Hiring experienced people is one of the most common solutions AV production company owners turn to when their businesses become difficult to manage. Projects are getting bigger, the calendar is filling up, and the owner is spending too much time answering questions, resolving conflicts and making decisions that should be handled elsewhere in the organization.
The obvious answer seems to be finding someone who can take some of that responsibility off their plate. Maybe it’s an experienced project manager, an operations director or a warehouse manager who has worked for a larger production company. The expectation is that bringing in someone with the right background will help the business become more organized and less dependent on the owner.
Sometimes that works. But experienced employees can only do so much when they enter an organization that hasn’t established how work is supposed to get done.
Experience Doesn’t Replace Structure
Consider a production company that hires an experienced project manager to oversee its growing event schedule. The new hire understands production, knows how to work with venues and clients, and has successfully managed complex events for other companies.
What they don’t know is how this particular company operates.
There may be no standard process for moving a project from sales into production. Equipment decisions might be made by whoever happens to be available. Labor scheduling could involve several people exchanging emails and text messages without one person having final responsibility. Client requests may go to the owner, the project manager or the technical director, depending on who the client knows best.
An experienced project manager will probably find ways to navigate these challenges. They may develop their own spreadsheets, establish personal routines and create informal systems to keep their projects organized.
The immediate result can look like an improvement. Projects get completed, clients are satisfied and the owner has fewer daily interruptions.
But the company hasn’t necessarily become better organized. It has simply hired someone capable of working around its organizational weaknesses.
When that person is unavailable, leaves the company or becomes overloaded, the same problems return.
The Difference Between Individual Performance and Company Performance
One of the challenges in our industry is that we’re accustomed to relying on highly capable individuals. A great A1 can make a difficult audio situation manageable. An experienced technical director can keep a complicated show running smoothly despite last-minute changes. A strong project manager can coordinate dozens of moving parts and make the entire production feel effortless.
Those skills are valuable, and there will always be situations where experience and judgment make the difference.
The problem develops when we start treating individual capability as a substitute for organizational responsibility.
If the only reason a project stays on schedule is that one person remembers every deadline, the company doesn’t have a reliable scheduling process. If the warehouse is organized because one employee knows where everything belongs, the company doesn’t have a sustainable inventory system. If client questions get answered because the owner checks every email, communication hasn’t actually been delegated.
These situations can exist for years, particularly in smaller companies where everyone is accustomed to helping wherever they’re needed. As the company grows, however, informal arrangements become harder to maintain.
More projects create more opportunities for information to be missed, responsibilities to overlap and decisions to be delayed.
Define the Work Before You Assign the Person
When an employee isn’t meeting expectations, the first instinct is often to question whether that person is capable of doing the job. Sometimes that’s a fair assessment, but before making that determination, it’s worth examining whether the job itself has been clearly defined.
Does the employee know what decisions they can make independently? Do they understand when something needs to be escalated? Are deadlines established, and is there a consistent way to track progress? Does everyone involved understand where one person’s responsibility ends and another’s begins?
These questions are especially important for companies that use a combination of employees and freelance production professionals.
A freelance project manager might be excellent at advancing an event, but they still need to understand the company’s expectations for client communication, purchasing approvals, labor coordination and documentation. Without those guidelines, every contractor will approach the assignment differently.
That inconsistency creates additional work for the owner, who ends up reviewing decisions, correcting misunderstandings and filling gaps between responsibilities.
Before assigning a position to someone, define what successful performance in that position actually looks like.
Start With the Processes That Create the Most Friction
Documenting every procedure in a production company would be an enormous undertaking, and it isn’t necessary to begin improving operations. A better approach is to identify the activities that repeatedly create confusion, delays or unnecessary involvement from leadership.
For many AV companies, those activities fall into a few familiar areas.
Sales-to-production handoffs. Establish what information must be transferred when a project is sold, including client expectations, outstanding decisions, budgets, commitments and key contacts. A project manager shouldn’t have to reconstruct the sales conversation to understand what they’re responsible for delivering.
Project ownership and communication. Identify who is accountable for each project and who has responsibility for responding to client requests. When several people are involved, make sure the process doesn’t depend on everyone assuming someone else will handle the issue.
Labor planning and scheduling. Define when labor requirements are established, who approves them, how changes are communicated and where the current schedule is maintained. The process should remain consistent even when different people are managing different events.
Equipment preparation and warehouse coordination. Establish expectations for pull sheets, substitutions, testing, missing equipment, returns and repairs. The warehouse team needs reliable information from project management, and project management needs confidence that equipment preparation is being handled consistently.
Financial authority and project changes. Determine who can approve additional expenses, equipment substitutions, overtime or scope changes. Employees need enough authority to do their jobs without waiting for the owner to approve every decision, but they also need clear boundaries.
The goal isn’t to create layers of bureaucracy. It’s to reduce the number of decisions that have to be made repeatedly because nobody established a standard approach.
Accountability Requires More Than a Job Description
Once a process has been defined, someone needs to own it.
This is where many companies struggle. They create checklists, assign responsibilities and introduce new software, but they don’t establish who is accountable for making sure the process is followed.
A production schedule can exist in a shared system and still be unreliable if nobody is responsible for keeping it current. A project handoff checklist accomplishes very little if the sales team doesn’t complete it or the project manager never reviews it. A warehouse procedure won’t improve accuracy if exceptions are handled informally and never documented.
Accountability doesn’t mean the owner needs to inspect every task. It means establishing expectations, reviewing performance and addressing recurring problems before they become accepted habits.
It also means giving employees an opportunity to improve the process. The people doing the work often have valuable insight into where information gets lost, which approvals cause delays and which procedures create unnecessary effort.
A useful operating system should make their jobs easier, not simply give management another way to monitor them.
Build a Company That Can Benefit From Great People
None of this diminishes the importance of hiring talented employees. Experienced people bring judgment, relationships, technical knowledge and ideas that can improve the entire organization.
But those contributions become more valuable when the company provides a structure that allows them to succeed.
A capable project manager should be spending time anticipating production challenges and supporting clients, not tracking down basic information that should have been provided during the handoff. A warehouse manager should be improving preparation and inventory accuracy rather than constantly compensating for incomplete pull sheets. An operations director should be managing the performance of the department rather than personally resolving every routine scheduling conflict.
When the fundamentals are defined, talented employees have the opportunity to improve the business instead of simply keeping it functioning.
Before You Make Your Next Hire
Think about the position you’re planning to fill, or one that has been difficult to fill successfully in the past. Write down the responsibilities you expect that person to manage, the decisions they should be authorized to make and the information they need from other departments.
Then examine whether the systems supporting those responsibilities actually exist.
If the answers depend on the new employee figuring everything out, the hiring decision may be premature. You may need to establish the process before you can accurately evaluate the person.
Growing an AV production company requires good people, but sustainable growth also requires an organization that doesn’t depend on extraordinary individual effort to accomplish ordinary work.
The best employees should make your company stronger, not become the system your company depends on.
Work on the Business at Jumpstart Orlando
Building a company that operates consistently, develops capable leaders and gives owners more freedom requires deliberate work on the systems behind daily production.
Join AV production company owners and senior leaders at Jumpstart Workshops, November 16–18, 2026, in Orlando, for two and a half days focused on improving business performance, operations and growth.
Registration is open, with $300 off the standard registration rate.
