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Mark Morton, left, and Donnie Brawner have brought together their companies with Dallas-based Cinemation Design to form Paragon 360. The merged company projects $10 million in 2011 revenues.
Mark Morton, left, and Donnie Brawner have brought together their companies with Dallas-based Cinemation Design to form Paragon 360. The merged company projects $10 million in 2011 revenues.

Paragon 360 forms auditorium powerhouse

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Two Springfield business owners with a long history of collaboration on church and amphitheater sound and lighting systems have teamed up with a Dallas staging company to create a full-on entertainment-production operation.

On April 1, SG Integration and Brawner & Associates of Springfield joined forces with Cinemation Design of Dallas to become Paragon 360 LLC, with projections of $10 million in 2011 revenues.

The companies have worked together on several million-dollar projects in recent years, and have developed something of a niche market in the megachurch audience staging industry. In September, Liberty Baptist Church had contracted with the three companies to provide light, sound and staging for its $30 million sanctuary in Hampton, Va. Audio, video and lighting equipment has been installed at Biltmore Baptist Church, a 6,800-member church in Ashville, N.C., and stage renovations are now finished for Prestonwood Baptist, a Plano, Texas, church with 28,000 members and a staff of 500.

The company can lay claim to the art-audio system for Echo Hollow in Branson, audio infrastructure for the Sight & Sound Theater in Branson, and lighting design and logistics for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. corporate meetings in Kansas City, Dallas and Fayetteville, Ark. Local customers of SG Integration and Brawner & Associates include JQH Arena, Drury University, Gillioz Theatre, Celebration City, KOLR-10 studios and Hammons Field.

“People have been coming to us for turn-key solutions – sound, lighting, video and staging. They’ve wanted us to do all of that,” Paragon 360 CEO Donnie Brawner said of the five year relationship with Mark Morton, owner of SG Integration. “In the beginning, I was concentrating on lighting, and he was concentrating on audio/video, but nobody was doing it all.”

Morton, who also owns audio equipment retailer Sounds Great on East Republic Road, has worked in the audio supply business since 1976. Sounds Great will continue to operate as an independent retailer, and SG Integration has yet to be dissolved, according to Morton.

He said he may continue work on a couple of smaller side projects for an undetermined amount of time.

Brawner and Morton first began collaborating on projects with Cinemation in 2008 as the scenic staging and broadcasting element to the projects Brawner would secure. Brawner, who has more than 25 years of lighting experience, started his company in 2000.

“When you piece all those things together, we cover the entire gamut of church-theater-school-amusement park attraction design,” Brawner said.

He said through the creation of Paragon 360, the partners want to distinguish themselves from other all-in-one staging companies that might specialize in only one area.

“We’ve brought an entire audio-video company to a company that does lighting and a company that does set and staging, so now you are getting the best of all three resources,” Brawner said.

Brawner said he is acting as the company’s CEO and will be paid an undisclosed amount for managing the company. Otherwise, everything is divided evenly among the partners depending on the amount of work to be done on any given project. Both Brawner and Morton said no money changed hands in the creation of Paragon 360.

“We had been working together through Brawner & Associates for quite some time, but we decided that all three companies would be better served if we were under a new umbrella, a new name,” Brawner said, adding that talks of joining forces began early last year.

He said Dwayne Gates, owner of Cinemation Design, would remain in Dallas, where he maintains a warehouse devoted to stage production.

Morton said the way the partners work together provides a seamless integration of components for their customers.

“A lot of what’s different about us is the way that the audio, video, lighting and set design blends together,” Morton said. “For example, in Biltmore, our screens were a part of (Gates’) set. As opposed to going into a church and seeing a couple of screens hanging from the wall or ceiling, ours was integrated into the set.”

Brawner said the company would be operating essentially the same way it had under Brawner & Associates since 2008. But through its sponsorships of megachurch conventions Metro 1 and Metro 2, which explore new technology options in ministry, Paragon 360 can now market itself as a one-stop shop for reaching the next generation of faithful.

“That has opened a lot of doors for us,” Brawner said of the conventions. He said last year the partners began participating in side-sessions where they educated churches on their areas of expertise. He said the company hasn’t spent any money on marketing besides costs to operate www.paragon360.com. All of its business, 80 percent of it coming from outside of Missouri, has come by referrals.

Paragon 360 employs about 30, and Brawner said each project, many of which are $1 million jobs, takes 18 to 24 months to complete on average. The company has church projects in the pipeline in Florida, North Carolina and Arkansas, as well as Abundant Life Covenant Church in Springfield and First Baptist Church in Bolivar. Its Web site lists 135 former and current clients.

Joe Wooderson, worship pastor for First Baptist in Bolivar, said it selected Paragon 360 after a nationwide search for a company that could manage a variety of sound and video projects at its two Bolivar campuses, which serve 1,000 people. He said the project has changed several times during the last two years, and the owners have gone out of their way to be flexible to the church’s needs.

“They’ve really been great and incredibly patient with us,” Wooderson said, adding that the project is currently suspended while the congregation leadership decides how and when the project should proceed. Among other goals, he said the church wants to upgrade its online broadcasting capabilities as well as install a recording and editing studio.[[In-content Ad]]

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