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: they came in with energy, had a decent book of contacts, talked a great game in the interview. Six months later, nothing. You’re covering their draws, making excuses to your partners, and wondering how you got fooled again.

The department head story: they were good. Really good. Built real relationships with your best clients over three, four, five years. Then they left — and so did the clients. You find out because one of your accounts goes quiet and eventually sends you a polite email saying they’re going in a different direction.

The young tech story: talented, picks things up fast, has a good feel for the room. But the moment a show runs long or a weekend call comes in, they’re suddenly unavailable or watching the clock. You start to wonder if anyone under 30 actually understands what this job requires.

None of these are bad luck. They’re all downstream of the same thing: doing the hiring without the system. Here’s what other industries have figured out — and how it applies to us.

The Salesperson Problem

The core issue with sales hiring in AV is that we confuse two completely different skills: the ability to interview well and the ability to sell. They overlap maybe 20% of the time. Someone can be charming, confident, and articulate for 45 minutes and still be completely unable to build a pipeline, push through rejection, or close a deal when the client is on the fence.

We hire the interview. Then we’re shocked when the job doesn’t follow.

Start with what “good” actually looks like

Before you post a single job listing, write down three specific things a successful hire should accomplish in their first six months. Not “increase revenue.” Something real: generate 15 qualified conversations with net-new prospects. Close two accounts worth $75K or more. Rebuild the relationship with the client we almost lost last year.

If you can’t write those down, you’re not ready to hire. You’re just hoping someone shows up and figures it out. And hope is not a hiring strategy.

Once you know what winning looks like, you can actually evaluate whether a candidate can deliver it. Ask them to walk you through how they’d approach a cold market. Have them respond to a tough objection on the spot. Give them a scenario — a client who went with a competitor last year — and see how they think through the re-approach. What you’re looking for isn’t the perfect answer. You’re looking for process, composure, and whether they treat selling like a craft or a performance.

The 90-day warning system

Even with a better process, some hires won’t work. The goal isn’t zero mistakes — it’s finding out faster. Build a simple 30/60/90-day plan with explicit milestones before the person starts. Not busywork checkboxes. Real signals: by day 30, they should have mapped their territory and made contact with a set number of lapsed accounts. By day 60, you should see qualified conversations in the pipeline. By day 90, early evidence of a deal forming.

If you’re three months in and there’s no activity to point to, that’s your answer. The worst outcome is waiting 12 months and $80,000 in salary to confirm what was apparent by month two. Move faster. It’s kinder to everyone.

Look at who you’re actually attracting

Compensation structure sends a signal before anyone applies. A job that pays a comfortable salary with a modest commission upside will attract people who want comfort. If you need a hunter — someone who will prospect aggressively, build from scratch, and push deals forward — your comp plan has to make that worth their while. The best salespeople in any industry go where their effort is rewarded. If your structure doesn’t do that, you’ll keep getting people who are better at managing relationships than building them.

“We hire the interview. Then we’re shocked when the job doesn’t follow.”

Try This: Before your next sales hire, write down exactly what success looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days. Share it with the finalist candidates. The ones who push back, ask good questions, or refine the targets with you are showing you something. The ones who just nod are telling you something too.

The Department Head Problem

This one hurts more because it usually involves someone you trusted — maybe even someone you helped build. They were good at the job, the clients loved them, and somewhere along the way the clients started thinking of them as the relationship — not your company.

When they left, the clients had a choice to make. And they chose the person they knew.

This is one of the oldest problems in professional services. Law firms deal with it. Accounting firms deal with it. Ad agencies deal with it constantly. The ones that have solved it have done two things: they’ve gotten serious about legal protection, and more importantly, they’ve changed the architecture of how client relationships work.

The legal piece: non-solicitation agreements

Non-competes are getting harder to enforce everywhere and are effectively dead in some states. Non-solicitation agreements are different. They don’t prevent someone from taking a new job or even starting a competing company. They prevent a former employee from actively reaching out to clients they served while working for you and pulling them away.

Courts tend to enforce these when they’re specific and reasonable. The key elements:

• Be specific about scope. Cover the clients the person actually worked with, not every client your company has ever touched. Overly broad agreements get thrown out.
• Set a reasonable time window. Twelve to twenty-four months is standard and defensible. Longer gets challenged.
• Make it part of the offer, not an afterthought. The right time to present a non-solicitation is before someone starts, as a condition of employment. Asking an existing employee to sign one mid-tenure creates legal complications.
• Get an employment attorney in your state. Enforceability varies a lot by jurisdiction. Don’t use a generic template for something this consequential.

The agreement doesn’t stop a client from choosing to follow someone. But it does prevent the former employee from actively engineering that move, and it gives you legal standing if they do.

The structural piece: stop letting one person own the relationship

Legal protection is the floor. The real fix is structural, and it has to happen before someone gives notice.

Ask yourself this honestly: for each of your top 15 client accounts, if the person managing that relationship left tomorrow, what would the client’s experience with your company look like? If the answer is “not great,” you have a concentration problem.

