The Truth About AV Monopolies: Do Event Planners Really Have a Choice? with Tim Lang, President of Proshow AV

The job of an event planner is to work with your client to figure out what their vision is and then to put on the best possible event for them. Because there is a near monopoly for AV in corporate meeting venues, that choice gets taken away from the event planner. It really deprives the event planner from their responsibility and their job, which is to choose the best suppliers for their event. Welcome to Production Value Matters, the business event podcast brought to you by Burn Production Services. Here we explore different ways business events can bring value to your organization, the latest technological advancements in the event space, as well as providing you with actionable strategies to make a business event a success. Let's create an exceptional event experience. Event technology continues to be one of the most transformative forces in this industry, shaping how organizations connect with audiences, deliver experiences and measure impact. But with that power also comes challenges from cost to competition to questions of access and innovation. In Canada especially, the conversation around fair competition and choice in audiovisual providers has become a pressing issue with venue monopolies limiting options for planners and and often driving up costs. That's why I'm really excited to be joined today by Tim lang, president of ProShow Audio Visual and President of the Canadian Audio Visual Providers association, who's been a leading voice in advancing fair competition and strengthening Canada's AV industry. Tim's got more than 30 years in Canada's audio, visual and live events industry. He brings a deep technical expertise, operational leadership and industry advocacy to everything he does. He began his career at Pro show in 1994 as a technician and advanced through rentals, operations, finance and finally executive leadership, ultimately becoming the co owner and president. Along the way he led thousands of high profile productions for corporate, government and not for profit clients including international meetings, televised press conferences, gala dinners, ceremonies and major sporting events. As the President of the cavpa, Tim represents Canadian owned and operated AV providers nationwide, advocating for fair competition, strengthening the AV workplace and fostering collaboration and growth across the country. In his day job at Pro Show, Tim leads strategy and financial stewardship while staying closely engaged with clients and staff, ensuring that their over 1500 annual events are delivered with precision, creativity and a commitment to excellence. Today we'll dive deep into some event technology, some industry advocacy, and why strengthening Canada's AV sector matters now more than ever. Tim, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. Well, thanks Matthew. Thanks for that great introduction. I need to go and brush up my LinkedIn profile to use some of your material there. That was great. Are you available for marketing consultation? Yeah, I Think that's going to be my side hustle. I have to say, after doing two and a half years of this podcast, we've got an amazing writing team in the back end. And that is a common comment. Every time I do an introduction, I immediately get an email afterwards going, hey, can I borrow that for my, my LinkedIn bio? And the answer is absolutely, yes, I will. I will send you a copy. So, Tim, you've been in the AV and live events industry for over 30 years. How have you seen event in production technology evolve during that time? Sure. Well, like all technology feels, whether it's IT or computers or, you know, cars or even appliances, it's been pretty dramatic change. When I started, there wasn't really even a V in av. It was more A and L, but the V was a slide projector or maybe an overhead or something like that. It really wasn't until the mid, late 90s, early 2000s that you, you know, you started to see projection technology and, you know, cameras and things like that make their way into the live event world. Of course they were around in television, but, you know, not really so much in av. And then from that point, you know, which is sort of where we got to the full AV and let's just call it around 2000, certainly for crochet, anyways, that's about when it happened. The pace of technology going from less than standard def to standard DEF to HD to 4K, from different bulb technologies up to LED, where we are now, the technical complexity of the equipment and the skill level needed for the technicians to operate this has grown exponentially and to the point that nowadays, not only do AV technicians have to have good ears to be able to, you know, ring out the room and make the PA sound good, which has not changed in 40 years of AV, but they have to be absolute experts on hundreds or even thousands of models of highly technical equipment. They have to be network engineers. They have to understand network switches and IP routing and VLANs and fiber transmission. And it's a lot in the. The workload and the amount of knowledge that an AV technician now is responsible for is 100 times more than 30 years ago. When I started, when I was younger, I actually knew how to use all of our equipment at Pro show, and that is certainly far from the case today. Luckily, we have a lot of really brilliant people on our technical team that know all these things. But yeah, it's amazing how the complexity is grown and also the client expectation, the delegate expectation. Thirty years ago, if the PA didn't sound Very good. Or there was some feedback or the projector cut out, they were just like, oh, okay, that's normal. Whereas nowadays, when you're doing, whether it's corporate events, concert events, you know, sporting events, the expectation is for technical excellence and perfection all the way through. And it's a big problem if it's anything short of perfect. And so I think that's different to the expectation level of the audiences and of course, correspondingly the clients, maybe companies which are largely event producers. So that's also different. Yeah, I mean, I remember in my very first job at an AV company when I was a very, very young man, it was a big deal that we had CRT TVs, which are the old tube TVs on a cart. And that was. We were. I used to set them at trade show booths in Montreal. And