Why Complex AV Projects Fail (And How We Prevent It)

And there are a lot of things that can go wrong in a project of that size. And so when you have this kind of complexity, you have this kind of scale, so many things can go wrong. So I, what I wanna do is I want to hear from you, what is it that goes wrong? Where does it start? Where should people start thinking about some of these problems upfront?

And then what do you think, uh, maybe advice or implementation or, you know, insights that you've had because of your experience that listeners can take away knowing this is the way that you should actually go through these kind of projects and do this kind of work. So I'll start at the very top, what goes wrong in a project of that size? Like where do we get it wrong and where should we start? What do you say?

Um, it's mission critical for getting to the end of the project and making sure you develop the space that people actually are interested in. And so with that. Architects do it. Great. They have a programming session and they're really great on bringing in everyone involved. So if you're done with the university level, maybe they're bringing in the student government, they're bringing in professors, they're bringing in deans, you know, everyone that's involved that may go through a space.

Um, you know, in our world, in the AV side of things, we may call it the needs analysis, but really we refer to it as a dreaming session, right? We wanna sit down and we just wanna hear from everyone. Who is using the room? How do you want to use it? What should it look like? How should it function? You know, do you use a Mac? Do you primarily, are you Windows based? You know, all these things.

They seem like, you know, the minutiae of what may be happening, but they're mission critical and so on. To kind of lay the foundation of, okay, what is this space? What is it gonna look like? How is it gonna function? Who needs to use it? Um, that's really the, the beginning of everything, you know, if you miss out on these key stakeholders, and we've seen it happen occasionally where you get to the end of a project.

The folks that are actually using the room were never consulted in the process. And they walk in day one and say, well, where's this? Well, where's that? Well, this is how I actually work every day. And so their workflows impacted, or you just, you end up having some users that just aren't really thrilled about the space, and that can be extremely deflating. You know, there are situations we get into where, say it's a bid environment.

Where, you know, someone may have driven the whole spec and they talked to, you know, one person, but then that person didn't do due diligence to bring everyone to the table. And that's how you kind of end up there. So that's, that's one of the more painful areas. And it's really the human part of where you can get off track, because without that human

input, you know you're gonna be lost. You're just dealing with, you know, boxes and computers and cabling. Anyone can do that, right? We can just fall out of bed and design a conference room. That doesn't mean it's the right conference room for every single user. And when you see a lot of folks talking about return to office. You know, how do you bring people back and make them feel heard about, you know, their workspace?

And some of that just goes into that, that same mindset of, Hey, let's bring 'em to the table. Let's sit down, let's talk about, you know, how do you need to work? When I walk into a conference room, maybe I only have my phone with me. I just wanna be able to join from my phone, throw it to the room, and I'm good to go. Maybe I'm a laptop person, right? I always have my laptop. I don't leave home without it.

I never do, honestly, this in my personal, in my personal life, I don't go anywhere without my laptop. But, um, you know, maybe I wanna come in and connect with the cable, right? Or maybe I wanna cast, or maybe I don't wanna come into the room with anything. Maybe I just wanna walk in. There should already be a keyboard, mouse there. And, you know, we have what we call host PCs. They're always in the room.

I just wanna come in and show up and start typing away and log in and do what I need to do, right? These are all very different experiences in the grand scheme of how a room should function. But if you haven't had a conversation, how do you know which one is right? You know, someone once told me. Hey Marcus, you guys are experts. Just go ahead and give 'em a conference room and you know, just show 'em something like, well, that's not what we do. That's not how we approach it.

'cause our goal is to really wow and delight clients. We want 'em to come in and we want to be very happy, right? And we want the system to be easy to use. It should be very intuitive to make a ton of sense, and that we solve all their communication issues. Because at the end of the day, that's why we're doing this. We're helping people communicate.

Like I, I imagine you could say something like. Okay, so you're gonna walk in the room and what are you gonna have with you and where are you gonna sit and what are you, kind of media, are you gonna be streaming or how are you gonna be using it? And so you're walking through these details, but the details matter. And I know you're, you're, you're very technical and your team's very technical, but those details really impact how you're gonna design things and what you're dreaming about.

