ROI on AV: Increase Decision Speed

Um, it's better to go with the $80 cable than the $8 cable because of, again, total cost of ownership. You're gonna get things working correctly all the time. Uh, and then also if you do it right the first time, you avoid having that IT person needing to pay him to run around and make sure all the AV setup works all the time. And, you know, they're double checking everything and so we just want it to work right. And there's a, a little bit of cost involved with that upfront. As you can imagine.

And so today, uh, Marcus, I want to talk more about that story and go further into that, uh, the ROI of when we want to establish this dream and really

build the AV setup of our dreams. What does that really entail, and how do I think through that quantitatively from a budget perspective? How do I sell that into the CFO, to the finance team, to the procurement team? How does that work so that I make sure we have all of our ducks in a row when I'm coming to bring your dream together?

Some of that time and that there is monetary cost there, but some of that just time, right? To get a decision made started to shorten and it's gotten shorter and shorter over the years. Well, when you have full scale conferencing and you know, all these ways to communicate now that feel like they're in real time, I can share more assets. I can do spreadsheets and all these things. Now the time to make that decision has shrunk dramatically from what it was, right?

Because now, Instead of hopping on the phone and trying to call and talk through a spreadsheet or email it and we're going back and forth 25 times trying to figure out what's happening on line 32, we just pull it up, we hop in a web conferencing platform, we can, you know, pull up our documentation. I can see it clearly. If you're in the room with me, you can see it. If you're remote, you can see it.

So by bringing in, you know, cameras and microphones, um, cutting down on latency and, you know, the delay that's built into some of this. Now we're really communicating pretty much in real time. We're able to see the documents. So how much time did I now save the company because we can work our way through this in, you know, 30 minutes, we make a decision, we're good to go.

So in one aspect, we've greatly shortened that cycle for decision making, which at the end of the day, you know, time is money when it comes to that. Um, you know, you don't want to spend a week trying to figure out something.

that you have to make in your working week, different people that need to collaborate on things, a global team, uh, and, and all the different media types that you need. Audio, video course, screen sharing, like you're talking about it, the, if you think about it in time, is money and decision making speed. That makes a ton of sense. I I, I really love how AV can be cast in that way. really smart.

Everything needs to kick off, you know, and be correct because if you have a delay of 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, how much time have you wasted of your highest, you know, your highest earners within the organization and how much have you lost in terms of, you know, trust currency because now the CEO is going to look at you, we'll say like the young people, they're gonna get you sideways and say, hold on now, you know, we just had this major board meeting. It was delayed by an hour.

You know, how do we make sure this is not going to happen again? We don't want to waste everyone's time. So that that is one of the major, you know, cost impacts because if you think, oh, the room's down, we have to move it. Okay, well, maybe you can if you have enough time, you know, in advance to make this move, but not just in the corporate setting, but also when we think about the judiciary, right? If you have a courtroom go down now, you have to move all the cases.

That's a nightmare trying to do that in the last minute. We deal with higher education, you know, are you going to scramble to find a classroom? I don't know how much you keep up with what's happening in colleges now, but trying to just rebook a class. That's a nightmare. It's, it's pretty crazy because I mean, those spaces are packed full.

So just, and you know, when it comes to trust currency, that's also a major issue that you want a functional system that has to do with, you know, upgrading on a certain cycle.

You don't want to try to stretch things out to the very limit because again, it'll fail at the worst possible time, which really, anytime it fails, seems like it's the worst possible time, but those are things you just want to factor in when you're thinking about the budget and what is, you know, the, the hidden costs in terms of your user groups. Trusting that this system is going to work and having the confidence to come in and use it and work through their sessions.

and work very well, uh, and then all that speed that comes out of that, whether you're at a, in a, you know, healthcare setting, corporate setting, um, government, judiciary setting, um, academic setting, it, it really is, it impacts the efficiency of the organization and to, to a pretty strong degree. Yeah. That's interesting.

