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Avid to move to Boca Raton to be closer to Bob Zelin
At least that’s my working theory.
That, or Avid needs a steadier supply of Entenmann’s Crumb Cake. Relatively rare in Boston thanks to the Dunkin Donuts mafia, but not even the nuclear apocalypse will disrupt the supply of Entenmann’s to Boca.
Or maybe it’s so they’ll be closer to Oliver Peters (like Bob, living in Orlando), hoping that he’ll be able to PROTECT them from Bob.
In any case, over the next 3 years, Avid will make a $2.6 million capital investment and create 100 new jobs, and will receive a $700,000 tax refund.
The short version of the story is here.
A longer version with a lot of PR puffery (not that there’s anything wrong with that) is here.
What strikes me about this one is that it doesn’t use simply the word “headquarters,” but rather the phrase “administrative headquarters.” Is it just a stray adjective? Seems unlikely since this release was clearly scrubbed by a number of PR professionals (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but what does it mean?
In any case, I hadn’t thought of Palm Beach County, FL as a technology hub of any consequence, not even when I was living in South Florida. Add this to the very long list of things I was either wrong about, or had just never occurred to me.
Although I’ll definitely note that when I was working for Avid in Boston, moving back to Florida occurred to me pretty regularly. LOL
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20 Replies
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I have a different take entirely Tim. I think this is all about the New England Patriots, Tom Brady, and “deflategate.” Who’d wanna hang in a state that supports Superbowl cheaters, when you can get a huge tax incentive, and choose from a wide array of good NFL teams who play by the rules?
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‘Administrative’ headquarters sounds like satisfying a state based tax break.
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[Michael Gissing] “‘Administrative’ headquarters sounds like satisfying a state based tax break.”
In the second article linked, the tax break appears to be tied to the new jobs.
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[Tim Wilson] “In any case, I hadn’t thought of Palm Beach County, FL as a technology hub of any consequence, not even when I was living in South Florida. Add this to the very long list of things I was either wrong about, or had just never occurred to me.”
Obviously this means Avid is doomed and the big wigs are just getting a head start on their retirement plans. 😉
[David Roth Weiss] “wide array of good NFL teams who play by the rules?”
If playing by the rules gets you the Dolphins, Bucs and Jags I can totally understand teams wanting to cheat. 😉
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I’m surprised that anyone is moving to Florida on purpose…
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I guess Louie wanted better winter weather. And the tax credit. Poor Marianna. Now the suits are just across the state! 😉
Interesting less than a month after this article (which has a LOT of subjectivity in it)
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
I’m hearing back office functions – HR, marketing, finance, etc. Note that this puts them in a good central position to service Latin America, Africa, and Europe, too. My guess is that software development stays in MA. But truthfully, all that is pretty spread out among various states and countries. So, very little nuts and bolts gear is manufactured in MA anymore.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I’m hearing back office functions – HR, marketing, finance, etc….My guess is that software development stays in MA.”
My first reaction to the story was, “But there’s no pool of appropriately-skilled software developers in South Florida.” It made no sense.
Moving the rest is fine….but still seems a stretch. They’d already moved to New Hampshire for what I always guessed were tax reasons, and they’re spending over $2 million to make the move, with “only” a $700.000 tax rebate. How long is it going to take them to earn back another $1.3 million in savings just to cover the cost of the move?
I gotta confess that creating 100 new non-engineering jobs makes no sense to me either.
I’m not sure that many other moves pass my sniff test either.
— Boston is closer to Europe than Florida. Having flown to Europe from both, I can testify that the difference in travel time and expense weighs against FL.
— Sales may be moving to Boca as well…but if the argument is “better service to Caribbean and SA,” this too makes no sense.
I don’t KNOW that this is still the case, but I’d think that Hollywood is still Avid’s key market, yes? Hollywood is being held down by a small Avid office plus a world-class VAR (Mike Cavanagh’s Key Code in Burbank), plus a wide variety of razor-sharp rental and support companies. Incredibly little expense to Avid.
