The building at the corner of Second and Main Streets toes West Dundee`s traditional Victorian line: an 1871 three-story brick with a storefront that`s loaded with woodwork, soaring ceilings, creaky floors and a bit of stained glass thrown in for sparkle.
But check tradition at the door if you should visit, for this is where creativity and the unexpected reign.
They do quite nicely without conventions, thank you.
Indeed, there are hot pink and turquoise walls, stacks of clutter, an oversized Minnie Mouse watch wall clock, books that ponder the meaning of life, tangles of cords and wires, and mountains of computer, video and electronic equipment, all leaving little room for the conventions of business most people observe.
This is New Orient Media, a place where funk meets antique, Victorian greets hi-tech, and owner Bob Sandidge orchestrates an electronic playground that carries the dreams, goals and messages of businesses across the country to their respective audiences.
New Orient Media is a communications firm. A school. A living lab. A training ground. A coterie of unconventional graphics and video nuts who wear flannel shirts and jeans to work and make their living playing with a bunch of expensive equipment and staging media shows for three-piece suits who meet in hotels for business meetings.
It`s where the owner has no office to speak of, and the company president claims just a cubbyhole when he`s not scrubbing out film processing equipment. It`s where job titles mean less than everyone pitching in to get a project done.
”We do everything here,” Sandidge says, referring to both the media productions the company creates and the work of his employees. ”We have a generalist concept, which means no person is in a job slot. Each has a certain talent or expertise, but they all teach each other, and each has a broad band of responsibility.”
In the last 20 years, New Orient Media has grown from a part-time business conducted out of Sandidge`s basement to his present West Dundee location where the firm bills up to $1 million in sales each year.
But 3-D video productions, for which clients don special cardboard glasses to view images that virtually jump off the screen and reach into the audience, are his particular claim to fame.
More than a few corporate types who may have viewed more than a few sales or training videos appreciate the novelty of this approach.
”It kind of blows their minds,” said Gary Esterline, who as director of marketing for an Oak Brook firm that remanufactures auto parts hired Sandidge to create a 3-D video as a way to stimulate the sales force. ”Everybody has seen videos and it`s expected. But when (the audience) puts on the glasses and see these images coming out at them, it`s something they don`t expect and they never forget it.”
Said Phil Weintraub, president of the Chicago Audio/Visual Producers Association: ”Some of the techniques Bob started using years ago have become standards in the industry, and he`s been particularly innovative in 3-D. He`s one of the few people I know doing things in that area. It`s a difficult process, and very few people understand how to do it or are willing to take the time to learn.”
New Orient Media is a company that would logically be located in Chicago. But Sandidge chose Main Street in West Dundee, a small town located downstream from his Algonquin home on the Fox River, enticed by the cheapest space he could find, $150 for a basement.
”But in looking to the future I figured the clients would likely be people who would be buying creativity and not care where I live,” he said.
”People come out here in their three-piece suits and look around and loosen up their ties. When you`re in Dundee you`re not caught up in someone else`s craziness.”
Although he quickly outgrew that space and moved across the street to the three-story brick building, Sandidge is committed to keeping his business small even though he draws big name clients, including Komatsu Dresser in Libertyville (formerly International Harvester) and CR Industries in Elgin
(formerly Chicago Rawhide). With a staff of 10, he offers a smorgasbord of audio-visual and print services to clients across the country who have a message to deliver.
The company is geared toward developing in-house communications for motivating sales people, orienting new employees, providing new product information to distributors and sales people. They produce slide shows, computer generated 3-D slides, animation and graphics, multi-image shows as well as putting together marketing concepts that include direct mail and videos that sell a product or service.
Bob Russell, currently in business for himself, was manager of marketing for CR Industries when they tapped New Orient Media for a project. Said Russell: ”In a sales meeting you`re trying to present your (company) well to management and hype the sales people, so the opening and closing shows are very important in setting that tone. The use of 3-D (for those shows) is pushing the state of the art and it really blew everyone`s minds.”
Russell said the sales people came in and groaned about having to put on the glasses, recalling those old 3-D movies from the `50s. But after seeing the opening show, they asked throughout the four-day meeting to see it again and again.
”A lot of these sales people have been to these meetings, so you really have to dig down and try to figure out how to surprise them and grab them in a different way,” Russell said.
