Meet Darrell Landers of Ultimate Outdoor Entertainment

Today we’d like to introduce you to Darrell Landers.

Hi Darrell, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
We began offering outdoor movies in the spring of 2008 as side business to supplement our household income. After two years and significant growth, I was able to leave my full time at Cisco Systems to focus on the outdoor movie business. Our clientele started out with mostly backyard parties and small events for school churches. After a few hundred successful events, we started getting calls from cities, park and rec departments and corporate clients for larger events with bigger screens. We reinvested everything we made for the first five years to buy bigger screens, better projectors and more robust audio systems while simultaneously expanding our footprint to more cities around the country.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Growing this business has been a wild series of ups and downs. We started in 2008, just as the housing crisis was unfolding and initially thought we had made a mistake. Who would have extra money for an outdoor movie party as many people were making their homes and their jobs. As it turns out, it couldn’t have been better timing. Outdoor movies in general were still a novelty and many people had never heard of them. In addition, it turns out people were pooling their resources and looking for affordable at-home entertainment options for birthday parties and other backyard fun – our inflatable screen rentals fit the bill perfectly and our first year was better than expected!

We’ve learned a lot of hard lessons along the way though too. Experimenting with expensive audio/video gear is hard on the budget and making wrong decisions can be costly. Finding the right mix of sturdy and dependable screens that looked good, combined with high-performing electronics, and turning all of that into an affordable outdoor movie service had its ups and downs. We wasted a lot of time and money on cheap overseas imports and even more dollars finding the right marketing strategy and sales techniques to get people interested in our outdoor movie services. There were several years early on that were financially very challenging. Learning to budget for payroll, fuel, insurance, taxes, state and local fees, equipment, training, travel and more was incredibly challenging, so having some real success later down the road was very rewarding.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Ultimate Outdoor Entertainment specializes in providing outdoor video screen services ranging from inflatable movie screens for backyard parties, movies in the park for cities, churches, school and neighborhoods, to Mobile LED screens for tailgates, festivals, concerts, golf tournaments, fan experiences, brand activations and and just about anything where people want big screen video for their event.

We offer a range of audio and video solutions that most companies simply can’t match because of our incredibly broad inventory and our footprint in more than 20 cities across the country.. Smaller companies may focus on smaller screens and projectors for a party rental type service, while larger companies have really high-end equipment intended for big productions, and rarely do they crossover. UOE provides almost every level of audio and video equipment which allows to be really creative with how we solve a client’s needs and fit almost any budget.

I think we are most proud of our company‘s part in creating a whole new genre of outdoor entertainment services. Outdoor movies were just in their infancy when we started so we feel like we’ve had a great deal of influence on the industry as a whole and have helped hundreds of communities create family-friendly, fun community-based events.

What does success mean to you?
Success for our company is really easy to define. Our mission is to make our customer’s events exceed their expectations and help them create experiences their audience will remember. If we achieve that while creating jobs in each city we operate in and create a fun place for our employees to work while making a reasonable profit for our business, we have succeeded!

Pricing:

• Backyard Movies Starting at $349
• Movies in the Park Starting at $799
• Drive-In Movie Rentals Starting at $1999
• Mobile LED Screens Starting at $2999
• LED Video Walls Starting at $3500

Contact Info:

• Email: events@uoe.com
• Website: uoe.com

Image Credits
Ultimate Outdoor Movies