that was like, ooh, look at the fancy guy. He's got a CRT tv. Which, you know, for anybody listening who has any idea about TVs, is really dating myself. And then it's interesting that you say about, like, the client and the show expectations that have changed over those 30 years, because I was suddenly reminded of one of the first NFL halftime shows, which was cardboard cutouts of sort of Disneyland princess towers. Now to, like, the expectation of, like, it has it's automated scenery with LED tile floors and tons of moving lights, which, you know, is a perfect sort of illustration of that massive change. Well, I'll say two things. The first, the CRT monitors, of course, I can remember again in the late 90s, long before LED video walls existed, having the stack of cubes of CRT monitors to make nine or 12 or 16, all stacked up in a. In a cube. And that was the video wall of those days. And none, none of them, no two looked the same. They were all a different color temperature, different contrast, a different brightness. And they all weighed like 400 pounds each. Needed a forklift to get them in place. But it's. We've come a long way since then. And I think the other thing with event technology in general, it's gone from an accessory item that you sort of, oh, yeah, we better have some sound or some lights or something like that. Whereas now in a lot of cases, the event technology, the sound, the lighting, the video is the centerpiece of the audience experience for, for the event. You know, gone are the days where we had, you know, massive two semi trailers of. Of wood flats and custom Styrofoam, you know, and that was the big, you know, all the. The hard scenic that's largely replaced by massive LED walls or huge, you know, 100 foot panoramic projection screens. And that is the experience now. It's obviously the content is, is equally important. But, but the role that technology now plays in delivering the key elements of the audience experience is very different from, you know, 20, 30 years ago where it was just sort of, oh yeah, we should have some, some aviation. That balance between innovation and technology and the operational and financial realities for running those sort of large scale AV installations, how have you seen that changed over the last few years? Years? I mean, it's. There. One thing that has not changed is the, the need to balance the desire of what the event would ideally like to have with what the budget is. That's not new. That's always been the case that the numbers are bigger now and there's a lot more technology. But I think that the, it's actually not that hard as a vendor to balance it because we buy equipment and provide equipment that our customers are willing to pay for. So even though it doesn't mean that we aren't interested in the latest greatest thing that just was announced at Infocom in June, but we, you know, we don't buy it unless we see there's a customer demand in our, in our market. In the market. We're in Western Canada, in Vancouver and Calgary. Our market is different than the Las Vegas market or the Los Angeles or New York markets. And so we listen to our customers. If we're thinking about getting something and we're not sure if we should pull the trigger, we'll talk to them and say we're thinking about this. Is that something you would like to see on your events? Would it add value? You know, what, what would you be willing to pay for it? And we work together with our clients. A lot of the expansions that we've had at Prosh over the years have been client driven where we've gone into a whole other area. For 10 years we had a TV truck division and that was always, you know, client driven, where the client said, hey, it'd be great if you could do this. And we listened. But it's, I think it's largely driven by the event planners who ultimately control the vision and control the budget. And we just have to do a good job of communicating with them, showing them what's possible, showing them, you know, here's, here's explaining the latest technologies or. But ultimately listening to what they want because we're here to serve the event planners. Absolutely. So I want to get into talking about The CAVPA for a second total disclaimer to the audience. I am also a member of the CAVPA and so big supporter and big fan. I'm totally biased, but I did want to draw some attention to it. So cavpa, you're really passionate about the issues that the members face in this industry and so why does it matter so much to you? Well, if we can just step back a minute to 2020, beginning of 2020 and for the decades before, there never was a national association in Canada for AV companies. There were large event planner or event associations like mpi, iahlea, vixa, but they covered a wide range of things and there wasn't something really specific for EV companies. And this, when I say that, I mean sound, lighting, video companies that own equipment and rent it out with technicians for live events, be that concert, corporate sporting, whatever that is. There was no association that specialized in that. So when the pandemic hit and we had some unique challenges in our industry because even though there were many good government support programs to support with labor and other things, it didn't really address the fact that AV companies also had massive multimillion dollar capital investments, warehouses, trucks and things like that. Bills had to be paid for and that wasn't addressed. And so when we and other companies across the country spoke to government to say, hey, we need more support than just this if we're going to survive through this pandemic, we got a lot of sort of understanding and sympathy from different levels of government. We spoke to Christia Freeland's office, we spoke to various provinces, but they all said the same thing, where is your industry association? Because we don't make government policy based on talking to one company. And that's something that really stuck with me. And even though CAFA didn't really come to fruition and get, you know, incorporated and get going until really the end of the pandemic, it was a great lesson that we should as an industry have an association other than one big international player, maybe one or two international players. Every other AV company in Canada, which there are hundreds and hundreds, is a small to medium sized owner operated business. And, and, and we really could