Is that fair? Is that my assessment of that? Is that how you guys think about it?

You just No, no, no, no, no. When you're doing it commercial av, you know, our big thing is aesthetically we want the room to look Awesome. So, you know from that just one statement of, oh no, I always come in with my laptop and I wanna connect to the table. Well, the, the behind the scenes work there is, okay, well now I have a cable. It's going through a box and a table. Someone has to cut out. Well, now I'm going down into the floor. I need a floor box.

Well, now I'm going through conduit over to the wall. Now I'm going up the wall. Get to this. So there's all this stuff happening in the background. Just because someone said, no, I want to come in with my laptop. I don't wanna do it wirelessly. I wanna connect just that one statement. Drives all of the rest of that to happen in that room. And if you missed it, 'cause you didn't know users came in and they wanna always have a physical connection.

Some folks, they don't love wifi for whatever reason. They don't wanna, they don't want to cast, they don't wanna do any of that. And sometimes, you know, it could be because their IT environment may be challenging and they just, they don't do it. You know, or if a guest is coming in, they don't have a, the capacity to be on the wifi and you know, wirelessly share or something like that. So there's lots of reasons for it, but just by missing that part of the conversation.

You would leave out that key detail and what people then start to miss is now your budget is gonna escalate. Because to go back in, we're talking about cord drilling, a floor and pulling conduit there's all these things that have to happen. So yeah, that's, uh, it's, we've seen it happen where, you know, the question just didn't get asked. And when you're sitting down really thinking your way through something, or you just just walks in, it's like, oh, well, well how do I connect this?

Oh, well, you know, we were under the assumption that you were doing wireless. They said, Nope, I actually do, I do physical connections. Okay. And we go from there.

'cause, 'cause it's gotta go through the ceiling, it's gotta go through insulation. All these joists that are across the ceiling into the crawl space of the attic that you can't actually access. And it was like a nightmare when he was explaining to me and I was like, okay, well I guess I'll use wifi in the office. So I get I get what you're saying. It's,

Yes, that's in my background as well, but it's just like, Hey, if I can get a cable, please gimme the cable.

Uh, the kind of like dreaming discussions that you have with folks and, um, and kind of the what's at stake when you're having these kind of conversations. And so if you could walk us through your process of when you're working with a client and somebody's dreaming, how you go from that dreaming stage down into the implementation.

So let's say somebody is like, okay, here's what I actually need out of the space and I bring my laptop, I wanna sit at the table and I. I plug in my, you know, I like to plug in my, my cord, and so we need, you know, holes here and do this and that. How does that get down to the implementation phase and like how, how do you bring

in all of these very, very detailed technical insights that you need in that very beginning stage brought down into the design team, the implementation team and support, because I know you've got this really great, um, proven process over decades of doing this. So walk me through like, okay, we got that meeting. And then now we need to like actually execute and implement this space. What does that look like, that process?

You know, at that point in time, no matter what someone is telling me, I'm just listening, making sure I understand what they're trying to achieve, what they hope, uh, the room will do. And then also what are the must haves, right? Because you have your needs and you have your wants, and oftentimes the budget's gonna dictate how much of both things you're gonna get. But at that point in time, we're just listening. That's it. We wanna see the space.

And now behind the scenes, not only did we listen, we're documenting, we're taking tons of measurements. Um, taking photos. We're gathering all this information because, you know, once we've had that dream session and really talked through what you want this to be, well, our next step is really to get back to our team and say, Hey, you know, here's what we have. Here's what they're talking about. Let's come up with, you know, a, a budget and a concept, right?

We call it our innovate phase, but we're really gonna sit down and take all these assets that we've gathered, all this information, and we work with our technical team. So we're divided up. We have account managers, we have, uh, design team members, and support team members, and finance and all these folks, right? So at different stages in our process, they're all gonna be involved. But early on it's primarily our account managers and our design team members.

And it's really just taking all of that feedback. Then the design team just gets to work, sketching it out, saying like, okay. And when I say sketch it out, it's quite literal. Some hand sketch, you know, some will do it all computer based, but we're just doing some rough things to say, okay, let's drop this here, drop this box here. We need cabling. Because that visual also helps the team really understand how does this connectivity look? How is this really needing to happen?

