|
Featured Guest:
Gary Fails Founder, City Theatrical Published October 24, 2025 In this episode of Wisdom for Wannabes, host Jackie Morreale interviews Gary Fails, founder of City Theatrical, who shares his remarkable journey in the entertainment lighting industry. From starting his business in a garage in the South Bronx to becoming a leader in lighting technology innovation, Gary discusses the challenges and triumphs of entrepreneurship, the importance of innovation, and the lessons learned throughout his career. He reflects on the evolution of the industry, the significance of building a strong company culture, and the value of mentorship and collaboration. As he embraces retirement, Gary also shares his passion for learning and personal growth, leaving listeners with valuable insights for their own entrepreneurial journeys. Listen to/watch the full podcast recording, or read the transcript below: |
Full Interview with Gary Fails:
"We always found another way to grow and another way to be successful. Sometimes it wasn't apparent. Sometimes it was different than we thought it would be."
- Gary Fails (Wisdom for Wannabes episode 25, 29:00)
Great quotes from the interview:
(More great quotes throughout the transcript in blue below.)
- "We became known for this."
- "Business is thrilling but difficult."
- "You have to want to do it. It has to be a burning desire."
(More great quotes throughout the transcript in blue below.)
Gary Fails Wins ESTA's Lifetime Technical Achievement Award in March 2025
|
Key Takeaways:
|
Interview Transcript:
Jackie Morreale (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Wisdom for Wannabes. My name is Jackie Morreale and I am the host. It is a new podcast series that seeks to discover wise words in business, beauty and betterment. Today's focus is on the topic of business by way of entrepreneurship. I want to welcome today's guest, Gary Fails. Welcome to the show, Gary. Thank you so much for being here. I've had the pleasure of knowing, working for, learning from, and being inspired by Gary Fails now for nearly a decade. In fact, he is the one who encouraged me to start doing these interviews in the very first place. I'm very grateful for you. Thank you, Gary, for being you and everything that you do and have done for me.
As a very short introduction to a person who has accomplished quite a lot, Gary Fails has a career in entertainment lighting that spans over 50 years. Gary founded City Theatrical in 1986 in a South Bronx garage while working nights as a Broadway stagehand and took the company international with an office in London. He is a pioneer and leader in lighting technology innovation areas, including wireless DMX, beam control, and LED lighting. Gary is also the co-author of three US and one European patent. Gary sold the company in 2023 after 37 years of product innovation that has spanned every Broadway and West End show, ballet and opera, premier broadcast TV and film productions, and iconic landmark installations around the world. Gary is a 45-year member of the IATSE Local One Broadway stagehands and was an instructor in their technology training program.
Gary is an ETCP certified electrician, an MBA graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Gary is married to Broadway actress, Terri Klausner, and they have three children, Greta, Joseph, and Michael, and two grandchildren. And in his spare time, if he has any of that, Gary has run 12 marathons, he practices yoga, and he builds acoustic guitars. (He also plays guitar very well.) Gary was recognized earlier this year by the ESTA organization with their Lifetime Technical Achievement Award, and he has been awarded the Wally Russell Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Lighting Field, and numerous Leadership, Business, and Product Innovation Awards in both the US and Europe.
Gary, it's such a pleasure to have you here today. I look forward to exploring your background. Let's start off the interview with a couple of background questions, if you can start us off with your full name, your hometown, and your current location.
Gary Fails (02:35)
I am Gary Fails. I grew up in Kirtland, Ohio, which is a small town east of Cleveland, Ohio, northeast Ohio. I moved to New York City in 1969 and have lived in New York City and New York City area ever since. I presently live in Rockland County, New York.
Jackie Morreale (03:03)
I know that you do quite a lot, but in a few words, what do you do and what is your passion?
Gary Fails (03:08)
Right now, I'm kind of an apprentice retiree. I am newly retired and trying to understand retirement and trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up in retirement. It's kind of like a teenager in retirement, an adolescent retiree. But prior to that, I worked in entertainment lighting for over 50 years. That was my passion. I loved the lighting world. I toured for 10 years with shows. I worked on Broadway after that. Really exciting backstage world. I started a business in the entertainment technology world and then grew that business from day one into a kind of a thriving business in that world. That became my real passion, running my business, growing my business, and trying to figure out how to play an important role in the lighting world.
Jackie Morreale (04:03)
How many years have you been doing it? I know we said, over 50 years, and with City Theatrical was 37 years.
Gary Fails (04:10)
My career was 53 years. I started when I was a teenager. I was going to college, I dropped out of Columbia University, and by chance, got a job going on the road with a ballet company driving their truck. I was 19 years old, I was a teenager. From that day onward, the only thing I've ever done is work in entertainment lighting. I went from touring to Broadway to innovation and business, but always concentrating in entertainment lighting. Just by chance, I had no training in it. I didn't go to school for it. I had no background in it. And don't think I'd ever seen a show before. It's just one of those things I stumbled into. It became my life.
Jackie Morreale (04:51)
Wow. It all started with a ballet company and driving their truck on tour?
Gary Fails (04:56)
Yes. It was $75 a week and $5 a day per diem.
Jackie Morreale (05:01)
Good for you. You just fell in love with show biz from there? The rest is history.
Gary Fails (05:04)
I did. It was a lot of fun. It was a great time to get into show business because the industry was young and just starting out. I didn't know it, but I was fortunate to get into an industry at its birth and grow with it for 50 years.
Jackie Morreale (05:18)
What has been the favorite part of your role?
Gary Fails (05:23)
I'd say my role as a business owner in the entertainment industry, I would say that nearly every single part of it was, unbelievably interesting, challenging and fun. I enjoyed my job tremendously, really, really thoroughly. Everything about it, nearly everything about it was, was really, really, really fun. It incorporates all the areas of business, strategy, operations, finance, people, travel, competition, all of these things were thrilling, thrilling to do, especially for somebody like me who had no experience in it whatsoever. To figure it out, day by day, and fight those battles, day by day, and to have the ups and downs of business, day by day, those were the really fun parts of it.
Jackie Morreale (06:08)
For me, at least, having worked for you for all those years, it trickles down too, to everybody else who works with you. It really was a fun place to work, and I learned a lot. The culture that you set really was incredible. Everyone could tell how much you cared about the business, the industry, the product. So top down, I think we all felt it.
Before we get into any of the deep stuff, let's talk some through some quick-fire questions and get to know you and your favorites. Gary Fails, what is your favorite food?
Gary Fails (06:34)
Apple pie. Apple pie is definitely the way to my heart.
Jackie Morreale (06:50)
Apple pie. I was this close to saying PB & J. That's good that Thanksgiving is coming up now. I know what to send. What is your favorite place?
Gary Fails (06:52)
Right now, our favorite place, my wife and I, is the Bahamas. We like the Bahamas. We go to Eleuthera, small island, sleepy, beautiful water. I like to fish. I fish there for bonefish, in the Bahamian method. I fish like a Bahamian, which means no fancy gear, just a hook and a line. It's really a lovely place.
Jackie Morreale (06:55)
What is your favorite book?
Gary Fails (07:12)
Gosh, this is a topic. It's a topic we could spend a lot of time on because I'm an avid reader. But I'd have to say in my favorite book, probably the one I've read more times than any other book, at least eight times, is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's not a book about getting rich, it is about thinking about your life and setting goals and moving forward towards something that you have decided that you really want deeply. It's a great handbook for living. That's my favorite. I have many, many, many other favorite books. The list is long.
I've read a lot of nonfiction business books and decided that I needed to read some fiction. I found an organization called 50greatestnovels.org, found their list of the 50 greatest novels. I read all of them. I read all of Shakespeare. I've done a lot of reading. I'm always reading something challenging and studying it. When I read, I study. That's what I do a lot of in retirement also, some serious reading.
Jackie Morreale (08:10)
You mentioned Shakespeare. Your show biz career didn't end, because I know that you guys have this wonderful way of studying Shakespeare…
Gary Fails (08:17)
Yes, at the dinner table, which is really a lot of fun. I recommend it to everybody. If you want to learn more about Shakespeare, which is a real challenge, it's not easy. Reciting it and playing the parts is a lot of fun.
Jackie Morreale (08:29)
Absolutely. With Think and Grow Rich, I remember eight, nine years ago when we first met, somehow I got the recommendation from you and read it. You inspired me to think big about business with that book. I appreciate that. Favorite song?
Gary Fails (08:46)
Probably goes into my favorite artists. Anything by the Beatles and that era, 'boomer music', like The Stones. The song I play when I pick up my guitar, I often play, In My Life by the Beatles, which is one of my favorites.
Jackie Morreale (08:59)
In My Life is a beautiful song. I thought you were going to say Let It Be, with the stoic philosophy. They have such beautiful music. Similar topic: Favorite musician?
Gary Fails (09:11)
All those early artists; The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, later Bruce Springsteen. I particularly like female vocalists because my wife is a female vocalist. I like female voice. People like Joni Mitchell, Eva Cassidy, Laura Nyro, and then some more modern artists like Sarah Jarosz and Molly Tuttle. Then guitarists, I like Tommy Emanuel. I like all the acoustic guitarists. I listen to them every day.
Jackie Morreale (09:37)
What is your favorite sport?
Gary Fails (09:39)
My favorite sport to play is football. Nearly every day, I throw the football with my son, Joe. We have for many, many years. We call it football meditation. We go outside in the driveway or in the street and we throw the ball and we talk. That is my real favorite.
Jackie Morreale (09:56)
I know that you and your son Joe have also done marathons together. This is an athletic relationship. Favorite team?
Gary Fails (10:03)
I have only one favorite team. It's none of the New York sports teams. It's none of the well-known teams, but my wife and I are fans of the Indiana Fever in the WNBA. Not only are we fans, but we go to the games. We drive to Indianapolis to go to the games.
Jackie Morreale (10:22)
What? My goodness. Is your wife from Indianapolis?
Gary Fails (10:23)
No, neither of us are, but they've got an interesting team, interesting players. We've been following them for a couple of years, and we've become real fans. We go to the games whenever we can. We went to Barclays, we went to Connecticut, to Mohegan Sun, and we went to Indianapolis. It's part of our travel adventures.
Jackie Morreale (10:38)
How cool. I've seen a couple of WNBA games at Barclays. It's an incredible experience. What is the name of the team one more time?
Gary Fails (10:50)
Indiana Fever. It’s a lot of fun to watch.
Jackie Morreale (10:54)
We got into some of your favorite things. Let's talk about growing your business. What is it like to grow a business from an idea to an international company?
Gary Fails (11:04)
If you're entrepreneurially inclined, if you want to start a business, it's an unstoppable urge that really can't be denied. For the people who want to do it, it is filled with the greatest hope and optimism. Everyone starts a business with tremendous hope and optimism. Everywhere I ever worked when I was young, I felt I could do a better job than the people who were running the company. Everywhere I ever worked, I said, I could do it better.
