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
A proposal might include a producer, technical director, audio engineer and several technicians, but the client isn’t necessarily thinking about those individual positions. They’re thinking about the promises made during the sales process and trusting that the team assigned to the project will deliver on them. This creates a responsibility for both sales and operations. The salesperson needs to communicate
There’s a stage in growing a production company when being involved in everything feels responsible. You know the clients. You know which crew members work well together. You know which piece of equipment has been temperamental, which vendor will come through in a pinch, and which client needs a little more communication than everyone else. When something goes sideways, people
Most AV companies set their prices while looking over their shoulder. A competitor drops a rate, a client mentions a lower quote, a slow month arrives, and the number on the proposal quietly shrinks to match the owner’s nerves. It feels prudent because it protects against losing the job, but it ignores what the job is actually worth to the
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
