What happens when the AV gets value-engineered out of a project?

I was talking to a sales rep at an integrator recently. He'd handed a system design over to one of their engineers, who'd specced a particular brand into it. When another rep later asked why that brand was in there, the salesperson didn't actually know, so he went and asked the engineer. The answer was simply, "that's what we use."

Nobody made a bad decision there. But nobody made a decision at all either, and that's exactly what I got into with Matt Garty on the podcast recently. Matt's spent his career on the AV side at Honeywell, and before that came up through music and artist development in Brighton's club scene, a background a lot of us in commercial AV actually share. His point was blunt: most of us are bringing the same thing to the table because most of us came up the same way, and a lot of integrators default to the systems they already know, not necessarily the ones that were actually specified or asked for. As Matt put it, people only know what they know.

That matters because higher-end products usually cost more for a reason, and customers rarely find out what they're missing out on if an integrator is worried that mentioning it will cost them the sale on price alone. And on most commercial builds, AV is treated as a nice-to-have long before it's treated as a requirement, which makes it one of the first things to get value-engineered down when a budget gets tight.

For a school or a church, that's a real problem, because there's usually only one shot to get the system right. There's no version two if the wrong call gets made at the tender stage.

That's just one part of a longer conversation. You can listen to the full episode with Matt Garty for more on where AV design goes wrong on commercial projects, and what it actually costs when it does.