Okay, if I'm going to spend, you know, a new building, maybe $100 million large scale building, can I offset that cost if I said, do we need this building right now or do we have the tools and technology available to enable more remote working, learning, whatever it is that we can feel confident in and it's working because now instead of needing, you know, a building that's $150 million, can I reduce that spend down because I can empower these rooms with everything they need.

And maybe this overall construction footprint shrinks a little bit and I get that cost down to, you know, a hundred million dollars or do I delay it all together? Because we say, Hey, we're going to go, you know, full scale remote with this. I don't get into the arguments about, you know, RTO mandates and things like that. But if you're bringing folks into the office, most likely in large scale companies, especially everyone's not going to be there at the same time. Right.

And if you're global, you know that everyone's never in the same space. So when you're thinking about your building footprint and your land footprint, can you use technology and these, you know, capabilities to offset some of that investment, which is the grand scheme of things, a much higher spend, uh, capital expenditure than what we're talking about in terms of technology solutions.

uh, 'cause that's really interesting to think like, okay, I was thinking I need. Five rooms to do these five different tasks. But really if you had one really well designed room that did all kinds of different things, I wouldn't need those four other rooms. And it brings that architecture cost down. How, like, talk to me more about that. That sounds fascinating.

So then it becomes a question of, okay, well, how do we reach more clients, which in this case would be students? How do we reach more of them? Well, now your solution becomes technology because you say, Hey, we can't get more people in seats because we can't put in more seats. There's no more room to create more seats, but what we can do, and you actually, this has happened over the years and it continues to expand more and more. You say, Hey, now we're going to do full scale remote learning.

So when you see your commercials for all your, you know, remote online campuses and all, all those things that actually spins out of the need to have it. And you can't just continue to build infinitely if you're a university. So now you start to outfit your rooms with cameras, with interactive displays, with microphones and all these technologies. So you may have a typical, you know, classroom. And now instead of seeing the 30 to 40 students.

Once you take it remote and enable those capabilities. Now you're seeing 80 students per class because you can have 40 remote and the professor can actually see them with a, if you do something like a high flex, which is hybrid flexible, a specific set of criteria for a setup. I can see the student's faces. I can see, are they getting it? I can interact with them. Um, I can understand who's falling, uh, falling behind, you know, just, just through visual cues alone.

So in higher education, that's one of the clear cut cases of, Hey, instead of building outwards. Let's build into this, this more technology. And then you start to design your classrooms to have that flexibility. So maybe if I'm just a instructor at the front, I'm teaching. Okay. That's easy to do. We have, you know, a few cameras. Well, I do a hands -on demo. Okay. Also easy. We'll bake in an overhead document style camera. So now those cameras that are facing the instructor for the next class.

They flip and go to the ceiling and I'm, you know, building a Lego house, whatever it is, you know, now I can actually pick that up clearly on camera and be broadcasting that as students follow along. Okay. Next we're going to have presentations and sales pitches from students that are around the classroom. Okay. Well there's another type of camera that's kind of spins around and now it catches the students.

So now we can make these classrooms, you know, multifunctional, uh, very, you know, didactic and how they're going to work. And you're in one singular space.

Um, okay, so we talked in, in a previous episode about, uh, some of the different industries we talked for a while about academics and, and some of those needs there. So, so go check out that, that episode, um, for more on that. But I'm curious, so we've talked about, um, so CapEx cost. The investment in the, in the AV installation, set up, design, support, cost. But how does this impact, uh, the other big, uh, chunk of a business's cost, which is your labor?

And where I'm going with that is what you just said about, uh, you know, now a professor can interact better, you know, have a higher quality, higher engagement kind of class. H how could it 'cause I, I could imagine there are certain professors, and I'm sure this is case, the case for for other industries as well, but there's certain professors that like can't do a remote setup in a traditional sense.