”Bob produces for results that burn an impression on an audience, and he does that tastefully,” said Weintraub. ”His graphic style is of a very high caliber, and he isn`t a producer who tries to find the latest hot word. He respects people and really listens to them, so he doesn`t have a sales aura about him.”
Sandidge sums up his style by saying he likes ”rubbing things up against something that might not necessarily fit for the creativity of it.”
It`s a philosophy that neatly explains the Victorian high-tech office decor that features out-dated video equipment mounted as wall sculptures and splashed with magenta, orange and fuschia paint.
And you`d expect no less of a guy whose recipe for whole cooked turkey calls for smearing it with peanut butter and topping it off with chili powder before baking it (”everybody who comes over steals that recipe,” he claims). Although it may appear Sandidge likes to keep things slightly off-center, both his management style and personal life are snugly wrapped in the same package and tied up with his philosophy of living. If he appears to take the business of living a bit too seriously, it`s only because he`s spent most of his 48 years trying to figure out just who he is and where he`s going and to achieve a synergy between his working and non-working lives.
”My life is my life and I`ve never departmentalized it,” Sandidge said. He may not fit his life-or his employees-into slots, but he has built his career in stages. Beginning in southern Illinois where he was raised in the tiny town of Grayville (”the town is just like it`s name,” he quipped), Sandidge knew he was going someplace. And he knew he was going to be in radio. In high school, he built a home sound system and played around with being a disk jockey. He had recorded audition tapes of himself playing songs and doing commercials, which he sent to radio stations in hopes of landing a job. ”They all turned me down, but I was really persistent because I knew this was what I wanted to do. And later on many of the ones that rejected me ended up hiring me,” Sandidge recalled.
Eventually a Grayville radio station hired him to push the buttons to run commercials during broadcasts of local sports events.
”I knew that was how it would happen, that you just have to hang around a radio station until one day somebody doesn`t come in and they ask you to
(broadcast). And that`s just what happened,” he said.
His high school English teacher and the program director at the station helped him tame his Southern twang, and a year later he took a job at another radio station that had first rejected him.
At that station he worked on a show called ”The Scooby Doo Club,” the area`s first rock `n` roll program. The show frequently aired at grocery stores and gas stations, and ”tons of people showed up, even though rock `n` roll wasn`t really a big deal yet.”
In 1962, he took a job at a radio station in Southern California that had a much larger audience than the one he`d had in Illinois. It was also a time when the Beatles and the Beach Boys were gaining in popularity. ”We did a lot of surf music, and since the Beatles were just breaking, the British stuff, too,” he said.
But he didn`t like living in California, and 18 months later he was back in Illinois doing radio work for a station in Robinson, near Grayville.
”This was the early `60s with all the war stuff, and I was getting straight on where I was going to be on that,” Sandidge said.
After extensive reading to hone his position on war, Sandidge said, he was prepared to reject military service and go to Allentown, the downstate prison where convicted war resisters served their terms. But instead his application for status as a conscientious objector was approved in 1964.
”Vietnam was not yet big news, so that really wasn`t my issue. I read a lot and my position was well thought out. But I was the first CO my southern Illinois draft board had ever seen, and they were very conservative farmers. There was major harassment.”
Sandidge chose to spend his two years alternate service as a conscientious objector at the Elgin State Hospital where he worked as a psychiatric aide on a ward that serviced alcoholics. But he ended up staying for six years.
During that time, he worked his way into the training department, and once again, he found himself turning to the media. He put together a television station on the hospital grounds and helped develop therapeutic video tools-he scavenged some of the electrical parts from dumps-that enabled patients and their families to better understand how they interacted with one another.
”We`d tape the interaction between patients and their families and then play them back for them. When they actually saw (how they interacted), they could no longer deny (negative aspects of their behaviors),” Sandidge said.
As the power of that video technique unfolded, Sandidge expanded upon it to develop video training materials for employees as well. The result was what he described as a ”black humor piece disguised as training material to get people to look at their role in the institution.”
”It was a way of trying to change the system from the inside because the institution treated patients like a herd rather than individuals,” said Art Dykstra, executive director of Trinity Services in Joliet, a social services agency.
Dykstra worked at Elgin State Hospital with Sandidge as a psychologist and said the video resulted in changes in how new employees were trained to work with mental health patients.
