THE WISDOM OF LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE My approach of applying professional consulting and project management techniques in custom home technology was working. In fact, Casa Integration seemed to attract as customers among the most successful and wealthiest people in America.
And they had the best architects. The best interior designers. And, the most important: the best builders, which came with the best craftspeople. How in the hell I had cried and bled and sweated my way into this arena amazes me to this day. I was lucky and I worked my ass off, but I also had a trick up my sleeve.
I learned quickly just how critical it was to build trust with this audience. Most of my competitors saw dollar signs in their clients' eyes: "Oh you have to have such and such in a place like this," forgetting about understanding what the customer wanted or needed.
Indeed, here was a market used to having every last penny extracted from their wallet by service providers.
I did the opposite and it worked to the point I essentially could stop marketing - apart from a periodically published newsletter - and rely upon existing customers and referrals only from 2007 onward. Time after time, I would play the fiduciary while others would play the used car salesman.
I developed a fairly standard response when a >= millionaire customer would say they'd been advised by others to buy such and such. In all cases, such and such would be overpriced, high-margin stuff produced to sell to this market. The term is diminishing returns: once you hit a certain price point in a given A/V category, spending more gets lessand less.
But I would be even more blunt. Especially when it came to the spend on some of the world's finest vacation homes.
"Look, you are here what, 4 times a year? I get you want the best and I get you want to love it when you crank things up. But these $10,000 flagship Boston Acoustics I'm suggesting are killer, and you can take the $30K you're saving and put it in your foundation. Or give it to your grandkids. Or whatever."
Then I would pause, look deeply into the client's eyes, and say, "You are going to love it."
And I was right every time. I had discovered a talent for prudently spending the money of others. Very wealthy others.
Indeed, this was the secret sauce of Casa Integration. In my personal life, I have earned the monikers The Diamond Man as well as the charming The World's Most Expensive Man. These refer to my predilection for the finer things. Yet not being wealthy, it was largely aspirational - but still.
I had loved music and the gear for its reproduction from my earliest days. I had, critically, also been exposed to just enough of the good life to know what I would personally want - if I could afford anything but didn't want to spend mindlessly, and/or be taken advantage of.
Getting peoples' homes to my standard, a standard born and bred in Albany, NY, was a match. A super strange match, but there I was. Among the best architects, designers, builders, and craftspeople anywhere.
I still don't believe it.
GUERILLAS IN THE MIDST Newsletter?
A motivator for telling this story is reminding would-be entrepreneurs that a lot is possible with what you have at home. I mentioned the book Guerilla Marketing earlier, and it was that book that 1) mentioned newsletters, and 2) educated me on what was possible with modern ink jet printers.
It would be hard to overstate how important this thing was. Here's one from the period.
I printed them on glossy brochure paper, and mailed them flat, in big envelopes. They were hard to ignore.
Which was fine, because I learned 1) people loved these things, and 2) they saved them. For their own use, but even crazier were the referrals.
Master/Madam of the Universe on the telephone to me: Hello. My friend (fellow Master/Madam of the Universe) gave me your newsletter from a few months back. I'm building a new home, and I think I could use you're help. Is this what you do?
Me: When and where will it be convenient for us to meet?
And just who were these masters and madams of the universe?
NOT NAME DROPPING I've already mentioned the advertising legend Jerry Andelin, Fairmont Hotel heiress Patricia Swig Dinner, and the most important client of them all: Randy Clough. We will return to Mr. Clough soon, but first, I would like to more fully document just how special my clients were.
Why? Here is what some of my clients did for a living.
Founded and ran EO (Essential Oils)
The author of 42 consecutive New York Times bestselling novels
The CFO of Kimpton Hotels
A San Francisco Mayoral Candidate
A top executive in the Fisher organization, which owns The Gap, The Oakland A's, and Mendocino Lumber, etc.
The Commissioner of the NCAA's Pacific 12 Conference (when it mattered)
The CIO of Google
The Chief Legal Officer of Broadcom
A Managing Partner at Sierra Ventures
An Animation Lead at Pixar
The Western Region General Manager for Slalom Consulting
An heiress to the Clos du Bois wine fortune
The CFO of Wells Fargo Bank
A 747 Captain for Delta Airlines
The Head of Trading for Charles Schwab
And the vast majority of the rest were equally accomplished, if not as famous. Much like the architects, designers, and builders I was working with, it was hard to process that I was now serving this caliber of clientele.
I had taken the concept of fake it until you make it and made it my own.
NAME DROPPING Randy Clough is so important to this story he gets a fake name. He was my biggest client, yet it's to whom he referred me that makes him a central figure.
It's simple: Randy's business, and that derived from my relationship with him, made Casa Integration. And by extension, the rest of my life.
By this point, Randy had taken a real liking to me. I had done a lot of work on his original house in SF, on Greenwich. What was cool was that he loved music and the gear for it almost as much as me - but unlike me, could buy anything he wanted. But by this time, I had earned his trust, and I was now his home A/V and tech guy.
In 2006, he began planning what can only be described as a mansion, to be built around the corner on Broderick, and he had engaged me from the get-go. It would turn out to be a Mount Rushmore sort of project for me.
