Light is life.
It draws the eye.
Changes your mood completely.
Purple color, you you feel the mystery.
Summer s day, winter s day, daytime, nighttime.
It can make you excited. It can make you scared.
Lighting changes everything about a space.
Without the light, you see nothing.
When we started ETC in 1975, I can remember we started in a garage,
and we're still in a garage,
just much larger.
With ETC, we manufacture a massive array of theatrical lighting and control systems,
architectural control systems, and rigging systems.
We reach customers all over the world, wherever they are.
We have a very complex manufacturing process. The material comes in as flat sheets
of steel, copper, and aluminum. We punch it. We form it. We weld it. We paint it.
We assemble the circuit boards. We build computers.
And it goes out as finished lighting consoles, spotlights, rigging hoists, or dimmers.
ETC equipment is found in almost every theater at this point.
Having made more than three million Source Fours, it's hard to find a theater that doesn't have one.
It might be 20 years old and scratched, but it s still making light.
We stand behind our product.
We really push to make sure that our customers have what they need, any time that they need it.
Most of the time, our product is in stock, and we can ship the same day as the purchase orders.
A lot of what shapes our consoles is the feedback we get from users, and for example, our last
big release was really focused on optimization, literally shaving off milliseconds from the code.
That's what makes ETC the leader, because the customers see what's behind the product.
We also do something most companies don't do.
For our rigging systems, every machine runs through an entire load cycle. They're all fully tested.
Nobody else is taking every single unit and making sure that it does all the things
it's supposed to do before it ships.
It would seem like that would be kind of a no-brainer, right?
ETC does that, and makes sure that it works every single time.
In the theater industry, you've got people rigging all night long, so you never know when there might be an issue.
At the end of the day, yes, technology is marvelous, but it's not human.
So you've got to have somebody there 24/7. The time zones make a huge difference.
So it s always nice to know that you've got somebody there.
The calls do come in in the middle of the night.
Four AM. Yeah.
But we're happy to help.
Yeah, sleeping, sure.
When you think about our offices in Asia, Europe, and America, the sun never sets on ETC.
There s always an office online.
If we can fix it, I'm so happy for that.
A problem is only the first step for a solution.
The show must go on.
My biggest pride in ETC comes from the strengths of more than 800 great people,
and that's why we are who we are.
When you're able to be friends with your colleagues, and you work as a team,
and you know that failure isn't really an option,
you don't want to let your friends down.
I can't imagine having a better job.
The nice part about it is I get to write code for something that's out there in the real world,
something I can go experience, and I get to write the line of code that turns on that light.
This is my life, and it's really fun. [Laughs]
It's not we say we are the leader.
People regard us as the leader because that's what they feel.