21st Century Company: Chicago Scenic Studios
As seen in the Chicago Sun-Times on May 14, 2001.
By Francine Knowles, Business Reporter
Chicago Scenic Studios Inc. designs, builds and manages scenery sets used by clients such as theaters, TV shows and corporate presentations. Its diverse resume includes setting scenes for DisneyQuest; the Democratic National Convention; ABC Saturday Football; the "Oprah Winfrey Show;" the Lyric Opera; Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s annual meeting, and the soon-to-open Amazing Chicago exhibit at Navy Pier. Here are the views of 46-year-old Robert F. Doepel, founder and president of the 22-year-old Chicago-based company:
Challenges: "The biggest is getting the crafts people in here. When we started the business 22 years ago, we used to use the theater schools. Universities were producing people who had the technical skills, the artisan skills.
"What we're getting out of college now, they're all being trained as lighting designers or production managers, set designers. But they don't have the core craft skills. Our workers are hands-on people, so it's finding people that still want to work with their hands, [work in] crafts. We have painters, carpenters, electricians, seamstresses, but they're all very much from an artistic bent.
"Another challenge is we're getting to an environment that's replacing us with virtual sets on television. So what we used to build, they're now doing electronically. As a design-build-manage firm, our bread and butter here is building things. So that's sort of hard for us to stomach."
Response: "Our designers are getting more and more up to speed in terms of computer systems. They're doing virtual walk throughs for presentations to our customers, so they'll be able to apply those skill sets to building virtual scenery for television.
"We're also utilizing computers greatly in communicating with our customers, doing drawings. We have computer controlled machines now that are making us much more efficient and allowing us to increase our quality."
Staffing solutions: "We have an apprentice program at our company. We're certainly working with the unions that represent our people in this apprentice program. It's doing very well. [To recruit], we use the Internet. We do advertising."
Uniqueness: "Size and skill level. We've been at this for 22 years. The typical life of a scene shop is about seven years. So we've beat the numbers.
"There're a lot of little competitors. There are not a lot of large competitors. We're one of the five biggest in the country in what we do in terms of the entertainment and theatrical side. There are exhibit companies that are much larger than us, but that's only 20 percent of our market share. If you look at the traditional scenery business, we're one of the leaders, the largest in the Midwest by quite a bit."
Lessons learned: "The importance of the diversity of market share has been the biggest thing. We have two guidelines. We never let any single customer become more than 10 percent of our business, and we don't let any market share become more than 20 percent of our business. So, we will not do more than 20 percent television or 20 percent business theater or 20 percent family entertainment centers.
"We'll take on one or two additional large projects, such as the Democratic National Convention or a DisneyQuest type project, but then we pretty much rely on our core markets.
"We try to keep them [below] 20 percent. Some years they'll sneak up to 25 percent, maybe even 30 percent, but we won't allow it to become a consistent core business that they will always be 30 or 40 percent of our business, because when the economy shifts, then whole market segments will drop out. We can adjust to a 20 percent market shift, but we can't adjust to a 30 or 40 percent market shift.
"Back in 1989, 1990 that happened to us. The economy went down. We had the Gulf War, and our business theater unit, which was about 40 to 50 percent of our business, just collapsed due to all the business meetings being canceled. It is one of the first things corporations cut back on.
"Unfortunately, we had to lay off people. It really hurt. We laid off 30 percent of our staff. It was a rough couple of years after that. I had to let people go that had been with me for 10 years. That really hurt. I don't want to have to experience that again."
Milestones: "Doing the two Democratic National Conventions were both big projects for us. To do it originally in 1996 was a big jump for us, and then to have established the rapport and the reputation to be able to have them transport us out to Los Angeles to do it in 2000 was even a bigger thing for us.
"We brought to the table a lot of diversity in terms of what we were able to do and skill level. We had an existing relationship with the production designer. We had a really strong reputation, and we came up with some very innovative ideas in terms of how to build the convention. In the past, they did what they call build-and-place. They would literally build [sets] in the stadium or the convention hall out of dry wall and steel studs. For the most part, we built probably 85 percent of the convention off-site, brought it in, assembled it very quickly, which allowed for much better scheduling.
"In 2000, we were responsible for the management of all the construction services, and [we] also built a good portion of [the set] here in Chicago."
Stress relievers: "The best way for me to relieve stress is to actually go work on the shop floor. That's where I started. I've got a son, and we build stuff [at home]. I work in the garden. I've got a five-year-old daughter who loves to garden with me. So it's physical activity of any kind, even if it's pounding nails."