Imagine that you’re a manager of a major league baseball team. Your scouts tell you there’s a ton of talented...

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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.

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.