'cause they either don't like it, they don't have the technical skill, you know, they can't see the students or it kinda limits what maybe the, the professors could. Teach or who could teach in different slots? Uh, have you seen anything where because you have a, a very high quality setup, that it actually gives you a much more, um, much more access to more people to be able to use the space making more. Call it like productivity or efficiency in your labor, expenditures over time, improve.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Is that, is that question

And now I can capture and he just teaches his class as normal, but I can actually capture his writing on the chalkboard for students that are now going to be remote, right? So you can start to cut down on your assistant labor. Um, we've seen a university who's deployed a pretty awesome. Uh, control set up so that they will have one person monitoring up to five classrooms at once because of how they're bringing all those signals in from the classroom.

And if anything happens, you know, the professor can just press a button, a light pops on at their station. They dial the room up and say, hey, how can I help you? What do you need? So instead of, you know, having one person per room, they're able to say now we have one person monitoring five rooms easily.

You can still capture that through technology in real time and then tie in folks that can't make it to the meeting. Okay. So again, in travel costs and just scheduling costs, trying to juggle schedules, I mean, we've all been on the invite from Microsoft where you have, you know, 20 people trying to coordinate and one person replies all saying I'm not available that day. So you're spinning out of control. Hey, don't even bother. We'll just go remote.

You know, there's still some timing things to figure out, but it's much easier and much more cost effective than saying, okay, let's all of us head over to the office. Sit around the table all day, you know, get this done every tool that we need. We can actually bring it into that environment now remotely, and it's just really a matter of thinking through where you're going, you know, in your business. How do you operate? How do your users work? What's actually happening?

So that gets back to, you know, those early conversations on, you know, what are we doing today and how do we want to work tomorrow?

You know, face the whiteboard and then after you're done, I know you've seen this a hundred times, is you pull out your phone and you take a picture of your whiteboard and then you drop that into Dropbox or whatever and label everything and you know, yeah. You know, so yeah. Cut out all that.

sounds great. Okay. Sign me up for that one. Uh, what else, what else would you like people to know about when they're thinking about the costs involved? Again, you have your dreams, they have to confront reality, and you guys coach, uh, you know, folks through that obviously, but what else would you like them to, to be thinking about when they're, as they're dreaming and scheming.

And so basically it's, it's like your Microsoft license, right? You just pay every month and you have access or, or your Google meets license or what have you G suite.

But you can do that with AV Now we've seen that over the years come up more and more so that, you know, instead of spending all of that up front, um, those up front dollars, what you basically do is just capitalize it over five years and and at the end of that five year period, it just refreshes and so essentially you can have a building that's just automatically refreshing every five years and all you doing is paying a monthly fee.

So we've seen that deployed and some companies really like that because it also helps you where now instead of being a CapEx It's an OpEx and it's just handled differently financially for you. And it makes life a little bit easier for some folks that need to do that.

Um, I love that idea of, of, uh, of being able to refresh. It's like the, you know, the phone upgrade plan every I, I just amortize that cost over two years. I know I'm gonna upgrade it 'cause I'm gonna have to, so I'll hit that upgrade in two years. That sounds

But if the proper display wasn't used, so it's not large enough, you know, it slows down your ability to catch an error, right? So maybe you don't speak up because you can't clearly see it and you're not comfortable. Maybe the next day you're viewing it. Now you comment. So in a way, you know, there's also a loss when you don't really think about this technology and you don't really go all in on like, okay, what are, what are the standards? What are the recommendations?

And again, I tell folks all the time, this isn't about driving dollars. This is about math, right? It's getting the right solution in the right room so that everyone can see it. Everyone can interact with it. Everyone knows what's going on and there's basically equity in the decision making because everyone understands and can see and can be involved in the process and feel comfortable with it.

There are things that need to be fixed and problems to resolve, and how do you go through the support process to get those things resolved. So we'll talk about that next time. Thank you, Marcus. See you then.