When Monika Smetona took over as president of the Californian audio company Renkus-Heinz in 2022, she felt under intense pressure to prove herself. As a rare female leader in pro audio, she believed she had to show a woman could do the job as well as a man. But that wasn’t all. As daughter of the company’s founder, Harro Heinz, she was driven by a desire to demonstrate she had been appointed on merit.
“One of my biggest mistakes when I got the position was to change my personality and try to show I was strong and successful,” Monika admits. “After a while, I realised it didn’t fit with who I am because I was actually getting nervous in front of people, feeling I wasn’t articulating very well and my vocabulary wasn’t at the level that a company president should have. This type of thinking is a danger that women can fall into.”
SHOWING EMPATHY
As Monika, who is now 62 years old, gradually relaxed into the role, she began to find her own style as a leader. She realised, she says, that being a woman can actually be an advantage, especially in a small family company which places a lot of value on personal relationships. “I feel being a woman allows me to ask questions that a man probably couldn’t ask another man, or which might not be received as well. From a personal standpoint there are things people share with me that they probably wouldn’t have done with my father,” she explains.
“And we are a family company where everyone pulls together and everyone cares about everyone else. You’re not just a number. Our international salesman has been with us for 46 years and a lot of our production team has been with the company for over 30 years. So, we try to know everything about people’s families so that it gives them a good feeling. That’s probably more my style as a leader. I genuinely care. So I don’t have to remain strong all the time and can show my empathy.”
By the time Monika was appointed president, she had been with the company for 23 years and earned a lot of respect from colleagues. But when she first arrived at Renkus-Heinz in 1999 to replace her father’s main bookkeeper, her status as the boss’s daughter provoked a dramatically negative reaction from the accounting department. Almost everyone left the company after assuming she didn’t know what she was doing and owed her appointment to nepotism.
In reality, Monika was highly qualified for the role and required only minimal training. She had a degree in finance and HR and had worked in similar roles for many years in the motorcycle industry for not-for-profit associations. But the prejudice was still there. “I think as a child of an owner, it’s harder to succeed as everyone’s eyes and ears are on you. The judgment can be very strong. The entire accounting team quit because their judgment was that I wasn’t educated, but I had 15 years’ experience!”
Even her father, Harro, wasn’t about to make life easy for her. She had to negotiate hard with him as he wanted to pay her less than the previous bookkeeper. “I said ‘absolutely not’. I can stay where I am and make more money’. His attitude was ‘you’ve still got to earn the money and you won’t get treated any differently just because you’re family’.”
Determined to earn respect, Monika set about learning how to perform every operational role at Renkus-Heinz. Any time someone was absent, she volunteered to step in. “So, we lost our production manager for a while and I took on the role for an interim period and it taught me how to run production. Later, I became VP of operations and gradually moved up the ranks. I can honestly say that, other than engineering, I can pretty much do most positions in the company and in a family company that builds respect.”
Monika’s parents emigrated to the US from Germany after Harro Heinz, who had trained as an electrical engineer, was offered a job with audio manufacturer Fisher Radio in the early 1950s. The couple’s intention was to move back to Germany after making their fortunes, but it never happened. Monika’s brother Ralph was born, then a few years later Monika arrived. And by that stage they had two American-born children and still didn’t have enough money to return to Europe.
But the family connections with Germany remained strong. Monika grew up speaking German before she knew English and even today her parents address her in their native language. Every summer the family returned to Germany until she was a teenager.
MIDLIFE CRISIS
Harro Heinz’s career went from strength to strength. But by the time he was 50, he was fed up with building up companies for other people. What Monika calls his ‘midlife crisis’ pushed him to strike out on his own. She remembers sitting around the kitchen table as he explained his ambitions to his family.
In 1979, Harro Heinz founded the company with partner Algis Renkus. At this stage, there was never any intention that Monika, or her brother Ralph – now the Renkus-Heinz CTO – would ever work for the family firm. While Harro wanted Ralph to develop a career elsewhere, his expectations for his daughter did not involve her working at all. Now aged 95, Harro’s views of women back in the 1970s belonged to another age. “I was supposed to get my degree and become good, intelligent arm candy for whoever I married, who would take care of me,” she says.
Like his father, Ralph studied engineering and ended up working for NASA in San Francisco, before joining Renkus-Heinz in 1989 to further his knowledge of electro-acoustics and horn speaker design. A prodigious talent, Ralph designed a method of arraying loudspeakers for better phase coherency in 1994, then in 1996, he patented a multiple driver horn. In 2016, he was named chief technical officer and works closely with his sister.
PERFECT PARTNERS
Monika believes her father’s best qualities are divided between his two children. “Ralph is a visionary and a designer, but you also need a boring account who is into systems. And together Ralph and I are my dad. Harro had the visionary side and I have the operational side. Ralph and I are two different beings, but we work well together to run the company.”
In her short time as president, the most difficult task was laying off some employees during Covid-19 pandemic, which she found “heartbreaking”. President Trump’s experiments with tariffs have also caused logistical problems with product supplies from China becoming more expensive and the company is looking at manufacturing some products in Europe in future. Nevertheless, despite challenges, 2024 saw the company’s highest sales to date.
The most exciting imminent development, she says, is a new Renkus-Heinz 3D sound system. It will bear some resemblance to the HOLOPLOT system used at the Sphere in Las Vegas, but there will be significant differences. For now, there is no official date for a launch and the project details remain confidential.
‘BRADY BUNCH’
Away from work, Monika’s family is so expansive it has been dubbed “The Brady Bunch”, after the US sitcom about an extended, ‘blended’ family. Married previously, Monika got remarried to her ‘soulmate’ more than 30 years ago. She brought a daughter from her previous marriage into her new family, whereas her husband brought three sons, which she has helped to raise since they were between five and eight years old.
And the family continued to grow. Monika had another daughter, Sarah, with her second husband. Then, when Sarah was in high school, her best friend was tragically orphaned so the family adopted her. “So that’s how we became the Brady Bunch. We have three boys and three girls. They go from 22 years old up to 41 and we have nine grandchildren. So it’s a big family, and I absolutely love my family. And we also have dogs to replace each of them as they’ve left home! It’s so much fun being a grandparent too.”
Monika lives in San Clemente, on the coast of Southern California. She can see the ocean from her home. The couple now do a lot of bicycle riding, whereas once she would have preferred the kind of bike that has an engine. “We’ve kind of shied away from motorcycling in California. Were both in our 60s, and we’re probably a little bit more concerned about getting injured.”
Once a month, they travel to their “forever home”, a 40-acre ranch in Utah. It’s about 17 miles from Park City Ski Resort, where she has skied since she was 21. Her daughter Sarah is living on the ranch. “I have such beautiful memories going back to when my father first took us there,” she says.
When Monika retires from Renkus-Heinz, the family will spend far more time in Utah. But for now, she is enjoying her time as president. Having once felt under such pressure to be a strong leader, she is much more able to be herself. And one element of that is being profoundly unimpressed by titles.
“My daughters were so excited that I was in a presidential role. It meant a tremendous amount to them. And I’m going ‘really, why?’. And their comment was more that, ‘oh, you’re a badass mom because you’re now in that position’. That was when I realised it was different from anybody else’s career.”
