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.

Imagine what it was like to be an explorer and discover the Grand Canyon for the first time. What a view! After you took in the scenery from the rim, what would you do? You’d most likely want to hike to the bottom to see what else you can find. That’s your next destination. How would you get to the bottom of the Grand Canyon? As a first explorer, you’d have three basic options:

Not all project managers are the same. And depending on your business model, products/services, culture, and niche, the criteria for choosing the right project manager varies greatly. So how do you know you’re hiring the right type of project manager for your company? We see this most clearly when it goes wrong. You hire someone with proven PM experience only to realize they don’t understand anything about how you do project management in your organization.

Are you following your passion at work? Or did you have to give that up when you decided to run your own AV business? Guess what? You can do both.