I always wanted to have a business, and I wanted to have a business in which I could make things. With no real experience or even with no business plan, with no clear idea of how I thought I could make money, I started a business.
I called it City Theatrical. I had small businesses before that where I did similar things. I had always been able to do something, hire people, make something, sell it, and make money. I knew I could have a business doing it. I started City Theatrical to have a business in the entertainment industry. I started by myself. In 1986, Terri and I got married. We had a baby and we started the business. We'd had a very big year, really, really big year of firsts and starts and growth and optimism. I started by myself in a little run-down garage in this very, very rough part of the South Bronx. When the South Bronx was really rough; the South Bronx was burning.
The place was a wreck. I renovated it myself and then began trying to figure out how to make it work. I went to an auction, I bought some tools, some very rudimentary, very, very old fashioned tools. The whole place was, I characterized it as Dickensian. It was really kind of industrial revolution. Old, dark, dingy, old machinery. That was the start of it.
It began to grow. I got some jobs and started to acquire a reputation, started to do things. It started to grow, brick by brick.
I hired a few people; it was me and two or three people. At heart, it was a sheet metal shop because that's what I had been doing in the job that I was at before I started City Theatrical. I learned sheet metal business and welding. I did sheet metal and welding jobs in the entertainment industry. There was no competition. Nobody did that sort of thing. I worked with all the lighting shops. At the same time, I was working nights on Broadway.
(Continued below)
Hello and welcome to Wisdom for Wannabes. My name is Jackie Morreale and I am the host. It is a new podcast series that seeks to discover wise words in business, beauty and betterment. Today's focus is on the topic of business by way of entrepreneurship. I want to welcome today's guest, Gary Fails. Welcome to the show, Gary. Thank you so much for being here. I've had the pleasure of knowing, working for, learning from, and being inspired by Gary Fails now for nearly a decade. In fact, he is the one who encouraged me to start doing these interviews in the very first place. I'm very grateful for you. Thank you, Gary, for being you and everything that you do and have done for me.
As a very short introduction to a person who has accomplished quite a lot, Gary Fails has a career in entertainment lighting that spans over 50 years. Gary founded City Theatrical in 1986 in a South Bronx garage while working nights as a Broadway stagehand and took the company international with an office in London. He is a pioneer and leader in lighting technology innovation areas, including wireless DMX, beam control, and LED lighting. Gary is also the co-author of three US and one European patent. Gary sold the company in 2023 after 37 years of product innovation that has spanned every Broadway and West End show, ballet and opera, premier broadcast TV and film productions, and iconic landmark installations around the world. Gary is a 45-year member of the IATSE Local One Broadway stagehands and was an instructor in their technology training program.
Gary is an ETCP certified electrician, an MBA graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Gary is married to Broadway actress, Terri Klausner, and they have three children, Greta, Joseph, and Michael, and two grandchildren. And in his spare time, if he has any of that, Gary has run 12 marathons, he practices yoga, and he builds acoustic guitars. (He also plays guitar very well.) Gary was recognized earlier this year by the ESTA organization with their Lifetime Technical Achievement Award, and he has been awarded the Wally Russell Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Lighting Field, and numerous Leadership, Business, and Product Innovation Awards in both the US and Europe.
Gary, it's such a pleasure to have you here today. I look forward to exploring your background. Let's start off the interview with a couple of background questions, if you can start us off with your full name, your hometown, and your current location.
Gary Fails (02:35)
I am Gary Fails. I grew up in Kirtland, Ohio, which is a small town east of Cleveland, Ohio, northeast Ohio. I moved to New York City in 1969 and have lived in New York City and New York City area ever since. I presently live in Rockland County, New York.
Jackie Morreale (03:03)
I know that you do quite a lot, but in a few words, what do you do and what is your passion?
Gary Fails (03:08)
Right now, I'm kind of an apprentice retiree. I am newly retired and trying to understand retirement and trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up in retirement. It's kind of like a teenager in retirement, an adolescent retiree. But prior to that, I worked in entertainment lighting for over 50 years. That was my passion. I loved the lighting world. I toured for 10 years with shows. I worked on Broadway after that. Really exciting backstage world. I started a business in the entertainment technology world and then grew that business from day one into a kind of a thriving business in that world. That became my real passion, running my business, growing my business, and trying to figure out how to play an important role in the lighting world.
Jackie Morreale (04:03)
How many years have you been doing it? I know we said, over 50 years, and with City Theatrical was 37 years.
Gary Fails (04:10)
My career was 53 years. I started when I was a teenager. I was going to college, I dropped out of Columbia University, and by chance, got a job going on the road with a ballet company driving their truck. I was 19 years old, I was a teenager. From that day onward, the only thing I've ever done is work in entertainment lighting. I went from touring to Broadway to innovation and business, but always concentrating in entertainment lighting. Just by chance, I had no training in it. I didn't go to school for it. I had no background in it. And don't think I'd ever seen a show before. It's just one of those things I stumbled into. It became my life.
Jackie Morreale (04:51)
Wow. It all started with a ballet company and driving their truck on tour?
Gary Fails (04:56)
Yes. It was $75 a week and $5 a day per diem.
Jackie Morreale (05:01)
Good for you. You just fell in love with show biz from there? The rest is history.
Gary Fails (05:04)
I did. It was a lot of fun. It was a great time to get into show business because the industry was young and just starting out. I didn't know it, but I was fortunate to get into an industry at its birth and grow with it for 50 years.
Jackie Morreale (05:18)
What has been the favorite part of your role?
Gary Fails (05:23)
I'd say my role as a business owner in the entertainment industry, I would say that nearly every single part of it was, unbelievably interesting, challenging and fun. I enjoyed my job tremendously, really, really thoroughly. Everything about it, nearly everything about it was, was really, really, really fun. It incorporates all the areas of business, strategy, operations, finance, people, travel, competition, all of these things were thrilling, thrilling to do, especially for somebody like me who had no experience in it whatsoever. To figure it out, day by day, and fight those battles, day by day, and to have the ups and downs of business, day by day, those were the really fun parts of it.
Jackie Morreale (06:08)
For me, at least, having worked for you for all those years, it trickles down too, to everybody else who works with you. It really was a fun place to work, and I learned a lot. The culture that you set really was incredible. Everyone could tell how much you cared about the business, the industry, the product. So top down, I think we all felt it.
Before we get into any of the deep stuff, let's talk some through some quick-fire questions and get to know you and your favorites. Gary Fails, what is your favorite food?
Gary Fails (06:34)
Apple pie. Apple pie is definitely the way to my heart.
Jackie Morreale (06:50)
Apple pie. I was this close to saying PB & J. That's good that Thanksgiving is coming up now. I know what to send. What is your favorite place?
Gary Fails (06:52)
Right now, our favorite place, my wife and I, is the Bahamas. We like the Bahamas. We go to Eleuthera, small island, sleepy, beautiful water. I like to fish. I fish there for bonefish, in the Bahamian method. I fish like a Bahamian, which means no fancy gear, just a hook and a line. It's really a lovely place.
Jackie Morreale (06:55)
What is your favorite book?
Gary Fails (07:12)
Gosh, this is a topic. It's a topic we could spend a lot of time on because I'm an avid reader. But I'd have to say in my favorite book, probably the one I've read more times than any other book, at least eight times, is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It's not a book about getting rich, it is about thinking about your life and setting goals and moving forward towards something that you have decided that you really want deeply. It's a great handbook for living. That's my favorite. I have many, many, many other favorite books. The list is long.
I've read a lot of nonfiction business books and decided that I needed to read some fiction. I found an organization called 50greatestnovels.org, found their list of the 50 greatest novels. I read all of them. I read all of Shakespeare. I've done a lot of reading. I'm always reading something challenging and studying it. When I read, I study. That's what I do a lot of in retirement also, some serious reading.
Jackie Morreale (08:10)
You mentioned Shakespeare. Your show biz career didn't end, because I know that you guys have this wonderful way of studying Shakespeare…
Gary Fails (08:17)
Yes, at the dinner table, which is really a lot of fun. I recommend it to everybody. If you want to learn more about Shakespeare, which is a real challenge, it's not easy. Reciting it and playing the parts is a lot of fun.
Jackie Morreale (08:29)
Absolutely. With Think and Grow Rich, I remember eight, nine years ago when we first met, somehow I got the recommendation from you and read it. You inspired me to think big about business with that book. I appreciate that. Favorite song?
Gary Fails (08:46)
Probably goes into my favorite artists. Anything by the Beatles and that era, 'boomer music', like The Stones. The song I play when I pick up my guitar, I often play, In My Life by the Beatles, which is one of my favorites.
Jackie Morreale (08:59)
In My Life is a beautiful song. I thought you were going to say Let It Be, with the stoic philosophy. They have such beautiful music. Similar topic: Favorite musician?
Gary Fails (09:11)
All those early artists; The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, later Bruce Springsteen. I particularly like female vocalists because my wife is a female vocalist. I like female voice. People like Joni Mitchell, Eva Cassidy, Laura Nyro, and then some more modern artists like Sarah Jarosz and Molly Tuttle. Then guitarists, I like Tommy Emanuel. I like all the acoustic guitarists. I listen to them every day.
Jackie Morreale (09:37)
What is your favorite sport?
Gary Fails (09:39)
My favorite sport to play is football. Nearly every day, I throw the football with my son, Joe. We have for many, many years. We call it football meditation. We go outside in the driveway or in the street and we throw the ball and we talk. That is my real favorite.
Jackie Morreale (09:56)
I know that you and your son Joe have also done marathons together. This is an athletic relationship. Favorite team?
Gary Fails (10:03)
I have only one favorite team. It's none of the New York sports teams. It's none of the well-known teams, but my wife and I are fans of the Indiana Fever in the WNBA. Not only are we fans, but we go to the games. We drive to Indianapolis to go to the games.
Jackie Morreale (10:22)
What? My goodness. Is your wife from Indianapolis?
Gary Fails (10:23)
No, neither of us are, but they've got an interesting team, interesting players. We've been following them for a couple of years, and we've become real fans. We go to the games whenever we can. We went to Barclays, we went to Connecticut, to Mohegan Sun, and we went to Indianapolis. It's part of our travel adventures.
Jackie Morreale (10:38)
How cool. I've seen a couple of WNBA games at Barclays. It's an incredible experience. What is the name of the team one more time?
Gary Fails (10:50)
Indiana Fever. It’s a lot of fun to watch.
Jackie Morreale (10:54)
We got into some of your favorite things. Let's talk about growing your business. What is it like to grow a business from an idea to an international company?
