A Car Audio Retailer Reverses Course

A year ago, Virgil Mascarenhas and his partner closed their shop of 15 years called Audio 2000 in Los Angeles, and Mascarenhas started performing installs by appointment.   He simply drove his station wagon to the customer’s home, office or to the car dealer.

He no longer had the overhead of a store. To his surprise, earnings are up.

Mascarenhas now travels around the local area to install a backup camera or upgrade an audio system.

It works, in part, because Audio 2000 had built a following over 15 years.

“We are in an affluent area. There’s two sides to an affluent area.  People have disposal income but they are also the first people to get the latest, greatest new cars.  And they turn cars in to get the latest features,” said Mascarenhas.

“Our lease terms changed and the lease was more expensive and we were selling less boxes because so many people are buying things on Amazon.  So how do you support the overhead?  Or do you ditch the overhead?  That seemed to be a much better move,” he said.

So last March, he put a sign in front of the shop saying it had moved with the phone number, which now simply rings into Mascarenhas’ cellphone.

Mascarenhas says his customers are happier because they get door to door service. “People are happy they don’t have to go anywhere. They already have that mentality that they don’t need to go anywhere from buying online.”

He still carries liability and garage keepers insurance, but after that, his overhead is a station wagon and gas.

He still serves two main car dealers and he gets a lot of work from local independent mechanics. Plus he still works on luxury cars and even celebrity cars.

“I’ve been doing this so long I know how to pick the battles and make this profitable.  If someone says can you build a speaker box with fiberglass, I say no, but integration can be done in the field if you know what you are doing,” he said.

Fabrication wasn’t a big focus for the shop anyway, because, serving the Beverly Hills area, customers with Lamborghini’s don’t really want anything blending in with the car, he said.

So Mascarenhas does the homework for a job ahead of time and brings the materials needed.

Typical jobs are backup cameras, custom radar detectors, blind spot monitors, and dash cams as well as audio upgrades. He carries Focal and Arc Audio and buys Pioneer and Kenwood through distribution.

A job will run anywhere from $200 to $3,000.

He helped perform installs on two cars for Lady Gaga and he’s done work for  snowboarder Shawn White.