Mike Watson – what an Absolute Cad!
We work with a range of specialist partners and know from experience that it’s all about collaborating with the best people in the business, so we thought that we would delve into the working life of some of our key partners.
The first person featured in our occasional series is the superbly organised Mike Watson, founder and Technical Director of Absolute CAD, a broadcast system integration company.
Hi Mike! Before we ask about the fabulous services that you offer, we just have to know more about how you came up with the name of your business…
I wanted a memorable name for the company, so I thought it would be fun to create a play on words combining CAD (Computer-Aided Design) with the 1950s term “cad,” meaning a bounder. This tied in beautifully with my admiration for the biggest cad of them all Terry-Thomas. The idea developed further when my father, a cartoonist, came up with a caricature logo based on the most famous film rogue. Every document we issue has this figure proudly standing in the corner of the page, saying “what an absolute CAD!”
It’s definitely given your business a distinctive look and personality. Tell me more about how you got into such a specialist sector
I studied physics and maths at Sheffield University and in my final year, heard that the BBC were offering a scheme for graduates, training them to become broadcast engineers. The course consisted of intensive television theory at the BBC training centre in Wood Norton near Evesham, returning for hands on training at Television centre in White City.
I worked in News & Current Affairs at TV Centre and have such fond memories of those years working in live news studios and visiting the iconic BBC bar where you would regularly see stars of the time, Rik Mayall, Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson to name but a few. But after seven years it was time to move on, and I took a job at TSI Post Production based in Soho, becoming the chief engineer. I have such fond memories from that time, largely because of the incredible people I met there. The seven-year itch struck once more. While recovering from life-threatening cerebral malaria, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to try something new, so I decided to launch Absolute CAD in 2001.
You’re famed for your beautifully loomed cables, what is the significance of this?
The beautifully loomed cables pay homage to my days at the BBC. Every installation was given so much care by the wiremen there, dressing cables with such precisions and skill. I wanted to make sure that all my own projects had the same wow factor, and only use experienced broadcast wiremen. There is a tendency these days to gather groups of cables together and putting some expandable sock around them to make them look neat. When budgets and timescales are tight this can help, but wherever possible I like to show our clients the amazing cable looming to enforce our professional wiring services. It’s really, really important for me to design and install super neat cabling. The guys who come to work for me feel the same way too – we don’t leave comms rooms with messy cabling, which is why, if you look at the photos on our website, there is a lot of beautiful cabling.
Sometimes it does feel like showing off but in reality, if it’s neat, you get so many more cables in the rack and of course, this is the end product of being organised with a cable schedule that tells everyone the function of every cable. We want to inspire confidence that even when you look around the back of one of our projects, you will never see a mess. That’s why we get so much work through word of mouth.
Is there an advantage in being a specialist project installer?
In the infancy of Absolute CAD, we struggled to get into most post production companies because they had their own engineering department. Most of the time, one of the in-house shift engineers would be given a project to design and install. Then a freelance engineer would be hired to cover the shift. This works quite well on small projects, but during my time at TSI I realised that on large projects it was not cost effective, especially as shift engineers are often not used to undertaking large project designs and running the installation. Quite often the projects were delivered much later than expected. I realised that a specialist project engineer would be better, with the skills to design the system drawings and create the schedules for the wiremen, as well as make sure the project is installed in accordance with the project timeline.
Another advantage of being a project specialist is that we do a lot of pre-wiring off site, which means the wiring can be done much faster. Quite often we pre-wire as much of the installation as possible. Equipment racks can almost be fully wired, and desk looms can also be prefabricated to speed up the delivery date of the project. The pre-wiring can then be done whilst the main construction of edit rooms or comms rooms, enabling a much faster technical install.
Where is technology taking your business?
We can see that the broadcast video and audio projects are reducing significantly, with much more focus on network infrastructures. These days, our projects involve significantly less of this, with video being sent over fibre, and audio sent as Dante over ethernet.
Our skill set has had to adapt accordingly, to incorporate fibre installations as well as 10Gigabit ethernet solutions. Our services include network cabling specification, installation and termination as well as testing. Even though these new skills can enable Absolute CAD to trade in new business sectors, we prefer to stay within the broadcast and television industry, as there is still an overlap in network and broadcast technology.
Designing and installing audio studios has always been my favourite type of project, and has evolved from suites with hundreds of analogue and digital audio cables, to systems with all of the audio channels sent in a single network cable.
How are you bringing on the next generation of talent?
One person who stands out for me, I trained from being the a runner through to be a broadcast engineer over the course of 10 years and he has gone on to do amazing things. I am so proud of his contribution and subsequent success, working in businesses like Jigsaw 24 and on a recent project at ITN with the East On team.
Currently, I’m training someone to be a wireman on a project. I’ve returned to the basics, getting my hands dirty to show him the ropes and actively participating in the broadcast installation. The broadcast wireman role is such an important one, covering so many aspects of the installation from installing cables cables through to understanding cable schedules & drawings of sometime quite complicated systems.
On occasion we have interns working with us to give them some insight into what is involved in producing high end wiring installations.
Does having your own business give you that famed work/life balance?
My wife works in the film industry and we have been able to share childcare with both of us working. The demands of a filmmaking mean that my wife works very long hours. I then take on the childcare duties, in the past managing the drop off and pick up from school. This allowed just enough time to rush in to London and check on the projects we were working on. Then when the film is finished our roles will reverse again. It has given me an extraordinary opportunity to spend so much time with my children during their formative years.
You quite obviously love the industry…
It’s all about job satisfaction for me and I get to work with some great clients. Knowing that we can bring projects in on time but with the most organised and precise cabling is an absolute bonus for us.
Thanks Mike…we’ll let you get back to that prewiring now!
