AMHERST, NEW YORK, October 6, 2016 — If you’re ready to take a global approach to distribution in a rapidly changing ProAV industry, Stampede has the infrastructure, resources, talent, and programs to make that dream an immediate commercial reality — that’s the message delivered by Stampede President & COO Kevin Kelly to more than 200 vendors, sales team members, and industry analysts that made the 2016 Stampede Vendor Summit the largest one yet in the company’s 18 year history.  The annual two-day summit took place in Buffalo, New York from October 3-5, 2016 and included two days of vendor exhibitions, one-on-one ‘speed dating’ style sales presentations, a state-of-the-business presentation, and a half-day Drone Vendor Summit — not to mention evening receptions designed to foster closer business and personal friendships.

“There is a lot to celebrate at this year’s Vendor Summit,” Kelly told attendees, “but the biggest thing to celebrate by far is the fact that Stampede is open for business worldwide — ready to bring your products and services to 7,000 new resellers around the world that did not do business with us last year,” he emphasized, referring to the net new gains in the company’s global reseller network achieved through its June 2016 acquisition of Just Lamps.  “Our network now approaches 20,000 resellers.”

And reaching this global network of resellers, he continued, is going to be achieved through the launch of an expanded new series of policies, programs, and processes that are going to make doing business with Stampede easier than ever before. “The addition of one more paragraph to a vendor’s existing agreement opens the door to a global market through a single value added distribution partner. That’s huge.”

Kelly emphasized that Stampede’s sustained record of growth and expansion is driven by its 100% laser focus on the ProAV marketplace, but he cautioned that the definition of ProAV is changing and Stampede is very much ahead of the herd in incorporating the next generation of products and technologies that redefine and extend the meaning of ProAV into the realm of ‘customer experience.’ “More and more vertical market customers aren’t thinking in terms of ProAV in the old product-centric way they used to,” Kelly emphasized. “And the new generation of vertical market customers don’t think in terms of AV at all.  They think in terms of experiences and they want us as an industry to provide the solutions that create these experiences.  This is a paradigm shift that is creating entirely new classes of resellers, end users, markets, and opportunities for everyone involved in our industry.” This shift is showing up in Stampede’s continued growth in revenue, gross profits, and gross margins — all of which set a new record for the company this year.

The company’s growth in vendor partners is equally impressive, with 36 new manufacturers joining the Stampede portfolio in the last 12 months, including 15 drone, 10 audio, six unified communications, and five new display manufacturers. “The key to our growth, across the board, is that we successfully integrate new product categories like drones, Drone Video Systems, Unified Communications, and Virtual Reality with systems that include traditional AV products. The result are solutions that meet new market needs and revitalize traditional AV product categories,” Kelly explained.

Looking forward, Kelly said that opportunity is knocking and it is time to adapt, change, and harvest the new opportunities this shift from a product centric AV industry to an experiential AV industry is creating. He said that Stampede’s near-term growth strategy revolved around three major initiatives: going for ‘gold’ globally, maximizing reseller engagement, and nurturing emerging product categories that complement Stampede’s current product portfolio. “Our goal is to continue to be the best final mile in the ProAV industry, and I believe we have the people, programs, and processes that will allow us to achieve this goal.”

Befitting the global focus of the company’s business today, Stampede will host additional Vendor Summits in Canada and in Portugal throughout the month of October.