FM Systems On 40 Years Of Sound Service & Steady Expansion

Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare drove home the lesson that slow and steady wins the race. Audio and live production company FM Systems has held to that as a guiding business principle.

FM Systems was launched 40 years ago by Terry Reeves as a regional operation in Canada, carefully expanding nationally in recent years, alongside a number of key acquisitions as part of a diversification drive moving into the West Coast of the U.S.

Marlin Jones, the company’s President and CEO, joined the company in 1998. “I was pushing cases and just a kid so didn’t really know much,” he says of his start there. Reeves had instilled inside the company a philosophy of doing things right and doing things well rather than chasing rapid, and often unsustainable, growth.

Jones became a partner in late 2007 and eventually went on to buy out Reeves in 2016. The company has continued to expand, helped by large capital investment. In 2018, FM Systems bought its first L-Acoustics rig.

“That was the turning point for us,” says Jones, explaining that it is important to have the market-leader technologies in order to maintain existing clients and attract new ones. “It became a lot easier to advance shows and really grow the company.”

FM Systems’ diversification strategy started in 2019 with the acquisition of a backline company, merging it with their own backline inventory and rebranding it as FourForty Backline. Two years later, it acquired road case manufacturer Rock Solid Cases and in 2024 it set up equipment transportation division Jones & Co, creating a vertically integrated ecosystem for the company.

The company had traditionally done business in the U.S. out of its Canadian offices, but formalized this with the opening of a Seattle office in late 2023. “That has really helped springboard our growth in the US and the Pacific Northwest, as well as down into northern California,” explains Jones. “That is really the focus of our growth going forward.”

Kelsey Haist first came into contact with the company as a client but joined as Director of Business & Corporate Development in 2021. “What really impressed me was Marlin’s vision and his desire to take a beat to realign with where the company had been and where it was intending to go,” she says.

“How do we scale it and make sure we stay true to ourselves in that process? Marlin is very intentional in making sure that we don’t lose sight of who we are.”

To have the best and most advanced equipment in live audio is essential for the business, but the investment costs involved in staying ahead of the pack are enormous, especially as margins get squeezed.

With a full-time staff of 50, the company still has the capabilities to support 1,500 events a year. In Canada, it covers concerts by local bar bands all the way up to stadium shows, although its focus in the US is on larger shows.

“Within Canada, we don’t want to lose where we came from, so we make sure we maintain those relations,” says Jones. “Some of them have been our clients for twenty or thirty years and we want to make sure we support them.”

For Jones, growth must happen at a speed that does not compromise the quality of the company’s offerings. “There are no shortcuts to success,” he insists. “We follow the twenty-mile march idea rather than try to sprint in order to gain growth all at once, but then get too big too fast and face all the problems that come with that.”

For now, expansion will focus on the West Coast of the U.S., serving the main touring routes there and moving into larger events. “We want to make sure that we don’t lose ourselves in that market,” says Jones. “We aren’t looking globally. It is continuing that twenty-mile march and that consistency, moving forward very strategically.”

Haist adds, “Acquisition is going to be in our future.” But that is wholly conditional. “We want to ensure we have a sustainable model that will continue to provide a service; not just growing for the sake of growing. We want to stay true to who we are.”