grAVITation TECH - Consultant = Jobless. So, Why Now?

Someone asked me why I started grAVITation TECH now?  Isn’t it risky to start a new business now?  Hell yes, it is!  But, it needed to be done now.  I recently read an advertisement in Popular Science that summed it up for me.  The ad read: “Gravity: The Most Dominant Force in the Universe? - Gravity rules the universe. It governs the rising and falling of tides, and it holds celestial objects in their orbits.  Without it, everything would dissolve into a gas of randomly interacting atoms.”  It was an advertisement for a master’s course in physics, but it spoke to me in volumes about what I wanted to do in AV and IT.  To me AV and IT are at the center of grAVITy (hence the company name grAVITation TECH).  All our marketing, product development, systems, solutions and training will have to center around AV and IT.  There is a need for AV and IT knowledge and consulting now more than ever.  This AV and IT knowledge has to be objective and proficient.  That is why I started grAVITation TECH now.

We have talked about the convergence of AV and IT for well over a decade now.  But, now it is hitting our businesses where it really matters.  It is not just a disruptive technology or a buzzword.  It is a get up “slap your mama” and change everything in your business to the core problem.  We used to see AV and IT as a problem where Pro AV integrators were losing one-off boardrooms and a few hang and bang conference rooms to IT integrators.  That problem was manageable.  Seemingly overnight, the problem grew to soft phones at every computer and skype replacing desktop phones and boardroom conference room systems. 

AV quality became less and less of an issue as bandwidth on demand and smartphone video conferencing and jabber became the collaborative standards.

With IT taking the lead in these areas I decided to take the leap and go into consulting and training to help AV integrators, manufacturers and consulting firms to bridge the gap and help them gain a better understanding of what AV and IT have to offer each other.  I stand by my early assertions that AV still has a lot to offer the IT world.  IT managers do not want to learn acoustics and lighting.  They do not want to have to understand presence and production.  AV’s value in the equation will remain, but it will change.  How the Pro AV Integrator understands and reacts to that change is the key.  My job as a consultant is to guide them in that change.

One piece of advice to the Pro AV Integrator is, and I have said this many years ago and I still see it raise its ugly head, do not have your internal IT person head up your IT market development efforts.  It is just bad all the way around.  I see it time and time again.  Ask yourself this question: would you use your CFO to manage someone else’s finances or your accounts payable to pay someone else’s bills? No. So don’t use your IT guy to define someone else’s IT/AV problems.  Dedicate a sales engineer and market development team for this purpose.  You’ll be glad you did.  It is a forest through the trees thing.

My closing thought on why I started my consulting firm now instead of waiting:  AV and IT are at the center of our technology universe.  Are you prepared to manage the combined forces of AV and IT?  If you hesitated at all in your answer or there is a hint of doubt, you might need my consulting services.  And that is why I started my firm: to serve.