And then from there, what we end up doing is kind of getting the budget ready and making sure we can get that to the client to say, okay. Here's what we heard you say, here's how we understood the project. Here's kinda what we put together. Is this directionally correct? Is this what you had in mind? You know, is this what you're thinking about? They say yes. Then we go full bore into designing. Right?

And that's really the bells and whistles of it because early on, you know, we never wanna crush someone's dream. I'm not a fan of dream crushing if I can help it. Um, and everyone tells someone we just can't do something until we really get into the weeds and see like, okay, what needs to happen? Because. I'll tell people, you know, no is not the answer. There can be a no but, or I can't do this but I can do something else. 'cause we're still trying to get to this end result for the client.

And so, you know, once we're aligned on, you know, we understand the concept, we're aligned budgetarily, and we really start designing, that's where we kind of take off on things. Because again, when you see a room, is the wall, is it drywall? Does it have steel studs? Is it brick? All of that affects how we're gonna need to connect things to the wall. How are we gonna run cab? Can we go through the wall to get up to the ceiling? Do we have to surface mount? Can we go through the floor?

That's really where our design team starts really putting together a lot of these details and our account managers would've caught it in the room anyway. That's part of our site survey. We're really picking up details about what is the physical structure that we're going into, what are the, the little nooks and crannies and things we have to think about. It's never necessarily perfect because sometimes even clients don't know they can't get you an architectural package.

We once had a situation where we were at a table, we saw a floor box. There was a display on a wall. It was only maybe 15 feet away. Okay, this should be straightforward. Everyone said, yeah, we have conduit. We're good to go. Once our guys got involved, they realized the conduit routed back out of the room, down the hall looped around, and it came all the way back. So what we thought was 15 to 20 feet was more like 90 feet. So it's

That's our project management team, our installation team. So here's where I say we save some time, right? Because on the front end, if we've really talked through everything, if we've gathered all the details, Hey, I know the display is going to be on the west wall. I know they also want one on the east wall. I know that there's gonna be a camera at this height on the front wall. You know, by gathering all that information and really taking our time to work through it up front.

We now save a lot of time on the backend because when our operations team receives the final packages we put together internally, they know exactly what's happening. There shouldn't be too many changes. Will there always be changes? Absolutely. Right. It's just the nature of people and how things work. But for the most part, you know, our job is to make sure that we've captured, you know, 85 to 90% of everything that's gonna be going on, and that speeds up our installation.

So now we can be very, very efficient. We actually had a client recently that said, man, you guys are awesome. They, they finished that much faster than we thought they would. All of that really comes from the fact that we spent all this time up front. And again, it's a slow process on the front end, but it really helps us be as efficient as possible on the back end. And we're, we're, we try to be a no change order team, right?

We wanna make sure that when we give you a price, when we give you a cost, it's correct. So that's also what drives some of that, you know, time that we're taking up front to make sure we have it right. Because, I mean, we don't, we don't do a lot of change orders. We just generally don't issue many of them. Um, unless a client just. Had some, some turnover maybe, or someone new was involved in the project and it was like, oh, you know what? I absolutely have to have this added.

Okay. Yeah, we'll change order to make sure that's correct, but generally that's our policy is, you know, we're doing our due diligence upfront to try to capture all these things because no one wants to do that. You know, if you're spending this kind of money, and honestly, if you're spending any money, right? I don't care if it's 5,000 or $500,000, you don't want someone to come in all of a sudden and say, oh, by the way, it's gonna be 10% more. No one likes that.

I don't like that in my life, if I think I'm paying one price, the next thing you know it's something else. I may just shut down.

right? To spend that time upfront than to all of a sudden do all this discovery as you're on site trying to figure out what you're gonna do. Now you're ordering parts, you're overnighting things, you're, you're spending all this money and all this time, and you can avoid all that. Just buy a little bit more time spent upfront.

Do you have conversations like that and have you, how do you work through a process of what this budget comes to be based on what the dreaming session was like? What is the dream that we're trying to achieve? And then, well, this is what it takes to pull off. How do you have that conversation if there's pushback on the budget or, or, and as it relates to like a failure of a project.