Gary Fails (11:04)
If you're entrepreneurially inclined, if you want to start a business, it's an unstoppable urge that really can't be denied. For the people who want to do it, it is filled with the greatest hope and optimism. Everyone starts a business with tremendous hope and optimism. Everywhere I ever worked when I was young, I felt I could do a better job than the people who were running the company. Everywhere I ever worked, I said, I could do it better.
I always wanted to have a business, and I wanted to have a business in which I could make things. With no real experience or even with no business plan, with no clear idea of how I thought I could make money, I started a business.
I called it City Theatrical. I had small businesses before that where I did similar things. I had always been able to do something, hire people, make something, sell it, and make money. I knew I could have a business doing it. I started City Theatrical to have a business in the entertainment industry. I started by myself. In 1986, Terri and I got married. We had a baby and we started the business. We'd had a very big year, really, really big year of firsts and starts and growth and optimism. I started by myself in a little run-down garage in this very, very rough part of the South Bronx. When the South Bronx was really rough; the South Bronx was burning.
The place was a wreck. I renovated it myself and then began trying to figure out how to make it work. I went to an auction, I bought some tools, some very rudimentary, very, very old fashioned tools. The whole place was, I characterized it as Dickensian. It was really kind of industrial revolution. Old, dark, dingy, old machinery. That was the start of it.
It began to grow. I got some jobs and started to acquire a reputation, started to do things. It started to grow, brick by brick.
I hired a few people; it was me and two or three people. At heart, it was a sheet metal shop because that's what I had been doing in the job that I was at before I started City Theatrical. I learned sheet metal business and welding. I did sheet metal and welding jobs in the entertainment industry. There was no competition. Nobody did that sort of thing. I worked with all the lighting shops. At the same time, I was working nights on Broadway.
(Continued below)
Best-Selling Test tool product developed by Gary Fails' engineering team at City Theatrical:
(Continued)
Gary Fails (continued)
I worked in the shop in the daytime, and I went into the city, and I worked on a show at night. I was a house electrician in a Broadway theater. The theater I was in, Circle In The Square, the house electrician was also the production electrician. I worked with the designers to set up and operate the shows. I was fortunate to be able to work with and meet all the Broadway designers. They became my friends. They gave me product ideas.
I'd go back to the shop in the daytime. I'd build products that they needed. We began this relationship with Broadway designers where I could build things to meet their needs. Again, no one else was doing it. It was a real niche. I would make products, and we'd sell them to the local lighting shops.
Somewhere along the way, maybe eight years into this process, we were getting repeat jobs from these shops. I said, Well, if we're slow, let's make up some more of these products. We'll put them on the shelf. When we're busy, we'll just take them off the shelf and ship them.
That became the beginning of City Theatrical as a lighting manufacturer. Without strategizing it, we became lighting manufacturers.
I went to the industry trade show in Orlando one year. I Xeroxed a piece of paper. It had some things we could make, and I walked around to the distributors at the trade show and I said, We're making these things for the New York lighting shops. Maybe you guys need them too. They looked at it they went, yeah, we do. We need that.
I signed them up, and I had dealers. I had a distribution network. I started to grow a distribution network. The distribution network grew. I had 10 dealers, 20 dealers. I set a wild goal of 100 dealers. We worked up to that. Then I realized, what we're doing, selling these things around the country, we could do this in Canada too. Then I realized we could do this in Europe, too. And we could do this in Australia, in Asia.
I met dealers, and we signed up distributors all over the world. Our product line grew, and it became more innovative. We started to move into electrical and electronic products. Our products became recognized for their innovation. We started winning a lot of awards. We grew faster and faster.
We grew by 40 % per year for five years in a row. We were officially designated as a gazelle, which is a very specific type of fast growth business. We won Cranes New York Business’ Small Business of the Year. We were on Inc. Magazine's Inner City 100, one of the fastest growing companies based in an inner city neighborhood for three years in a row. We were just really growing in a spectacular way.
So exciting. Growing our catalog, growing our distribution, growing the complexity of our products.
We started to set our goals higher, for more complicated products, more useful products for more people. Started to swing the bat harder, swinging for the fence, and trying to grow faster and faster.
We developed a couple of products that were quite unique. One was called the AutoYoke, which was an incandescent automated spotlight. This was in the early days of the moving lights in the entertainment industry. There were only a couple of companies doing this and we were a tiny, tiny company of maybe 10 people in the South Bronx, barely manufacturers. We developed this automated light that was unique in that it was incandescent and it didn't have any fans. It met a very specific niche. By coincidence, London's Royal Opera House was looking for a new moving light to build their lighting system around. They asked to review the AutoYoke and all other moving lights in the world. They reviewed all moving lights that were manufactured in the world and the AutoYoke. We were by far the smallest company. They called me in for a meeting in London at the boardroom in the Royal Opera House. They said, After very careful review, we have chosen the AutoYoke to be the heart of our lighting system. Simply because it was silent and it was for opera. It made no noise. All the other ones had loud fans. They didn't like the fans in any of the other fixtures. We were on Cloud 9. We had hit the big time. We were taking orders for AutoYokes and really, really growing tremendously and tremendous notoriety and product awards.
Up until that time, we had no competition from anybody anywhere because no one was doing what we were doing. That was the crossroads because these big companies that we beat for this job decided they would compete against us.
To make the AutoYoke, I had borrowed a lot of money. I had convinced the banks to lend me the money, way over a million dollars. They said, Sure, happy to lend you a million dollars, you will have to sign a personal guarantee for everything you own in your life for your home and sign an insurance policy over to us. In case you die, we're still going to collect.
Jackie Morreale (18:25)
Wow, big risk, big reward?
Gary Fails (18:28)
Yeah. We launched the AutoYoke and we were doing well. But in business, you never know what's around the corner.
Around the corner for us was 9/11, which brought the entertainment industry to a screeching halt. Shows stopped all over the country. People stopped buying. Several large competitors, maybe 20 or more times larger than us, decided that they would make competing lighting fixtures like ours. It really cut the legs off from our growth.
For the first time, after this meteoric growth, we were faced with a major crisis of what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? How do we react to this? How do we grow? How do we get back on track? What I learned along the way was that business is a series of ups and downs. It's a series of growth and setbacks that are quite unpredictable.
No one really can see over the horizon about what will come up. We were not capable of producing that lighting fixture in our rudimentary little factory and meeting the growth that we were trying to achieve and competing against real manufacturers. It shook us to our core. We regrouped and we moved forward again, looking for new products to manufacture and looking for different things that we could produce that were not against major manufacturers.
We began to investigate wireless DMX technology. I formed a group with two colleagues who didn't work for City Theatrical, but were both engineers. Their names are Paul Kleissler and Larry Dunn.
Gary Fails (continued)
I worked in the shop in the daytime, and I went into the city, and I worked on a show at night. I was a house electrician in a Broadway theater. The theater I was in, Circle In The Square, the house electrician was also the production electrician. I worked with the designers to set up and operate the shows. I was fortunate to be able to work with and meet all the Broadway designers. They became my friends. They gave me product ideas.
I'd go back to the shop in the daytime. I'd build products that they needed. We began this relationship with Broadway designers where I could build things to meet their needs. Again, no one else was doing it. It was a real niche. I would make products, and we'd sell them to the local lighting shops.
Somewhere along the way, maybe eight years into this process, we were getting repeat jobs from these shops. I said, Well, if we're slow, let's make up some more of these products. We'll put them on the shelf. When we're busy, we'll just take them off the shelf and ship them.
That became the beginning of City Theatrical as a lighting manufacturer. Without strategizing it, we became lighting manufacturers.
I went to the industry trade show in Orlando one year. I Xeroxed a piece of paper. It had some things we could make, and I walked around to the distributors at the trade show and I said, We're making these things for the New York lighting shops. Maybe you guys need them too. They looked at it they went, yeah, we do. We need that.
I signed them up, and I had dealers. I had a distribution network. I started to grow a distribution network. The distribution network grew. I had 10 dealers, 20 dealers. I set a wild goal of 100 dealers. We worked up to that. Then I realized, what we're doing, selling these things around the country, we could do this in Canada too. Then I realized we could do this in Europe, too. And we could do this in Australia, in Asia.
I met dealers, and we signed up distributors all over the world. Our product line grew, and it became more innovative. We started to move into electrical and electronic products. Our products became recognized for their innovation. We started winning a lot of awards. We grew faster and faster.
We grew by 40 % per year for five years in a row. We were officially designated as a gazelle, which is a very specific type of fast growth business. We won Cranes New York Business’ Small Business of the Year. We were on Inc. Magazine's Inner City 100, one of the fastest growing companies based in an inner city neighborhood for three years in a row. We were just really growing in a spectacular way.
So exciting. Growing our catalog, growing our distribution, growing the complexity of our products.
We started to set our goals higher, for more complicated products, more useful products for more people. Started to swing the bat harder, swinging for the fence, and trying to grow faster and faster.
We developed a couple of products that were quite unique. One was called the AutoYoke, which was an incandescent automated spotlight. This was in the early days of the moving lights in the entertainment industry. There were only a couple of companies doing this and we were a tiny, tiny company of maybe 10 people in the South Bronx, barely manufacturers. We developed this automated light that was unique in that it was incandescent and it didn't have any fans. It met a very specific niche. By coincidence, London's Royal Opera House was looking for a new moving light to build their lighting system around. They asked to review the AutoYoke and all other moving lights in the world. They reviewed all moving lights that were manufactured in the world and the AutoYoke. We were by far the smallest company. They called me in for a meeting in London at the boardroom in the Royal Opera House. They said, After very careful review, we have chosen the AutoYoke to be the heart of our lighting system. Simply because it was silent and it was for opera. It made no noise. All the other ones had loud fans. They didn't like the fans in any of the other fixtures. We were on Cloud 9. We had hit the big time. We were taking orders for AutoYokes and really, really growing tremendously and tremendous notoriety and product awards.
Up until that time, we had no competition from anybody anywhere because no one was doing what we were doing. That was the crossroads because these big companies that we beat for this job decided they would compete against us.
To make the AutoYoke, I had borrowed a lot of money. I had convinced the banks to lend me the money, way over a million dollars. They said, Sure, happy to lend you a million dollars, you will have to sign a personal guarantee for everything you own in your life for your home and sign an insurance policy over to us. In case you die, we're still going to collect.
Jackie Morreale (18:25)
Wow, big risk, big reward?
Gary Fails (18:28)
Yeah. We launched the AutoYoke and we were doing well. But in business, you never know what's around the corner.
Around the corner for us was 9/11, which brought the entertainment industry to a screeching halt. Shows stopped all over the country. People stopped buying. Several large competitors, maybe 20 or more times larger than us, decided that they would make competing lighting fixtures like ours. It really cut the legs off from our growth.
For the first time, after this meteoric growth, we were faced with a major crisis of what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? How do we react to this? How do we grow? How do we get back on track? What I learned along the way was that business is a series of ups and downs. It's a series of growth and setbacks that are quite unpredictable.
