SCN: How long have you been with this company, and what are your responsibilities?
John Maier: I have been in the role of CEO for a little over a year, since May 2023, but I was on the team at Transom Capital Group, the private equity firm that took the company private, when the opportunity first came up in 2022. As far as my CEO responsibilities are concerned, they’re twofold. It's the normal things you would think a CEO would do, but it's also standing up a new independent business from scratch.
SCN: What was the reason for the split?
JM: I certainly can’t speak for Bose, but it's rare that a top 100 brand sells off part of its business. And that's exactly what got me excited.
When Bose Professional was taken independent in 2023, the intellectual property and the core teams of product development, sales, and marketing came with, but we didn’t get functions like operations, finance, IT, global logistics, legal, people and culture, and so on. That means we’re building a business up from scratch while we’re running the business, sort of the “building the plane while we’re flying it” idea. It’s really an incredible opportunity when you think about it—we get a 50-year legacy of innovation and global relationships, but we get to act like a startup when we think about the systems and structure we want to work in for the future.
[Executive Q&A: Command and Control and Beyond]
SCN: How has this separation benefitted Bose Professional?
JM: The number one thing is that we are now in charge of our own destiny. We exist to be a professional audio company that serves the professional audio market. Having that kind of focus and responsiveness represents a huge freedom. We are in the position of being able to act like a startup, but we're already at scale. We get to decide what systems we are going to use, what software applications, what processes, and how we are going to be organized, knowing what we know about the industry right now. That's an incredible opportunity for an established business, and we're already seeing the results across the company.
The number one thing is that we are now in charge of our own destiny.
SCN: Earlier this year, you announced a “hybrid” sales model in the United States. How well has it been working?
JM: In some regions, we found a hybrid system with our own direct teams and third-party partners working together has worked well. We recently announced that we’re combining the best of our internal North American teams with a group of select partners to get much better coverage and offer much better service and support to the channel.
SCN: Bose Professional is opening new Experience Centers across the world. How many have you opened in 2024, what is the goal for 2025, and what value do these bring to your customers?
JM: We've opened 10 new offices and Experience Centers so far in 2024 in cities including Singapore, Shanghai, Bejing, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and London, with new buildouts in Paris, Dubai, and a new Bose Professional Global Headquarters in Hopkinton, MA, still planned. These new offices and Experience Centers make it easier for our customers—consultants, integrators, and system operators—to see and hear our solutions, be able to make better decisions, and ultimately move faster with their own clients. It also helps to have these meeting points around the world where you can connect at a real level as opposed to the remote world that we've all been living in.
SCN: Currently, what are some of the most popular vertical markets for Bose Professional?
JM: Our primary markets would be hospitality, restaurants, and retail, with a strong presence in worship, outdoor and indoor public performance, workplace, and education.
SCN: In your experience, what do customers tend to get wrong or just not understand about sound systems?
JM: We’ve all been there; a great performance or a lovely dinner ruined by bad sound. It's usually not about the volume, it's about the clarity. Voice intelligibility is mission-critical in sound systems, and directivity and placement are crucial when it comes to achieving it. You want to make sure the loudspeaker’s direct sound arrives at the audience’s ears before any early reflections—that's key. Bose Professional loudspeakers, with their high degree of directivity, make a huge difference in clarity and intelligibility, ensuring that the message being presented resonates better with the audience.
[SCN Hybrid World: Out of Sight Sound]
SCN: One new product you showed at InfoComm was a low-profile version of your EdgeMax in-ceiling speaker. What makes your offerings unique in this product category?
JM: The EdgeMax series offers an incredible, dynamic lineup of powerful, directional loudspeakers. They sound like a surface-mount loudspeaker, but are placed in-ceiling and project sound asymmetrically out into the room to deliver amazing performance and directionality. They are loud, clear, directional, and, best of all, hidden in the ceiling. Our customers had asked us for a new solution with the same level of performance built into a shallower enclosure designed for tighter ceiling spaces, so we're rolling out the EdgeMax LP, which is 60% thinner than EdgeMax EM series. We went from a 10-inch case depth to a 4-inch depth. We'll keep both EM and LP models in the lineup to allow designers the perfect blend of performance and flexibility.
SCN: What is ControlSpace and how does it help integrators and end users?
JM: ControlSpace is the glue that strengthens our solutions. It has a lot of components—from loudspeakers to amplifiers and controllers to design and operations software—that all work together. ControlSpace is designed to make your Bose Professional system work smarter and more efficiently and deliver outstanding audio performance with ease of operation and management. It delivers incredible stability and performance in installations like restaurants, retail spaces, hospitality venues, auditoriums, houses of worship, and conferencing rooms. And ControlSpace is a proven solution for business end users with thousands of installations around the world. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the months ahead.
[Viewpoint: Making AI Connections]
SCN: What’s next for Bose Professional?
JM: As we continue to build out our process and systems, I’ll be working to make Bose Professional more of an “outside-in” organization. And by that, I mean focusing on what's happening in the market and what our customers’ needs are and being responsive as a business. With our new, focused approach, we’re going to move faster and be more prolific when it comes to innovative solutions and new products. We’ve just shown what we can do in a year at InfoComm. Bigger projects take more time and we’re looking forward to sharing those with you in the future. These are exciting times for the business for sure.
