Jim Paetschow of Sound Productions

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Ryan Burger: This is Ryan Burger, the president of Mobile Beat Magazine. I’m here with Jim Paetschow, the president of Sound Productions, another disc jockey service that I want all of you to know a little bit about and maybe learn a little bit from.

Jim, introduce yourself and tell how you got into this whole business.

Jim Paetschow: I’m Jim Paetschow. I started Sound Productions back in 1980 in junior high school, and just kept after it and kept going and things just kept growing and growing. We currently have 28 systems — 28 identical DJ systems. We play music all over Michigan, northern Ohio.

The company is into so many different things today it’s just kind of — we’ve adapted to what our customers’ needs are; photo booths and large event production shows. We’ve got a crew and we’re on our way to Texas currently today, and from there they leave to go to Atlanta, Georgia because if we do production work for AFLAC insurance, so that takes us all over the country anymore.

But our main focus is wedding receptions, and we do about 2500 of them a year.

Ryan Burger: Fantastic. When you first started, I imagine it was just yourself and then you started growing from that point. How long ago did you go full-time with the business

Jim Paetschow: Oh, geesh, 20 years ago.

Ryan Burger: Okay. So it’s been a full-time occupation for you for the majority of that time, no doubt about it.

Jim Paetschow: Yes.

Ryan Burger: How many full-time staff do you have in there? I imagine the rest are part-time weekend warriors for you, right?

Jim Paetschow: Yep. Realistically there’s six full-time staff and another 35 weekend warriors.

Ryan Burger: Fantastic. Obviously you had said weddings are your biggest area. What percentage of your business is within weddings, whether it be the photo booths, DJs, or whatever you do for a wedding? What percentage is in the wedding area?

Jim Paetschow: Probably 60 percent.

Ryan Burger: Okay. You big into the bridal fair scene? How do you get most of that business?

Jim Paetschow: Word of mouth is the best. We do a lot of bridal shows. We do about 23, 24 bridal shows every year and that’s gotten to be part of our production stuff. So all these — like in Michigan, the Amway people own DeVos Center and we do all the production for all their bridal shows. Not only do we have a booth there, we do the stage and the sound and the lights and video and the whole shebang. So that’s the ultimate way to advertise at a bridal show.

Ryan Burger: Now, are you — this time of the year, we’re recording this in the first quarter of the year. I imagine it’s bridal fair season. You got a couple of them going every weekend, I assume, or how crazy does it get?

Jim Paetschow: We have three to five every weekend.

Ryan Burger: Fantastic. We have one this weekend. I’m trying to come up with staffing to cover all the stuff. So I can understand. You send a couple of full-time staff to each one, a couple of your DJs –

Jim Paetschow: Yep.

Ryan Burger: — and then you’ve got to have the tech side of the things, because from what you’re telling me, the vast majority of them you’re technically involved, not just setting up a little 10′ by 10′.

Jim Paetschow: Right. It’s all hands on deck.

Ryan Burger: Describe the style. Everything started with yourself, obviously, and all the DJs are a little bit different. Where do you put yourself in the way of the style? Can your DJs do everything from sitting behind and pressing play every five minutes to wacky-crazy, or do you have kind of a niche?

Jim Paetschow: We never sit down, number one. There’s no chairs. It’s forbidden to sit at your show. We’re a lot more interactive. And with 28 shows that are all identical — I mean, every single piece is identical, right down to the Ultimate Sports Dance. Every piece of lighting’s all identical. So everybody knows the same thing and you can give them all the same identical music and they’re go do totally different shows.

And the beauty of having so many people is you can teach each other. We have what we call a “hidden video.” We have 28 systems, so we have only 14 hidden video packages. The hidden video package, we record and we actually sell it to a bride and groom; sell it for $175. It’s just a DVD handed to them that night. Whenever those aren’t all out, we bring those back and we watch them and we can, whenever we have a meeting, we pull all the great ideas off them or the not-great ideas off them. And we watch it as a company and learn from them.

Ryan Burger: Fantastic.

Jim Paetschow: It started as a learning tool or kind of a training tool, but then brides and grooms started to want to buy it, and so it just kind of evolved from there.

Ryan Burger: So your staff’s in constant training. I mean, do you have something — I imagine a new DJ program is going on all the time. You constantly have to have people coming up the lines.

Jim Paetschow: We do. Training is neverending. Training’s expensive. It’s very time-consuming, very expensive, but if you’re going to be successful in this business you have to spend it or you just won’t make it.

Ryan Burger: Okay. Obviously you work with a ton of equipment. You said it’s identical across the whole system. Give us a little bit of a lowdown of what the average DJ rolls out with from you guys.

Jim Paetschow: We have all the trucks. We own 17 trucks. They come here, they get in one of our vans. Astro Van is our van of choice. They get in their van, they know where they’re going. Hopefully they’ve already talked to their bride and touched base with them. We really push for that. And everything’s got a Garmin in it and you go to your show and set up and do your thing and come home.

All the equipment’s loaded for them. They don’t load anything. There’s guys here that just load and unload vans all week long.

