Business will come back. As shows reschedule, events go live, and AV expertise is needed again, will your company be ready to scale? The current way of doing things in most AV businesses hasn’t set us up to scale easily. We’ve inherited some bad habits from our AV forefathers that drastically diminish our effectiveness.

For the first time in months, I feel like the Live Events industry is on the right track. There’s a long way to go, we aren’t all happy about it, but our course is starting to feel durable. I don’t have a crystal ball and there are some big factors outside our control, but here’s why I think we are going to be okay.

Many years ago I found myself in search of the proper title for my position. Job titles were not a big thing at my employer, but we had a business reason to devise one for me. A preferred provider agreement needed a key organizational contact and "Tom" was not going to cut it. I thought about the daily tasks I seemed to be responsible for. I sold things. I defined operational processes. I tried to herd salespeople. The warehouse supervisor reported to me. What am I? I could not find a parallel in other companies like ours. Everyone was either "Sales" or "Operations".

The struggle is real. I have spent most of my professional life managing the tendencies of sales and operations teams to conflict with one another. I have a mantra and it goes like this: "Sales' job is to sell what Operations can support. Operations' job is to support whatever sales sells." The battle field is much more sophisticated than it was when I started. We no longer rely on paper files and clip boards to do our work. I can't just stroll over to a salesperson's desk and find a phone number in his Rolodex or search his phone messages for the latest changes in projects. Likewise, it is nearly impossible for a salesperson to monitor all the operation and logistics processes that touch their projects.

Small business has a problem. Most of the time it is too busy to solve basic problems. The rest of the time there is no money to pay for solutions. If one of the issues you need to address is a low profit, it is easy to see how the cycle of too busy and no money could go on forever.

Growth is not linear. Profit is not one for one. Life is uncertain. This is why small companies stagnate. As small businesses grow, owners continually encounter new challenges. Some are solved by getting the next sale: cash flow, paying the bills, payroll – things that represent survival. Other problems can only solved by taking on more risk: operational capacity, more employees, increasing profit – the things that represent progress.