Tell us a bit about how and when Sydney Hi Fi Mona Vale started.
We took it over about 12 years ago. We bought it from George and Tracy, their shop was initially over on Bungan Street here in Mona Vale. Prior to that we had our hi-fi business called Electronic Enterprises over in Gordon. We wanted to move out of our Gordon location, so we took over this business. About 8 years ago we moved from Bungan Street into this location. We’d out grown the little shop there. The focus of the old business was quite different than it is today. They’d focused a lot on competing against the mass market businesses… a lot of TVs, a lot of lifestyle systems. Our direction was a more music and custom installs background – it was a long transition because a lot of the previous clients had known what the old Sydney Hi Fi was all about but then it changed over time. They had attempted custom installs but it wasn’t too successful. We’d already had a good background with custom installs so we were able to take it to a much higher level. Initially we employed our own people for custom installs but we’ve stripped back to a core unit now, and now have teams of contractors we employ to do the jobs for us – we still manage them of course. We’ve been very successful in our strategy and now actually have people wanting to come work for us. So, these days I do the actual business side more, rather than a lot of the physical work I used to do. It’s worked very well with our contractors – we’ve had most of them for well over 10 years. We have three main areas within our business: the shop floor and audio, the custom installs (which
