How do I Interpret an AV Quote

So you’ve got an event coming up and you need AV. You reach out to several places and the quotes have finally come back. (Why that took so long you have no idea, but I digress. Lol)

To your dismay, there is no order or synergy between them. With some it’s just a bunch of line items of stuff that looks more like a shopping list or recipe than a solution, others are beautiful proposals but the prices are all wildly different. What gives?

How do you make sense of it? 
Which one is the correct price? 
Which one is too high and which one is too low? 
How do you know if your getting what you need or being overcharged or going to come up short on show day?

You don’t want to over pay, but you also don’t want to be embarrassed. Well, you’re in luck. Let’s dive in and I’ll show you how to interpret all of this.


Step 1 - The absolute first thing to look at is the people. The people will make or break your event. 

Sometimes called labor or crew, sometimes called technicians. Sometimes they just say, A1, A2, A3, LD, General AV Tech, whatever. 

First question is how many are there?

You’re going to need to think of the scope of your event. If you have a small 10 or 15 person meeting and the stakes aren’t terribly high, there might only be one person and that’s probably just fine. If that same meeting is 10 or 15 fortune 100 CEOs, you might want more and better people (But if you’re doing that event, you already knew that. Thanks for trusting us again this year! See you next year!).

While assessing the people, think about them like different departments or even different companies because often they are.

Audio
Video
Lighting
Power
Rigging
Staging
Scenic
Creative
Etc




Each one of those is a different skill set. An entirely different trade. If we were to relate it to home services since that’s something most of us can relate to easily. You could break this down into:

Electrician
Plumber
Flooring
Painter
Roofer
Landscaper
Carpenter
Handyman
Etc.

Now, to tie them together; a general AV tech is similar to a handyman. (Think In-House AV here) They can kind of do a little bit of everything but don’t necessarily specialize in one thing or do anything exceptionally well. Depending on the scope, it can be just fine, honestly. Need a lightbulb changed or an outlet swapped out? Easy. Some light drywall patching from the soccer ball that hit the wall? It all turns out fine-ish. But, when you go to re-do the electrical panel or re-roof the house, you don’t call your handyman. You call a specialist. Someone with years or decades of experience in that one specific thing that is super important for the integrity of the house. A leaky roof or a mis-wired electrical panel, can spell disaster. A drywall patch that didn’t hold? Not as critical…. See where I’m going here?

Our event industry works exactly the same way. An AV company is just the general contractor. 

Each specialty is a subcontractor. Audio is a subcontractor, Lighting is a subcontractor. Video is a subcontractor, etc. Each with their own set of obsessed specialists that have forgotten more about their topic of expertise in the last 5 min than most General AV Techs will ever know. 

Now, some companies house these all under one roof and try to do them all. (AV Companies) Some even do a pretty good job at most of them. But the absolute best? They do one thing exceptionally well and are able to source other exceptional subcontractors for you to create a team of superheroes that make you look like a Golden God to your client. They find the other companies or departments that also pack a bunch of “yeses“ into their proposal. That way when you get on site and things change, they can say yes to the additional requests. 
I know, I know, things have never changed on site for a show ever……..🤣🤣🤣

Now that we have lifted the curtain on the hierarchy or the framework that we are asking for bids on. Along with the companies and people were dealing with, we can start to dig into some pricing to see if we’re getting a fair shake.

Again with the people, I would look at what they’re charging to see if that aligns with what other skilled trades typically go for in your area. Again a plumber or an electrician, etc. If the hourly or daily rate (typically they are billed on a 10 hour day) is approximately what it would cost for a plumber or electrician or other skilled trade in that area that’s about right. If it’s significantly lower than that, buyer beware. That is not a very experienced operator and may cause challenges on your show. If it’s a super simple show with a super tight budget, maybe it’s OK. If there’s any type of complexity with cues and stingers and walk on and playoffs, I might be looking for somebody a little more experienced. If they are charging several times what that would look like for other skilled technicians in the area, that would be excessive in my opinion.

Now I would look to see if there are enough people and if there are specialist in each seat or department. This will again depend on the scope of your event. 