No one really can see over the horizon about what will come up. We were not capable of producing that lighting fixture in our rudimentary little factory and meeting the growth that we were trying to achieve and competing against real manufacturers. It shook us to our core. We regrouped and we moved forward again, looking for new products to manufacture and looking for different things that we could produce that were not against major manufacturers.
We began to investigate wireless DMX technology. I formed a group with two colleagues who didn't work for City Theatrical, but were both engineers. Their names are Paul Kleissler and Larry Dunn.
Paul Kleissler, later, on his first day at City Theatrical.
|
Larry Dunn, later, on his first day at City Theatrical.
|
I said, Come on, let's work on this technology. We did. We developed a wireless DMX system that became the standard of the industry. It was a very innovative product that allowed theaters to send communication controls without running cables, similar to Wi-Fi, but much more robust. We grew through that. We grew through other ways. We grew through other products. We grew through other electronic technology. We expanded our manufacturing capability to become high-tech manufacturers.
We just continued growing step by step, innovation by innovation, looking for ways that we could participate in the lighting industry. We were always innovative, always doing something that no one had ever done before.
We had our contacts in Europe and in London from the Royal Opera House. I said, Let's open an office in London. Let's go over there. We went to London, found an office in the London suburbs, opened an office in New Maldon. Then we had a foothold in Europe. We began attending the European trade shows and expanding our distribution over there, looking for products we could manufacture for that market, and looking for ways to grow there.
Again, each time we reached a certain level of growth, other competitors would come in and we started to face more and more difficult competition as we went along.
We were so successful in some areas that we were sued for antitrust and for having a monopoly in some areas. People said, It's unfair. You have too much business. You're not allowed to have that much business. We faced lawsuits for that, for antitrust. But we prevailed and worked our way through that.
Jackie Morreale (21:22)
It makes me feel something to hear your words and how you – brick by brick – built this business. When was the transition from the South Bronx to New Jersey?
Gary Fails (21:32)
We had always wanted to get a bigger place. We wanted to stay in the Bronx, but the industrial space we needed didn't exist there. We grew by expanding our little building, breaking through the walls to adjoining buildings. We did that four times and we got a building up the block, a building across the street. We had six unconnected buildings, and we just needed a different place.
In 2006, we moved across the river to New Jersey. The whole time we were in the Bronx, I had a vision board. Today, you would have Pinterest or something like that, where you could put up images of what you foresaw as the future.
I had a vision board of what I wanted the factory to look like. It was my image of a modern factory: big, open, bright windows, loading docks, offices, modern machinery.
We found a building and we actually created that factory in Carlstadt, New Jersey. It was exactly my vision of the factory that I always wanted. 40,000 square foot, a 300-foot-long manufacturing aisle. We made a major investment in machinery there, modern sheet metal and electronic manufacturing machinery, powder coat paint line. We raised our ability to manufacture, ratcheted up several levels. It was a great thrill. It's a wonderful factory. I just love that factory. Windows all around, bright sunshine coming in. A lovely factory.
Jackie Morreale (22:47)
It's amazing that you were able to take this business as a manufacturing, a local manufacturing, domestic manufacturing in the New York City region, to this level and to carve this niche in the entertainment lighting world. You had this direct connection to all the designers on Broadway, the West End, and all around the world, because you had your foot in the door as a stagehand, as a production electrician on Broadway shows yourself. So the real question is, when did you sleep in these days?
Gary Fails (23:16)
Well, unfortunately, I was always a workaholic. I loved to work. Work was my comfort zone. I didn't need much sleep. After I had run the business for about 10 years, working two jobs, never being home, I had three young children, too. We had three kids in three years. I had three young children running the business.
I decided that I would concentrate on the business and I would stop working on Broadway. I did this around 1998. I put all my effort into the business. Right around that time, I realized, business is doing okay, but I didn't really understand enough about business, how to operate a business, how to really do it. It was all kinds of seat-of-the-pants, common sense stuff. From one of the awards that we got from Inc. Magazine, they sent me to Harvard Business School for a week to take classes. The preeminent professor at Harvard on strategy, Michael Porter, gave a lecture that I attended called On Strategy. This is his famous On Strategy lecture. He described what business strategy is. I went, Wow. I had no idea what it was all about.
Jackie Morreale (24:26)
Having Michael Porter as your professor… oh my gosh.
Gary Fails (24:29)
I decided that I would go back to school while I was running the business and I would get an MBA and I would study on the level of Michael Porter. I did not have an undergraduate degree at all because I was a college dropout from Columbia and I applied. I had an interview, and I told my story. They said, Okay, you'll probably be an interesting addition to the class. We're to let you in. I took it.
While working full time, raising a family, and I decided to go to school full-time, also. I loved every minute of it. It was fun. My kids helped me with it. They helped me with my cases. We did things together. I had a negotiation class. We did practice negotiations.
Jackie Morreale (25:04)
Here they are watching you do all this, run a business, learn about business, do it all. And they were able to help you!
Gary Fails (25:15)
Yeah. I learned what to focus on. I learned about strategy. I learned about communication. I learned about marketing. I learned so much that was beneficial.
Primarily, I learned that the role of the business is to produce profit. I began to focus more on producing profit. My business became less of a seat-of-the-pants hobby and more of a real, real business. That was a turning point.
Odd things happen. We went through Hurricane Sandy, we had a terrible flood and we had a terrible setback from that. It was as bleak a period as I had ever experienced. Nearly every business on our block went under. They didn't even come back.
We committed to staying in business. We committed to moving forward. We committed to rebuilding the factory. We committed to growing the company. I remember addressing the whole company saying, This is a real setback. I don't know what will come out of it, but something good will come out of this. That was a stretch. I didn't have any idea what it would be, but we spoke it out loud and we said something good will come out.
By chance, right in that time, after Hurricane Sandy, my son, Mike, he worked in the film industry. He's working on a movie and the production designer on the movie wanted some LEDs. He said to Mike, Can your dad get us some LEDs? Mike said, Yeah. This was The Amazing Spiderman 2. It was the largest feature film being shot in the world at the time. Huge, huge production in New York City. They brought me in, and I knew nothing about LEDs. They said, Can you help us? I said, Yes. We started the journey towards working with LEDs and did that movie, did a huge LED, several huge LED scenes in that movie.
By chance, that led to a connection with NBC TV. When Jimmy Fallon came back to New York with The Tonight Show and they decided to put it in Studio 6B in NBC, the original Tonight Show, Johnny Carson's studio, renovated the studio. They called and said, Can you come in and help us with the LEDs? I did. From that, I became the LED advisor to NBC 30 Rock.
We did show after show after show there. Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Seth Meyers. A number of other shows there. Just one after another, after another, after another, working in the studios. I was back to work. This was late in my career, say 10 years ago. I was back on stage in the studios, working with the crews and doing LEDs. We took The Tonight Show on tour, I went on tour with them, twice to California, twice to Florida, two Super Bowl shows.
In this, we developed a whole new lighting catalog of LED products, LED tape, LED dimmers, and other accessory products, solely from the experience that I gained in doing all these shows.
I'd say, We need to do this because I need this on the shows I'm working on. We developed product after product after product, tremendously innovative that no one had ever done before, even the biggest companies in the industry. We developed wireless products and LED products and became really renowned for it. That produced a new wave of growth for us in new areas around the world.
Of course, next came COVID, and COVID shut down the entertainment industry. Broadway closed and said, We're going to close for three weeks. They ended up being closed for a year and a half. Broadway was a ghost town, New York City was a ghost town, and our business shriveled up to nearly nothing. We kept going.
As COVID died out and COVID receded, the lighting industry came back in a boom era. That became the biggest boom of City Theatrical.
We experienced tremendous ups and downs, tremendous periods of growth, periods of running into a brick wall, not knowing which direction to go. The book, Who Moved My Cheese, sums it up. When they move your cheese, you've got to go somewhere else. You've got to find another way.
We always found another way to grow and another way to be successful. Sometimes it wasn't apparent. Sometimes it was different than we thought it would be.
We had to do things we didn't know how to do. We had to take on new skills, but we always did.
(Continued below)
Making History by way of Wireless DMX Innovation:
(Continued)
Jackie Morreale (29:22)
I wasn't there for 9/11. I wasn't there for Hurricane Sandy. But I was there for COVID, and not easy times. We stayed busy. We did a lot in that time that we had learned, pivoted, figured stuff out, innovated, kept going. And that's Gary Fails right there. You figure out how to make it through and keep everybody on board.
Gary Fails (29:51)
It was. When we had nothing else that we could do, when there was no business, we did a series of webinars and we taught the industry how to do things and we just kept our name in a prominent position and we were there when the industry came back.
Jackie Morreale (29:56)
Exactly. Let's talk more about innovation because I love to hear you talking about the LEDs, wireless DMX, the AutoYoke. I was there and lived these things and helped market these things. It's so exciting that a company that was locally manufacturing in New York City for this specific need of show business could drive such innovation and invention of all these new products.
As a founder, as the person who's driving this innovation and invention of these products, what was your process like to bring them to market? What was that process like to go from spark of an idea to product?
Gary Fails (30:43)
It was always looking for an unmet need, finding something that was needed but was not made. My dad was an innovator. My dad was a machinist. He made things. He said to me when I was a kid, some things you can't buy in the hardware store. You have to make them. I've always believed in that. If it doesn't exist and you need it, figure out a way to make it.
In the course of working on shows, I always found things we needed, things designers needed, things the electricians needed, that weren't being made. The niche that we were in, which was lighting accessories, was great because big companies would develop lighting fixtures and they always had faults. They always had problems in the optics or the brackets or the hangers or the clamps or something. Something always didn't work. We would say, Okay, we can make it work. We'll build something to make it work. We'll build something to fix the optical problems. We'll build something to make it better for designers. Designers tuned into this really well, and said, OK, I need you to make this.
The years I was doing shows, we'd come into the theater on day one, and I would say to the designer, by the end of the week, give me five product ideas. Give me five things that don't work for you that you need. We'll build them. And we did. People would come to us; we became known for this. They would call us with product ideas. They'd say, Hey, I need this. Can you build this?
We also sought out other inventors. If I saw an inventor who was a garage inventor like I was, I would say, Hey, you're a great inventor, but it's very hard to be a manufacturer and distributor. Let me manufacture and distribute your product for you, and I'll pay you. We had a series of these, a dozen or more, inventor relationships that we became the manufacturers and distributors of these products. We recognized these people. Every catalog we'd put it out, we'd say, we recognize these inventors who brought these products to us. Some were garage inventors, some were designers, some were friends, some were colleagues, stagehands. That became a big part of our business. I ended up buying some of those small companies and integrating them into City Theatrical because they were so important. I knew that you can't live on one product. You can't manufacture, distribute one product. Young inventors always think they're going to get rich on one product. It's impossible.