So what I'm, what I'm thinking of here is like, okay, so let's say this is gonna be $300,000 or $500,000 for this project, and that was more than they were anticipating, but. Maybe you have this conversation of like, well, in order for us to do that, it's gonna be, it's gonna require this and, but, but requiring this is actually how this is actually going to like, save you money long term, down the future. Do you have conversations like that? Like how do you sort through that? I,

We just wanna make sure we deliver really first and foremost, that we deliver on the expectations and make sure we do it at a fair price. So what always encourage folks is if I'm just doing an initial visit, we're just sitting down listening. At this point, we've done so many projects and different types of projects. We kind of have an idea anyway about where the project will land.

And so it's easy to just in that initial conversation, we don't wanna harp on it because we also don't want to get someone too far off pace of what they're hoping to have. So I may just say, Hey, just FYI, but you're describing, eh, we've seen something similar. It's about $150,000 that you budget, that you know, are you expecting that? Because they say, oh no, I've only budgeted $35,000.

Let's take a quick pause to say, okay, let's, let's really drill in to understand what do you have to have and what would you like to have? Because when you hit that point, if there's that big of a gap, you're completely misaligned and you have to kind of really understand where everyone is at. It doesn't happen very often. Um, and oftentimes, again, you can kind of curtail some of this just by having a quick conversation. It's not meant to be accurate. It's not meant to be the gospel.

It's just, Hey, from what we've seen, you're gonna be in this range. But then as you talk through things with folks. You know, we do get asked quite a bit about our pricing. I always say this, I I don't hide it. We are never ever the cheapest option. Never. It's never happened. Uh, not that I'm aware of every once in a while.

Okay. Maybe, maybe 5% of the time, but we also don't try to be, um, what we've seen is when that happens, you know, we're trying to make sure we've captured everything to do the project correctly so that again, what we show you in our final proposal. That's what you're gonna pay. Right? We don't want any surprises, any changes. We try to be as upfront and capture everything that we can.

There's also, unfortunately, and this is in any industry, so you know, there's, there's different manufacturers, right? And they operate at different price points. They have a different focus. And so for us, we partner with manufacturers that we can trust. They're gonna be there for the long haul, right? If we install something, we actually have systems right now that they're still running and they're probably 12 to 15 years old.

And that's because we partnered with the right manufacturers that provide the hardware. We know how to configure it. You know, there, there are cheaper options out there. A client once asked me like, Hey, would you be willing to change this out because I saw the manufacturers you all usually use, but there's some other manufacturers that I know are cheaper. Would you be willing to change?

And it was a no said, Hey, we're, we're not gonna be able to have alignment when it comes to that because again, you know, it's, we're not here to sell you boxes. Right? We're not here to just sell you computers. We're here to bring our expertise into the conversation and what we've experienced, and part of that expertise comes from our support team.

Our support team has been doing it for a really long time, and they can tell you right away what fails, what doesn't fail, what works great, what they feel is terrible, right? And that is very valuable feedback that actually loops back into our design team so we can sit down and understand, hey, you know that video switcher, it failed three times. Just in the first month, there's a problem. Because then we wanna have conversations with manufacturers and we do all these things.

So with that happening kind of behind the scenes, that's kind of what drives our pricing. Right? And then on the, uh, the other component of that is just what we charge in labor. You know, we have a full-time staff. Um, we're big on training. I'm a big fan of education. Uh, retaining staff is very challenging, right? I tell, uh, people all the time, the more skilled folks get. In our industry, everyone's after the same people. Right? We all do the same thing. For the most part.

Our process may be different, some of our manufacturers are different. But yeah, we're big on training and that just to retain staff, send out the trainings, bring people in to do more training, you know, that just kind of drives the expense. And so by us being all full-time employees, it's a little bit different. There's different models out there, businesses, some folks do all contracting. Um, and you know, I don't judge any other company. We just have seen for us.

They primarily drive what we're doing and have it in-house. Our collaboration is much better, you know, and our design team, at any point in time, someone kind of spin around in their chair and say, Hey, have you used X, Y, Z before? And does this work? Someone that used to work with us even said like, that was pretty amazing because he rarely ever had to call the manufacturer to ask the question.

