Allen & Heath’s new managing director Rob Clark reveals his plans for the mixing consoles manufacturer after taking over from longtime figurehead Glenn Rogers.
What is your first order of business as managing director?
With the recent launch of SQ and dLive Installed Solutions, the focus is on ensuring a great rollout for these products, and getting the product message out in the right channels.
With the company currently in a strong position, are you looking to build on what’s there rather than making any wholesale changes?
It’s definitely a case of building on what we’ve achieved under Glenn’s leadership and continuing to strengthen the product range and the team. Glenn always pushed to invest in research and new technology (I am a product of that myself!) and I will ensure that we continue to fuel the research programme that underpins the future product roadmap.
To what extent is it an advantage coming from the R&D side of the company?
You must have a keen insight on the outlook of the product development side.
Allen & Heath has often been talked about as an R&D-led business, which is hardly surprising since Glenn started here as a design engineer. I come from the same R&D background. Since 1993, I have been privileged to be involved with the company’s digital journey and experienced the results. This is a great aid in my new role. Having said that, I also inherit the stability of strong finance, operations, sales and marketing teams whose expertise I can rely on.
Having been at Allen & Heath since 1993, how do you feel it has changed over that time?
We’ve always been creative and ambitious, but we didn’t always have the investment we needed to match our ideas. With the support we have enjoyed from investors in recent years, and with the weight of the Audiotonix group behind us, we now have the people, facilities and technologies that we always aspired to.
How much are you looking forward to your first ISE as MD? And how is the planning coming along for it?
ISE 2018 will be a big one for us. Earlier this year we shared our plans to extend our dLive digital mixing system into installed solutions. The concepts we shared will all be finished products by the time we get to ISE, so we’re looking forward to demonstrating how we can provide a new kind of mixing solution to meet all the needs of multi-purpose venues.