We were fortunate to have great inventor relationships over the years where we could take these products and distribute them. It's something we did all through the history of City Theatrical.
For innovation, we were always looking for products, always asking people what didn't work, what they needed. When I worked on stage, both in the early part and in the later part of my career, I always saw these things with my own eyes. I said, We need this. I have to make this. Let's think of a way of doing this. We have to do it.
So many of our products came that way. My role became thinking of things that were needed, then working with my team of engineers to develop them, whether it was hardware related, software related, electronic related. We had skills in all those areas and say, Let's find a way to do this. My team would be able to put those into practice.
Jackie Morreale (33:35)
You really are able to balance the visionary, creative thinking, outside of the box thinking, identifying low-hanging fruit, talking to designers, and then getting it done. You have the operational sense of how I'm going to make it and get it out to the market and the business end, but you really have this talent for observing voids in the market and niches and how you fill it and this creative spirit, I think that has differentiated you as a leader and a business owner. My personal opinion.
Gary Fails (34:16)
Yeah, it's not common. Not everyone has that. But I was able to do it, realizing I had no training at all. I had no theater training, and I had no engineering training. To have a high-tech manufacturing company in the entertainment business without those two foundational skills, I just learned it.
I learned it by doing it. I learned it those 10 years I was on the road, traveling with shows around the world. I learned it in the shops in New York. I learned it in the theater in New York. I have a natural ability to make things. I'm not afraid to go out and buy very expensive, large machines and figure out how to run them. It's always, always a thrill for me.
Jackie Morreale (34:51)
I think that is very humble to say that you don't have the traditional training in it. I've been there, I've heard you talk about all the technology, wireless DMX as a pioneer. I know that you're an ETCP trainer. You have all the certifications. I think you're extremely curious and you've been able to pick up so many technical skills along the way and apply them in such unique ways.
I appreciate that founder's humility because when you build something brick by brick, you've picked up so many different skills and learnings and shaped the future of an industry. It's beautiful talking to you about this stuff because I could still feel the founder energy from the South Bronx. You're going to get it done no matter what.
Gary Fails (35:34)
I made a lot of mistakes. But there's that old saying, I learned so much from my mistakes, I think I'll make a few more. But I made many, many, mistakes, but I could always try to correct them and learn from them.
Jackie Morreale (35:41)
Exactly! And not be afraid to make them, right? Because how else do you learn?
Gary Fails (35:52)
Right, I was never afraid to make mistakes. I was never afraid to take risks.
Jackie Morreale (35:56)
Exactly. Let's talk about manufacturing products locally. This is, you really dared to be different on this one. The trends of manufacturing in this country were so going the opposite direction in terms of outsourcing and just the expense of manufacturing locally alone.
I've also been to the factory and I know how you maintain things in an extremely lean and 5S, these innovative manufacturing methods. You also have this just-in-time inventory management. How did you put all these ducks in a row: as a local manufacturer, just-in-time inventory, all these innovative ways of handling your operations?
Gary Fails (36:36)
There are many ways to have a business. It's a matter of personal philosophy how you do it. Some businesses are only distributors. They don't make anything. Some manufacturing businesses outsource most of their manufacturing, do final assembly and sell it. I made the choice of being a vertically integrated manufacturer, which means we made nearly everything in our factory. There were things that we could have jobbed out that we did ourselves. We had a lot of machinery. We had a lot of technology. Why? Because that's what I like to do. There are people who sell toilet paper. Can you imagine that question, What do I do for a living? I manufacture toilet paper; I sell toilet paper. I didn't want to have a business like that. I want to have a business where we made interesting things.
I wanted to face the challenge of making them ourselves in a vertically integrated method, which means we made little parts and then put them together into bigger parts. We wrote the software. We made the metal casings for the things. We made the circuit boards. We populated the circuit boards. We did the testing. We did the painting. We did the training. We had a big staff. We trained them how to do it. That's as full-throated manufacturing as you can get. That's everything.
We had the distribution, we had the sales, and we had the marketing. We had everything. To not have any part of that, I think, would have been a loss for us that we would have felt. We could have done it better ourselves than jobbing it out to somebody else. And we liked doing it. We enjoyed that whole process from top to bottom.
Not everybody does. Not everybody wants to do that. Not everybody wants to figure out how to run the laser, or run the punch press, or do stamping, or to do circuit board making. There are other ways to do it, and other people do it in other ways. The way we chose was complicated, capital intensive, and required a lot of careful management to accomplish.
With that, we learned how to be better manufacturers. We were doing a project with ETC. We became very close with ETC and we manufactured parts for them. The project came along and they gave us a cost target that required us to completely change how we did everything to drive our costs down. We became very, very cost conscious. From that point on, we implemented that with all of our other product development and to produce at a lower cost, more efficiently, more carefully. How to purchase more carefully, how to manufacture more carefully. It was a great learning experience for us that came about just through being forced to do it by working with a major manufacturer who demanded better pricing from us. We studied manufacturing a lot. As a group, we read The Goal by Eli Goldratt, one of the manufacturing bibles on Just in Time and Lean. A lot of our philosophy came from that book. All our managers read it. We followed that model throughout our manufacturing career from that point on.
Jackie Morreale (39:32)
You just brought up ETC, who's in their 50th year this year, another domestic manufacturer in Wisconsin making waves, changing the lighting industry as we know it. It's been in such alignment with the company that you founded all this time, almost 40 years.
For me, from working as an employee at the company, it never felt like I wasn't working in show biz. Although we were a domestic manufacturer and we had such an incredible range of abilities right under one roof, it still felt as though the main goal of this being able to produce better theater, better opera, better dance, whatever the end goal was for entertainment purposes. It always felt like we were part of that. Even if it was just a top hat, something that was 'just' sheet metal, created in-house. Here we are helping the overall artistry behind that show or that production or that installation. I think that it’s important too, that everybody top down knew that this was part of some bigger picture.
Gary Fails (40:28)
It is. We became one of the most important companies in the industry. Great reputation, great image to the whole world. And it was a fun place to be. It was a fun role to play in a rather small industry of entertainment lighting.
Jackie Morreale (40:50)
Exactly. Let's talk more about the industry, because it is a niche industry. Not everybody knows that there is this entertainment lighting world that we know. What is the best way to differentiate a company, a brand in a saturated market? Is it to find your own niche market? Is it to carve your own niche market? Is it to carve your messaging? How do you stand out as more and more companies figure out that this is a market that's viable, and it becomes saturated?
Gary Fails (41:17)
That's a great question. The entertainment lighting industry is a niche of the commercial lighting industry, the bigger lighting industry. What we did was a niche in the entertainment lighting industry. Our niche was lighting accessories. So we were a niche within a niche. For a long time, we had no competition.
As we grew, what I found out was, success attracts competition. People start to copy you. People start to knock off your products. As you grow, okay, if everybody's just going to knock off our products, What are we going to do? How are we going to grow in an industry that we're not that big and people can easily steal our products? The way to do that is through innovation.
Anybody can copy, but most people can't innovate. Trying to be a step ahead of what everybody else is doing, trying to protect your products with trademarks, which are important, trying to brand them with names that make them memorable, trying to patent them so that your products cannot be stolen, and then enforcing those patents when necessary with litigation to let people know that they are not going to come in and steal your technology, that you work so hard to develop. We faced this.
All our success in our field came through innovation, branding, and very, very skillful marketing of how we portrayed the company and what our image was in the world. We did it with images that were different than other people used, colorful images, careful ads, careful branding. When we opened our office in London, we rebranded the company as City Theatrical, New York, London. We branded ourselves as an international company. No one else really had ever done anything like this. It made us look bigger than we were, and much more important and influential than we were, but it helped us to become more influential.
The branding we did, the marketing we did, the communications we did, our newsletter. We started a monthly newsletter really early on and faithfully produced the monthly newsletter every month that was of interest to our customers and our distributors around the world. We attended a lot of trade shows. We always took pictures of the visitors in our booth and we put those in the newsletter and it became very popular. People would open the newsletter, see their picture.
It just became an important part of our image. You don't know these things when you do them, what they're going to turn into. The innovation and the marketing of that innovation became our focus of everything we did.
Jackie Morreale (43:41)
Absolutely. It's funny to hear you talk about when you first started going to trade shows in Orlando with some Xerox copies of 'Here's What We're Selling' and then to know all these years later, the catalog and the brochures and the trade show booths. Where it came from, and where it is now. To be at the show from March that we were both in attendance, when you won the Lifetime Achievement Award. To see the people and the interest in the brand from every direction on the show, from students, from experienced designers, from the technical people, from the artists. People attracted to the booth for the brand, for the products, for the innovation. and it's still growing.
Gary Fails (44:21)
Yes. Companies acquire momentum. Reputation is hard to build, easy to destroy. If you can sustain your reputation over a period of time, you can acquire a momentum that makes everything easier. As the company grew and the recognition of the company grew, we were able to sustain a reputation as a good company, a good-hearted company, good people with great products, around the world. It was a good position to be in.
(Continued below)
Jackie Morreale (29:22)
I wasn't there for 9/11. I wasn't there for Hurricane Sandy. But I was there for COVID, and not easy times. We stayed busy. We did a lot in that time that we had learned, pivoted, figured stuff out, innovated, kept going. And that's Gary Fails right there. You figure out how to make it through and keep everybody on board.
Gary Fails (29:51)
It was. When we had nothing else that we could do, when there was no business, we did a series of webinars and we taught the industry how to do things and we just kept our name in a prominent position and we were there when the industry came back.
Jackie Morreale (29:56)
Exactly. Let's talk more about innovation because I love to hear you talking about the LEDs, wireless DMX, the AutoYoke. I was there and lived these things and helped market these things. It's so exciting that a company that was locally manufacturing in New York City for this specific need of show business could drive such innovation and invention of all these new products.
As a founder, as the person who's driving this innovation and invention of these products, what was your process like to bring them to market? What was that process like to go from spark of an idea to product?
Gary Fails (30:43)
It was always looking for an unmet need, finding something that was needed but was not made. My dad was an innovator. My dad was a machinist. He made things. He said to me when I was a kid, some things you can't buy in the hardware store. You have to make them. I've always believed in that. If it doesn't exist and you need it, figure out a way to make it.
In the course of working on shows, I always found things we needed, things designers needed, things the electricians needed, that weren't being made. The niche that we were in, which was lighting accessories, was great because big companies would develop lighting fixtures and they always had faults. They always had problems in the optics or the brackets or the hangers or the clamps or something. Something always didn't work. We would say, Okay, we can make it work. We'll build something to make it work. We'll build something to fix the optical problems. We'll build something to make it better for designers. Designers tuned into this really well, and said, OK, I need you to make this.