The wealth management industry figured this out the hard way. The firms that lose the fewest clients when an advisor leaves are the ones that deliberately built relationships between the client and the firm — not just the individual. Multiple touchpoints. Multiple people who know the account. A client who has interacted with the owner, the lead PM, the operations director, and the account manager has four reasons to stay. A client who only knows one person has one.

In practice, this means:

• Owners and senior leaders need direct contact with top accounts. Not through the account manager. A personal note after a big show, a call when something went wrong before the client calls you — these build the institutional relationship.
• Introduce your bench deliberately. When a client knows your backup PM and your lead tech by name, your company becomes harder to leave.
• Get the institutional knowledge out of people’s heads. Every major client account should have documented history in your CRM: preferences, past problems and how you solved them, key contacts on their side, what they care about. If that knowledge only exists in one person’s memory, you’re one resignation away from losing it.

 “A client who only knows one person at your company has one reason to stay.”

Try This: Pull up your top 20 accounts. For each one, name every person at your company who has a real relationship with someone on their side. If you can only name one, that’s the risk to fix — starting this week.

The Gen Z Problem

Let’s be honest about what the frustration actually is: you have technicians who are capable, who show up, who learn fast — and who treat a live event like a job rather than a calling. The show runs long and they’re watching the clock. The weekend call comes in and they’re suddenly unavailable. They want the paycheck and the career, but not the full weight of what this work actually requires.

Before you write this off as a generation problem, it’s worth separating what’s actually new from what’s always been true about young workers.

What’s always been true: people in their early twenties are figuring out who they are and what they value. They test limits. They prioritize differently than someone with a mortgage and a family. That’s not a Gen Z trait, that’s a life-stage trait.

What is different: this generation grew up watching people grind themselves into the ground and decided it wasn’t for them. They have more options than any previous generation of entry-level workers. And they’re genuinely less inclined to treat work as the center of their identity. They’re not wrong to want a life outside the job. The question is whether the job they signed up for was ever clearly defined — and whether you gave them a reason to care about it.

The conversation you’re probably not having at the offer stage

The single most effective thing you can do is the simplest: tell the truth about the job before someone says yes.

Before you extend an offer, say it plainly: this role requires availability 30 to 40 weekends a year. Shows run 12 to 14 hours regularly. When something goes wrong, you stay until it’s right — not until your shift ends. Some of your best weeks will happen in December and some of your slowest in July. That’s the job.

Some candidates will pull back when they hear that. Good. You just saved yourself months of frustration and them a job that wasn’t right for them. The ones who stay have now made an informed commitment. That’s a different psychological contract than “I accepted the offer and figured I’d deal with the details later.”

Give them a reason to care that isn’t the paycheck

The technicians who go the extra distance on a long show aren’t doing it for the overtime. They’re doing it because the show matters to them. That sense of craft — the pride in a clean mix, a perfectly timed cue, a room full of people having an experience they’ll remember — is either there or it isn’t.

Your job in hiring is to find people who already have some of it. Your job in managing is to cultivate the rest. Talk about the shows that mattered. Tell the story of the product launch where everything went wrong and the team pulled it together anyway. Connect what someone does on a specific show to what it meant to the people in the room. That’s not soft management. It’s how you make the stakes feel real to someone who hasn’t been around long enough to feel them naturally yet.

Show them where this goes

One thing younger workers are genuinely good at is asking: what does this lead to? If your answer is “work hard and you’ll move up,” that’s not an answer. That’s a hope.

A visible pathway looks different. It names the levels — A2 to A1 to lead audio to audio director. It says what skills and experiences are required to move from one to the next. It names people in your company who have made that journey and can talk about it. When someone can see their next two moves inside your organization, they’re far less likely to go looking for them somewhere else.

The honest limit

Not every young hire is going to make it in AV. The work is genuinely hard, the hours are real, and the standard is high. Some people will find that out and decide it’s not for them. That’s fine.

What isn’t fine is hiring indiscriminately and then spending years frustrated that your team doesn’t share your standards. Be selective. Have direct conversations early when the commitment isn’t showing up. The owners who manage this generation well aren’t lowering the bar — they’re just better at communicating what the bar is and why it’s there.

 “The technicians who go the extra distance on a long show aren’t doing it for the overtime. They’re doing it because the show matters to them.”

Try This: Look at your last three offers. Did you explicitly tell each candidate the real demands of the schedule before they accepted? If not, some of the frustration you’re feeling now was baked in at the offer stage.

The Common Thread

Look across these three problems and the same thing keeps showing up: most of the pain happens before the person ever starts. How clearly you defined the role. What you said — or didn’t say — at the offer stage. What legal and structural protections you had in place. What environment the person walked into.

The AV industry runs on improvisation. That’s a strength on the show floor. It becomes a liability when it bleeds into how we build teams. The businesses that have solved these problems — in other industries and in AV — did it by building a repeatable approach. Not a perfect one. Just a consistent one.

You don’t have to fix everything at once. Pick the one problem that cost you the most this year. Build one better process around it. That’s how the discipline starts.

[Jumpstart]() is a resource for audiovisual professionals navigating business growth, workforce development, and industry strategy.