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
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. Rental companies have a fatal
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 more than most people think.
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 single time they walk in
Your “Competition” Might Be Your Greatest Asset There’s a common instinct in small business: keep your head down, guard your strategies, and never let the shop down the street see how the sausage is made. It makes a certain kind of sense. You worked hard to build what you have: your clientele, your vendor relationships, your systems, your voice. Why
Salespeople who don’t sell. Department heads who walk out with your clients. Young techs who treat a flawless show like just another shift. These aren’t bad luck — they’re solvable. Here’s how. I’ve talked to a lot of AV company owners over the years. At some point in almost every conversation, one of three stories comes out. The salesperson story:
The real reason meeting planners choose in-house AV over you has nothing to do with your equipment, your price, or your portfolio. Here’s what’s actually happening — and how to win. You’ve been in this situation before. You know your company offers better equipment, more creative production, and a lower price point than the in-house AV company at almost any
