Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephen Pavlik. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Stephen Pavlik, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
How this all actually started is kind of silly, and not too important as this “business” has been around in some form for years through multiple DBA’s in multiple cities. It didn’t become interesting or productive until around 2020/2021. Either way, this company designs and manufactures unique antenna solutions for the music industry. I was and still am a touring Sound Engineer, specifically a Monitor Engineer. I mix what a live band hears during a show which means I am responsible for a lot of inbound and outbound radio frequency (RF) signals, think like wireless microphones, guitars and wireless monitoring systems. This leads sound engineers in this positions to get involved in educating themselves with knowledge of radio frequency systems, some to a greater extent than others. In my case, I went hard down that rabbit hole. One day, to tie this all back together, our antenna case that held all the antennas for those inbound and outbound signals disappeared. Really it got pushed on another truck and I figured this is what happened but we wouldn’t see it again for a month or two. In this time, rather than tell my bosses I lost thousands of dollars of antennas that we needed, I decided I would just build some to get us through until the antenna case could be located. And that is exactly how we got through with our shows until our antenna case was found and returned to us. In the process of building all these antennas, once I was finished with the last antenna I was sad, this experience was something that I didn’t want to be over. And that is how this company started. This was probably back around 2015/2016 and at the time the antennas we were creating were pretty bad. I mean they worked, but we had nothing to offer as far as competition with what was on the market at the time.
Now fast forward to 2020 during the pandemic, one of the biggest challenges in the infancy of a manufacturing start up is how do you make custom and specific parts without draining your entire bank account? Injection molding can produce cheap parts, only once you make the initial investments in the molds. This can be around $8,000-$10,000 for a “family” of small parts. For a specific example a $10,000 mold can make (4) 25x30mm parts. If you are a very small start up company or you just want to prototype something that pricing may be completely out of the picture. That is just one example of manufacturing options and there are more processes needed in our case such as milling and thermoforming but for the moment these limitations we’re holding back a lot of ideas we had. Now back to 2020 during the pandemic, I personally was out of work, furloughed technically, and was looking for different avenues for income as I was a sound engineer, who worked with large crowds. Something the pandemic really didn’t like. Through the help of Sound Design Live, an established online educational outlet, I built an online course to teach audio guys radio frequency but after that I still needed something. It was around Christmas and I got my first 3d printer. At first I was just having fun with it then realized how capable it was and how useful it could be. All those parts that needed to be custom made that we could not afford were suddenly accessible, and that changed everything. Once again the big shift towards where we are now came about by accident as did the company. I was trying to repair a common antenna used in the field, at this time without good antennas to compete with the industry we did a lot of repairs, and created something that didn’t quite work as a 1:1 repair. But it was something that made us realize that we could now make this type of antenna on our own. It also helped that at the time I was reading a lot of research papers trying to get new ideas of how we could adapt antenna technology in other fields to out little tiny corner of RF in the music industry. What we ended up with is still our best selling product. Our AMH-3 Helical antenna.