benefit from an association similar to the Canadian Restaurant association or the Pacific Salmon Farmers association or you name it. And so that, that was the impetus for kafpa. And so that we would, you know, largely driven from the need to be able to communicate with government, whether it be the federal government, provincial governments, you know, any level of government as an industry and not an individual company where you're biased by, you know, that's just for your one company, you know, to have a proper industry voice to advocate to government and also to interact with the event planning community, a MPI and the other organizations out there that are representing event planners and putting on events like the GOEST conference where you and I both spoke on the panel back in February as an industry and not change it as being just one company trying to advance its own commercial interests. And so that's, that's, I think the real beauty of KAFPA and as it, and so it started with just five companies and then every year we've added more. I think we're at 36 member companies now nationally from every province, I think, except, except for the territories. But I believe every single province has representation now coast to coast and it allows us to, you know, have that voice. And so when we go and talk to government about what are the pressing industry challenges in our industry, just like any other industry now we have some credibility and clout, you know, speaking with that industry voice. And same thing with being able to, you know, promote right now, of course, with the trade climate being what it is, we're able to push a Buy Canada message for our members through social media, through advertising, just to promote the benefits of, of having a Canadian vendor, Canadian owned AV vendor in there, like every other industry is doing. And so those are some of the great things that CAP is able to achieve that would be difficult for any individual company to do even if they had the, the financial resource to do the campaign. It. It just wouldn't have the, it wouldn't have the same resonance coming from one company as it does from a national association. Absolutely. And so how do you see kavpa's advocacy shaping the future of AV in Canada? Well, I think it gets us a seat at the table. Whereas before we were invisible, we didn't exist. As far as the federal government, most provincial governments exist, which is strange because you don't get to be an elected politician, let alone a cabinet minister or a premier prime minister without having a lot of interaction with an AV vendor. You will attend election campaigns, press conferences, fundraiser dinners, national conventions, you name it. All of that doesn't, you know, doesn't happen without an AV partner. And yet when it comes time to policy, it's, as was evidenced during the pandemic, it's like they forgot that we exist and it was impossible to really get any airtime with them. And so now that we have that, we've had great traction. We have a lobbyist at cafa, we've had great traction interacting with different ministers at different levels of government, whether it be on government procurement and again supporting Canadian businesses or whether it's, it's on other industry issues. You know, if we had, if Kappa had existed 10 years ago when they had the spectrum auction for all of the, the RF spectrum in the UHF range for wireless microphones, we might have been able to say, wait a minute, you're about to cost, you're about to wipe out tens of millions of dollars of capital investment from all these small and medium businesses that we've bought in wireless microphones that are going to be useless once this goes through and unusable. And I don't think, I mean that was a multi billion dollar revenue cash cow for the government. It wouldn't have stopped them from doing it. But we might have been able to get a, some a grant program for partial recapitalization grant for, for Canadian companies to help pay for all the new wireless we had to buy. So you know that that ship has sailed. But we'll be ready now for the next time something like that comes up to have that voice and to have already made the connections with different ministers, with different bureaucrats and even interacting with other associations like the CFIB which is a great partner to CAF. They represent 100,000 small media businesses and they do a great job. But of course EV companies as a percentage of their membership is 0.0000 something or other. So it's important that we have our own voice as well. Yeah, absolutely. And for those of you, most of our listeners are event planners and event marketers. This was back in early 2000s that cell phone companies wanted to buy a bunch of the radio waves so that they could do more cell phones. And every AV company in North America and Canada especially struggled because all of our microphones didn't work one week and we had to go and get new material. It was a very harrying time. I think if you were an RF technician or a radio frequency technician at the time, you were making tons of money because you had to go in and consult with a everybody to make those things work. Okay, so you've highlighted one of the biggest challenges in our earlier conversations in Canada with a almost near monopoly for in house venue av. Can you explain why this is such an issue and why it's so critical to event planners and to their clients? Absolutely. This is definitely a key area of passion and importance I think for the event community in Canada. The job of an event planner, whether you're an in house planner for a big company or an association, or whether you're a contract event planner for working for an event management company, your job is to work with your client who wants to do the event to figure out what their vision is, what their desired outcomes are, what their budget is, and then to put on the best possible event for them. That means making the best choice possible for the menu, for the brand identity, for, for the scenic and decoration and includes for the av. And it's the job of the event producer to make those decisions and decide what is the right company, what is the right vendor, what is the right solution for all of those things. And unfortunately what is what is happening in Canada and to a lesser extent in the US and other countries, but particularly in Canada, is that because there is a near