The years I was doing shows, we'd come into the theater on day one, and I would say to the designer, by the end of the week, give me five product ideas. Give me five things that don't work for you that you need. We'll build them. And we did. People would come to us; we became known for this. They would call us with product ideas. They'd say, Hey, I need this. Can you build this?
We also sought out other inventors. If I saw an inventor who was a garage inventor like I was, I would say, Hey, you're a great inventor, but it's very hard to be a manufacturer and distributor. Let me manufacture and distribute your product for you, and I'll pay you. We had a series of these, a dozen or more, inventor relationships that we became the manufacturers and distributors of these products. We recognized these people. Every catalog we'd put it out, we'd say, we recognize these inventors who brought these products to us. Some were garage inventors, some were designers, some were friends, some were colleagues, stagehands. That became a big part of our business. I ended up buying some of those small companies and integrating them into City Theatrical because they were so important. I knew that you can't live on one product. You can't manufacture, distribute one product. Young inventors always think they're going to get rich on one product. It's impossible.
We were fortunate to have great inventor relationships over the years where we could take these products and distribute them. It's something we did all through the history of City Theatrical.
For innovation, we were always looking for products, always asking people what didn't work, what they needed. When I worked on stage, both in the early part and in the later part of my career, I always saw these things with my own eyes. I said, We need this. I have to make this. Let's think of a way of doing this. We have to do it.
So many of our products came that way. My role became thinking of things that were needed, then working with my team of engineers to develop them, whether it was hardware related, software related, electronic related. We had skills in all those areas and say, Let's find a way to do this. My team would be able to put those into practice.
Jackie Morreale (33:35)
You really are able to balance the visionary, creative thinking, outside of the box thinking, identifying low-hanging fruit, talking to designers, and then getting it done. You have the operational sense of how I'm going to make it and get it out to the market and the business end, but you really have this talent for observing voids in the market and niches and how you fill it and this creative spirit, I think that has differentiated you as a leader and a business owner. My personal opinion.
Gary Fails (34:16)
Yeah, it's not common. Not everyone has that. But I was able to do it, realizing I had no training at all. I had no theater training, and I had no engineering training. To have a high-tech manufacturing company in the entertainment business without those two foundational skills, I just learned it.
I learned it by doing it. I learned it those 10 years I was on the road, traveling with shows around the world. I learned it in the shops in New York. I learned it in the theater in New York. I have a natural ability to make things. I'm not afraid to go out and buy very expensive, large machines and figure out how to run them. It's always, always a thrill for me.
Jackie Morreale (34:51)
I think that is very humble to say that you don't have the traditional training in it. I've been there, I've heard you talk about all the technology, wireless DMX as a pioneer. I know that you're an ETCP trainer. You have all the certifications. I think you're extremely curious and you've been able to pick up so many technical skills along the way and apply them in such unique ways.
I appreciate that founder's humility because when you build something brick by brick, you've picked up so many different skills and learnings and shaped the future of an industry. It's beautiful talking to you about this stuff because I could still feel the founder energy from the South Bronx. You're going to get it done no matter what.
Gary Fails (35:34)
I made a lot of mistakes. But there's that old saying, I learned so much from my mistakes, I think I'll make a few more. But I made many, many, mistakes, but I could always try to correct them and learn from them.
Jackie Morreale (35:41)
Exactly! And not be afraid to make them, right? Because how else do you learn?
Gary Fails (35:52)
Right, I was never afraid to make mistakes. I was never afraid to take risks.
Jackie Morreale (35:56)
Exactly. Let's talk about manufacturing products locally. This is, you really dared to be different on this one. The trends of manufacturing in this country were so going the opposite direction in terms of outsourcing and just the expense of manufacturing locally alone.
I've also been to the factory and I know how you maintain things in an extremely lean and 5S, these innovative manufacturing methods. You also have this just-in-time inventory management. How did you put all these ducks in a row: as a local manufacturer, just-in-time inventory, all these innovative ways of handling your operations?
Gary Fails (36:36)
There are many ways to have a business. It's a matter of personal philosophy how you do it. Some businesses are only distributors. They don't make anything. Some manufacturing businesses outsource most of their manufacturing, do final assembly and sell it. I made the choice of being a vertically integrated manufacturer, which means we made nearly everything in our factory. There were things that we could have jobbed out that we did ourselves. We had a lot of machinery. We had a lot of technology. Why? Because that's what I like to do. There are people who sell toilet paper. Can you imagine that question, What do I do for a living? I manufacture toilet paper; I sell toilet paper. I didn't want to have a business like that. I want to have a business where we made interesting things.
I wanted to face the challenge of making them ourselves in a vertically integrated method, which means we made little parts and then put them together into bigger parts. We wrote the software. We made the metal casings for the things. We made the circuit boards. We populated the circuit boards. We did the testing. We did the painting. We did the training. We had a big staff. We trained them how to do it. That's as full-throated manufacturing as you can get. That's everything.
We had the distribution, we had the sales, and we had the marketing. We had everything. To not have any part of that, I think, would have been a loss for us that we would have felt. We could have done it better ourselves than jobbing it out to somebody else. And we liked doing it. We enjoyed that whole process from top to bottom.
Not everybody does. Not everybody wants to do that. Not everybody wants to figure out how to run the laser, or run the punch press, or do stamping, or to do circuit board making. There are other ways to do it, and other people do it in other ways. The way we chose was complicated, capital intensive, and required a lot of careful management to accomplish.
With that, we learned how to be better manufacturers. We were doing a project with ETC. We became very close with ETC and we manufactured parts for them. The project came along and they gave us a cost target that required us to completely change how we did everything to drive our costs down. We became very, very cost conscious. From that point on, we implemented that with all of our other product development and to produce at a lower cost, more efficiently, more carefully. How to purchase more carefully, how to manufacture more carefully. It was a great learning experience for us that came about just through being forced to do it by working with a major manufacturer who demanded better pricing from us. We studied manufacturing a lot. As a group, we read The Goal by Eli Goldratt, one of the manufacturing bibles on Just in Time and Lean. A lot of our philosophy came from that book. All our managers read it. We followed that model throughout our manufacturing career from that point on.
Jackie Morreale (39:32)
You just brought up ETC, who's in their 50th year this year, another domestic manufacturer in Wisconsin making waves, changing the lighting industry as we know it. It's been in such alignment with the company that you founded all this time, almost 40 years.
For me, from working as an employee at the company, it never felt like I wasn't working in show biz. Although we were a domestic manufacturer and we had such an incredible range of abilities right under one roof, it still felt as though the main goal of this being able to produce better theater, better opera, better dance, whatever the end goal was for entertainment purposes. It always felt like we were part of that. Even if it was just a top hat, something that was 'just' sheet metal, created in-house. Here we are helping the overall artistry behind that show or that production or that installation. I think that it’s important too, that everybody top down knew that this was part of some bigger picture.
Gary Fails (40:28)
It is. We became one of the most important companies in the industry. Great reputation, great image to the whole world. And it was a fun place to be. It was a fun role to play in a rather small industry of entertainment lighting.
Jackie Morreale (40:50)
Exactly. Let's talk more about the industry, because it is a niche industry. Not everybody knows that there is this entertainment lighting world that we know. What is the best way to differentiate a company, a brand in a saturated market? Is it to find your own niche market? Is it to carve your own niche market? Is it to carve your messaging? How do you stand out as more and more companies figure out that this is a market that's viable, and it becomes saturated?
Gary Fails (41:17)
That's a great question. The entertainment lighting industry is a niche of the commercial lighting industry, the bigger lighting industry. What we did was a niche in the entertainment lighting industry. Our niche was lighting accessories. So we were a niche within a niche. For a long time, we had no competition.
As we grew, what I found out was, success attracts competition. People start to copy you. People start to knock off your products. As you grow, okay, if everybody's just going to knock off our products, What are we going to do? How are we going to grow in an industry that we're not that big and people can easily steal our products? The way to do that is through innovation.
Anybody can copy, but most people can't innovate. Trying to be a step ahead of what everybody else is doing, trying to protect your products with trademarks, which are important, trying to brand them with names that make them memorable, trying to patent them so that your products cannot be stolen, and then enforcing those patents when necessary with litigation to let people know that they are not going to come in and steal your technology, that you work so hard to develop. We faced this.
All our success in our field came through innovation, branding, and very, very skillful marketing of how we portrayed the company and what our image was in the world. We did it with images that were different than other people used, colorful images, careful ads, careful branding. When we opened our office in London, we rebranded the company as City Theatrical, New York, London. We branded ourselves as an international company. No one else really had ever done anything like this. It made us look bigger than we were, and much more important and influential than we were, but it helped us to become more influential.
The branding we did, the marketing we did, the communications we did, our newsletter. We started a monthly newsletter really early on and faithfully produced the monthly newsletter every month that was of interest to our customers and our distributors around the world. We attended a lot of trade shows. We always took pictures of the visitors in our booth and we put those in the newsletter and it became very popular. People would open the newsletter, see their picture.
It just became an important part of our image. You don't know these things when you do them, what they're going to turn into. The innovation and the marketing of that innovation became our focus of everything we did.
Jackie Morreale (43:41)
Absolutely. It's funny to hear you talk about when you first started going to trade shows in Orlando with some Xerox copies of 'Here's What We're Selling' and then to know all these years later, the catalog and the brochures and the trade show booths. Where it came from, and where it is now. To be at the show from March that we were both in attendance, when you won the Lifetime Achievement Award. To see the people and the interest in the brand from every direction on the show, from students, from experienced designers, from the technical people, from the artists. People attracted to the booth for the brand, for the products, for the innovation. and it's still growing.
Gary Fails (44:21)
Yes. Companies acquire momentum. Reputation is hard to build, easy to destroy. If you can sustain your reputation over a period of time, you can acquire a momentum that makes everything easier. As the company grew and the recognition of the company grew, we were able to sustain a reputation as a good company, a good-hearted company, good people with great products, around the world. It was a good position to be in.
(Continued below)
Gary Fails' 30 Year Anniversary with City Theatrical:
(Continued)
Jackie Morreale (44:51)
Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit more about the industry itself. What do you like best about the lighting industry or about the lighting accessories for the entertainment lighting industry?
Gary Fails (45:04)
What I liked about it, that I didn't know until some time went by, is that I joined the industry at its birth. I joined the industry when it was really just starting. In 1971, when the first rock and roll tours with lighting and Rolling Stones and those things were beginning. Broadway was primitive. Most of the lighting world was primitive. But, I didn't know anything else. It's all I knew what they were doing then.
I was able to, in hindsight, realize that I joined a growing industry very early on and was able to participate in that growth for 50 years, all the way through the growth of electronic dimming and modern lighting fixtures and the growth of ETC. Then the birth of LEDs. I remember the first trade show where LEDs appeared and looking at them and laughing at them. They were so dim. That changed the lighting world. It changed everything.
