As your live events business grows, so do the complexities of managing freelance technicians. With every new project, you face increasing risks and administrative burdens—from creating compliant contracts to securing the right insurance and ensuring on-time payments. At Mertzcrew, we understand that these challenges can feel overwhelming, especially as your company scales.

Booking talent in the AV industry can be challenging, and every event requires AV professionals with the right experience, knowledge, and equipment to meet or exceed client expectations.

When you’re responsible for planning and producing large corporate events, you need tools that will help you streamline your work and deliver the best possible result for your clients. Ideally, you want to find solutions that take some of the repetitive corporate event production tasks off your hands, so that you can focus on what you do best.

The market for talented freelancers is more competitive than ever before. The best and most skilled freelance talent is in high demand and what was already a competitive industry has turned into one that’s beyond challenging for live event companies. If you want to work with top freelancers, you need to understand what will attract them and make them want to work with you.

Event production companies rely on freelancers to do much of the work related to the events they produce, including technical aspects. Freelancer costs can add up quickly and may vary depending on whether the workers you engage are 1099 workers or W2 workers. In both cases, there are direct and indirect costs to consider.

Staffing an event is about more than finding skilled AV freelancers. The team structure of your event team is a key component in your success in creating events that your clients will love. All members should be working together to deliver production services, aware of what each is doing and how every part fits into the whole.

AV companies face an interesting dilemma in 2016: companies in industries all around them are adopting SaaS tools to optimize their projects and workloads while gaining better efficiency, while AV companies themselves struggle to find a SaaS solution that can fit their processes well enough to merit a switch from the disjointed project management tools they’ve used for decades.

Process improvements are the key to establishing a workflow that improves your AV team’s productivity and helps your team deliver exceptional work for clients.

But before you can make any crew management process improvements, your organization needs to identify where inefficiencies exist, what possible solutions may fill them, and how to get the rest of your team on board with these new changes.

It’s easy to cling to an AV project planning process that has been with your organization since its start -- your employees are used to it and it works (for the most part) -- but it’s important to consider whether your process is still serving your company as well as it could.

Strategic workforce planning is all about having the right crew members in the right place, at the right time, and at the right cost. It’s a process that involves internal coordination and communication within your AV team, effective crew member selection and scheduling, and working with crew members to get them on board and up to speed quickly.