monopoly for AV in corporate meeting venues, is that that choice gets taken away from the event planner. It doesn't mean that isn't the right thing to, you know, the best choice isn't to use the in house. Often, often that is the best choice. But the event planner is, is in many cases forced to use the in house company even though they don't want to. Maybe because they didn't have a good experience with them last time, or they didn't think the value proposition was good, or they just have a favorite supplier that they have a long term relationship with that they always like to use on their events and, and then they go into one of the big chain hotels and they of course want to work with their same preferred vendor that they always work with and they find out that, well, they can. Technically the AV is not exclusive in any venues in Canada that I'm aware of. You always can bring in your own. But the way that these venue contracts are sometimes set up or often set up is that if you don't use the in house preferred AV vendor, suddenly your costs for other things that are not ev, things like the Internet, power, even room rental can get massively more expensive, sometimes by an order of magnitude that's more than the entire EV budget. Because you, you know, and so yes, technically you had a choice. You could use the AV you want, but do you really have a Choice? If the AB budget's 50,000, but the dollar cost of penalties for not using the in House is 50,000 as well, well then you don't really have a choice, do you? And you're not able to use the vendor that you want to use or that you have the relationship. Or maybe your client always works with a particular vendor and they want to use that and now you have this big problem and I think that's unfair and really bad customer service for the event planners. It's unfair for the end clients that are trying to do the event. It's certainly not a healthy competitive market. And because we have a near monopoly situation in a healthy market, if you weren't happy with hotel A and that situation, you could go across the street to hotel B or down the road to Hotel C. But when the same vendor and the same situation exist in all of those hotels now you don't have a proper competitive marketplace and you can't say to the to venue A, well if you don't be more reasonable, I'm going to go to venue B or venue C. They'll say well go ahead, you're going to have the same situation there. And it really deprives the event planner from their responsibility and their job which is to choose the best suppliers for their event. Yeah, and I want to emphasize one of the things that we talked about in our pre call which is it's not necessarily the, the existence of an in house vendor that is great. As you, as you and I have spoken about at length in different forums. You know, sometimes that's a really great and convenient and strategic choice. You know I will say that you guys are preferred an in house vendor in a few venues in the west of Canada, if anywhere in these, I'm not even quite sure. But that isn't to say that you know, using an in house vendor is a bad idea. It's it's to say that like maybe that practice should be a little bit more open, transparent and cohesive to innovation and competition is. I think that's what we're trying to get down to. Yeah, well it's all you know, first I'll say yes, absolutely. Approach. We have a number of in house venue contracts including at the Vancouver Convention center where we're the official AV supplier and a few others in B.C. and Alberta. And it's, you know, it would be bizarre to have a venue that didn't have an in house vendor. You need if you're a venue, if you're a hotel or convention center providing a service to customers for events, it's reasonable and really expected that you should have an in house team that can set up a podium mic tied into the house sound system in the meeting room or do at the very least basic AV and hopefully that can scale up to mid size or even larger scale shows. That's a critical service every venue should have. There's Nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with having those contracts. And of course there's always any in house vendor, whether it's the hot dog stand at the Rogers arena or whether it's an AV company venue. There's always a behind the scenes structure in terms of commissions and everything. And that's all normal and fine. That's not the issue at all. The issue is when people, planners who don't want to use who that vendor is, are being forced into using it by leveraging other areas that have nothing to do with AV or not really related to the av, like Internet, like power, like room rental. The AV and a venue should be good enough and provide enough value that customers can decide, yes, we want to use that on their own. They shouldn't need the crutch of having to penalize people in other areas just to get them to use a vendor they don't want to use. The vendor should make sure that they're providing a good value and a good service. So the customers do want to use them and that shouldn't be, they shouldn't be again, propped up by other areas that have nothing to do with av. That's, that's where the problem comes in there. There's no problem in and of itself having in house vendors. That's actually critical. You need to have in house vendors and there's huge benefit to using an in house vendor when you can have a last minute requirement, oh, we need an extra wireless mic or we need an extra PowerPoint remote, or oh, we need an emergency press conference. Having a vendor who's in the hotel with staff, with equipment is essential and can save your bacon. Absolutely. As the event planner. And even sometimes you might as a planner choose to bring in an outside vendor for your big plenary or your big gala and work with the in house vendor for the meeting rooms and some of the trade shows. And that often makes a lot of sense. You know, the smaller the event, the more sense it generally makes to work with the in house vendor because you've done, you're not paying for trucking, you're not paying for transportation for all of this thing. You're not paying four hour calls to set up two microphones and two speakers on stands. So a lot of times the right decision for the event is indeed to use the in house and there's nothing, nothing wrong with that. So to be clear, you know, it's not anything bad about in house av, it's about having