Latin America should be working the same way, right? Even if Miami were the hub of it (Telemundo and Univision are both based in Miami for example), you don’t need the whole non-dev company there for that. South America and the Caribbean really are incredibly accessible, even the western edge of the SA continent. Only 3 hours to Quito Ecuador, which is in the US Central time zone!
But again, this is something for a small sales team to handle. Not the rest of the company in a way that’s also adding 100 new jobs.
[Scott Witthaus] “Interesting less than a month after this article (which has a LOT of subjectivity in it)”
Any stock analyst who claims objectivity is a cynical charlatan at best, if not an actual thief preying on the gullible and witless. In any case, absolutely and unequivocally sinister. Certainly someone to be avoided at all costs. The fact that they’re not trying to hoodwink anyone on this count is salutatory. Full marks.
I can’t comment on the accounting issues, although I find some of the commenters more persuasive. I was struck by “we normally don’t pay attention to ex-employee lawsuits, except this time where it’s super-important,” and was surprised that they didn’t even try to justify breaking their own rule. They didn’t try to persuade me, and I was indeed unpersuaded.
I CAN comment on their grasp of the industry, which is almost dizzying in its cluelessness. They cite among the pressures on Avid the entry of SONY into the professional editing scene? Sony’s Avid-targeted NLE is long gone, and as underrated as Vegas is, how many sales has Sony Vegas been taking from Media Composer?
The author also fails to account for Avid’s major sources of revenue in storage and Pro Tools, where (with ALL the respect in the world to those companies) neither Apple or Adobe is drawing major blood, nor has this been part of their model.
And as has ALWAYS been the case, Avid’s play was never OVERALL marketshare, but service to its core customers. As Andrew Kimery and others have pointed out, Avid’s position on the ground in core Hollywood production may be firmer than ever, certainly firmer than the recent past. We can debate that (hell, we can debate EVERYTHING), but this seems another serious lapse in analysis.
Again noting that I don’t have the skills to address the accounting analysis, I think the author underrepresents the role that the SEC and Justice Department had in checking Avid’s math before recertification. Not that one should overstate that either, but the author acts like it never happened.
Still, what it lacked in rigor it more than made up for in vigor. LOL I like that. I’ll be reading more of their stuff, but until I know that they understand other markets better than ours, I won’t be using them to guide my investment. I’m really glad to read it though!
[Scott Witthaus] ” Poor Marianna. Now the suits are just across the state! ;-)”
I note your wink, and return it with a smile. 🙂
I had first gotten to know Marianna when I was a Media 100 customer, but one of my great pleasures after I became a full-time corporate weasel at Avid was when she joined the company a year after I did.
(I should note that I have no dog in the Avid stock debate. I sold my stock years ago at a huge loss, just because I was tired of thinking about it. LOL No bitterness. I love the people I worked with, including Marianna, and think that they’re some of the sharpest in the business….but I wasn’t shy about expressing my reservations when I worked there, just as I am now.)
On the customer side, Marianna is obviously a peerless gem. But within Avid, her primary role was supervising release engineering. Customers really don’t get to see just how skilled she is at this, and can’t imagine how closely involved she is in every part of the technical side of the company: engineering, QA, documentation, manufacturing, support — she was functionally the COO for anything release-related.
Which means that she’ll be going to Boston exactly as often as she has been. It may just be providing more of an escape than it used to. LOL
[Shane Ross] “I’m surprised that anyone is moving to Florida on purpose…”
There’s that. More than anything else. smh
That’s why I can ONLY assume that it’s to be closer to Bob where they can hear his pounding hooves and feel his hot breath on their neck as they duck at the last minute to avoid his baseball bat.
Plus free-flowing access to Entenmann’s crumb cake. Anyone who has eaten Entenmann’s crumb cake knows that I am not joking about that.
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[Shane Ross] “I’m surprised that anyone is moving to Florida on purpose…”
If you’re in the PRM (people’s republic of Massachusetts), I suppose anything looks good…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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It was the snow.
As for the Entenmann’s, they only had to go to NYC for that.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf
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