”This sensitized employees to the patients in getting them to realize they were not God in somebody else`s life, even though they were the ones with the keys,” Dykstra said.
The training piece, called ”Critical Mass,” garnered national attention and was based upon the idea that employees make up an institution and each had a responsibility to make the organization better.
It`s an idea that holds true in his own business today.
”The way the work goes through here is through individual responsibility,” he said. ”We`re not a system that`s here to produce outcomes, and we`re not just maintaining a roomful of drawing boards. Work comes from everyone being responsible and everyone asking for a higher level of functioning and higher expectations.”
Those years at Elgin State also gave him the chance to experiment with communications and apply all that he was learning. When he left in 1971, he freelanced as a consultant to companies that needed marketing and training services. He ended up working full time for one of his clients, Wurlitzer Organs in De Kalb, a move he likened to going to business school.
”I had only worked in small businesses, and I learned that
(corporations) have their own kind of craziness, too,” Sandidge said.
”Electronics were coming in, and Wurlitzer had super electronic capabilities. It seemed logical for them to get into it, but they used it to build jukeboxes instead. I saw that as putting themselves in the grave.”
Wurlitzer was, in fact, bought out by another company. But before that could happen, Sandidge started New Orient Media in 1971 as a part-time business out of the basement of his Elgin home with a partner ”to do some media stuff.”
But the original idea for New Orient was based on developing a school model, not a business model, where people concerned about social issues could learn how the media works and gain access to it in order to promote their causes.
”It would have a central dome for the studio and (provide) a place for people to work and live while learning about the media. And we`d have paying clients to support the school,” Sandidge explained.
Although the domed building never came to be (New Orient moved to West Dundee`s Main Street in 1972), Sandidge`s ideas on helping people use the media to better their lives still holds firm. And that applies to both the employees and the clients.
”The emphasis here is on the development of the people working here and on selling (clients) experiences that leave people in a better place than when we found them,” Sandidge said.
”(New Orient) is a unique workplace, and it`s not anything we take for granted,” said New Orient`s president, Tim Haley, who joined the company seven years ago. ”We have a real sense of family, and everything is very open here. We almost work in unison with little communication (among the employees) because we understand what each of us can do.”
Haley`s educational background crystallizes New Orient`s commitment to creativity over traditional business practices. As president of a business, you`d think he`d be inclined to pursue an advanced degree in business administration, but he`s working on a master`s degree in history.
”History has always interested me, and it`s something I enjoy doing,”
Haley explained. ”It`s a fun hobby, and education is important to me.”
Haley said the technical side of the communications business can be learned easily and New Orient places a higher value on creativity.
”There`s a lot of personal freedom here and nobody gets in the role of supervisor. New Orient allows people to tap into their creativity and let it loose,” Haley added.
Sandidge is, of course, the boss and has final say over what happens in his business. But employee Todd Underwood, who is also Sandidge`s stepson
(Sandidge is twice divorced), said Sandidge has acted as both mentor and teacher to his employees.
”He has that (boss) hat he puts on once in a while, but for the most part he`s a fellow worker,” Underwood said. ”He takes the lead in training the staff. Our industry is communications, and (employee training sessions)
help us figure out what the client really wants.”
For instance, a recent session on neural linguistic programming trained employees on reading body language and voice intonations as a means to provide clues about what people are really saying.
”You have to understand the client`s needs and their industry in order to do what they want,” Underwood said.
Sandidge says much of his business is learning everything possible about a client`s business in order to provide them with the services they really need.
”And they don`t always know what they need,” Sandidge said.”They may come in and say they want one thing, but after talking with them we find that they really need something else.”
A subsidiary of New Orient Media is Creative Core, a publishing company that provides media services mostly to service-oriented and social
organizations with limited budgets. It also carries out Sandidge`s original vision of helping people with social causes obtain access to the media.
”I separated that out, and it`s for people who think they can`t afford any media services,” Sandidge said. ”But we can work within anyone`s budget.”
If Sandidge were to visually interpret his own job resume, he could end up holding a colorful quilt that would include squares for his many incarnations: disc jockey, war resister, mental health worker, trainer, salesman and producer. But communication is the thread that ties them all together, and teaching others how to communicate remains his kismet.
And while he may have started his career as a 16-year-old playing with an unsophisticated homemade sound system, he has come full circle. You should see his sound system now.
