WHAT happens in Vegas, as the saying goes, stays in Vegas, but David Baxter is only too happy to tell the story of how a trip to the Nevada city to attend a conference changed the entire direction of his life.

Mr Baxter is chief executive of Revo Technologies – a Lanark-based company which produces high-end radios exported to 50 countries. He also runs import business NWX, and last year acquired a hi-fi speaker business.

And it all began at the CES (Consumer Electronics Association) exhibition in Las Vegas, a place that has become a home from home for the Lanarkshire-based 49 year-old, who began his career in the blossoming video games industry of the 1980s.

“When I was 13, home computers and video games were in their infancy and I was completely mesmerised by the whole thing,” he says. “I stopped kicking a football and the whole video games thing just opened up for me, it was all I wanted to do.”

Self-taught, Mr Baxter headed to college to take a course in computer data processing to pacify his parents and then surprised himself by netting a job with London videogames producer Elite as a project manager.

After a year he moved to bigger firm US Gold and by 21 was a software development manager there – which first exposed him to CES. “I was brought up in a wee village near Carluke, and Las Vegas and Braidwood are like different planets. Las Vegas wasn’t a place you went to, it seemed like the end of the world.

“Everything with technology involved was there and it woke me up to the possibilities of business.”

Shortly after deciding he needed to be his own boss, he moved back to Scotland and set up a company distributing car products. That business, NWX, is still running – but in its early years it required his continuing attendance at CES.

“I had the idea for doing an in-car DAB product while walking about the CES show. It crops up a lot, I’ve been there 27 out of the last 28 years, I got married in Las Vegas, it has been a big thing in my life.”

DAB (digital audio broadcasting) is the digital broadcast of radio stations, and at the time Revo was founded it was very much in its infancy.

Mr Baxter identified that the car industry was slow to respond to advances in this sort of technology so believed there was a window of opportunity to launch an in-car radio product.

He invested “everything I had earned in 15 years” into the new product, working with manufacturers in Asia and technology providers in Cambridge to create the best product he could.

“We put it together in nine months, it got rave reviews, it was going into 1,000 stores on day one, and people were going nuts for it. We shipped 5,000 units on day one and waited for the phone to ring with reorders, and it didn’t. I just didn’t sell.”

Mr Baxter takes a deep breath before revealing he lost around £300,000 before winding the company up, but he says it was a disappointment rather than a devastation, and it opened his eyes to what could be achieved.

“Being small and inexperienced is not necessarily a barrier to entry for most things,” he says. “It allows you to move quickly and enthusiasm doesn’t get washed away in board meetings.”

After six months, following a trip to Norway where DAB had taken off with more appetite than the UK, Mr Baxter decided to create an in-home product.

Revo was back, and this time it was only going in one-direction. William Ramsay was drafted across from NWX as finance director, and graduate Colin Urie was recruited, with both being given shares in the business.

And for the first time, the company went to the bank. “We got the backing from Clydesdale Bank quickly, and they were brilliant,” says Mr Baxter. “They were pragmatic, not letting systems get in the way of the opportunity. And we paid them back within a year.”

The product launched in Switzerland and Norway, where DAB was most popular, and Revo was on its way. Just before the financial crash, it was exporting to 30 countries, all from the offices shared with NWX.

Six years ago Mr Baxter made the decision to put quality ahead of volume, which has defined the business’ strategy since.

“We thought we’d rather sell fewer units at a higher price, because you get to do cool things, like the best quality display, walnut veneer, joysticks instead of buttons,” he says. “And looking at the way the market was going for DAB and internet radio the price was going down, so we moved away from consumer products to specialist audio.”

The company just about straddles both, with its entry product at £199, rising to £549. Its SuperSeries range has three products carrying the same design language, with refinement and not replacement at the heart of their evolution. Mr Baxter describes the product as 50 per cent a piece of furniture and 50 per cent a music player.

These days, in addition to having DAB functions, the radios are wifi connected, offering 30,000 internet radio stations, and fitted with Bluetooth to stream music from devices such as computers and mobile phones.

The strategy aims for one new product per year, and two will arrive in 2017 after one slipped from last year. These are the SuperCD, an “all singing, all dancing” radio system with a compact disc (CD) player, and the SoundStage, a £400 wireless Bluetooth speaker.

The business model has changed with the advent of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, and Mr Baxter said there was a lot more change going on right now, particularly in speech recognition. He predicts that in ten years the company’s products won’t look much different but you’ll be able to simply tell it what to play.

“When we started you had CDs and digital music had just started with the advent of the iPod. Now very few people even buy digital downloads, it’s all streaming subscriptions services, so our products are streaming music systems. That hopefully keeps us relevant. And it’ll look nice in your room.”

The UK is the number one market for the country (with John Lewis and Amazon the top two customers), but accounts for just 45 per cent of sales, with 55 per cent being exported to 50 countries.

Revenue last year was around £2m and this year Norway will become the first country in the world to switch off its FM radio signal.

Mr Baxter says: “Our sales to Norway in January this year exceeded our entire exports there in 2016, so 2017 could be a good year, it might be our best year. We also have the advantage of having two new products. We’re way more confident about the coming year than we were last year.”

And then there’s the new business. Last year the business made its first acquisition with the purchase of US loudspeaker brand Anthony Gallo Acoustics, which NWX had imported.

“We’ve moved it all to Scotland, it’s gone from California to Lanark. That’s exciting. It’s a boost for us.”

The move sums up Mr Baxter’s business philosophy – keeping things exciting.

“If you can have fun the days pass quicker and you can look back at the end of the year and think ‘that was brilliant’. And it’s not all about the finances; you’ve got to be able to make enough money to blow your nose but the measure of success for us is not purely financial. We’d never have dreamed of what we’ve done and the places we’ve been and the awards we’ve won.”