When a job is sold, there is a margin built into the plan. The proposal accounts for equipment, labor, sub-rentals and the other costs anticipated when the job is priced. What is much harder to see is how much of that expected margin can disappear between the signed proposal and the truck leaving the warehouse. A cable is missing from
A clean show and a fair invoice get you paid once. Neither one is why a client picks up the phone and calls you for the next job instead of putting it out to bid again. Price and performance are what a client expects going in, the baseline of the transaction, and baselines don’t get remembered. What sticks with a
Every AV company owner has used the word “luxury” in a proposal at some point, usually to describe a client’s expectations rather than their own practice. That’s worth examining, because luxury isn’t a tier of client or a category of gear. It’s a discipline of attention, and it belongs in the operating model of any company that wants to be
Most conversations about AI start in the wrong place. Which platform should we use? Which model is better? Which tool should we buy? What can we automate? Those questions matter eventually, but they are not usually the reason companies struggle to get useful results from AI. In his AI workshops at Jumpstart Vegas, Mark Wells argued that the bigger problem
Most live production company owners treat new business as a single event: send the proposal, win the job or lose it, move on to the next name on the list. Karl Becker led two sales sessions at Jumpstart Las Vegas this July, and both were built around taking that idea apart. His argument was that almost nobody arrives ready to
The AV industry has spent years complaining that clients treat production services like a commodity. Then we hand them proposals that make it almost impossible to evaluate anything except the final price. A typical proposal may include dozens of pages, polished renderings, equipment descriptions, labor categories, bundled services, list prices, and multiple layers of discounts. The document looks substantial, but
At Jumpstart Las Vegas this July, Shane, VP of Technology at LMG, opened his session by asking a room full of live event company owners a simple question: how many of you feel completely caught up with technology? A single hand went up, out of a room made up entirely of people who buy, rent, and operate this gear for
Every AV conversation this year has the same shape. Someone brings up InfoComm 2026, mentions “agentic AI,” and the room nods like that settles it. Self-optimizing systems that flag equipment failures before they become showstoppers. Cameras that track a speaker without an operator. Captioning and translation that happen in real time. All real, all useful, none of it is where
Every conversation about the labor shortage lands on the same false choice: eat the rising freelance rates and hope the pool refills, or start converting show ops to full-time staff and eat the overhead instead. Both are wrong moves. The pool isn’t refilling on its own, and building full-time crew for show operations defeats the entire point of running a
Open ten websites in the AV and live events industry. Read the homepages back to back. Innovative. Customer-focused. Full-service. Passionate about what we do. You could swap the logos and nobody would notice. This is not a coincidence. It’s what happens when companies describe themselves the way they want to be seen, instead of the way they actually are. The
