“In my other life", before Signet Staging, Inc., I had my own business as a carpenter here in New York working mostly in the Hudson Valley. At that time I was also heavily involved in playing music in the church as well as producing Contemporary Music concerts in the area.

In 1985 our church bought land and entered into a building project that began in the spring of 1986. At that time the construction industry was slowing a bit so I decided to take some time to build our new church building. One of my friends was working at IBM managing audiovisual services for the facility in East Fishkill, NY. He offered to hire me as a freelance audiovisual technician and work there on a part time basis while I was helping to build the church.

The audiovisual field seemed to come very natural to me because of my background in music and concert production. At IBM I learned how to set up multi-image slide shows, sound reinforcement, lighting, video and video production.

In 1987 the church building was complete. At this point I was left with a decision. Do I go back to construction or do I change direction and go forward in the corporate audiovisual field? Well, you all know what my decision was because you are reading this today.

My friend ended up leaving IBM in 1988 and starting a business of his own called Corporate Images Group. I stayed on as a freelance audiovisual technician at IBM and also helped manage and stage many events for Corporate Images Group. That is where I learned how to produce, manage and stage regional and national events.

In 1991 I met Jack Gagliardo, who was an internal corporate meeting producer for KRAFT Foods. At that time Jack was asked to expand his internal communications department from producing commercials and videos to handling their meetings on both a regional and national level. Jack accomplished this by utilizing internal resources and integrating a team of various freelance personnel. I am grateful both then and now to have been included in this team of highly creative and energetic people.

During the next couple of years, while working with KRAFT Foods, I got the opportunity to develop strong relationships with staging companies across the country. I also began working as a technical director for some other production companies. These relationships proved helpful then, and are still helpful today.

In 1996 I became what you might call a “real” company by hiring a technical staff to help support my two IBM locations and other clients that I had gained. Initially we were considered a show management company, although, we had limited audiovisual equipment to support our growing business. We saw this as an opportunity to expand our services by owning more equipment, which we purchased in 1998. This gave us the capability to fully support accounts that we had been previously managing. Now that we owned our own equipment, our staging partners utilized our services more to support their events.

So here we are today, Signet Staging, Inc., the result of a decision made back in 1987. Forming Signet Staging, Inc. has changed my life and the lives of my family. It has also given me the ability to meet so many wonderful people in this industry. For this, and this alone, I consider myself very blessed”.

David Hendrickson

President / Executive Project Manager