to force the hand or to really coerce planners to use that company when they don't want to use them by penalizing them in other areas that are not the AV 100% I 100% agree with you on that point. When it's not just another meeting, when it's the event that matters, you need a production partner who delivers Burn Production Services specializes in multi day meetings, conferences and large scale events that demand flawless execution. From cutting edge audio and video to stunning lighting and staging, we're built for your largest events. Take your production to the next level. Visit burn productionservices.com and request your proposal today. Enjoying the show? Don't miss a single episode. Follow Production Value Matters wherever you get your podcasts and for bonus content, tools and event insights, head over to productionvaluematters.com and subscribe. Stay sharp. Stay inspired. Production Value Matters. So how do you see the path forward where advocacy and awareness can help level that playing field? Well, education is the number one thing. So first of all, you know, trying to make sure and this is what something Kappa does, trying to make sure that event planners first of all understand the nature of these arrangements with with in house vendors for AV in in hotels and convention centers. Of course it's not just av, there's also catering. Now catering usually is exclusive rather than preferred, unlike av which is preferred. But rigging will be exclusive. That you know, the chairs and the risers will generally be exclusive. You know. So it's educating planners on on the language, what exclusive versus preferred, what things they have to get from the venue or the or and sometimes the venue's AV company is also middling or providing or managing the Internet or the power, things like that, the rigging certainly. And so understanding the differences, understanding the motivation on why the venue might want to, let's say encourage you to use the in house vendor because they're getting a big, you know, a cut on the commission. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just about being transparent and understanding the commercial relationship and understanding particularly before you as a planner or company book your venue before you sign the contract identifying if I choose not to use your in house av, what are all the extra charges and fees I'm going to have to pay? There's no problem, there's nothing wrong. In fact it's correct to pay for power, Internet and rigging. Those things all have a cost to put in, a cost to maintain. They have to you need people to do all the Mitsubishi 100% appropriate to pay for those things. What's not appropriate is when you pay 10x the normal rate because you didn't use the in house ab. And that's unfortunately what we see happening all too often. So. So CAFA has by the way, a great resource on our website that's available to all of our members, which is a venue RFP template. So if you're an event planner and you are in the process of booking your venue and you want to make sure that you protect your right to choose, just keep your options open. You can use in house, you can use external, whatever you want. You can make sure in your contract that you have pre identified fixed rates for things like the Internet and powered rigging so that you know you have the certainty those aren't going to change based on your AV provider decision. And if there are extra fees, external vendor fees or oversight fees or whatever, which is fine. These are all private businesses of the venue, they can charge whatever they want. It's about making sure it's transparent and identified in the contract. And if you think it's unfair, before you sign the contract, negotiate. Once you sign the contract, the time for negotiation is over. But until you've signed it, you still have the power as the customer. And on the Capcom website available for our members is a toolkit of language that you can put into your venue RFPs to help you identify all that. So you don't have to sort of, you don't have to figure out all the lingo and think about what those are. You can just cut and paste from our toolkit. Absolutely. And we'll certainly link that in the comments of this episode. So if you're listening on whatever device, just check out the comments and you'll see a link to the CAVPA website where you can download those resources. Some of them are locked for membership, but there are some completely free resources for event planners to be able to access that language so that when you are going out to book a venue you can put that in that first email, which is great. Absolutely. And you'll see on the resource page there's a little lock icon. So some of them are available for anyone. Some of them you just need to go through a member. And the reason that we did that is to encourage event planners to talk to a member because these are complicated issues and you know, as, as we tried to do the best job we can in the toolkit document, but it's always best to talk to one of our members and they can help guide you through that process with menu questions. Another great resource we have is a white paper we did last year on immigration Rules. So if you're thinking about having a foreign AV company come into Canada from the US or from anywhere, what the rules are for the workers, what they are allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do in terms of the immigrations and foreign worker rules in Canada. So that's another great resource we have. Well, thank you very much for setting me up as a great segue into my next subject which is, you know, with a lot of economic uncertainty, there's a lot of things happening in the world right now. How can Canadian Navy providers best position themselves to stay competitive and innovative in this kind of global marketplace? Like how do we go elbows up as members of the cavpa? Well, I think first and foremost we should be proud to be Canadian companies. Canada is a much smaller market than the US or than Europe with a very large geography to, to service and a lower, lower average budgets for events than you would have in big US or European cities. The ROI on equipment for a Canadian vendor is a fair bit less than it is for the same vendor in the States or in Europe. So it is not easy to run an AV business or lighting business, you know, technology, which is a capital asset based business in Canada. So first