Happy Holidays 2021

Last week, I found myself at a bar called O’Sullivan’s. This bar is not just famous for having the most apostrophes in a single name of any bar. It has Pliny on tap. Two kinds of Pliny.

I sat down in the outside area with some of my AV cohorts and threw down a couple of beers. We laughed about our goofy industry. We waxed how we are old now and griped about the lack of new fresh, young faces in our industry. But mostly we just drank some beers, talked about nothing. We did what friends do after a not so hard day at work.

Yeah, supply chain. Yeah…HDCP. Yeah…blah blah multicast. AV is pretty hard. There are late nights. There is some stress, but we all know we have it pretty good. We are messing with cool stuff, or talking about cool stuff, or just buying and selling cool stuff a lot of the time. And after work, me and this group of dudes….we are all just friends and we really like hanging out together.

And when I say I like hanging out with my customers, or that my customers are my friends, it is totally one hundred percent true. YES, when I first walked through your door, my singular goal was to get you to use all of my gear. I swear on my Christmas Ham that now, if you never buy anything else from me again, it won’t affect our friendship. It started out as a sales call, but when we go get a beer, it is just that. A beer. With my friends.

I am blessed like maybe nobody in AV has ever been blessed. I have been hired by Shure, QSC, Barco, Panasonic, Philips, FSR. I sit at the table with the owners of Listen Technologies. My team consists of people considered to be literally the brightest minds in AV. I get to meet with and even sometimes influence people that are my professional heroes. I am blessed. And people buy and use a ton of my stuff.

You see, I don’t need to buy anyone a beer anymore. As a matter of fact, on that night at O’Sullivan’s’s’s’s, I didn’t pay. We are just friends. And I mean it. You folks, KENNETH FAUSE, you are my friends. And I know what you have done for me. It is massive. It is amazing.

So those of you that have had a beer with me, you know it was the real deal. And those of you that I have YET to have a beer with, when I do, that beer means that I know what you have done for me, my family, my team. You have affected my life for the better….

So enjoy a beer without me these next couple of days. I will be thinking about how lucky and thankful I am to call you my customer and my friend.

Oh…and the beer is figurative…It is not all about beer. I like bourbon as well.