We were able to get involved with that very early on with Color Kinetics, a partnership to produce lighting accessories and electronic accessories for them as they came into the lighting world. The whole lighting world changed with the growth of LEDs. The arc of the lighting industry from very primitive to growth, to LEDs, to moving lights, wireless DMX. Then, in the later years, some things that were more difficult was the entry of Chinese manufacturing into the industry and the entry of private equity into the industry and the consolidation of companies. It became a dramatically different industry at the end than it was in the beginning. I was fortunate to be there on day one, very, very early. I rode through it all the way until I was able to sell my business, kind of at the peak, and to retire. It could not be done today what I did when I started my company. It's a different industry.
Jackie Morreale (46:49)
It's every entrepreneur's dream to build something brick by brick and do what you love. Have your family there watching you do all this and then wrap it up with a nice bow and have somebody value it and want to buy it. For other entrepreneurs of all different industries, are there any learnings that you can share from building and selling a successful company, based on local manufacturing and innovation?
Gary Fails (47:13)
Sure. General entrepreneurship. People who want to have a business and are bound to determine to have a business, they're going to have one. My recommendation would always be do something that you know about. Don't be a novice. Don't try to be a novice in an industry where you don't know anything. Create a business in a field that you are familiar with. Get enough experience in that field before you start your business and then do something that you know and that you enjoy. Because business is difficult. Business is difficult. It's not like you see on TV. It's not Shark Tank. It's not an overnight success. It's not billionaires. It's not what you imagine it will be. It's much more difficult, much more brutal, much more competitive. Your competitors are trying to put you out of business every day. And most businesses don't succeed.
If you're going to have a business, you have to accept it's going to take longer than you imagine it will. It's going to cost more than you imagine it will. It's going to require a lot of work from you personally. It's going to carve out a portion of your personal life and your family life that you can never get back. And if you don't put 100 % of your effort into it, you probably won't make it.
It requires sacrifices and those sacrifices can be difficult. I'm fortunate that I have a great spouse who stood by me through the entire way and helped me. My kids helped me. They stood by me. I'm fortunate that I had that. Business is thrilling but difficult. You have to be ready for whatever comes along.
Jackie Morreale (48:42)
If you could do it all over again, first of all, would you? And would you do it any differently?
Gary Fails (48:48)
Okay, it's a good question. When I went back to school, as part of an entrepreneurship class I was taking, I had to interview a successful business owner and I interviewed Fred Foster, the founder of ETC. Fred was a good friend of mine and really a wonderful guy who helped me in many, ways. He was tremendously successful. This was in the period prior to the LED revolution in lighting.
Jackie Morreale (48:59)
I remember that interview. That was 2001, right?
Gary Fails (49:11)
Yes. I said, Fred, if you had to do this all over again, could you do it? Could you start from scratch and grow another company? Or was it just luck and big balls? He said, he said, I know a 100% I could do it again if I started over. At that time, I think he could have today.
I think, for myself, I could not start in the entertainment lighting industry today and do what I did 37 years ago, with City Theatrical. The industry is not the same If I was determined to have a company, I would probably look for a young industry where growth opportunities existed. I would look for something there so I could grow with an industry.
In hindsight, that's easy to say. Most entrepreneurs just look for something and try to do it. I don't think the opportunities exist in the entertainment lighting industry. There are very few mom and pops anymore, the way they were when I started my business, when most businesses then were mom and pops, people starting from their garage and growing businesses. Very difficult now. It takes a tremendous amount of capital to begin and competition from China makes it very difficult or impossible to do that.
Jackie Morreale (50:16)
Anything there with building acoustic guitars?
Gary Fails (50:19)
Well, I am trying to resist all urges to start a business building acoustic, high-end acoustic guitars, which I enjoy so much.
Jackie Morreale (50:23)
Just curious, as lighting and sound go hand in hand. Always at the back of my mind what Gary is going to do next. I guess time will tell.
So, advice. I know it's not easy. I know your journey was your own, but if you could give advice, just very simple advice to anyone looking to start a new business, what would it be?
Gary Fails (50:45)
Rule number one, you've got to want to, you've got to want to do it. It has to be a burning desire. It has to be the most important thing to you. It has to be something that no one will stop you from that you must do and that you're willing to fight for. You're willing to get up early and you're willing to work weekends. If you want a lifestyle, if you want to live your best life, it's not for you. It's work.
Be ready to do it. Be ready to be committed to it.
Jackie Morreale (51:11)
Are there any strategies that you can share for team building or building a brand that other entrepreneurs can use and apply to their own business?
Gary Fails (51:20)
I think that building the culture of the company is extremely important in a founder-led company. The founder always sets the culture. The founder's culture becomes the company culture. In other bigger companies, it's hard to sustain, but in a smaller company that with a founder, you set the culture. So you better be sure the culture you're setting is a culture you want.
Better be sure that everybody understands what the culture is and that the culture is communicated carefully, properly, with the right symbolic gestures, right celebrations. You celebrate the right things. The rituals you have on a daily basis are important and sustainable. That's what builds the culture. You do certain things. This is the way we do it here. Other people do it different. This is the way we do it here. These are the things that are important to us. If you write those things down and recite them regularly, people get the hang of it.
They perpetuate that culture as staff changes. New people come in and it starts being something they learn. They go, Oh, here's how we do it here. We are careful to do these things. We take care of each other. We support each other. We learn from our mistakes. We compete vigorously against our competitors.
Jackie Morreale (52:36)
We demand excellence. I'm going through the list…
Gary Fails (52:40)
Yes. Those things are really important. They're easily missed. It's up to the founder. It's up to the leader to create, communicate those things, and enforce them.
Jackie Morreale (52:49)
Absolutely. What would you say to anyone looking to get into show biz?
Gary Fails (52:52)
My gosh, well, I'll start off by saying I didn't encourage any of my children to go into show business. Although my son Mike is in show biz in the film industry.
Jackie Morreale (53:00)
Do you really have a choice if that's your burning passion to go into show business?
Gary Fails (53:04)
No, but most people don't have a clear-eyed understanding of what show business is all about. If someone is bound and determined, I would say, try to get into an area of show business that pays well, so that you can support yourself. Because There are many areas of show business where people are willing to work for free. It's very hard to make a living there. Acting is very, very difficult.
There are areas of show business that pay well, but they take their pound of flesh too, with long hours. I worked my whole life in it. Parts of it were so much fun. I can't even describe how much fun they were. Being on the road with Broadway shows and musicals when I was young was so much fun.
Traveling from city to city, traveling around the world. It so much fun. I'm so glad I had a chance to participate in that. Working backstage on Broadway was so much fun.
People would line up at the box office and pay a lot of money to go in and watch. I was backstage. They paid me to sit backstage and participate in it. I would have done it for free. It was so interesting, to be with the people backstage and be part of a a successful Broadway show.
If you want to go into show business, good luck, have fun, go for it. I hope it works out. Have a fall back. My wife teaches musical theater now and she has trained a number of people who've gone on to Broadway careers. It's one out of a thousand that have both the talent and the burning desire to do it and are willing to do the work and the sacrifices to do it. If you don't have the talent and the burning desire, think twice.
Jackie Morreale (54:36)
Right, you've got to check both boxes. That's true, you and Terri are the powerhouse Broadway couple! She's on stage, you're backstage and making all these products. You never know… big things.
Any shoutouts to folks who have been there along the way and helped you get to where you are today?
Gary Fails (54:56)
When I was a teenager, when I went on the road, there was a guy who was with me and I worked with, and he has been my colleague for over 50 years. Steve Terry, who went on to a great career, had a company, one of the greatest companies in the industry, and sold that. Went to work as head of product development for ETC. A real icon of the industry, a wonderful guy. We have been friends and colleagues ever since. We often talk about those days when we knew nothing and we were teenagers and driving the trucks around the country and loading in and doing the shows. So, Steve, top of the list.
Fred Foster of ETC, who helped me in so many ways.
The guys at Four Star Lighting where I was the Local One apprentice and I learned my skills of welding and sheet metal and the Broadway world. It's the DeVerna family. Frank DeVerna, Steve DeVerna, Bob DeVerna, Darren DeVerna. Bill Maier there, the metal department.
Then later at City Theatrical, my product development team, Paul Kleissler, Larry Dunn, Philip Nye, very, very, very, great engineers, that were able to realize the products that we dreamed up together. And all of my staff at City Theatrical over the years.
Mark Lacko, who did so many things for over 20 years, helped me develop products and produce the images that were iconic for the company.
Of course, you, Jackie, so much you did to help me to brand the company and to have a really professional image to the world. Much appreciated.
There are so many people, hundreds and hundreds of people who I've worked with over the years who have helped. The professional designers who really made the company for it, to be able to work with the designers, Jules Fisher + Peggy Eisenhauer, Don Holder, Ken Posner, Natasha Katz, Jeff Croiter, just one after another, all of the top Broadway designers. Every single one of them were important to me and my company. Helping me, bringing me ideas, encouraging me, very wonderful people encouraging me to do what I was doing because it was important to the industry. I appreciate all of them and everything they did for me. That was a big shoutout and I could go on forever…
Jackie Morreale (57:03)
I'm sure they would say the exact same thing because you really made so many of their dreams come to life. It's a symbiotic relationship. Last but not least, what's next for you, Gary Fails?
Gary Fails (57:18)
I'm kind of in the learning mode. I'm reading a lot. I'm taking courses. I'm reading the 600-page history of the constitution, We the People, by Jill Lepore. Studying politics, studying government, following the news, being an active participant, paying very close attention to what's going on around the country and around the world. Looking for good challenges in my life.
Designing a guitar for my grandson. It's a baby guitar. He's not even two years old, but he plays the guitar. plays his brother's guitar that I built. He's going to be a musician, he's got music in his blood. I have some other guitar challenges on my plate that I want to build.
And staying fit. I work out every day. I'm going to live a long, healthy life. I work out every single day vigorously.
Jackie Morreale (57:54)
Always optimistic, always learning. Never a dull moment. Thank you so much, Gary! Have a wonderful day.
Gary Fails (58:13)
That's for sure. Thank you, Jackie. You, too.
To learn more about Gary Fails, read his 2023 retirement interview:
Congrats to Gary Fails on Retiring from City Theatrical
Jackie Morreale (44:51)
Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit more about the industry itself. What do you like best about the lighting industry or about the lighting accessories for the entertainment lighting industry?
Gary Fails (45:04)
What I liked about it, that I didn't know until some time went by, is that I joined the industry at its birth. I joined the industry when it was really just starting. In 1971, when the first rock and roll tours with lighting and Rolling Stones and those things were beginning. Broadway was primitive. Most of the lighting world was primitive. But, I didn't know anything else. It's all I knew what they were doing then.
