CE Pro September 2022 - 36

CE PROFILE
Pair Electronics
the company's growth spurt in recent times.
On the technology side, too, Pair Electron " We've
had
to make
what we've had
to make with
every grit of our
hands, because
we're just not in
a metropolitan
area. "
-Jason Pair,
Pair Electronics
ics continues to explore ways to add more
services. The company has as its major brands
Anthem, Paradigm, Yamaha Aventage, Sony
ES, Samsung (it's a Platinum Program dealer),
Origin Acoustics, Klipsch, Monitor Audio, and
the Snap One portfolio including Control4
automation and panelized lighting.
It installs Screen Innovations shades and
has been taking Lutron training to add more
lighting and shade options. Pair Electronics
has also made a foray into Dish Networks
fiber and Dish Concierge program, successfully
doing its first project for a multifamily
property in town.
Pair Electronics has established itself as the
dominant brand in eastern North Carolina,
but not being a true metropolitan area has
forced Pair and his team to somewhat carry
on the old road warrior tactics of his grandfather's
original business to meet customers
where they live rather than the customer
coming to them.
" East of I-95 is really a small area. You had
Audio Advice there in Raleigh with Leon
[Shaw, its founder] doing a great job, and
that's where you go if you want premium
audio, everybody knows it, " Pair says. " But
there's nothing [for competition to Pair Electronics]
on our side of the state. It's like the
armpit of North Carolina. "
Greenville might be best known as the
home of East Carolina University, but it's not
a highly populated area, and Pair Electronics
takes pride in servicing a 120-mile radius up
and down the North Carolina coastal and
inland rural locales to fill its busy workload.
" Greenville's a small tobacco town. Greenville
could not support everything we wanted
to do, so we've had to diversify, " Pair explains.
" We've got trucks that go to Wilmington on
Wednesdays, we're in Morehead four days a
week, Elizabeth City, New Bern. We've had to
make it with every grit of our hands, because
we're just not in a metropolitan area. "
That includes getting hands-on with many
equipment rack messes over the years, Pair
says. Having lost a couple of competitors,
especially in the late 2000s the integrator did
a lot of cleanup work that comprised 20+%
of revenues and created satisfied customers
over people who felt like " they'd been
burned " by technology contractors, he adds.
Commercial, Security Work Step Up
New Bern is a quaint, historic riverfront city
where the evolution of Pair Electronics has
led to a greater presence. This year the company
opened a second location there.
" New Bern was a way that we could bridge
the gap between the beach and our local
store. So we just opened a store there that's
just a vignette, to try as a design location
where you come in and you have a TV room,
a Frame TV and cozy setting and a conference
Clamoring for Better High-Speed Broadband
Business at Pair Electronics could be even more booming with
larger-scale projects, but Pair says eastern North Carolina has
been stuck behind the times when it comes to high-speed
broadband. Like other rural areas that have been stymied in this
regard, the towns beyond Greenville can be difficult to outfit
with smart home tech because the Internet pipe remains painfully
slow to handle myriad devices. He's happy about solutions
such as Elon Musk's Starlink but looks forward to when he can
take advantage of higher speeds that are coming as fiber is
trenched in the area.
" I'll go out to a $2 million house and I can only get 5-meg
DSL lines - so I'm having to put in three DSL lines to get
things to work or wait for Starlink or something else to happen.
We could do 35% more in our area if we have better broadband,
hands down, " Pair remarks. " We've had to turn jobs down be36
| CE Pro September 2022
cause I had to go to our people & processes [department] and
say, 'Look, we can't put this in.' "
Pair says Greenville has an infrastructure plan that calls for fiber,
and Pair Electronics has started making it a point to have customers
who are getting Internet service reach out to the integrator
at the time it's being installed so they can upgrade the router and
add access points. They can also add Ethernet to all relevant AV
end points and strengthen the network, something the company
still did at a brisk pace in Greenville during the first year of COVID.
" We just believe in dedicated networks. I'm old school that
way - everything hard-lined, from the AV to the TVs to the
security and cameras. It just works, " Pair says. " With us not
having the speeds we need out here, you're going to lose 40%
of Wi-Fi when you've got [a family using it]. Hardwire the TV
and Netflix is not going to buffer. "
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