On Sound Footing: Electro Acoustics Founder Chris Jordan Passes Torch to New Generation

The most pivotal moment in Chris Jordan’s life was as a 20-year-old, 400 feet in the air, and gravity making no exception to its principles.

Jordan and his brother, a member of the airborne forces in Vietnam, had gotten into sport skydiving. They would hit the county fairs and chili cookoffs, and even Willie Nelson’s famed Fourth of July picnics.

They had done about 250 jumps, Jordan surmises, when, sure enough, one day he’s about 400 feet off the ground and the parachute folds up.

“It caught the wind wrong, just completely folded up. I knew I was dead,” he says, not speaking in any figurative sense. “I just got myself in the best position I could to hit the ground and just milliseconds before I hit the ground, the thing snaps back open.”

Now, that is a come-to-Jesus meeting. And, for Jordan, it literally was. Call it whatever you want, the episode was a powerful realization for a 20-year-old.

“I realized I wasn’t as immortal as I thought I was.”

You can’t write about Jordan’s life without mention of this incident and the guiding spirit that has led it, particularly when you consider his life in sound. It’s perhaps coincidental, or ironic even, that Jordan has made a life out of facilitating messages and atmosphere through sound, what with the message he heard that day.

You can’t attend a major event in Fort Worth without experiencing the handiwork of Electro Acoustics, the company founded by Jordan and his wife Sue in 1984 and now owned and operated by their sons, Luke Jordan, the CEO, and Sam Jordan, the COO.

Dickies Arena is merely one premier venue where Jordan’s team has installed sound systems. Others include Bass Performance Hall, Kimbell Art Museum, TCU’s Amon Carter Stadium and Schollmaier Arena, and Globe Life Field, the Texas Rangers ballpark constructed in 1994.

The career has been a full one, though hardly complete, even after Jordan and wife Sue sold the company to their sons.

Recently, Jordan, 66, was inducted into the Systems Contractor News Hall of Fame. 

It was the best kind of news: a total surprise. Kind of like the parachute suddenly opening back up, which led to an improved relationship with the Lord. That’s not written in jest. Returning safely to the ground that day opened up doors and not just church doors.

Through church, Jordan met an academic mentor who “took me under his wing,” and introduced him to all sorts of literature, from Kafka to Kierkegaard. Through it all, he earned his own private liberal arts education, he says.

He jokes that before then, he wasn’t a top student at Castleberry High School. Distractions, you know.

“I thought I would be an architect, but I got I got distracted to put it one way,” he says. “My junior English teacher came to me my senior year and said, ‘Jordan, if you don't pass grammar again this semester you're not gonna graduate.’ And, so, I turned it around and, you know, I ended up finishing fourth in my high school class.

“Fourth from the bottom.”

These kinds of the quips the world needs more of, but I digress.

Learning under his mentor gave Jordan the confidence to learn through self-study, and that’s how he taught himself sound system engineering acoustics, with the help of, as they say, his better half.

It’s not as if he went into sound completely blind. His father had a little business he ran out of his garage, Henry Jordan Sound. Young Chris Jordan would tag along with his father on jobs and had a curiosity about how things worked.

Henry Jordan was great teacher in that “he didn’t teach,” says the son.

“I would have a problem and he would always have to have two responses,” Jordan says.

The first response was to go figure it out on your own. The second was to draw it out.

“He would just keep forcing me back to creating a sketch for it, drawing it out, trying to come up with the answer. So, he forced me to learn how to solve problems and to draw those problems out. It forced me to think outside the box. I had to keep working until I got a solution.”

And, indeed, Jordan has a reputation as an innovator and problem solver.

Electro Acoustics began in the same garage, its first job the Westminster Presbyterian Church. The company’s first big job was a performing arts center for Groesbeck High School, a job 10 times larger than any other it had done before. To get the job, Jordan and Sue had to put their house up as collateral. Each job going forward got bigger and bigger. 

That first year in business, the company did about $143,000 in sales. It will do about $9 million this year, says Jordan, who has taken on a new title with the company, “Founder and Chief Steward.”

He is an employee now, not running the show, after completing the sale of the business this year to his sons. His counsel on matters of business is also still of great value, of course. 

“It's gone really well,” Sam says of the transition. “And I think it speaks a lot to just dad's incredible character in that, you know, he really wanted to let us run with it. He was humble enough to be able to step back and say, you know, I can be here at Electro Acoustics and not be in charge, really set the second generation up for success. We're all super grateful for What an incredible gift and privilege it is to be in business together.”

Chris Jordan today focuses on specific clients without having to go to meetings, so to speak. That’s a dream job.

Relationships, of course, have been essential to Electro Acoustics’ growth. That’s one big reason Jordan has taken on a pet project that he has become devoted to. Jordan, a member of the Rotary Club of Fort Worth, was the driving force for the organization's award recognizing minority-owned businesses.

Jordan knew how important the awards his company had won in the past were in helping market his business. Electro Acoustics won the 2020 Grand Forte Award. Jordan also is a Fort Worth Inc. Entrepreneur of Excellence Award winner.

Moreover, the important relationships and network provided through affiliations such as Rotary were essential.

Places like Rotary are where “business is done,” Jordan says.  

He also saw that there weren’t enough minority companies with access to those same relationships and network.

The 4-Way Minority Business Awards recognize minority businesses that have demonstrated core elements of the Rotary 4-Way Test through leadership, community engagement, and outstanding business practice in Fort Worth.

The top three finishers receive membership benefits to the Rotary Club and a three-minute professional video produced by Farlow Media, a $5,000 value, and a trophy presented by Mayor Mattie Parker.

The program has changed the face of Rotary in Fort Worth, Jordan says. At the outset of the program, there were seven minority companies involved in Rotary. As of last year, there were now 55, he says.

“Now you walk into rotary, it's not the same club,” he says. “It has been a successful program beyond all measures.”

It’s merely one gesture of gratitude for a stubborn parachute’s serendipitous change of heart.