Listen instead on your Monday Morning Drive:

Most AV business owners are accidental entrepreneurs.

You know how to get shows done. You know how to buy lighting gear. You know how to solve technical problems. So you built a business doing what you know.

Then you neglected everything you didn’t know how to do.

Now you can’t sell your company. You can’t hire anybody who understands how your business works. You realize you should’ve been strategic years ago and you need help with the not-fun stuff that makes everything else possible.

Before you chase growth strategies or try new ventures, master these three fundamentals. They’ll reduce your risk and open doors you want to walk through.

1. Fix Your Accounting

Your accounting is probably wrong.

The CPA who set up your books doesn’t work in this industry. They didn’t structure your financials to match how you actually do business. This impedes your decision-making every day.

Stop worrying about fixing 10 years of historical data. Start keeping your numbers correctly now. The sooner you fix this, the sooner you’ll have consistent data to guide your business.

How to get started:

Align Revenue to Services

Your revenue categories must match your actual business offerings.

Dry hire rental is different from rental for production. Rental for production differs from rental for creative work. If you shoot videos, the equipment revenue for creative projects needs its own category separate from show equipment.

You’re probably running three or more distinct businesses units under one roof. Track them separately.

Match Costs to Revenue

Every revenue category needs to be aligned to a cost of goods sold (COGS).

Production Services income is made up of multiple revenue streams, each with corresponding costs:

• Equipment for production aligns with sub-rentals
• Labor for production syncs with direct labor costs
• Travel for production aligns with travel costs
• Trucking for production is made of logistical costs
• Supplies for production correspond to expendable purchases

Create the same structure for dry hire and creative services. You’ll have three subrental categories if you do all three types of business. This shows you exactly how profitable each service line is.

Organize Your Overhead

Everything that isn’t revenue or COGS is overhead expense. Keep it simple with three categories:

Selling expenses: Everything that helps you acquire business (sales team, marketing, business development, entertainment, promotions)

Administrative expenses: Bills you pay regardless of revenue (management, buildings, utilities, insurance)

Financing expenses: Banking-related costs (credit card fees, depreciation, loan interest)

This clean structure makes every financial decision clearer.

2. Fix Your Pricing

If you’re guessing at pricing, you can’t make money consistently.

Your dry hire business might price differently than production services. Your creative work needs its own pricing model. Each should align with its actual costs.

Build Your Pricing Structure

Answer these questions:

• Do you need baseline packages?
• What enhancement options make sense?
• How do you estimate custom orders?

Your pricing must connect to your cost structure. If it doesn’t align with COGS, something’s broken.

Stop guessing. Start calculating. Know your margins for every service you offer. Which are actually worth more?

3. Set Your Standards

What does “good” look like in your business?

Most companies can’t answer this question. They deliver inconsistent quality because nobody defined the standard. Your team makes inconsistent decisions because they don’t know your expectations.

Define Execution Standards

What does a properly prepped equipment order look like? What makes a show setup “rehearsal ready”?

Write it down. Train your team. Talk about these standards daily.

Without clear execution standards, you can’t scale. New team members won’t know what success looks like, and existing staff will interpret quality differently.

Establish Service Standards

Customers aren’t always right. Sometimes they’re wrong, sometimes they’re jerks, and sometimes they treat your people badly.

What are your boundaries? How far will you go to deliver on promises? Your team needs to know.

Define your service standards and document your response protocols. Make sure everyone understands the limits.

Why This Matters Now

These aren’t exciting tasks. But they’re foundational to your success.

Without clean accounting, you can’t see what’s profitable. Without proper pricing, you leave money on every job. And without clear standards, quality varies wildly.

Fix these three things, and strategic growth becomes possible. Skip them, and every growth initiative becomes harder and riskier.

The choice is yours: Keep fighting problems created by past neglect, or invest time now to build a business that runs without you.