Why I Started an AV Company: The Real Story Behind SPOR Group
I left a safe sales job to start my own AV company. Here's the honest story of how SPOR Group actually came together.
Chris Gore | Updated 2026
We've recently been announced as finalists for the Great British Entrepreneur Awards, I'm speaking at Ideasfest, and my business partner Chris Spence and I were named in the Founders 250 alongside people like Ben Francis from Gym Shark. None of that is me having a brag. It's just meant a lot of people have started asking the same question. What is the story with SPOR? So I wanted to sit down and actually answer it properly, rather than in bits and pieces.
I run an AV company. We design and build video conferencing and meeting room solutions, and we do it well. But the honest version of how that happened involves the military, a £100,000 gap nobody else wanted, and a fair amount of risk I didn't feel ready for at the time.
How I Ended Up Starting an AV Company
I was in the military for 13 years. The military put me through my MBA, and that led to a sales job selling AV, meeting room and video conferencing technology, for what turned out to be the biggest AV company in the world at the time.
The problem was scale. When a client had a project worth around £100,000, I couldn't get them a proper team, because that team was busy delivering £67 million projects. So I started asking clients a simple question: who's actually doing that £100,000 job for you? The answer, back in early 2019, was usually some version of the same thing. Nobody, really. It's Gary in a van.
A freelancer would come in, hang a few screens, then disappear onto the next job. No ongoing service. No maintenance. If anything went wrong, good luck getting hold of Gary. That gap in the market, projects between £100,000 and £250,000 with nobody properly looking after them, is exactly where the idea for an AV company of our own came from.
Building an AV Company From Nothing
We started SPOR in 2019. We're still going, now with 35 staff across two UK offices, delivering projects globally into places like Sydney, Singapore and Hong Kong. We've also built our own proprietary system for monitoring and managing client assets, so we can see whether cameras and rooms are online or offline before a client ever walks in and finds out the hard way that nothing works.
None of that happened quickly or easily. The biggest early challenge wasn't the work itself, it was that nobody knew who we were. SPOR didn't exist as a name. Chris Spence and I were known personally, but the business wasn't. We had to go out, deliver projects well, build case studies from scratch, and slowly make a name for a company that had none.
Taking the Leap When You Don't Feel Ready
I'm naturally quite risk averse, which is a strange thing to admit given how long I spent in the military. I had a secure, well paid role when I started seriously looking at starting my own AV company, and the leap didn't feel obvious or easy.
The conversation that actually made it possible was with my now wife, my girlfriend at the time. I asked her what she thought, and more practically, how long we could survive if it went wrong. She told me to go and make it happen, and gave me two years of her covering the mortgage as a safety net.
That backup plan mattered. If it had failed, I'd have gone back into a sales role, except with two years of business ownership, procurement and management experience that most sales candidates simply don't have. The downside was genuinely limited. Thankfully, it never came to that.
The Partnership Behind It
Chris Spence, or Spenno, is my business partner, and we're the yin and yang of each other. When we started, we sat down over a beer and agreed something important early on. We needed to be able to have a properly difficult conversation with each other when something wasn't working, and once that conversation was done, it was done. No grudges, straight back to being mates.
As it turns out, I've never actually needed to fall back on that agreement. We're both fairly logical, we both lead with common sense, and we've never had an argument about the business to this day.
Where This AV Company Goes Next
We're at an interesting point now. We're a well respected tier two AV company, comfortably delivering projects up to around £1.5 million, with a strong senior leadership team and project delivery team behind us. The jump from tier two to tier one means serious investment in people and warehousing, so we're weighing that up against a different option, growing a wider group rather than just growing a single AV company. There's more to come on that which I can't share yet, but growth is the plan, just not necessarily in the way people might expect.
My Number One Piece of Advice
If someone's watching this wondering whether to take the leap themselves, my advice is always the same: test the market before you build the business.
Say you want to start a dog walking business. You don't need to buy a van or print business cards on day one. Here's what I'd actually do with a budget of around £2,000.
Build a landing page. Explain what you're planning to offer and invite people to join a waiting list, nothing more.
Run a small local ad. Push traffic straight to that page rather than a personal profile, targeted at your local area.
Count real signups. If nobody joins the list, you've lost a bit of ad spend and a few hours, not a business.
Decide with evidence. If 150 people sign up, that's real justification the market exists. If nobody does, you've saved yourself from building something nobody wanted.
For more on the systems we use to run an AV company without everything falling on one person, take a look through our SPOR Learning Centre.
Why I'm Sharing This Now
The point of putting this together isn't to gloat about awards or recognition. It's that enough people have asked what the story behind SPOR actually is that it felt worth answering properly, in one place, honestly. This is the kind of company we run, and this is how it actually came together, gaps, risk, and all.
If you're sitting on your own version of this decision right now, safe job, steady income, but an idea you can't quite let go of, test it before you leap. It costs far less than finding out the hard way.
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