of all I think you should be proud if your business is still in business after the pandemic in Canada. Job well done. You're already doing a great job balancing that. But it is important to recognize that we don't have the same density of events. You can, you know, if in the States when you're in a market, there's 17 other major cities within a four hour, eight hour drive that you can provide your services at without having to, you know, if I wanted to do an event in Toronto out of Vancouver, that's five days each way in the truck. We've put $50,000 of transport into the EV budget. We haven't actually done anything. All we've done is roll the semi back and forth. Yeah, for sure. The, you know, it's challenging. So I think that going to the question is what do we need to do, you know, to make sure that we are winning that business. It's, it's first of all making sure customers understand that they're supporting a Canadian owned business, which doesn't matter. If you're a foreign, if you're American association, you probably don't care. But if you're a Canadian company, Canadian association, you should care. And then it's, it's listening to the customer. As a smaller medium business, you are by definition more boutique than a big international conglomerate and able to provide a more personalized level of service. So have those relationships with the customers. Make sure you're listening to what they want and what they need. Don't, don't tell them what they want. Listen to what they want and then try and figure out the best value from your available pool of inventory that you have or you have access to what's going to meet their need, what's going to provide good value for them, and, and, and really be a partner to, to those clients as opposed to just a, just a supplier. It's like the small bookstore, you know, when Amazon came in. And of course, you know, it's very easy to go on the Amazon webpage and get whatever you, whatever you want shows up the next day. But it's not like when you went into the bookstore and you talked to, you know, the, you know, the German guy who'd been working there for 52 years and he knew every book and he remembered the last 10 books that you bought because you go in there a few times a year and he says, oh, well, you, you know, you might like this one. And it was just such a more personal, personalized customer service environment. And that certainly can be true in our industry as well. So what advice would you give to any young professional sort of considering a career in AV and live events right now? Well, I think that answer is very different if you're thinking about starting up an AV rental company with capital investment versus, say, being a, being a technician. I think in terms of the vast majority of people are not going to be AV company owners, but they may be technicians. I think it's an exciting time. There's a real convergence right now between information technology, networking and event technology. And it's a really interesting time to be in the industry to see those changes. And there's a lot of opportunity if you're motivated, if you are smart, if you go and put yourself through the training that you need. And most of it is all available for free through YouTube videos, through manufacturer provided courses, or very low cost. And you go out there and decide, I'm going to learn everything that I possibly can on, you know, large pixel screen switching technology, whether that be the barcode, encore 2, encore 3, stuff the, the analog way, Aquilon and, and you can go out there and really quickly get a name for yourself. It's important to be well rounded in all of the areas, but pick one or two areas that you become a really good expert on and you can do very well. And in the corporate side of The EV industry. I mean obviously there's concert touring, there's theater. In the corporate side, which is the side that pro shows in. In the west, you can have a good family, supporting income, it can be a career and not just a job, which is maybe not the case in concert touring, which is a lot harder on families and on your physical person, some of the rigors of being on the road like that. But it is, it is an industry where you can have a rewarding and fruitful and long career if you want it. But you do need to be, you know, there isn't really a lot of university programs or college programs that are going to teach you much about industry. They can teach you specific things about how to use a mixer or a microphone, but you need to do it yourself. And you can't really expect the companies to, to do training for full time staff. Of course companies will do training, but again, other than other than one or two big ones, it's all small to medium sized businesses that don't have the resources of some of the German companies that, that have full institutes of learning for their employees or even LNG in the States, in Orlando and Vegas they have the Coil Institute, which is basically a school for technicians. It's very impressive. It's unbelievable. But they also, I mean just that one company basically probably does like what ev, you know, gross revenues for all of Canada, all companies combined. It's, you know, we're in a small market here which presents unique challenges but also unique opportunities for people that are motivated and ambitious and hardworking. So if someone's listening in the planning side right now and they want to ensure that they navigate their AV options, what, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them? Talk to a Navy company, not, not the in house one. Talk, talk to one that you trust or that you've worked with before or if you're new, talk to some of your colleagues. You know, if you don't belong to MPI or il, certainly I would encourage you to join both great organizations. But talk to a colleague, get a referral to an, a trusted AV company and talk to them. They will be able to really help you. Whether you're just trying to navigate the venue contract, whether you're trying to say what are the things I need to look out for? If you've already got the contract signed, sometimes companies, big companies will have a different company altogether. That isn't the event planner who books the venues years in advance. And as the event planner you sort of get brought in. It's like, oh, the venue's already, already contracted, that ship's already sailed. But it doesn't mean there aren't