I was able to, in hindsight, realize that I joined a growing industry very early on and was able to participate in that growth for 50 years, all the way through the growth of electronic dimming and modern lighting fixtures and the growth of ETC. Then the birth of LEDs. I remember the first trade show where LEDs appeared and looking at them and laughing at them. They were so dim. That changed the lighting world. It changed everything.
We were able to get involved with that very early on with Color Kinetics, a partnership to produce lighting accessories and electronic accessories for them as they came into the lighting world. The whole lighting world changed with the growth of LEDs. The arc of the lighting industry from very primitive to growth, to LEDs, to moving lights, wireless DMX. Then, in the later years, some things that were more difficult was the entry of Chinese manufacturing into the industry and the entry of private equity into the industry and the consolidation of companies. It became a dramatically different industry at the end than it was in the beginning. I was fortunate to be there on day one, very, very early. I rode through it all the way until I was able to sell my business, kind of at the peak, and to retire. It could not be done today what I did when I started my company. It's a different industry.
Jackie Morreale (46:49)
It's every entrepreneur's dream to build something brick by brick and do what you love. Have your family there watching you do all this and then wrap it up with a nice bow and have somebody value it and want to buy it. For other entrepreneurs of all different industries, are there any learnings that you can share from building and selling a successful company, based on local manufacturing and innovation?
Gary Fails (47:13)
Sure. General entrepreneurship. People who want to have a business and are bound to determine to have a business, they're going to have one. My recommendation would always be do something that you know about. Don't be a novice. Don't try to be a novice in an industry where you don't know anything. Create a business in a field that you are familiar with. Get enough experience in that field before you start your business and then do something that you know and that you enjoy. Because business is difficult. Business is difficult. It's not like you see on TV. It's not Shark Tank. It's not an overnight success. It's not billionaires. It's not what you imagine it will be. It's much more difficult, much more brutal, much more competitive. Your competitors are trying to put you out of business every day. And most businesses don't succeed.
If you're going to have a business, you have to accept it's going to take longer than you imagine it will. It's going to cost more than you imagine it will. It's going to require a lot of work from you personally. It's going to carve out a portion of your personal life and your family life that you can never get back. And if you don't put 100 % of your effort into it, you probably won't make it.
It requires sacrifices and those sacrifices can be difficult. I'm fortunate that I have a great spouse who stood by me through the entire way and helped me. My kids helped me. They stood by me. I'm fortunate that I had that. Business is thrilling but difficult. You have to be ready for whatever comes along.
Jackie Morreale (48:42)
If you could do it all over again, first of all, would you? And would you do it any differently?
Gary Fails (48:48)
Okay, it's a good question. When I went back to school, as part of an entrepreneurship class I was taking, I had to interview a successful business owner and I interviewed Fred Foster, the founder of ETC. Fred was a good friend of mine and really a wonderful guy who helped me in many, ways. He was tremendously successful. This was in the period prior to the LED revolution in lighting.
Jackie Morreale (48:59)
I remember that interview. That was 2001, right?
Gary Fails (49:11)
Yes. I said, Fred, if you had to do this all over again, could you do it? Could you start from scratch and grow another company? Or was it just luck and big balls? He said, he said, I know a 100% I could do it again if I started over. At that time, I think he could have today.
I think, for myself, I could not start in the entertainment lighting industry today and do what I did 37 years ago, with City Theatrical. The industry is not the same If I was determined to have a company, I would probably look for a young industry where growth opportunities existed. I would look for something there so I could grow with an industry.
In hindsight, that's easy to say. Most entrepreneurs just look for something and try to do it. I don't think the opportunities exist in the entertainment lighting industry. There are very few mom and pops anymore, the way they were when I started my business, when most businesses then were mom and pops, people starting from their garage and growing businesses. Very difficult now. It takes a tremendous amount of capital to begin and competition from China makes it very difficult or impossible to do that.
Jackie Morreale (50:16)
Anything there with building acoustic guitars?
Gary Fails (50:19)
Well, I am trying to resist all urges to start a business building acoustic, high-end acoustic guitars, which I enjoy so much.
Jackie Morreale (50:23)
Just curious, as lighting and sound go hand in hand. Always at the back of my mind what Gary is going to do next. I guess time will tell.
So, advice. I know it's not easy. I know your journey was your own, but if you could give advice, just very simple advice to anyone looking to start a new business, what would it be?
Gary Fails (50:45)
Rule number one, you've got to want to, you've got to want to do it. It has to be a burning desire. It has to be the most important thing to you. It has to be something that no one will stop you from that you must do and that you're willing to fight for. You're willing to get up early and you're willing to work weekends. If you want a lifestyle, if you want to live your best life, it's not for you. It's work.
Be ready to do it. Be ready to be committed to it.
Jackie Morreale (51:11)
Are there any strategies that you can share for team building or building a brand that other entrepreneurs can use and apply to their own business?
Gary Fails (51:20)
I think that building the culture of the company is extremely important in a founder-led company. The founder always sets the culture. The founder's culture becomes the company culture. In other bigger companies, it's hard to sustain, but in a smaller company that with a founder, you set the culture. So you better be sure the culture you're setting is a culture you want.
Better be sure that everybody understands what the culture is and that the culture is communicated carefully, properly, with the right symbolic gestures, right celebrations. You celebrate the right things. The rituals you have on a daily basis are important and sustainable. That's what builds the culture. You do certain things. This is the way we do it here. Other people do it different. This is the way we do it here. These are the things that are important to us. If you write those things down and recite them regularly, people get the hang of it.
They perpetuate that culture as staff changes. New people come in and it starts being something they learn. They go, Oh, here's how we do it here. We are careful to do these things. We take care of each other. We support each other. We learn from our mistakes. We compete vigorously against our competitors.
Jackie Morreale (52:36)
We demand excellence. I'm going through the list…
Gary Fails (52:40)
Yes. Those things are really important. They're easily missed. It's up to the founder. It's up to the leader to create, communicate those things, and enforce them.
Jackie Morreale (52:49)
Absolutely. What would you say to anyone looking to get into show biz?
Gary Fails (52:52)
My gosh, well, I'll start off by saying I didn't encourage any of my children to go into show business. Although my son Mike is in show biz in the film industry.
Jackie Morreale (53:00)
Do you really have a choice if that's your burning passion to go into show business?
Gary Fails (53:04)
No, but most people don't have a clear-eyed understanding of what show business is all about. If someone is bound and determined, I would say, try to get into an area of show business that pays well, so that you can support yourself. Because There are many areas of show business where people are willing to work for free. It's very hard to make a living there. Acting is very, very difficult.
There are areas of show business that pay well, but they take their pound of flesh too, with long hours. I worked my whole life in it. Parts of it were so much fun. I can't even describe how much fun they were. Being on the road with Broadway shows and musicals when I was young was so much fun.
Traveling from city to city, traveling around the world. It so much fun. I'm so glad I had a chance to participate in that. Working backstage on Broadway was so much fun.
People would line up at the box office and pay a lot of money to go in and watch. I was backstage. They paid me to sit backstage and participate in it. I would have done it for free. It was so interesting, to be with the people backstage and be part of a a successful Broadway show.
If you want to go into show business, good luck, have fun, go for it. I hope it works out. Have a fall back. My wife teaches musical theater now and she has trained a number of people who've gone on to Broadway careers. It's one out of a thousand that have both the talent and the burning desire to do it and are willing to do the work and the sacrifices to do it. If you don't have the talent and the burning desire, think twice.
Jackie Morreale (54:36)
Right, you've got to check both boxes. That's true, you and Terri are the powerhouse Broadway couple! She's on stage, you're backstage and making all these products. You never know… big things.
Any shoutouts to folks who have been there along the way and helped you get to where you are today?
Gary Fails (54:56)
When I was a teenager, when I went on the road, there was a guy who was with me and I worked with, and he has been my colleague for over 50 years. Steve Terry, who went on to a great career, had a company, one of the greatest companies in the industry, and sold that. Went to work as head of product development for ETC. A real icon of the industry, a wonderful guy. We have been friends and colleagues ever since. We often talk about those days when we knew nothing and we were teenagers and driving the trucks around the country and loading in and doing the shows. So, Steve, top of the list.
Fred Foster of ETC, who helped me in so many ways.
The guys at Four Star Lighting where I was the Local One apprentice and I learned my skills of welding and sheet metal and the Broadway world. It's the DeVerna family. Frank DeVerna, Steve DeVerna, Bob DeVerna, Darren DeVerna. Bill Maier there, the metal department.
Then later at City Theatrical, my product development team, Paul Kleissler, Larry Dunn, Philip Nye, very, very, very, great engineers, that were able to realize the products that we dreamed up together. And all of my staff at City Theatrical over the years.
Mark Lacko, who did so many things for over 20 years, helped me develop products and produce the images that were iconic for the company.
Of course, you, Jackie, so much you did to help me to brand the company and to have a really professional image to the world. Much appreciated.
There are so many people, hundreds and hundreds of people who I've worked with over the years who have helped. The professional designers who really made the company for it, to be able to work with the designers, Jules Fisher + Peggy Eisenhauer, Don Holder, Ken Posner, Natasha Katz, Jeff Croiter, just one after another, all of the top Broadway designers. Every single one of them were important to me and my company. Helping me, bringing me ideas, encouraging me, very wonderful people encouraging me to do what I was doing because it was important to the industry. I appreciate all of them and everything they did for me. That was a big shoutout and I could go on forever…
Jackie Morreale (57:03)
I'm sure they would say the exact same thing because you really made so many of their dreams come to life. It's a symbiotic relationship. Last but not least, what's next for you, Gary Fails?
Gary Fails (57:18)
I'm kind of in the learning mode. I'm reading a lot. I'm taking courses. I'm reading the 600-page history of the constitution, We the People, by Jill Lepore. Studying politics, studying government, following the news, being an active participant, paying very close attention to what's going on around the country and around the world. Looking for good challenges in my life.
Designing a guitar for my grandson. It's a baby guitar. He's not even two years old, but he plays the guitar. plays his brother's guitar that I built. He's going to be a musician, he's got music in his blood. I have some other guitar challenges on my plate that I want to build.
And staying fit. I work out every day. I'm going to live a long, healthy life. I work out every single day vigorously.
Jackie Morreale (57:54)
Always optimistic, always learning. Never a dull moment. Thank you so much, Gary! Have a wonderful day.
Gary Fails (58:13)
That's for sure. Thank you, Jackie. You, too.
To learn more about Gary Fails, read his 2023 retirement interview:
Congrats to Gary Fails on Retiring from City Theatrical
Continued reading on business, recommended by Gary Fails:
|
|
Who Moved My Cheese?: An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life. By Spencer Johnson (Author).
|
|
Wisdom for Wannabes
10299 Southern Blvd. Unit 212771 Royal Palm Beach, FL 33411 USA |
© Wisdom for Wannabes LLC 2026. All Rights Reserved.