LANDON MCCOY, 26 Founder Chaos Audio in Panama City Beach, Florida
What’s your biggest professional accomplishment? I’d say building a guitar pedal you can talk to. We’ve shipped over 2,200 Stratus units, and Nimbus raised more than $300,000 on Kickstarter with 700 backers waiting on January delivery. That’s already further than most independent guitar hardware ever gets. But the part I’m proudest of is what a player can do once it’s on their board. With the AI FX Builder, they describe the
sound they’re chasing and get a custom effect built for them. No code, no menus, no manual. For a century, if you wanted a sound nobody had made yet, you waited for a company to build it. Now you don’t. The market answered fast. FX Builder drove demand past what we had on the shelf, and we’re currently sold out with 500 backorders shipping next
JONATHAN HENDRIX, 31 COO Spicer’s Music in Auburn, Alabama
What’s your biggest professional accomplishment? One of the most meaningful parts of my work has been helping our team grow at Spicer’s Music. Since stepping into day-to-day leader- ship in February 2025, I’ve tried to recognize people’s strengths, support their development and give them room to contribute their own ideas. I’m still learning as a leader, but seeing members of our team take on new responsibilities and bring ideas to life has been especially rewarding. One example is working alongside our assistant manager, Jes- sie Osborne, as she has stepped into directly leading our sales and purchasing departments. She has substantially improved our processes and results in those areas, and it has been rewarding to see her put her strengths to work and grow into greater leadership responsibility. She has also developed She Collective, or SheCo, an initiative that supports, connects, and creates opportunities for existing and aspiring female musicians. Jessie deserves the credit for the work she has put into these accomplishments. For my part, I’m grateful to have helped create opportunities for her to grow and to offer guidance and support along the way. What’s your defining leadership moment? Just seven days after our owner, Tim Spicer, moved out of state and entrusted me with the day-to-day leadership of Spicer’s Music, a car drove through the front of our building. It caused significant damage, disrupted operations, and created a stressful situation for our team and customers. Being fresh to my new responsibilities, I certainly didn’t have every answer on how to handle a situation like this. However, I kept my focus on being present for our team, remaining calm, communicating clearly and working through the immediate deci- sions one at a time. That meant keeping employees and custom- ers informed, staying in communication with ownership, and helping us find a way to keep the business moving forward. MI PROFESSIONAL AWARDS, MEMBERSHIP & RECOGNITIONS: NAMM Young Professionals Board member and an important part of Spicer’s Music receiving NAMM Retailer of the Year (2026) and the NAMM Music Makes a Difference Award (2025).
month. Getting here meant doing the sound design work, the manufacturing, the European regulatory filings, and the retail negotiations. Moving between all of those without dropping quality in any of them is the accomplishment underneath the accomplishment. What’s your defining leadership moment? A handful of our Stratus pedals in the field started failing to turn on — not consistently and not many out of thousands shipped. We had a production deadline in front of us, and the easy move was to call it a fluke and keep going. However, I stopped shipping until we found the real cause, and I ran that investigation myself rather than handing it off. We found it, fixed it and built the fix so it would install auto- matically over the internet, meaning customers who already had a pedal got it without mailing anything back to us. Then, I added a part to the new production run that makes the problem impossible going forward, at our expense. The leadership wasn’t the technical work. It was the standard it set for the team: A problem affecting a few cus- tomers is urgent, we fix causes instead of symptoms and we absorb the cost of making it right. That’s much easier to es- tablish once, under a deadline, than to claim afterward. MI
PROFESSIONAL AWARDS, MEMBERSHIP & RECOGNITIONS: 1st Place, Florida State University InNOLEvation Entrepreneurship Competition, Entrepreneurial Student of the Year Award, Gulf Coast State College, TechCrunch Startup Battlefield 200 Selection (2026), Alibaba CoCreate Pitch Competition Selection (2025).
NOVEMBER 2026 I MUSIC INC. I 41
Powered by FlippingBook