About the Episode
In this episode of Corralling the Chaos, Ryan Amen — General Manager of Design Sound — talks about the year he stopped chasing the next gig long enough to ask why he was chasing it at all. Ryan’s path into sound started in a junkyard as a teenager, banging on a metal vat with the biggest pipe he could carry. Seventeen years into running an audio company for weddings, galas, and live music in the LA market, he hit a different kind of question, and the answer reshaped how he leads, what he asks of his team, and what Design Sound is actually selling. He and Angela get into the discomfort of asking, the survey that told him more than he wanted to hear, and what’s on the other side for companies still running flat out.
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Takeaways
Takeaway 1: Questioning the whole thing isn’t a crisis. It’s a check-in. Ryan hit a point last year where he started wondering whether he wanted to keep doing this at all, and he’s clear about how that felt. “It’s scary because you’ve built your life around it. You’ve built your family, you’ve built the network of everything.” His read now: the fear is normal, and the question is worth asking anyway. “I think it’s actually extremely healthy to make it a check-in and say, hey, am I on the right path?”
Takeaway 2: Growth and momentum can hide the fact that you’re still on the treadmill. Dave Ramsey’s book gave Ryan a name for where his company actually sat, and it stung. Every business starts as a treadmill operator: get through this event, then the next one, then the next. “I realized holy cow, we’re still there. In many ways, we’re still running on the treadmill.”
Takeaway 3: The why turned out to be a service business, not an audio business. When Ryan finally landed the answer, it broke into three groups his team is accountable to. The couple or client paying for a milestone moment. The planner juggling a thousand details, who deserves to spend zero of them worrying about audio: “I want to be the least of their worries because that’s what they deserve.” And the musicians and speakers on the mic, who spent years getting good. “They’ve earned our excellence.” He also pushed his team off perfection, which he calls unattainable and subjective, and toward something they can actually hit. “Let’s move away from that and instead think about excellence. We know what that is. We know what that sounds like.”
Takeaway 4: Asking your crew for the truth means being ready for it. Ryan ran an anonymous team survey this spring, and he was upfront with everyone about why. “I want to do better by everybody.” The results weren’t what he expected. “I was surprised how it wasn’t as rosy as I thought.” The biggest theme was a communication gap between management and the people out in the field. He and his core team spent the first half of the year working on it, and he says the crew feels more connected for it.
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