Len Dozier, a well-known and well-loved member of the AV industry who built Premier Mounts from the ground up, died on July 16, 2022, in California. He was 80.

He died “with his wife and all of us kids by his side,” according to an email from his daughter, Tiffany Dozier. “It has been a very rough four months for him in the hospital and he put up a great fight, but he is now peacefully in heaven with his lord & savior.”

Len founded Premier Mounts in 1994 — it quickly gained a reputation for being an innovative, hands-on company after it developed the first universal wall mount.

Premier Mounts was initially just a part of a parent company — Progressive Marketing Products, Incorporated. It quickly became apparent to Len that the mounts were where the money was.

“I didn’t know right off the bat because I was still doing a lot of work in consoles,” he said in an episode of Rants & rAVes with Gary Kayye. “But after a couple of years, it was obvious to me that in my warehouse, 85% of my space was taken up by console furniture (because I had my own product line in Delta Designs). Over in the corner was this little mount business and this little mount business was outselling the console business for me 10-to-one.”

The “little mount business” continued to grow over the years, growing a catalog of 1,000 different products sold through 2,000 resellers worldwide and online by 2021. It was this year that Gamber-Johnson, a supplier of rugged mounting systems for fleet vehicles and other mobility applications, purchased Premier Mounts. It was also this year that Len retired.

Tiffany said even toward the end of his career that “he was very hands-on. He loved going in with the engineers and designing products. He always wanted to be busy, even later … he was still there every day, managing the hospitality business because he had a direct relationship with the hotels around the world.”

One of the highlights of his career, Tiffany said, was when Premier Mounts ended up doing all the Wynn properties globally.

“He developed a relationship with Steve Wynn and his team,” Tiffany said. “Any time they opened up a property around the world, they would call Len.”

Len was born on June 10, 1942, in Monterey Park, California. He left The Golden State for a few years while serving the military in Montana, but moved back when it was time to settle down and raise a family.

By climbing his way up, Len went from maintenance electrician to working for a radio station to a spacebound recorder manufacturer called Odetics.

“I was 34, I’d had a hell of a self-taught education, I wasn’t financially independent like I wanted to be, and I wanted to take a year off from what I was doing and clear my head,” Len said in an interview with rAVe in 2014. “So, I called Joe [Girard, a car salesman for a Chevrolet dealership in Detroit, Michigan] up, told him I liked what he did, and I asked him if I could take the tapes that he produced and sell them to dealerships around the country. Joe said yes, so I packed up my dogs into a motor home and toured the country for a year. And selling Joe’s tapes was how I financed my trip.”

He then worked for Alco Paramount, where he sold Steve Jobs “six Sony professional monitors in order to demonstrate his first, original ‘wire wrap’ Apple computer” in what he believed was 1979. He moved on from Alco and created his first business after working on a line of carrying cases for specific recorders, and realizing there was a hole in the industry for just that. The rest is history.

Aside from AV, Len was passionate about fly-fishing, motorcycles and his church, New Wine Church in Fullerton. The church also serves as a “recovery home for men and women who are just getting out of prison or who have had issues with substance abuse,” Tiffany said.

Len became involved in the program, mentoring and hiring some of those in it to work in the warehouse at Premier Mounts.

“He was always looking to help people,” Tiffany said. “Everyone who met him just felt how genuine he was.”

In addition to his wife, Cheryl Dozier, with whom he lived in California, he is survived by his son, Adam Dozier; his daughters, Tiffany Dozier and Kim Bogdan; and his granddaughter, Amanda Walls.

A memorial service for Len will be planned in the next 30 days. Please reach out to Tiffany Dozier at tdozier@btechavmounts.com if you’d like more details.