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St. Pete car audio company to break $100M in revenue
Tampa native Kevin Schlenker knew he would become a businessman, but unbeknownst to him, that path would lead him to drop out of college and create a company that is now on track to top $100 million in revenue.
“As much as I had the ability to do well in school, I wasn’t excited about it. I was getting bored,” said Schlenker, the founder and CEO of Skar Audio, a car audio products distribution company in St. Petersburg.
“I saw my uncle’s successful business career, and I wanted to strive for that lifestyle – not from a monetary aspect, but to have that same type of passion,” Schlenker said.
Schlenker’s uncle is Marc Lore, a serial entrepreneur and former founder and CEO of Jet.com, an e-commerce platform that Walmart acquired in 2018 for approximately $3 billion in a cash deal.
A short weekend-long trip to Jet.com’s New Jersey HQ was enough to ignite a fire inside Schlenker.
The idea of selling audio products with competitive prices clicked after seeing numerous affluent students blast music while driving their luxurious cars around the campus. “I have a natural knack for music and audio. This combination and goal sparked my business concept,” Schlenker said.
To test the water, a family friend provided a small loan to Schlenker to purchase 100 speakers. He quickly sold the speakers, yielding $9,000 in sales.
One year later, Schlenker, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, made the impulsive move to ditch the traditional college-bound plan.
Schlenker inked a lease for a warehouse in Orlando and booked a trip to China to meet six different factory owners. He ultimately secured a business relationship with one of the vendors to supply Skar Audio with amplifiers, subwoofers and speakers.
“Car audio specifically was behind the times. You still had to go to the shop and get your system put in. It was exorbitantly expensive. I was thinking about how consumers can save those costs,” he said.
Skar Audio has a direct-to-consumer model, rather than solely selling products to businesses.
“We want to have sustainably cheaper great products in comparison to what’s out there,” he said.
In the first year of operating in 2012, Schlenker earned $1 million in revenue. The business organically grew, and Schlenker opened a warehouse in Brandon. Sales continuously climbed year over year, reaching over $16 million by 2015.
In 2019, Schlenker opened the current 100,000-square-foot facility at 9700 18th St N., where just over 50 full-time workers manage the thousands of orders arriving and shipping overseas.
The headcount may seem abundantly low as the warehouse receives 50 to 60 containers from the Port of Tampa and other logistic centers on a monthly basis, but Schlenker says it’s all manageable.
“I am very much a geek at heart. I sit here and write code all day for the business,” he said, showing the software program he built from scratch. “I’ve been able to save a lot of employee overhead by building all of this out. The benefit of this is a lot of companies struggle with scale. You plateau or bring in investors and may end up selling the company.”
The majority of customers, he said, discover Skar Audio through ads, word of mouth and third-party sites.
Schlenker said he spends roughly $30,000 a day on Facebook ads alone.
To grapple with the growth while keeping overhead costs low, Schlenker recently hired Bryce Smith as the CPA and VP of finance. Smith previously served as the audit manager of the global accounting firm KPMG.
The tactics of managing the internal organization and product delivery software, investing in ads and hiring strong talent have propelled the company forward.
In 2020, the revenue bumped up to over $53 million. One year later, Skar Audio’s revenue increased to $89.5 million. Schlenker attributes the spike to the government’s disbursement of stimulus checks, which provided consumers more spending power. Schlenker said he sold out of products at times as people were quickly buying speakers and learning about the installation process.
Although the consumer spending impact of the pandemic has dissolved, Skar Audio is still experiencing high demand – so much so that Schlenker says in the next two years, he will have to lease or purchase a 200,000-square-foot warehouse in St. Pete.
For now, he is leveraging his 3,500-square-foot building in Las Vegas as a satellite shipping location.
Schlenker said is not considering taking the initial public offering route with Skar Audio; he doesn’t want to let go of the reins just yet, and wants to remain in full control of the business.
Lee
June 20, 2023at10:19 pm
I’m in the audio business. Have been for 40 plus years now. Skar is not “high quality”. Overall, it does not sound good. It’s a cheap line marketed directly to the consumer who in turn tears a lot of it up. He’s done great with his marketing, but don’t get the rest twisted.
connor price
June 8, 2023at9:03 am
It would be nice to see him reinvest some of his earnings into American manufacturing. As well as innovating and designing new audio products to futher the industry/community as a whole.
Jerry
June 7, 2023at4:02 pm
You can’t blame that on Skar Audio.
The Install, Enclosure , Electrical & the operator,
all play crucial role in how a system will perform.
9 times out of 10 the operator is to blame.
If it’s playing when it leaves a shop, it’s not the equipment.
Wesley Wilson
June 7, 2023at3:10 pm
Anyone speaking on Skar product quality without having actually used the products should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ve had 3 of their subwoofer lines. All of them outperform expensive brands costing twice as much. None of them failed and they sound amazing. Speakers can always fail due to user error and other system malfunctions but in my experience these are very high quality products
Anthony San Martin
June 7, 2023at10:33 am
Skar audio is a affordable option to people that want car audio equipment that sounds good.
Jonathan Lee
June 7, 2023at8:57 am
I’m glad he’s successful, but the speakers aren’t the greatest quality.. many friends have bought them and constantly have issues with blown voice coils and other technical problems. I suppose over time, he will get all the kinks out and maybe spend some more money or r and d
Tony Wagner
June 6, 2023at3:17 pm
Congratulations on your success!