things you can do or negotiating points that you can, that you can try and, and put into play. But talk to, talk to your trusted AV company because they, this is what, this is what we do every day. We've pretty much seen it all and, and that's going to be your best resource. And most AV companies, even if you're not going to hire them for the job, they're happy to talk to you about the, your challenges or the, the venue thing because maybe next time you will hire them. You know, and most companies are like ourselves, we're just passionate about the education piece and trying to enable that level of understanding with event so that there could be the transparency and you know, hopefully a power shift back into the hands of the event planner and out of the venues. Absolutely. We say this all the time. Call us anytime you just want to chat about your challenges. We'll help you out. Absolutely. For free, you know, and never with an expectation of life. I bet next time you're going to give me the contract. I mean, that would be nice. But the reality is that as an industry, we're all like, it's a smaller community. You've said this a couple of times in this episode. We're sort of a tenth the size of the US market. There are some companies in the AV world that are based out of the US who have the entire gross domestic product of our industry in their 1P and L. And so we have to be an integrated community. We have to be, be more collaborative in this market. And so, yeah, call anytime. Like if you want me to take a look, there's a list on the CAFA website which is CAVPA ca. There's a member list and a map. So you can go and look at who are the member companies in your province or your city and you can call a local one and I'm sure they would be very happy to help you as well as provide you any resources that you want off the, off the CAPCO website. Absolutely. And by the way, Canada's population is 10% of the U.S. but I would suggest that our AV market, especially corporate events for EV, is probably not 1/10. It's probably 1/25 or 1/50 the size. It's way smaller. And there's, there's a lot of challenges, the taxation regime in Canada, especially if you're in a province like British Columbia where we have the PST There, there are a lot of challenges that, that result from our smaller, you know, smaller population base, smaller overall industry size and some of the tax things that we have to deal with that make it, make it challenging in Canada. So again, if you're, if you're an AV company owner for a full time, for an EV company that's still operating now, you should be proud of that because it is not an easy industry. It's probably easier to make money opening a new restaurant actually. Yeah, a buddy of mine and I used to joke about one day we're just going to quit working in this industry and like create like a, like some app on the App Store and make a $4.55 billion valuation on day one. You know, nobody that I know and I've been very privileged to meet and talk to a lot of AB company owners in Canada. No one that I know that owns an AV company did it because they said when they were younger, what can I do that's going to make me a lot of money? Not a single one. Not a single one. Because they're passionate about the industry. They're passionate about having the most amazing visuals, the most amazing lighting, the most, you know, great looking events that if they're passionate about customer service, they're passionate about working with event planners and clients on delivering amazing experiences. I mean the, the electric feeling when the audience applauds at the end of a show, whether that's a theater show, a concert or a corporate show. That's, that's what they do it for. It's passion for the industry. It's not for the money, which is good because otherwise. Yeah, we're questioning their life decisions. Absolutely. So what's keeping you inspired about the events industry right now? You know, one of the top things that inspires me is how in Canada all these companies have come together and many KAFPA members are competitors with each other. Right. In, in Vancouver and in Calgary, many members who we directly compete with on, on a weekly basis. But we've managed to overcome that and find some areas of alignment where we can agree and we can work together to advance the industry. And I think that's very exciting. I mean that was unthinkable 10 years ago that we can now have all these competitors working together, talking to each other to try and achieve some common goals that benefit really the whole industry nationally. And I think that is probably the thing that excites me the most right now about the industry in Canada. Excellent. So at the end of every episode I always like to ask Every guest. What do you think is actually valuable in event production and what do you see as a waste of time, money or effort? Well, I'll answer the second one first because it's much easier and it's something that you've talked about quite a bit actually on some of your other episodes. And that's what is the biggest waste that I see. And that is not having enough pre event planning to identify the setup time that's needed, the schedule, not really having a good plan of what your whole event needs to look like. It needs to be for av, but everything else, not just av, food and beverage for all things. The longer you leave it, the more it's going to cost you. If you didn't book the venue the day before for the setup or whatever. And then we have to load in overnight. Well out here in the west, that's going to be automatic double time for all of those overnight hours. Or you might be in overtime the next day because it has to be done in a 16 hour day instead of two 8 hour days. There's huge cost for that. Or if we set up the room sideways, pointing to the west and then you realize, oh no, the CEO wants it set up with the stage on the north. Well, now we have to reset. You know, if everything could have been coordinated and planned further in advance, there wouldn't have been all that wasted time and effort and stress on redoing things or having to scramble at the last minute and having all that, that overnight or overtime or stat holiday setup labor. That's the biggest waste I see. It's to do with scheduling and pre planning and the waste when that doesn't happen. So that's the second one in terms of the first question, which I think was what do I see providing the