When everything went digital, whether we wanted it to or not, what kind of experience did you have corporately?
Chris:
There was a very similar experience going through that transition as there was when we went from what I just described, going from wired to wireless microphones, because we have so many people that use our products and are audio people through and through, and a lot of purists. You can start to question whether or not this new technology that people are talking about is going to degrade the audio experience that Shure is famous for. So there was definitely internal debates about, should we go there or not? But at some point you finally realize that technology is going in a direction and you can't dig in the heels any further.
With a combination of retraining the folks that you have and bringing in some new people that understand that technology, you start to get very creative in terms of, well, how can we take this new technology and make it as good as what we knew in the analog world? In some cases, it turns out that you can do it even better. So it's a real transformation process. You go through kind of these cycles of, there's a little bit of grief at the beginning. Like this can't be happening. This really isn't happening and it'll go away. It's not going to work. But then you have to become more accepting. Then you go through the process of understanding and then really learning about what the new technology can do for you.
So I've seen this go through those cycles and it's excruciating at the beginning because you don't really understand what the transformation is going to mean to you. But on the other side, it's very rewarding because you can get creative about things, you advance your state of the art, and you get to a point where you have a much better solution for your end users.
Keith Brunson:
I've been surprised with the advent of the home studio. I deal with a lot of people in the voiceover, in every realm, and nobody goes to the studio anymore. They go to the back of their house where their studio is. Does this surprise you?
Chris:
Again, we saw that trend happening before the pandemic. It was right around the start of the pandemic when we got that statistic I told you about, where two out of five people consider themselves to be a content creator. So we saw the trend happening. We saw the demand going up, but could we have put a bigger accelerant on that trend by really forcing people to get creative because they had to stay at home. I don't know that we would be at the point that we are today had that not happened. I think we would've gotten there five years down the road, maybe 10 years down the road, but that really was a sea change.
Keith Brunson:
So what's next for Shure? What are you presently that you can talk about developing that is interesting to learn here?
Chris:
Well, in the two main markets that we have our heads down the most on around, first of all, the video conferencing world, the business world that I just talked about, as well as our core business, our professional audio and our performance group. Those are areas where we're still exploring new technologies. On the business side of the fence, think about what's happening with the work environment that everybody is now facing. It's not everybody in the office and it's not everybody at home. It's going to be this sort of mysterious realm of hybrid that everybody keeps talking about.
So every single meeting that I've seen happen at this company and every other company in about the last four months has been, you've got maybe a contingent of people sitting in a meeting room. There might be three or four people in a corporate meeting room. Then you've got the rest of the folks at home, either on Teams, Zoom, what have you know, pick your favorite platform. So I don't know what your experience has been, but that can be pretty unsatisfying. The people that are sitting at home on Teams are looking at folks in a meeting room, and they're really small. That sound in that room might be really hard to hear. You hear a lot of people saying, can you repeat that? I didn't hear that.
Then there's different sizes of people on the screen. So there's been a lot of discussion recently about meeting equity. Whether you're sitting in the office or at home, how can you have an equitable experience in that meeting environment? How can you see everything the same? How can you hear thing the same? So that industry is heading in that direction, how to make that experience as productive as possible, because I think we've all been in meetings that take way too long to start because people can't hear each other, can't see each other, and then meetings that just get disrupted because there's some sort of audio interruption. There's some sort of thing happening in the background.
If we're going to support the hybrid environment going forward, we've got to have better technologies to get that done. So we are definitely exploring how to make the hybrid meeting experience much more satisfying and much more productive getting back on track with the show must go on. Let's let's hope, knock on wood, that as we head into this, April, May, June and into summer, festivals are back, concerts are back and Shure will continue to provide the best possible audio experience when people go to those large venues.
So you just said that when you were told to buy a photograph needle, you're pretty positive that it was a Shure at the time, because that's what everybody used and it was the best audio experience. We want everybody's in person performance experience, their concert listening experience to be the best possible, and we want those performers to have the best microphone in front of their face. So we'll continue to develop new solutions for them as well.
Then the third leg of the stool is exactly the kind of business that you are in, Keith. Somebody in their studio, whether it's something that's professional or they've taken it back home again, how can we make that as easy for them as possible and provide the best audio experience as possible. So that's really where we're focusing all of our energies right now.
Keith Brunson:
I read some things, I know nothing about it, but tell me about the 55. Do you have a new development called the 55?
Chris:
Well, the 55 microphone is what we lovingly refer to here as the Elvis microphone. It actually was Mrs. Shure's favorite microphone because of its design. It's like the bird cage style microphone that everybody's kind of familiar with.
Keith Brunson:
Yes. I remember quite well.
Chris:
That Elvis microphone, it's our longest standing microphone that we have at the company. Every couple of years, it goes through some different iterations. We've done special edition colors. We've done special edition, maybe affiliation with an artist or something like that. So there's always something new to be done with that product. It's amazing that it's been around as long as it has, and it's still a fan favorite. So stay in tune on that one.
Keith Brunson:
Well, it's an interesting company to have lasted since the twenties and the thirties to still be evolving today, the company that you're leading. How does one person lead such a gigantic enterprise? How do you do that?
Chris:
That one person doesn't. That's the simplest answer I can give you. It has to be about having the right team and the right people on board. Shure has a very unique culture, and it's something that we're proud of. Those of us that have been here for a long time do everything that we can to perpetuate it. I can tell you that people have a very, very strong passion for what we do. There's a very strong connection with end users. I think when you talk to customers, people in the market, they'll tell you that Shure is very approachable, that we're very friendly. The reason that they feel that way is because that's what it feels like inside these four walls.
People want to help each other, and they especially want to help our end users and our customers. So if I don't have the right team surrounding me, if I don't have the right feet on the street, whether it's here in the United States or one of those other 140 countries that we talked about earlier, then we can't get the job done. We have to have people that have that passion and have that desire to give everybody high quality and exceptional audio experiences.
Keith Brunson:
My experience from concept to today was always very warm and friendly. I had nobody send me to somebody else who sent me to somebody else. As you know, I wrote you. And then you responded with [inaudible 00:27:40]. It was a wonderful, unique experience for what were really is a gigantic global company. Now you're getting into AI and software and things of this nature, just part of the journey, correct?
Chris:
It certainly is. I think, as much as we are very much gear heads at this company, we love our products. We love the stuff that we put into people's hands. I can't emphasize enough that the other side of the equation that we are known for is that human touch, that ability to answer questions, that ability to get somebody on the phone that you can talk through a problem with and find a solution. So that's a very important tenant of ours that we hold dear to ourselves.
Keith Brunson:
Well, you can certainly notice it if you do contact Shure. Otherwise, we would not be talking today as we are. There are many times when you just can't get through to the right person, to the leader of a business because of all of the filters. But my experience was the antithesis of that, and I appreciate you being so warm and friendly and allowing us to talk about Shure today and the voiceover business. For people who are watching this that want to get into voiceover, I want to encourage you to go to voiceshopcoaching.com. If you want to be in voiceover, you can learn from beginner to expert, accents, dialects, you name it. We offer it at The Voice Shop, which you find at voiceshopcoaching.com. Chris, I want to thank you for joining us today. It was my distinct pleasure and I wish you continued success there in Chicago and across the planet.
Chris:
Oh, thank you, Keith. I really appreciate your time today and I wish you nothing but the best with all of your work. It's very good work.
Keith Brunson:
All right. Thank you so kindly, and so long.
