The message usually lands late in the week. Your audio visual (AV) supplier cannot deliver. A van is off the road, a crew has gone down, the equipment is still on another job, or the company has stopped answering. The event has not moved. The room is booked, the speakers are travelling and the delegates have been told where to be. Emergency AV hire is what fills that hole, and it goes better when you spend the first hour gathering facts instead of ringing round. We get a lot of these calls. Being let down by a supplier is common enough to be worth planning for before it happens to you.
The first hour is for facts, not phone calls
The instinct is to start dialling. Resist it for half an hour. The first thing any replacement supplier asks is what the room actually needs, and every minute you spend hunting for that answer comes off the get-in, the window in which equipment is brought in and built.
Get these written down in one place first:
- What was contracted, from the final specification rather than the original proposal.
- What has already been delivered to the venue, and what is still coming.
- The venue contact, the access times and any restriction on lifts, doors or noise.
- The running order, and which parts of it depend on AV at all.
- Who can approve a change without going away to ask.
That last one matters more than people expect. Recovery moves at the speed of your slowest decision.
Find out whose equipment is in the building
If the failed supplier has already dropped part of the kit at the venue, that equipment is still theirs. A new crew will not rig or power somebody else’s stock on their own responsibility, and they should not: they did not bring it or configure it, so they cannot stand behind it. Establish the position in writing. Is it staying, and on what terms. Is it being collected, and when, because a collection during your build has to be scheduled like any other vehicle movement.
Do the same with the venue’s in-house equipment: what is included in the room hire, what condition it is in, and whether anyone from the venue operates it. Mixed arrangements work fine. Rick Stock, in a published review of a video wall hire with us, described our install crew offering support with equipment supplied by his other suppliers. That is normal on a recovery job. It just needs agreeing in advance.
What emergency AV hire can realistically replace
Quite a lot, if the stock exists and a crew is free. Sound reinforcement, meaning a public address (PA) system with radio microphones, is usually the easiest thing to replace, and screens, projection, stage lighting for a lectern and playback of a laptop feed are not far behind. All of it travels in cases, gets configured on arrival and needs no structure built around it.
What decides it is availability rather than ambition: what is on the shelf that week, how many technicians are free, how far the venue is from the warehouse, and how long the get-in window is. We hold audio, video, lighting, rigging and staging in one place and deliver nationwide from Manchester, which shortens the first two answers. It does not touch the last one. If the venue gives you four hours, four hours is what everybody has.
What will not be rebuilt by Friday
Some things cannot be compressed, and a supplier who says so plainly is worth more than one who tells you otherwise.
Anything flown is the clearest example. A rig hung from a venue’s structure has to be planned, loaded and signed off by people competent to do it. The Health and Safety Executive is direct about this: plan the work properly before you start, include what you will do in an emergency or if someone falls, and make sure the people doing the job have the right experience and training. Re-engineering a lighting grid or a large light emitting diode (LED) wall onto a different support at two days’ notice is not a delivery problem, it is a design problem.
Bespoke content is the other one. Pre-programmed lighting states, rehearsed cues and a show built around a specific screen shape all live in a file somebody else made. Assume none of it transfers.
Licensing catches people out too. If the plan moves the event into a space not licensed for what you now want to do there, a temporary event notice has to be given at least 10 clear working days beforehand, or 5 clear working days for a late notice. The calendar does not negotiate.
A replacement supplier is a new contractor, and the duties stay with you
This is the part that gets skipped when everyone is in a hurry, and the part that turns a bad week into a serious one. The HSE’s guidance on using contractors is worth reading in the calm before an event rather than the panic during one. It says you need to satisfy yourself that the contractor you choose can do the job safely and without risks to health, that both you and the contractor have responsibilities under health and safety law, and that the contractor and their workers need information on the risks they may face and on your emergency procedures. Those duties do not transfer just because you are the injured party in somebody else’s failure.
Competence is the word doing the work here, and the HSE defines it as the combination of training, skills, experience and knowledge a person has, and their ability to apply them to perform a task safely. In practice: ask for a risk assessment and method statement (RAMS), evidence of insurance, and the name of the person who will be on site running the job. A supplier who sends all three inside the hour is telling you something useful. So is one who cannot. Our post on what to ask an AV supplier before you book covers the longer version.
What to put in the first message
Send one message, not six. A supplier deciding whether they can take the job is answering two questions: can we get there and build it in the time available, and is the equipment free. Everything else is detail.
- Venue name, address and the get-in and de-rig windows, de-rig being the strike of everything afterwards.
- Room size, ceiling height and how equipment gets in, including lift or door restrictions.
- What power is available and where.
- Delegate numbers and the room layout.
- The original specification, and what has changed since.
- What is already on site and who owns it.
Half of a recovery brief is about what has already happened, so say what went wrong plainly. Nobody worth hiring will think less of you, and the detail changes what they bring.
Making the next booking harder to break
Once the event is over, the useful question is why the failure reached you at all. Most of the time the answer sits in the booking, not the day. Ask who will be on site, and whether they are employed or subcontracted. Ask what happens if a vehicle fails on the morning, and who you call if your main contact is unreachable. Ask whether the equipment is owned or cross-hired, because a cross-hire is another company’s reliability wearing your supplier’s name.
Then look at how many suppliers you are running. Splitting audio, lighting and staging across three companies gives you three chances of this happening and nobody who owns the room when it does. We think one supplier beats three, and the reason is not paperwork. When something breaks at four in the afternoon, one person’s job is to fix it. Our post on dry hire against full production works through where that line sits.
If you are in the middle of one right now
Tell us the venue and what the room has to do on the day. We will tell you honestly what is possible in the time you have, including the parts that are not. We supply audio, lighting, LED video walls, staging and rigging with technicians who stay for the event, across conferences and full technical production nationwide.
Get in touch through the contact page or email hire@eventproductiongroup.co.uk. If the event is close, say so in the first line.
