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A Promise Fullfilled
FOUNDERS AWARD
Languishing in a German POW camp, Mackey Barron pledged to
make something of himself. With A/V innovator HB Communications,
he did just that
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Business New Haven
1/25/1999
By: Susan Banfield
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During World War II, Mackey Barron flew B-24 Liberator bombers over enemy-occupied territory in Europe, dropping leaflets, fuel, ammunition and supplies to members of the Danish resistance.
On his 13th such spy mission Barron was shot down, captured and shipped off to a German prisoner of war camp, where he remained for nearly a year. The time Barron spent as a POW had a profound influence on him.
“It made me so much more goal-oriented” than he had been, he recalls. So he resolved that, “If God granted me to come through the experience, I wanted to prove I was worthwhile saving.”
Over the course of the last 53 years, Barron has more than lived up to his wartime resolve. The business he founded back in 1946, HB Communications, has grown from a tiny firm operating out of Barron's house to a company with more than 130 employees that has engineered products as diverse and sophisticated as the corporate boardroom at Duracell, the award-winning auditorium at the Bose Corp., the command-and-control center for the Connecticut Valley Exchange, the Betting Bar at Foxwoods Resort Casino, and a DUI program for Aetna Life & Casualty.
Mackey Barron has been both a pioneer and a leader in the high-tech audio-visual field. But just how did he come, back in those early postwar years, to choose the A/V industry as the one in which he would strive to make his mark?
For Barron, that interest began back in high school when a projection reel fell off a film projector at Brookline (Mass.) High School. As it rolled down the aisle, young Mackey retrieved it and successfully reinstalled it on the projector. A year later, following graduation, he went to work for Catholic Film Services. He worked there until entering the armed forces in 1942.
While in the Army Air Corps, Barron's eyes were opened to the broad range of educational opportunities and possibilities presented by A/V equipment. After seeing aircraft-identification slides presented to servicemen for four seconds at a time, Barron himself began using A/V equipment for instructional purposes. “What a great way to teach people,” he thought.
After the war, looking for a way to get into business, it was almost inevitable that Barron should decide to enter the burgeoning audio-visual industry. In 1946, with a partner named Don Hawthorne, Barron founded HB Motion Picture Services.
Since its modest beginnings - HB's first significant sale was ten projectors to the International Silver Co. in Meriden - the company has grown steadily.
In 1947 HB moved out of Barron's house to an office on George Street in downtown New Haven, then again in 1957 to a 3,000-square-foot facility on Audio Lane, off what is now Ella Grasso Boulevard, and once more in 1986 to a 17,000-square-foot headquarters in North Haven.
Earlier this month, HB moved again to a 90,000-square-foot facility, also in North Haven. HB has also operated a branch office in Massachusetts for the past 11 years.
As the business grew in size, it also expanded in scope. During the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, when government money for education flowed freely, HB thrived as a firm focused almost exclusively on the educational market. Its named changed as well, in 1963, to HB Educational Systems.
But in the 1970s, as sophisticated A/V equipment began to play an ever more important role in the industrial and corporate world, HB Vice President Don Anderson began to expand sales into these markets.
By 1986 it had become appropriate to change the name of the company yet again - to HB Communications.
Throughout these years, and especially after 1962 when he bought out Hawthorne to become sole owner of HB, Barron has worked long and hard to make the company a singular success. He would frequently see salesmen from 4:30 in the morning until ten o'clock at night, and for a quarter-century 85- to 90-hour work weeks were the norm. By way of illustration he often poses his favorite riddle: “When does success come before work?” The answer: “Only in the dictionary.”
Today HB sells nearly every imaginable kind of A/V equipment representing more than 250 brands. The company also goes beyond the sale: Its team of engineers and technicians designs, installs and services all manner of custom systems.
The new Avon corporate headquarters in Manhattan, for example, required the design and installation of five presentation rooms, each with its own independent control system, as well as a full video production studio for use by the firm's in-house advertising agency.
In fact, in order to ensure that there will always be a pool of engineering talent from which to recruit key players for HB's increasingly important engineering team, Barron has devised an internship program for engineering students at the University of Connecticut. An outstanding junior student is invited to work at HB the summer before his or her senior years. If things work out, the student is offered a job following graduation.
Barron has also worked with Richard Dressner of the International Communication Association to help the group set up its own university in Fairfax, Va.
HB serves the educational, industrial, corporate, church and government markets in the six New England states, New York and New Jersey. The company is currently moving toward becoming both more national and even international.
“We have some clients who want us to service them throughout the U.S.,” Barron says. “As long as they're willing to pay for it, we're assigning people to work with them.”
Since its founding 53 years ago, HB has operated in the black every year but one, says Barron. To what does he attribute this impressive track record? “Hard work,” not surprisingly, is his initial response.
But that's not the whole story. Other contributing factors he cites include first-rate engineering, outstanding sales and marketing (co-workers call Barron himself “the best salesman in the business”) and “completing jobs 100 percent - where competitors complete 95 percent,” Barron says.
Certainly Barron himself remains squarely in the middle of HB's success story. To this day, at age 79, he remains an active and involved president, coming into the office each morning well before nine o'clock.
He also remains unswervingly optimistic about HB's future. “This field will change more in the next ten years than it's changed in the first 75,” he predicts.
And he fully expects HB, by remaining on the cutting edge of new technology, to profit handsomely from the changes.
“With this move,” he says, “giving us the necessary space to expand our business, we will increase our business 25 to 75 percent in the next three to five years.”
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