Let’s Make a event scenario for our discussion today so we can have some actionable data. We have the three basic departments of Audio, Video and Lighting, in a hotel ballroom for several hundred people. I would expect there to be multiple technicians in each of those departments. That might look something like:

A1
A2

LD or L1
L2 or Master Electrician (not to be confused with the master electrician that will be handling the event power more on that later)

V1 or TD
LED or Video Tech
And possibly one or two more people in each department, depending on the complexity of our couple hundred person ballroom event.

Now you can put together a reasonable scope and starting price.

Here on the West Coast of the United States, all of those trades are north of $100 per hour. Electricians, plumbers, auto mechanic, Audio Engineer, Lighting Designer. Skilled trades are roughly the same cost across industries. 

So, for easy math let’s say there are two people per department, three departments operating on a 10 hour day. That’s going to be a base cost of $6000 to crew the event. Assuming there is no overtime or double time. (You ARE minding your business right?) Don’t let your schedule or scope creep too much or it will cost you big money.

Now, you can factor in logistics, trucking, delivery whatever they call it, which is again going to be another person driving probably an hour or more each way in a box truck. That probably ranges from several hundred to maybe $1000 round-trip in town.

Great $7K baseline cost for our event so far. Simple enough.

Step 2 - Onto the gear or equipment. Which, if I’m being candid is the least exciting and in my opinion, far less important than the people operating it. But, having the correct tools for your people to do their jobs is important. No necessarily in brand name, but in type and scope. 

Since we’re an audio company, I can talk specifically about that. But, there will be similarities with other departments.

Ask each of the people that submitted a quote or proposal to also send along their PA design. 

We have the ability to computer model the speakers in the room you’re going to be in at the proposal phase. Kinda like Amazon’s “view in your room” feature, but not as slick for the customer since we are not Amazon. Haha They should be able to send you a PDF or JPEG picture of their design from their software though. If they cannot do that, they are simply guessing as to how your show might go or what it might sound like. I’d move on if I were in your shoes. You’re reputation and career are on the line and leaving it up to a strangers guess doesn’t seem like a reasonable gamble.

Before you freak and worry about the “Tech Stuff”, You don’t actually need to understand how to read it in depth, the first step is just sorting out the people that aren’t going to do a good job for you and cannot do this first basic step of Event Audio. Which is, see if what I’m selling my client is actually going to work for my client! Pretty straightforward, right? You pay them to do a job and they do that job to the best of their ability? It’s not rocket science. 🤣🤣

Great, so now you’ve disqualified one or more potential vendors or partners or whatever the cute current term is. I bet those remaining quotes are much closer in price than the initial batch you got aren’t they?

The whole time you’re going through this process you’re constantly keeping in mind. What is the scope of my event and how important is this in my event. If the AV is absolutely mission critical, treat it as such and budget for it. If it’s a side note, or a background or maybe nobody really cares, again treat it as such and budget for that. No need to buy a Bentley when a Kia will do type of thing…..Now, I would speculate that the quotes/proposals that are left look more alike than different. The brand names of speakers will be different, but we already determined usually we don’t care about that. What we do care about is what type of speakers they are. Eg, Compact Line Array, 12” Point source speaker etc. THAT will have a very different use case, outcome and budget for you. 

Here’s a real world example for our few hundred person ballroom event:

Company A has spec’d 4 boxes of a premium brand 12” point source speaker (This might look like x12, 12xt, X40, UPJ, M4 etc) for this event as L/R mains and L/R outfits on standard 6’ tall tripod stands to cover our ballroom. So, these premium speakers are actually only going to cover 30% of our attendees and the other 70% are saying they can’t hear. Not good!

Company B has spec’d 6 boxes of a middle of the road compact line array as 3/Side on tripod stands, but these stands could also go up to 10’ tall…. (This might look like HDL6a, HDL26A, T4) This allows them to design a 1Far/2Mid/3Close approach to the speakers and get them above the heads of the attendees. Now the design you requested from them looks VERY even and covers 100% of your audience. No complaints, nobody getting BLASTED in the front row so the back row can hear. Perfect!

And the price to you is roughly the same. Which would you choose?


THAT is why we need the PA design, it’s a pretty picture that describes the ingredients list of a quote that most AV companies sent. 


Here are the 2 PA predictions so you can see what I’m on about. Fig1 is Company A, Fig2 is Company B. The more red, the better.