Carlton Audio Visual has been a business entity for over thirty years now. One of the common fundamental issues that a small organisation like ours faces is how do we keep the good people we have who work here? 

We didn't start out as a family business ... it evolved this way. At some stage in our minor business development we graduated from professional selection of staff to tribal methodology. So although I have been trained in interview techniques and selection criteria management by RMIT I have put that deliberately aside and have gone to a "trial by peer" approach. My family and friends who work here argue that by employing them at Carlton Audio Visual they have now become persona non grata elsewhere in the industry. I would argue that no one else would offer them such reasonable and lenient working conditions ... :)

When there are only fourteen people in a workplace its not as though the conventional "climbing the ladder through the layers of management" is an option. The conventional expectation of a career path is that a talented individual will either be promoted within an organisation so that they achieve a level commensurate with their abilities, or that they leave their existing organisation to take up a more senior position in an alternative company.

There are a few problems with this ...

This traditional career path progression requires emplacement within a large multi layered corporation that supports a wage and empowerment hierarchy which provides the carrot for talented people to be rewarded. In actuality those who successfully climb the fish ladder of corporate promotion are often that personality type that posses the peculiar ruthless psychopathy that can be so effective at getting job rewards.

In this theoretical corporate environment the rewards these days will go to those who improve shareholder value, not those who are the best to work with.  Then there is the slash and burn approach to promotion wherein the newly positioned management individual works on the Key Performance Indicators for short term improvement and bails out leaving the true cost of the changes to be borne by their colleagues. 

The "produce results but don't worry about the consequences that you leave behind" type of behaviour is perhaps derived from the rationalist economic world of the eighties onwards, where the human values of a company were subsumed to short term financial gains. Gains that could then be removed by the senior management and reinvested in their next venture. We saw this in a number of very high quality UK brands in our our Hi Fi scene that were effectively asset stripped in the eighties and nineties and left as hollow brand names to be often picked up by a Chinese manufacturing conglomerate.

 A 2011 study in the Journal "Psychology, Crime and Law" tested 39 British senior managers and CEOs and found they had more psychopathic tendencies than patients in Broadmoor High Security Psychiatric Hospital ...

Then there is the new "Gig Economy" ... what a frightful development this is. Abrogate a hundred years of workers rights and entitlements and surrender your livelihood to an oligarch controlling you with an algorithm for maximum productivity and return. As a worker you are caught between the carrot of the five star approval rating and the stick of instant dismissal for transgression or circumstance.

By the way I believe the magazine "What Hi-Fi?" is the originator of the ubiquitous Five Red Star approval, they have a lot to answer for therefore. The number of red stars out of five on their Google rating is perhaps the single most telling performance characteristic of a business to its demographic and is considered to be a crucial marketplace performance indicator. Needless to say it is therefore also vulnerable to targeted abuse by both allies and adversaries as we found to our cost when the anti vaxx brigade decided to target us. Likewise we note other dealers in our sector have very positive reviews on their Google rating page where the language is clearly "trade" rather than "consumer"...

So how do you prevail in a small medium enterprise career path. For a start you need to work in a business that ... works ...

Fortunately there is a Hi Fi scene in Melbourne that has prevailed through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the consumer electronics market in Australia. It has become something of a phenomenon that I am finding in that visitors from around Australia are coming to Melbourne for a few days of Hi-Fi tourism. 

The longevity of the dedicated specialist high fidelity business ventures in Melbourne is actually very unusual ... in fact remarkable for small medium organisations of their size.

One would argue that this reflects the passion and dedication of the participants in these companies and it is that peculiar enthusiasm for technology of music that actually underpins the sustainability of these companies.

Of course small business entities that often involve family relationships are not necessarily noted for their durability. Family business units are associated with both extremes of exploitation and nepotism and these traits can flow on to very dysfunctional internal relationships and a limited survival prognosis for the business so afflicted.