We could just throw it out into the air in between our design team or our support team, they know it, right? And then if we go over to install, they can tell us, oh yeah, that actually takes, you know, two hours because of whatever reason to do that. Versus, you know, someone may think it's 30 minutes. So. Pricing wise, all of that goes into who we are, right?

And that's something that we're not looking to really change. Um, and we know it's also not for everyone. And that's okay too. I tell folks, Hey, Toyota makes Lexus for a reason. Right? They're not all the same. They're different demographics. They're still, they make cars. They're all cars. But it's really what do you want and what's the experience you want? And that's where we're, we try to separate ourselves and really differentiate.

No matter who shows up at your site, you're gonna love them. They're gonna be great. They're gonna be highly skilled. I've actually had one of our larger clients say that to me once where he said, Hey, you know, it was our first project of that magnitude for them. Um, it was probably, you know, over a million dollars in that neighborhood. And, uh, it was one room and it was highly complex. And he gave me a call and said, Marcus, I gotta tell you.

Everyone out here knows exactly what they're doing. They know how it should be happening. They're personable. It's like, Hey, that's great news. I'd love to hear that, because that's, that's who we want to have on our team, right? And we are a team. You know, we, we work on so many things together, all across the organization.

So, and again, that goes from the first time you meet someone on the account team to, if you close, you're closing out with our finance team, it's all about a complete wow and delight across the entirety. Of our interactions. And you know, by no means are we perfect, but that's what we're going for, right? So when you put all that together, that's kind of how you get to that pricing. So that's really the story when people say right away like, Hey, well that's, you seem more expensive.

That it's not that we seem more expensive, it's that we are, I want to clear that up right now. We are definitely more expensive, but the return on your investment and the value we're bringing to the table is again, from top to bottom. The expertise we're gonna come in with how we're gonna make sure we're, we're holding your hand through the process. You'll know exactly what's going on.

If there's a bump in the road, hey, we'll, pulling the right people to make sure that by time this thing is done, you're gonna be happy and your space is gonna work as expected.

time. And, uh, and that value, like you're saying, like the real ROI, when you look at like, okay, they did it right the first time and it, and it just works, and then all the training that you have in your team and you keep them full time and they, they have that better collaboration, that expertise like that really adds up that compounds over and over and over again over the years.

So in our industry, and we'll talk about it in later podcast, it was a system that's known as AV over ip. One of our partner manufacturers work with all the time. We do them all the time. So we said, okay. I said, Hey, tell me what's going on. You know, shoot me a list of your bill of materials so I can see what's happening. So I see it and I'm talking to one of my teammates, uh, Connell Smallwood. So shout to him.

He's also awesome, but we're talking about it and he said, yeah, I feel pretty good about it. I can probably fix whatever's happening and, you know, maybe three days tops. Okay. So it's complex system and we've never seen it. Never seen it. So he kind of gets a feel for it. He starts working on the code, so he drives up on a Sunday and, uh. He's pretty much done by Monday, so it's, and I didn't even know what all had happened until the client called me. He sent me this really long email.

This was great email, and he was just saying, you know, the experience was so off from the other team that he didn't have confidence in us coming in. He just thought we'd be another fly by night style company

So the client ends up telling me, he said, Hey man, we were so amazed. He's so professional. He knew exactly what to do. You know, when he showed up, he had already had the program written and no one was expecting that. So they said he was able to get in there. He called the contractor back to fix the things that were incorrect. And then from there, he just got all the programming done, got everything configured, everything was working. So we kinda estimated maybe three days.

It was about a day and a half, right? And the client just could not believe. And to this day, the room is working perfectly and it's one of those things where we talk to the project manager who's overseeing all this and we said, Hey listen, I get it right. I really do understand like a lot of times there are these terms get thrown about best value determination, the lowest responsible bidder and all these terms. All that means is you're typically in a race to the bottom.

