Show Notes
Recorded July 17, 2026
In Part 2 of our conversation about building an internal AV integration team, the panel turns from the organizational obstacles to the practical question: how do you actually justify, staff, and scale the operation?
We dig into translating outsourced labor costs into FTE requests, documenting hidden workloads, using dashboards and project data to make the case to leadership, and allowing a little strategic failure to expose where the existing team has reached its limits. The discussion also explores whether the next hire should be another technician or someone higher in the stack, such as a project manager, field supervisor, designer, or other knowledge-focused role.
Along the way, we consider how student employees can free up full-time staff, why “internship” may be a better recruiting pitch than “student worker,” how good integrators can complement rather than replace an internal team, and why every staffing plan needs to be ready before a stray FTE or pile of magical, mystical money suddenly appears.
Connect with Tim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timdickson0ctsd/
Alternate show titles: A design apprentice, so to speak Don’t bring up your dirty math! Support Plus I could save them $100,000 a year I’m going to tag onto Marc and then change I can take care of you and you can take care of me The AV consultant doesn’t know how we do it on campus Just like a consultant would… That’s not the way levers are pulled Which isn’t a service we actually offer… but it’s a service we offer This was actually a good show It’s not like math…
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More from AV SuperFriends: On Topic
Recorded June 26, 2026 Freshly returned from the show floor at InfoComm 2026, the AV SuperFriends gather for a full-length roundtable on trade show regrets: the booths they missed, the sessions they skipped, the demos they should have recorded, and the party they may never emotionally recover from missing. This episode wanders through the aftermath of a massive conference week, including arguments over who should really be explaining AI to the AV industry, what happens when AVIXA TV is more networked than expected, why show-floor “hidden gems” are still somehow hidden behind the wrong booth wall, and how even seasoned attendees can come home realizing they saw only a tiny slice of the show. Along the way, the crew revisits booth tour challenges, suspicious conference sandwiches, tote bag logistics, USB-C mysteries, browser-based control, over-caffeinated presentations, and the now-legendary Panasonic dinner brownies. It’s part InfoComm recap, part confessional, and part warning label for anyone who thinks they can actually see everything at a trade show.
AV SuperFriends: On Topic - We won’t do anything until that form is filled out
AV SuperFriends: On Topic Why are you doing speechlift from the can?