greatest value? I think it's video technology in particular. Large screens, whether it be LED screens, big projectors, one big screen, many smaller screens, it doesn't really matter. But how that has first of all replaced hard scenic where you used to have the. The carpenters would come in and there'd be sawdust all over the floor as they cut all the flats and put on all the, the applique for the graphics, which cost a lot of money and also was not sustainable because all of that would be thrown out at the end of the event. But most of it's not recycled. Not good for sustainability at all, not good for budget. It's messy. And having screens, you can do so much more and it can change. Instead of one backdrop, you can have an infinite Number of backdrops. If you use it, the AV company, we provide the canvas. But ultimately, of course, the planners still have to leverage that with the content. And if you have a 5,000 pixel wide screen, a 3 to 1 aspect ratio or 5 to 1 aspect ratio, you need to think about how you're gonna, how you're going to leverage that and use that to the best effect. And is it going to change every time there's a new panel or a new theme? But I think that's, that's what excites me is how through event technology, we're improving event sustainability. You know, all the lights nowadays are LED, the projectors are all LED. Just, just going from a 20,000 lumen bulb based projector to a 20,000 lumen laser projector. The power consumption savings is about 45% just in that one change. And so it's very exciting to see how this is not really driven by EV rental companies because we can only buy what the manufacturers manufacture. This is driven by equipment manufacturers. But the fact that the whole industry has shifted to much more sustainable products. Less power draw less heat generated, less weight, that's exciting. And then again, leveraging that as a planner to replace all the old physical things with reusable multifunction displays, even lecterns that have the LCD in the front of them, I think that's great because you can have a different look for every speaker if you want, instead of just one for the four day event. Yeah. So look, I'm going to 100% agree with you that it is a waste of time. And I think that's driven by venue decisions and the overvaluation of the venue decision sometimes. Because like even the other day we had a great call with a client that we were like, well, we want to load in on the Sunday because, you know, we want to be ready. We want to be at the point where your executives can walk in at 3 o' clock in the afternoon on the Monday and everybody's going to have an amazing time. And they were like, ooh, but that would mean an extra day of venue rental. I was like, okay, let's do some math here. And, and like quickly demonstrated to them like, no, I mean, it's going to be like just 5% more expensive to get the extra day than, than not versus the overtime in the middle of the night to get all of these things done. So, you know, but they still couldn't get over the fact like, yeah, but an extra day of rental. And I was like, there's an overvaluation of the word venue rental here. And so I think that's something that, you know, as an industry, we need to get a little bit more. It's. It's the number one area where planners I know budgets are stretched. I mean, I don't think I know one planner who said to me, tim, I just have so much trouble spending my budget. I just have more money than I can spend. I. I haven't heard that yet. If you know any planners like that, send them over our way. That'd be great. But. Well, then one of the top ways to save money is by things like that. And you can book the. Yeah. Yes. Of course you're going to pay an extra, whatever it is to, to rent the venue for the extra day, but it's probably the same amount of money, plus or minus 5% as all of the labor for having to do the compressed overnight setup or having the super long day. But not even if the, even if there's a slight premium to doing that. You've got to think about the integrity of your event. What is the risk of all your risk management exercise hour 14 or 16 of their day when your CEO gets onto the stage because they had to start at 4 in the morning doing the setup? What if something goes wrong and there's a dead projector at 3 in the morning? Well, you can't call up another company and get a replacement at 3 in the morning. If you were setting up the day before and this is discovered at noon, there is time to deal with it. And some companies, certainly in our company, we, you know, have a certain amount of spares of backup that we just have available on site, but that's not the case universally. And when you, when you don't have that buffer time, boy, the risk, the risk goes way up. And you don't want to be the one there as your CEO or association chair or whatever is ready to start the event and you're like, well, we're going to have to hold for a couple hours because we're not ready or you can't have the rehearsal anymore. Sorry. Because we didn't allow enough time for the setup. So there was a little bit of buffer. That's not a place you want to be 100%. So, Tim, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights on event technology, advocacy and the future of Canada's AV industry. For those of you listening, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you like, follow and subscribe to Production Value Matters. You can do that on our site. ProductionValueMatters.com where you can look up old episodes, get ahead of new episodes coming out and we always publish additional insights related to all these episodes. Tim, again, thank you so much for joining me. This is a great conversation. Yeah, thank you Matthew. Thanks for doing the podcast. I really enjoy listening to it. I mean you're doing I think a great service for the event industry having having this Canadian specific voice here. So I really appreciate it and I look forward to the next episode. Absolutely. Thank you very much Tim. All right, have a great day. Production Value Matters, the business event podcast is brought to you by Burn Production Services. To find out more about Burn Production Services and how putting on events can drive value for your business, visit burn productionservices.com make sure to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. And on behalf of the team here at Production Value Matters, thank you so much for listening.