Blog: In-house vs Your own Team?
Ian Grime, October 19, 2011
I have just completed a major event for a client which involved two main plenary rooms and several breakout rooms. The venue was a major conference centre in the UK. The client hired the venue and therefore we had no choice about it and were duty bound to work with the in-house technical team. In one of the plenary rooms and one of the breakouts the arrangements meant that we could use our own team of technicians – some of whom were freelance, but all belonged to our ‘trusted’ team of engineers. In those two rooms we had nothing but praise from the client about how well everything had gone.
However, in the other main plenary, (which I was looking after), I was faced with a whole series of issues. Once I actually managed to track down my ‘team’ of technicians to brief them, it was down to work and shortly thereafter it was rehearsals.
The rehearsals ran on, as they tend to do, and suddenly one of the technicians announced he had to leave to go home….I was given little choice in the matter, and left to wonder how he was going to run the show the following day having not seen part of it.
Ian Grime
Sure enough in the show next day, one of the speakers walked on stage and….his radio mic wasn’t working….
The ‘excuse’ I was given is that the engineer had placed the mic on the speaker and had instructed him to turn it on before he walked on stage – to save batteries as he put it….of course the speaker forgot and there was that pregnant pause before he realised…
The venue have since apologised for this ‘bad practice’ and have acknowledged it should never have happened…
…and I have since found out that the team of technicians, (much as I suspected), had little experience, and had been hired from a local college. It was one of a number of issues I had during a very stressful day.
My question is this – have other people had this kind of experience and should it be allowed for these so called larger venues offering a ‘complete solution’ to hold producers over a barrel with regard to technical staff? I know they all have ridiculous sales targets to achieve, but surely not at the expense of my job?
Incidentally my client realised the situation and all is OK on that front, but that’s not the point – particularly when you then see these particular venues winning awards for their excellent in-house service. How ironic, but then the criteria for how some of these people win awards could be the subject of another rant!
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I have had similar experiences with in-house crew and hate being forced to use crew who I haven’t chosen, and are not right for the job or the client.
I also get annoyed when the in-house team undercut me by quoting for an inferior job (which the client doesn’t understand) using less and inferior crew and equipment. They then go on to jack up the clients bill once they have got the job.
You have started me off now, I could moan about this all day.
Ian,
You are spot on with this. The venues sell the idea of a cost saving to the client by using their in-house service. You need experienced crew working on your events, ones that know how you work & what the expectation of the client is. Sadly this isn’t the case with many in-house teams. With the drive down on costs this is going to be a reoccurring theme.
Very frustrating. Nothing worse than feeling obliged to use an in-house service when you know your team is more capable of delivering.
From an AV suppliers viewpoint it’s an interesting revelation to see that Producers have less ownership of their event than perhaps the client realises. In times of reduced budgets the pressures are in plain sight of all . Quality , expertise & production values are compromised , seemingly on a weekly basis. This cannot bode well for client retention or future business. The credibility of an event rests upon content & tech support .It’s really a matter of educating the client ( after all they are trusting us to all deliver on message ), and that matter of education is well within the remit of today’s producers.
As the manager of the *cough* winning in-house AV team at the 2010 AV Awards I have quite strong opinions on this matter. Firstly, a lot of in-house AV teams are not employees of the venue but of an AV Company with the contract act as the AV teams. This is true of most hotel venues I can think of as well as many major London venues. The venues are seduced by an AV company promising commission on all AV sales (which i have known to be as high as 45%) and the Av Companies are seduced by getting an “in” into all the AV business at a particular venue.
The trouble is that nether party gets what they wants and the business model is, well, bollocks. The AV companies paying the high commission rates to be in-house actually often end up behind in the competition for business because they have already got to find an extra % to cover the venues commission and the venues find the AV companies cutting corners wherever they can to compensate for the crappy terms they agreed to to get the “in-house” gig they lusted after. Sometimes to compensate the AV companies the venue will try to force clients to use the “in-house” team by creating huge dis-incentives for using an outside production company.
Like i said that business model is bollocks. When an AV team is employed by the venue, when the venue invest properly in that team and when that team works to the standard of a production company in terms of technical knowledge, appearance and attitude then it can be very lucrative for the venue in the long term and the venue can also develop a very healthy mutually beneficial relationship with clients and production companies.