However it is that junction of small medium enterprise and technology purveyance that is the key to sustainability and provision of internal organisational opportunity for the employees of an audio visual company. The continually evolving wavefronts of both the technology being purveyed and the technology of purveyance make the uptake of new knowledge and skills a prerequisite of success in this sector for individuals who choose to work in it long term.

In fact those companies that fail to adapt to new ways of doing things and new categories of product to sell are those that will fail to adapt and be left by the commercial wayside. The prevailing competitive conditions and changing product environment enforce a continual evolution on the frontline resellers of the consumer technologies.

In a company like ours there is both that demand and opportunity for my younger colleagues to continually acquire new skills and product knowledge that, simply put, keep things interesting and challenging. It is the job therefore of a company such as Carlton Audio Visual to allow and encourage its members to self direct their own learning in their trade and choose a speciality to develop in.

If that means that they develop into another job somewhere else then so be it. This nurturative approach means that one is handing the keys to their future back to them in a way I would argue, that a larger company or an autocrat small business is not able to accommodate.

I will throw in a bit of Jonathon living seagull here ... "if you love someone let them go, if they love you they will come back." Not a workplace staff management theory that prevails in one of the large corporate entities ...

The point is though to allow the people in the workplace to do whatever it is they are best at. Not coincidentally this will generally also be that endeavour that most interests them and to which they will dedicate personal learning and research.

This means that as an employer you have to be prepared to let the dog off the lead, and of course it won't always run in the direction you may hope or expect. It is not always the case that the area of self directed learning is necessarily going have an immediately obvious sales or administration return to the organisation. The point is to allow the participants to realise their own self worth through the aegis of the workplace and reciprocate with enthusiasm and application.

It's hard to buy that in an employee simply by paying them. Money is definitely nice however it dosn't create interesting people with genuine enthusiasm for their work. Perhaps it should be said that the money through wages in the AV scene where margins are tight and competition is intense is not in the drug dealer/rock star category unfortunately. However you should be able to earn a good middle class living with decent conditions and opportunities. Once upon a time not so long ago, that would mean being able to buy a house in the suburbs on a single income. Alas I'm not sure that this is the case anymore. Sorry about that Millennials. 

Locally in Victoria our business sector is marked in the last thirty years by a steady state small universe of dedicated enthusiast based companies, with occasional large scale entrants from majors with aspirations to scale the higher end AV consumer market. Myers, Harvey Norman franchisees, the Good Guys, David Jones and others have all attempted inroads into the high end AV sector with high investment premises and a convincing business plan to attract appropriate brand distributor support. They have all failed thus far ... although they have the stock and the demonstration facilities and the finance they have not been able to support the critical human interface with client. Without good staff they have been predestined to fail. Even when they buy in high quality staff from established specialist business entities it seems that they are unable to keep them past the initial honeymoon period.

There are some new ventures happening in Melbourne just now that are different high investment AV retail stores from these previous corporate invaders. The new Addicted to Audio store on Church st in Richmond dedicated to Naim and Focal is a beautiful five story gallery in the heart of high discretionary-spend-land. Opening soon is the new Rio store on Bell st in Preston that promises to set a new AV home theatre retailing standard for the Northern urban expansion corridoor. Then there is the "Theatre at Home" stores opening in Nunawading and Packenham targeting the Eastern outer suburban growth with a "cinema room package in a room" offer, they may well have a tough time on the home turf of the Big Picture people who already are well established with package cinema offers in the suburbs.

The difference with these new Melbourne stores is that they are being opened by the likes of George Poutakidis, Paul Riaci, and Vinod Christie-David who are from successful dedicated specialist contemporary local retail backgrounds rather than being designed by faceless corporate planners without previous experience in our sector. These particular people have that enthusiast passion and energy to make their ventures succeed where the likes of Myers and David Jones have flailed like fish out of water in the past.

Melbourne is thus an interesting place for our business type right now, it is my hope and expectation that we are working to make the size of the pie bigger rather than fighting for market share. There is such opportunity and potential in our categories, however like our staff it requires a nurturative approach to grow the market.