Timing Your New Building

When to Involve AV Teams in Your Planning

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We wanted to put together a few articles based on a new building installation we recently did. We hope that these might help your organization as you plan for the future. In this first article we want to talk about when to get an AV integrator involved and why timing is so important. 
We started working on Gather Church in Florida almost a year before we installed any equipment in the building. This was an important timing decision! It helped us to define much of the budgeting and needs in the new space. Many times we are asked to become involved either too late or too early in the process. There are several things to consider before getting an AV team involved and if you are still in doubt, you can always ask the AV company what you need to have in place to begin a tech design, quote, and plan.

When is too late? Too late is pretty easy to quantify with new buildings. If construction has already started on the building before the involvement of the AV team, it is too late. It's hard for an AV team to get involved at this stage of the process. At this point, for the most part, we are playing catch up to the rest of those involved and have to work around other's plans. It can be hard to add instructions to contractors and to check for potential pitfalls in AV design when walls are already going up and money has already been spent. 
Just like being too late, it's important to realized that being too early can be an issue as well. We have also worked on a few projects where a client comes to us looking for a bid when there are no current plans to build a space or it's years out. Worse still, are the times when there is no funding in place. This usually causes us to design and re-design the space every 6 months causing wild variations in needed budget because nothing can properly be decided upon. ​

Gather came to us with preliminary building plans, a selected general contractor, a timeline, a budget, and most importantly a list of needs and a list of dreams. The needs for the space were: a great sound system with a digital console, stage lighting, and video presentation equipment. The dreams were LED house lighting, and a projector with a possibility of an LED wall instead. This allowed us to focus on a budget around what the church felt was most important and then try and add in as many dreams as possible from there. We worked to produce preliminary plans from an AV design and a list of equipment. Once that was pulled together a discussion was started. That discussion mostly involved a mix of Gather Church communicating their needs, and Lambda linking those 

needs with the experience we have about what works well and what does not. We were then able to problem solve each piece to come to a satisfactory result.
Here at Lambda discussion with our clients is very important to us. Whether it's a personal meetings or talking over the phone, our goal is always to make sure that our clients feel their goals and desires are heard. We work hard not to just build a system, but to problem solve, and give you the best possible system you could have. We don't want to just give you equipment we want to give you everything you need to succeed!

More to Come!

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