Someone's gonna try to do this as cheap as possible. And we have photos of this room. We saw how it was installed and we couldn't believe it. It, it just blew us away about how poorly it was actually installed in terms of like, they had just gone to the store, I guess, to buy some internet cables and Proud Milk. Amazon. No, no offense to Amazon. Amazon at all. Don't sue me please.

But, um, yeah, it's, it's just, it was really substandard work and we have some competitors out there that we're really, we call 'em frenemies. We're really close. We're all the same trainings. We see each other all the time. So we, we know, we all have similar skills. Just our processes are different. That experience was a quick reminder of like, this matters, our experience matters. Us knowing what we're doing, it matters.

Because again, they saved money by bringing in this company, but their room set for 18 months. So what was the real cost of that? right. What was the cost and the loss of belief in your internal stakeholders? The cost of the room being down and not being functional, and having to find other places to do your events. You know, all of that is kind of what gets hidden behind the scenes that people don't think about it, but there's a real cost there and there's really.

Time, energy and just kind of trust like the capital of trust being lost because you brought a team in that couldn't do the job

But as I age, I'm 35, so I'm relatively young, but as I get older, I'm finding that I just want stuff that just works and I'm, I'm willing to pay, like. A lot more money than I ever thought I would on lots of different things, whether it's a computer, a car, you know, a cookware, just anything around the house, a couch. Um, I'm just, I, I just want things that work well and I'm, I'm willing to like, spend that money.

So anyway, that's what makes me think of when you talk about, you know, doing things the right way, having a solid team, even though yes, it's a little bit premium, but when you think about the total cost, what you just said, like maybe that room sitting. Vacant for 18 months. Like there's a huge cost to that that may not show up on a p and l, but you see it in having to do other things.

The distraction that it causes, the headache that it causes, the communication and collaboration, you know, issues that show up later on, like the trust that's lost, all that stuff is very costly. That that can't be quite quantified in a, in a, you know, financial terms. But it does show up. And so yeah, I love that emphasis. I think it's great.

So in the last, uh, little bit here on this episode, last question for you is, if you were talking directly now to a decision maker, let's say, at, uh, a large health core healthcare organization, a dean at a university, you know, the head of a, a large, you know, corporate organization that is like, okay, I, I think I have this. This project that I know is gonna be important over the next, let's say, eight to 12 months, you know, end of 2026.

And I need to be thinking about this the right way upfront, and I want to avoid the kind of problems that you're talking about. And I wanna, um, uh, make sure I have my ducks in a row at the very beginning. What would you say to them? What advice or what takeaway or insight would you share after doing this for so long with so many different projects?

They should be there as the architect is working through their, you know, their drawings and putting together, and I mean, early phase. Schematic design programming, like the early phases of the architectural process, your technologists should be there also because they work together. We have several architects we work with very closely. You know, we're working early on, oh, can we move this wall? Can we add this? Can we add this electrical here?

Oh, the client said, you know, the X, Y, or Z. All those conversations are happening before we ever get into construction documentation, and that's really. That's really the most important part there. So if you're a key decision maker, any kind of leader, make sure you're having that discussion as early as possible because that way you're prepared for it, right?

So there's the one issue of you don't want a project to close out and you didn't get what you want, but you also don't want to be in the middle of a project and see your construction costs going up by 10 to 15, 20% because no one thought about the infrastructure that has to be in place to support what your dream is, right? I wanna, I want to display this, gonna be 20 feet tall and 40 feet wide. Awesome. So do I. They look great. But on the flip side, how are you supporting it?

What is the structural, you know, integrity of the wall? Is everything there? That probably needs, you know, 15 independent circuits. There's all these other things that have to happen, and that conversation needs to happen early. So it gets documented correctly. It gets, you know, included with drawing set. Everyone's on the same page. That's, that's the most important piece of advice, you know, is bring everyone to the table early, you know, your technology specialist.

Opinion, uh, key opinion leaders, your users of the space, and everyone should just be in there collaborating, talking, working through, you know, what is the space? It could be a room, it could be a building, it could be a campus. What are we trying to achieve? What our goals?

Go to contech.com, K-O-N-T-E k.com, and you'll find all kinds of info there. And reach out to the team and try to prevent the problems that arise from complex AV projects. We will see you next time. Thanks, Marcus.