Company: ATR Treehouse
Owners: David J. La Porte and Wade Ogden
Location: Providence
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Employees: 20
Type of Business: Audio/Visual production, installation
Annual Revenues: WND
It’s been a busy week for ATR Treehouse.
The audio-visual company is working what traditionally has been its biggest, most high profile job of the year: Harvard University’s commencement ceremony, which takes place this week on the Cambridge campus.
For more than a week now, ATR Treehouse technicians have been slinking cable through trees and mounting dozens of inconspicuous speakers to ensure that everyone in the estimated crowd of 30,000 can hear the vaunted goings-on.
On Wednesday afternoon, techs will watch with bated breath when comedian Will Farrell – the first speaker of Harvard’s two-day graduation proceedings – steps to the podium, and his first “George Dubya” imitations are piped throughout the outdoor Tercentenary Theater.
“There can be a great deal of stress that goes into doing some of these large events,” said Bill Murray, ATR Treehouse’s general manager. “You can hate it at the time, but once it goes off and it’s successful, it gives you a lot of satisfaction.”
ATR Treehouse sells, rents and installs theatrical lighting, sound reinforcement, visual effects, multimedia equipment and art and production supplies. It designs and builds custom stages, scaffolds and theater sets.
It also produces. For 17 years, ATR Treehouse has set the stage, so to speak, for theater productions, concerts, trade shows, conventions, parades, fairs, wedding receptions and fashion shows throughout Rhode Island.
It has transformed rickety gymnasiums into gleaming theatrical space; converted dull classrooms into multimedia labs; washed over the Rhode Island State House with a warm pink and orange glow during the 2000 millennium celebration.
While its client list grows beyond Rhode Island every year, the company remains tied to its Ocean State roots, cultivating a client list thick with representation from the state’s educational institutions and arts community.
Founded by University of Rhode Island alumni, ATR Treehouse has produced commencement ceremonies for URI and the Rhode Island School of Design (and Harvard, since 1994). It has installed A/V equipment and theatrical lighting systems in high schools from Woonsocket to Westerly.
“Between Brown, RISD, URI and Johnson & Wales, we get a good percentage of our income from the schools,” said David J. La Porte, who co-founded ATR Treehouse in 1986.
La Porte estimated that the company has retrofitted more than two dozen RISD classrooms with projection screens and sound systems. It has installed lighting and sound equipment in every Brown University theater, he said.
The business has produced every “First Night Providence” New Year’s celebration since 1987, an event that calls for nearly all the sound, lighting, staging and projection equipment in the company’s vast arsenal. It has provided the sound system for the WBRU-FM’s summer concert series for the past five years.
It has produced sales meetings and conferences for corporate clients such as GTECH Corp., American Power Conversion Corp., Cox Communications, Goldman Sachs and Walt Disney World Wide Services.
While full-scale productions like the Harvard commencement is enough to put managers’ stomachs in knots, the real challenge comes in juggling the personnel and equipment required to put on multiple big productions simultaneously.
Every season has its flurry of activity. In the spring and fall, the colleges are in full swing with ceremonies, concerts and athletic events. Summertime brings festivals, parades and outdoor shows. In winter it’s corporate-event season: conventions, trade shows, meetings, Christmas parties.
“The human resource is the hardest resource to deal with, because we get into crazy hours – nights, weekends, holidays,” Murray said. “It’s not like we have a set schedule. It’s all based on our clients’ needs.”
Last November the company relocated from its Johnston facility after acquiring a new, larger office and warehouse space on Charles Street in Providence. It recently sank nearly $10,000 into software to enhance scheduling. Two full-time employees man the company’s “operations center,” tracking “who’s going where when,” La Porte said.
Many of its 17 full-time employees have college degrees in areas like technical theater, engineering or sound reinforcement. The business also relies heavily on part-time help to handle the ebb and flow of events.
Of course, with much of its business tied to corporate events, the company was hit hard by the aftereffects of Sept. 11. A string of tentative corporate events were canceled, the company eventually was forced to close its Newport office, which had subsisted largely on meetings and conventions at the Newport Marriott.
The economy’s stubborn recovery has curbed the company’s growth from what La Porte said was 15 to 25 percent annual revenue spurts throughout the 1990s. Clients are putting off decisions until the last minute, making an already hectic business even more difficult to forecast.
But the first quarter of this year showed vast improvement over 2002, Murray
said. And besides, the company has more important things on its mind – like
making sure the podium microphone at Harvard is working.
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