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Jul 12, 2023

South Bend audio company leans into growth out of pandemic

LEA Professional in South Bend has set out to flip the way the audio industry operates. The company, which develops professional-grade amplifiers and sound systems, has grown rapidly since its

LEA Professional in South Bend has set out to flip the way the audio industry operates.

The company, which develops professional-grade amplifiers and sound systems, has grown rapidly since its founding nearly five years ago and attributes its success to an innovative product and a customer-driven model.

LEA Professional’s product line includes several variations of amplifiers as well as a full suite of Cloud-based services, meaning the company’s sound controls can be accessed remotely and entirely online.

Customer service teams working from South Bend can often assist clients live over the phone without having to call out a tech team, its founder said, saving clients’ time and money. The company markets its product to commercial businesses — like restaurants, live event venues and hotels — as well as private residences with home theaters or sound systems.

LEA Professional CEO Blake Augsburger says the company is still on an upward trajectory.

“Our story is all about customer support,” CEO Blake Augsburger said. “We think we can service our customer better than the competition.”

The South Bend-based company grew out of an all-too-familiar headline: “Global manufacturer announces mass layoffs.”

Augsburger retired from a leadership role at Crown Audio in Elkhart in 2016, shortly after Crown’s parent company, Harman International Industries, was acquired by Samsung. Within a year, Harman announced it would shutter its Elkhart plant and move its work out of state.

Augsburger saw a window. Out of the layoffs, he recruited several of Crown’s top engineers and started a new company, LEA Professional. LEA stands for Loud Enuff Audio — named after Augsburger’s boat, Loud Enuff — and the company carries nautical themes throughout.

Augsburger founded the company in January 2019 and began shipping product in 2020. About 60 days later, he said, the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Though it brought its challenges, the pandemic proved to be a catalyst for the LEA Professional brand. Some competitors saw business slow, especially in repair services, at a time when many homes and businesses closed their doors to everything except the necessary. Aside from short installations, LEA Professional’s web-based features allowed the company to conduct most of its business from afar. The company capitalized on residential services as more people worked remotely and took on home renovation projects early in the pandemic, Augsburger told Inside INdiana Business in 2021. The team also found unexpected success working with hospitals which kept an especially tight circle of employees in person.

Unlike competitors, LEA Professional also maintained access to some difficult-to-source materials and was able to continue installing new systems while some other companies dropped off. That translated to an influx of new clients.

“We had a lot of people try us for the first time and then they just came back,” said Brian Pickowitz, LEA Professional’s vice president of marketing. “The pandemic gave us an opportunity because we had product in stock and we won a bunch of customers who won’t go back to who they used for the past 10 years.”

In the years since, LEA Professional has continued to grow, doubling in size each year for the last three years, its founders said. The company is hiring and Augsburger expects he will have 40 employees by the end of the year.

LEA Professional works with 1,500 dealers, expects to ship 40,000 amplifiers this year, and is now settling into a recent 6,000-square-foot expansion, doubling the size of the company’s current headquarters in the Renaissance District – a former Studebaker factory turned office park just south of downtown South Bend. The company’s product is made in Costa Rica and warehoused in Elkhart. Its employees in South Bend focus on marketing, customer service and engineering.

The company has found success locally in replacing former Harman systems, which carry a life of three to five years. One of its notable local clients is Four Winds Field, home of the South Bend Cubs. The company is also landing big national clients like Marriott, Starbucks, Six Flags and others that, for confidentiality reasons, its leaders can’t publicly name.

LEA Professional’s team says it’s all about what they can provide that’s different from audio equipment manufacturers. In addition to getting an early jump on Cloud technology, Augsburger says LEA Professional has intentionally invested in creating a hub of resources on its website for customers to learn about and make the most of the systems the company sells.

Augsburger discusses LEA Professional’s growth strategy.

“If we sell to some guy that’s going to provide a service to somebody else, if we can make his service better, he’ll come back to us,” Augsburger said. “We have guys that have had maybe a couple bad experiences, but they stay with us because we take care of them. We’re able to give them those extra pieces that they need to beat their competition.”

Augsburger has no plans to slow down. The CEO owns a small office in Singapore, for which the company is currently hiring, and has its sights set on further expansion into the international market. The company’s business is currently about 30% international. Augsburger said he would like to move that metric to about 40% and has his sights set on offices in Europe and the Middle East next.

“In the old days of Harman, we really focused on a good, better, best strategy,” Augsburger said. “(At LEA Professional), we’re really focused on better, best. We’re not looking at good. There’s a lot of places we can take this.”