Talk about the finest architects and builders.
One day, after a meeting with Randy and his wife to discuss the new place, he pulled me aside.
"Portico, I was hanging around with the other parents at my kids' school today. Love that Claypool guy from Primus - he's so normal, it's frightening.
But listen, that's not it. I gave your name to Chris Olin - great guy, and he and his wife Regan are building a new house in the Richmond, and they need you."
As I look back, it makes perfect sense that Chris or Regan or any of their family didn't ask me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Despite being among the most wealthy and famous families in America, I am not sure if I've been around finer or nicer people. It's true.
It turns out it Regan was Regan Pritzker. Of the Chicago Pritzker's. Of the Hyatt Hotel-owning Pritzker's. Of the Penny Pritzker's. Of the J.B. Pritzker's.
And Regan was the daughter of Nick Pritzker, who would become a long-time client. This is from Wikipedia:
Pritzker assumed responsibility of Hyatt Hotels Corporation in Chicago, Illinois after working with his father, Jack Pritzker, in real estate. He served as the president of the company and oversaw international hotel projects. Pritzker also served on Hyatt Hotel Corporation's board of directors from 1980 to 2007.
I had done a bang-up job on Chris and Regan's home, and they referred me to Nick. It would turn out, after Chris and Regan's place, I would do all of the tech in Nick and Susan's Pacific Heights home, their Hacienda and Hicks Mountain Ranch vacation compounds in Nicasio, and the SF homes of their sons Jacob and Joby.
Early in our relationship, I visited Nick at his Pac Heights home, and we chatted a while. He told me about Hyatt's recent investment in Vi Senior Living, and I thought to myself, Is this really happening? I am sitting with Nick f'ing Pritzker in his gorgeous SF living room and we're talking biz?
That was right before he asked me if I wanted to take his new car for a spin. You see, Nick had just made one of the earliest and largest investments in a brand new car company.
Nick Pritzker asked me to drive his new Tesla Roadster.
I did not shit my pants, but I did demurely decline.
This isn't Nick's, but his was the same year and color. While I missed out on driving Nick's car, I'd soon be saying yes to even better and more generous offers from the Pritzker family.
THAT'S THE WAY I LIKE IT Also around this time, I met a celebrity of a different ilk. Far different, this celebrity's name is Harry Wayne Casey. But you may know him better as K.C. As in K.C. and The Sunshine Band. His interior designer was also working with one of my own clients, and that's how it happened.
For the record, and like the Pritzker family, Harry Casey could not have been a nicer individual. And it was a thrill meeting the guy behind 3 of the most popular songs ever: Shake, Shake, Shake; Get Down Tonight; and of course, That's The Way I Like It.
As if the project was not going to be fun enough, his home - at least the one I'd be working on - was on Hawaii Island.
Road trip. And my first visit to the Big Island.
We were hanging out in my friend Arthur's Noe Valley pad before going out to dinner. Naturally, I was going on about my upcoming trip to Hawaii.
Arthur drew another major bong rip, held it, exhaled and while doing so said, "It's true. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is as spectacular as Yosemite."
"You're fucking high," I correctly said. "No way. No fucking way - there's no place like Yosemite."
Arthur said, "You'll see," and it turns out he was right.
I enlisted friend Hunter Deuce to assist on the install, as this was post-David and David and pre-Mr. Larry. In other, words, a buddy and I got to go to Hawaii to install the A/V for K.C. of K.C. and The Sunshine Band. We were even able to tear ourselves away from the work. To this.
It all went great, and the system I put in, featuring some very fine Canton Speakers, absolutely rocked.
I have the clearest memory of being in his luxe condo at the end, by myself, drinking a bottle of sake, and cranking K.C.'s megahit "Get Down Tonight" on the system I had just installed. I may have even danced to that silly song, by myself, in its creator's condo, on Hawaii Island.
Like usual for me, tears flowed, but this time from happiness.
The Big Island of Hawaii to this day remains one of my favorite places anywhere; I believe I've been 5 times since. The last time? It was on a client's private charter jet to visit his property there.
That, captured below, would occur just months before I shut down Casa Integration, but we're not quite there.
Because between now (2007) and then (2016), I will fight a war with technology that I will mentally lose. But I did get some nice trips out of it.
Steven Simon brought up a fine shared memory of our first library growing up - thank you for that, my friend.
André Aurich likes Tiburon, and not just the exclusive cocktail parties:
Great article about libraries. I have used the Tiburon library on multiple occasions - mostly to check out books, but the other cool thing the Tiburon library has that I have used - they have the equipment/software to convert VHS and cassette tapes to a digital format.
And no wonder he's Elizabeth "Polly" Michaels's boy toy. I nearly choked up when I read Primo Harvey PhD's response, picturing the little handsome brainiac clutching The Boys of Summer.
I love today's piece about the public library, and remember the excitement as a child of going to the library and being able to pick out any two or three books that caught my eye (almost exclusively sports biographies).
Thank you for reading this newsletter.
KLUF
Of course. Here - on its 4th play on KLUF, and for good reason - is the searing East Bay Archive, Vol. I. from Tower of Power.
