Why I started this.

I've been in this trade for damn near two decades — retail home theater first, then custom integration, one way or another the whole time. I've put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into getting good at it.

At the start of this year I had a falling out with someone who'd been my boss on the AV side, my partner in a separate lighting company, and for a long time one of my closest friends. It ended abruptly, and I'm not going to get into it here beyond saying it happened and it wasn't small.

What I will say is that it blindsided me, and it made me stop and actually ask whether I still wanted to do this work.

I took a beat. And what I landed on was that yes — I'm good at what I do, I genuinely love how custom and ever-changing the work is, and while some days it drives me crazy, I still like helping people and meeting people. That's not nothing after twenty years. Plenty of guys hit year twenty and can't say it.

So EchoHaus exists because I still believe there's a version of this business that works for everybody in it. The client gets what they were promised. The people doing the work have enough structure around them to do it well, and feel valued for doing it. And the person running it makes a decent living.

Those three things don't have to be in tension. They often are.

The thing I don't want us to become

The habit in this industry that bothers me most is not listening.

You see it constantly — an integrator walks into a house and tries to hit a home run out of the park. Biggest system, most zones, every room. And it's a real turn-off. Worse, when it goes badly it leaves that client with a bad taste for integrators in general, and the next guy who walks in the door pays for it.

Not every client is the same. That sounds obvious. It apparently isn't.

Here's the example I use with my guys. Say you're sitting with an older couple. They are not interested in distributed audio. They don't want music in eleven zones and they're not going to use it. If you push it, you've lost them, and you've probably lost the whole project.

But if you explain to them that with lighting control they can shut the whole house down from one button on their way to bed — instead of walking the entire first floor turning things off — now you've got their attention. Because that's a real thing in their actual life. That's worth money to them.

Same house. Same visit. Completely different outcome, and the only variable was whether anyone bothered to listen.

What custom work actually is

I tell my team all the time that this work is hard specifically because of what it is. Custom.

You're in a house being built by a dozen trades who are all working to their own schedule, and things happen. Wires get covered or cut. A designer moves a beam layout at the last second and now it sits right where a pair of invisible speakers was supposed to go.

That's not a failure. That's Tuesday.

What matters is how it gets handled. The key is working as a team with everybody making decisions — the builder, the designer, the other trades, and most importantly the client — and communicating clearly without throwing anyone under the bus. If you present a problem fast and get heads together on it, there's almost always a workable solution. If you sit on it, or spend your energy figuring out whose fault it is, you end up with a bad outcome and a room full of people who don't want to work with each other again.

I'd rather be the guy who makes the call nobody wants to make than the guy who hopes it sorts itself out.

The other reason

My daughter is eight months old.

I won't pretend that's not part of it. Starting a company with an infant at home is not what anyone would call good timing, and there have been some long nights where I questioned the sequencing.

But it did clarify a few things. Mainly that I want to build something that's still here in twenty years, that I'd be glad to have my name on, and that treats the people working in it like their time matters. That's a longer game than chasing the biggest sale in front of you.

It also means I understand something about our clients that I didn't fully get before. Most of them aren't buying technology. They're buying the version of their house where things just work — where the evening happens the way they pictured it, and nobody's hunting for a remote or explaining an app to their mother-in-law.

That's the job. The equipment is just how we get there.

What this will be

I'm going to use this space to work through things that come up — what's actually new versus what's just being marketed as new, what we're seeing in new construction around Oklahoma City and Edmond, and the occasional honest take on a product or an approach.

I'll try to be useful rather than promotional. If I'm ever not, tell me.

— Harrison