Getting back on track from concept and what we had to figure out to make this work, the short answer is a lot! Of course the antenna had to function like an antenna, for us that was the easy part. But how do you make a product? And in our case, how do you start from the ground up and create something that people recognize as a product while on a very tight budget? We had to learn to implement processes that were easy to get locally, like powder coating but on a tight budget we had to do it in house, we modified pizza ovens, made make shift spray booths, scoured the internet for hours, maybe even days to find ways to cover imperfections in our designs and what was physically in front of us to make a “product” something that didn’t only work great, but look great and equally important, survive it’s environment. This is part of manufacturing and product design that still stresses me out with every product we launch. But you have to remember that no one gets it right the first time. We’ve had to make changes to our products down the line just like how auto manufacturers have recalls from time to time, at least that’s how I like to think about it. To avoid the risks of investors or loans, we created methods to manufacture almost everything in house which allowed us to keep pricing down and literally build the company from the ground up. Through that, we have a lot of experience taking product ideas through the point of conception to knowing how we want to make it, figuring out how to actually make it, then figuring out how to make people trust it. Which for the latter, I cannot stress enough that user reviews or testimonials are invaluable. And if you are creating something technical, even if not regulated to do so, independent laboratory testing is arguably necessary.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We design and manufacturer RF accessories for the music industry. Mainly this is antennas, cables and filters. We have our products that we come up with and develop and then we have products that customers or even just interested people reaching out to us to inquire about. We actually had no intention of making a circular polarized omnidirectional antenna. Then someone asked us about it and we made it. We are currently working on a filter to block two way radio signals that can be very powerful and more or less overlap in the radio frequency spectrum we use. These are both exciting projects that almost makes us more of a custom build company. However, we just launched a new product! An antenna system that has never been done before, our LAS-UHF multi-mode antenna system. It took about two years and I’d have to say that it is what we are most proud of. That and receiving our first patent last summer. I think what sets us apart comes down to a few things. One is that we use what we have learned as far as manufacturing almost all parts in house to keep prices low to the end user. When we say we offer affordable antenna solutions we really mean in! Another is that some of us are still touring audio engineers so we have a direct hands on knowledge of what is currently in the industry and what is needed. That is a huge factor that drives our R&D. We also painstakingly engineer our products to be competitive. We have at least one of all of our competitors antennas on our shelf that we constantly do comparisons with to make sure our products are on par if not better than what is currently on the market. This is as much a passion project as it is a company.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We pivot constantly in our product development. I was going back through a box we have in our lab labeled “sh*t boards, please recycle” pardon the French, and saw an older prototype of one of our antenna systems. This older prototype is almost unrecognizable from the final product. I think when ideas come to fruition physically, you can more easily see problems than when just working with CAD programs. There are other times when we’ve had to pivot to change material types to meet demanding environments that we had not originally anticipated our products operating in.
Specifically, when we first launched the AMH-3 Helical antenna we did a lot of testing for ambient temperatures slightly over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We had a lot of customers in Texas and knew the summers would be in that range. To take it to the next level, we increased the temperature around the antenna and determined that the exterior ABS plastic cover, sometimes called the radome, would melt before then internal components would see issues from heat. The next summer however had some record heat waves and we notices a degradation of the internal components of some of our antennas that we keep on hand and continually test for failures once launched. After noticing this, we placed a digital thermometer inside one of the antenna’s radome that could record temperatures and log the data over a two week period. We realized that while the ambient temperature was still slightly over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the antenna, in a case, in a truck, being heated all day long by the sun could actually reach internal temperatures over 120 degrees Fahrenheit leading to the internal degradation. We learned that one of the previous tests we did to increase the temperature of the antenna, where the radome melted before internal temperatures got too high, was a faulty test. We used radiated heat as that was the only method we had at the moment to increase the temperature. This super heated one specific area of the antenna rather than gradually heating the entire antenna by bringing up the ambient temperature.
In the aftermath of this we changed all plastics used in all of our antenna products as well as invested in a “scientific oven” which is kind of like a precision convection oven that we can now use to raise ambient temperatures to extreme levels to make sure all of our products can handle their environments. In general there are so many examples throughout history where things look good or work on paper but are completely different in reality. You have to be comfortable with this, this is getting close to the art of compromise which is a necessary evil. Be ready to adapt, because you will inevitably have to.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Be nice, share what you can and always try to help. I have always tried to help educate people as much as possible in the field that we specialize in. Sometimes that means very long emails to strangers trying to help them understand concepts even if you know they will never purchase your product. But they will remember that, and I too used to email companies to ask them questions. It helped my understanding of things that felt highly technical and out of reach. And if they took the time to answer I never forgot it. Plus an educated industry will in turn only help you, especially if you believe in what you are doing or creating.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sventenna.com
