PA Matthews Audio is a private, fully owned family run business which commenced trading in 1992 in St Marys, west of Sydney. In 2005 it outgrew these premises and is now based at a new fully owned purpose built facility located on 1 acre of land in semi rural Tennyson (Near North Richmond), NSW. It is a small business with only four full time employees and several additional family helpers filling tasks such as Accounts and Office duties. In 20 years PA Matthews Audio has grown to be the premier PA System contractor for NSW State Government schools with a value point few can match. We conduct around 30 complete renovations or new installs of major systems in schools each and every year – state wide.
From the beginning, PA Matthews Audio saw that this sector was inadequately serviced by the wider audio installation industry because they don’t understand the needs of educators – who do not have the same financial resources as standard commercial clients. Most audio contractors gear their business around high value, time critical customers such as shopping centres, major retailers and corporate clients. They need their job done NOW and they’re willing to pay big dollars to get their way.
In these markets gear turns over and is replaced every 3 to 5 years. In most cases they are managed by full time staff trained in operation of such equipment. Unlike corporate clients the main issues facing educators are : Cost, Long Life and Ease of use. The funding available is a fraction of that of the corporates. It can take up to 12 months to secure funding, meaning quote lead times can blow out to many years before a job goes ahead. Once a system is installed it is expected to last for at least 10 to 15 years in daily service with core infrastructure such as cabling and mechanicals lasting between 30 and 50 years before needing substantial upgrade. Finally the most important requirement is for ease of use – because as educators, you don’t have time to learn about PA systems – you’re too busy
teaching and running schools for all that.
Fortunately the Primary and High school sector are also very patient – unlike their corporate cousins. Instead of requiring immediate emergency response within 4 hours, most schools can cope with losing part or all of the functionality of a failing system for at least a few days before it becomes an urgent matter. In many cases schools are quite OK if it takes up to 3 months to get their new install completed. Times like this would be completely unacceptable to corporate clients.
Because schools are generally “willing to wait”, PA Matthews Audio can offer the schools sector fully operable, high quality complete solutions at a fraction of the cost of our competitors. PA Matthews Audio operates a very efficient business because all materials are prepared in our workshop as a “kit” which means far less time on your site and no time lost waiting for critical components to arrive. Our buying power with our suppliers means there’s always plenty of stock of the items schools need – right here in our workshop.
Efficiency is also improved because we can very carefully and accurately schedule work ahead and not have it interrupted by other urgent jobs. Our work “on the road” is vastly improved by being able to schedule visits to clients in “clusters” rather than having our staff spending half their time driving around the city. Visits are handled by area – not by urgency. Costs are also kept low by our low overheads – no premises rental, and “in house” trained staff, and extensive reuse of existing facilities in designs.
PA Matthews Audio passes these efficiency gains directly onto it’s customers in the form of substantially lower prices across it’s full range. Services that cost our competitors twice as much to supply – because they are also busy serving their corporate clients – with price lists to match.
By specifically focusing in on the Schools sector and using the “slow” nature of the sector to it’s advantage PA Matthews Audio has been able to turn a sector of the audio industry previously seen as “unproductive” and “under serviced” into a highly profitable small business where everybody wins.
Especially YOU the customers – who get great systems that really work – and stay working – at a truly affordable price!
Paul Matthews
Business Owner
2017