The Three-Part Framework for Making AI Actually Useful
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 […]
You Already Know Your Next Best Client. You Just Haven’t Asked.
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 […]
What a Used Car Salesman Can Teach You About Your Next Proposal
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 Two-Degree Course Correction Every Live Event Company Needs
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, […]
AI Won’t Save Your Show. It Might Save Your Business.
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, […]
The Freelance Pool Is Shrinking
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 […]
Why Your Marketing Sounds Like Everyone Else’s
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 […]
What the Beach Chair Guy Knows That You Don’t
There’s a reason so many live production companies hit a ceiling they can’t break through. They do great work. They have skilled people. They’re busy. And still, at the end of the year, the profit doesn’t match the effort. The answer is almost always the same: they’re running a service company like a rental company. […]
Does Buying New Gear Actually Help You Scale?
Most AV company owners treat equipment purchases as growth investments. Buy the LED wall, take on bigger jobs, grow the business. It’s a logical assumption. It’s also how a lot of companies get stuck. The gear doesn’t scale the business. The right gear, at the right time, acquired the right way, can. The distinction matters […]
How small AV companies are beating the big guys
The big production companies have one structural advantage above everything else: they can hand a planner a single contract and a single point of accountability for any market, any size, any scope. That’s what planners are actually buying when they go big. Not better gear. Not better crews. Certainty. Small companies lose that pitch every […]