Ryan Burger: Oh, wow. So are you guys Pioneer guys, Denon guys — what kind of parts?

Jim Paetschow: Denon. Actually, Denon dual-CD. We’ve got a brand new system coming we’re just introducing this year, and it’s computer. We went to computer a few years ago with DJ Power and nobody liked to use it. It was boring. So we went back away from it.

We have some party buses, too. We have three buses and those buses all have computers on them just because you can’t really run a CD player cruising down the highway.

Ryan Burger: Understandably. DJs are always bragging about the rate stuff that they charge. What is the average rate in your market and what do most of your guys go out for? Do you have different wedding packages? How is it done?

Jim Paetschow: Yep. There’s three different wedding packages. We start at $750. An average wedding for us is $1100. We’re in rural Michigan. The city that we’re in — it’s not a city; it’s a town — of 3,000 people.

Ryan Burger: You’re probably the biggest employer in town, then, right, or pretty close?

Jim Paetschow: Well, no. Everybody who says you’ve got to be in a big city to be successful is full of it, especially in this business because you have a service and you’re taking your service to the customer. So we literally are on Mackinac Island all summer long. We leave two systems up there all summer. And we in as far south as Toledo, Ohio, and everywhere in between.

Some of the big metro markets like Detroit and stuff, we don’t even advertise there anymore. You’re just lost in the sea of DJs, so you’re kind of a nobody. And like I say, the word of mouth is great. And down there, people don’t seem to talk and have word of mouth like in other parts of Michigan. I would suspect that’s true in any big city.

Ryan Burger: Yeah. Wow. So I guess I never asked you. What part of Michigan are you in? You’re obviously in rural. How far out from Detroit; what direction? I’ve been to Detroit. That’s about the only part of Michigan I’ve been to.

Jim Paetschow: About two and a half hours north of Detroit; right in the center of the lower peninsula.

Ryan Burger: Gotcha. Okay.

Jim Paetschow: Mount Pleasant’s our closest big town; CMU — Central Michigan University.

Ryan Burger: You guys do have a very strong website, SoundProductions.com; a lot of video content on there, a lot of different stuff on there. What do you use to run the back end of your business? Do you use one of the online packages?

Jim Paetschow: The DJ Intelligence we use for the bride for planning. That’s nice. You can just turn them loose with that. Saves fielding phone calls, you know? “Hey, I want to change my bridal song to this today.” It cut all that out. It just got to be overwhelming; 25 to 50 brides a week we talk to, literally.

And then InfoManager’s our main base. And Todd Wheat’s been great with that company. He’s a phone call away. We have a problem, we can call him. If we want to modify something, we can call him. He’s just fantastic. He logs right in, fixes whatever we need. I would recommend InfoManager to anybody.

Ryan Burger: Very cool.

Jim Paetschow: We’ve looked at other programs, but something’s always missing, so we always just stick with InfoManager.

Ryan Burger: Todd’s a good guy. I met him 10 years ago down at a show down in Texas, so very cool.

Goals for the next 10 years: do you want to do more gigs or do higher-priced gigs or get more into some of the sidelines, the photo booths, and some of the other kinds of things? How many more brides could you want to work with on a weekend?

Jim Paetschow: Yeah, I know. That’s a great question, and I don’t really know the answer to that. We have one photo booth. We bought an Apple photo booth of the real nostalgic steel, 1950′s-style photo booth. And I’m watching all these open-air booths and all these guys are just — and everybody not in the wedding business is getting into the wedding business and is kind of ruining the market for everybody else.

But I don’t know. I’ll tell you, the big money’s in corporate stuff. There’s no end to it. Some of these shows that we do for AFLAC, they’re major, major productions. They’re truckloads of stuff.

We did Orange County Choppers this summer. That’s the biggest show we’ve ever done to date. In Mount Pleasant, Michigan, the Soaring Eagle Casino, they came and gave four bikes away. They custom-built four bikes for them and they gave them away. We did the stage, crew, sound, lights. That’s all over our website, too. We rented a lot of stuff to do that. We rented the roof, but we did all the rest of the stuff. So that’s where we want to be more focused.

The weddings will always be there. I can see us staying with 20 wedding shows and then the rest corporate.

Ryan Burger: Okay. I guess if there’s anything else that you want people to know about Sound Productions of Michigan or yourself, give them the lowdown and we’re done.

Jim Paetschow: You know, stick with it. Everybody starts out thinking they’re going to get rick quick in this business. It’s taken me 30 years to get where we are. We do a million dollars a year. In the market that we’re in, I don’t know if that’ll ever grow. I don’t know that that number will exceed a whole lot than that.

Take care of customers. Customer service, customer service, customer service. I just can’t say that enough to people. And it’s really hard to grind that into your DJ’s heads. They can’t have an attitude. The customer is always right, unfortunately, and they’re not right a lot of times. But they’re always right. Just keep that in the back of your mind.

Every business that I’m into, it all goes back to customer service. If you don’t have it, you might as well go home.

Ryan Burger: Very cool. Jim from Sound Productions in Michigan, thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you soon.

Jim Paetschow: Thanks, Ryan.