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Schadenfreude and the Art of Fixing Other People’s Mistakes

cable-clutter-1215Clients left in the lurch by AV pros who had no business ever calling themselves an AV pro in the first place is a very real issue in this business.

As AV pros, we often feel a sense of schadenfreude (perverse joy at someone else’s misery) when looking at pictures of botched projects. I know that I do. But the disasters left behind by trunkslammers and contractors who are one step ahead of their creditors leave a bad taste in client’s mouths and tarnish the image of the entire channel.

Maybe it’s the economy, but recently one of my long-time friends in the business (who didn’t wish to go on the record) observed that in the past six months his company had been called upon to pick up the pieces of what he characterized as “a lot” of botched and half-finished projects.

Like myself, my friend prefers to see opportunity and upside. These unfortunate stories present opportunities for competent AV pros to make clients-for-life by making it all better.

Interestingly, in many cases, the prospective client is a lot less price sensitive than they might have been initially. After all, price shopping may have been what put them into this mess. As another veteran AV pro once characterized it to me, many times the client says, “The heck with it, I’ve already sunk twenty grand into this. I don’t care, just make it work!”

Back to my friend and his company, he shared with me two examples he’d seen recently of projects left unfinished that they had been asked to fix.

In the first instance he describes a very large two-story building whose prewire had over 200 wire drops with no documentation and no labeling. It took two techs four entire days to validate and label all the lines in the building.

But that’s trivial compared to the next story.

Far more serious, was another project that came their way. The homeowner had actually contacted the automation vendor at their U.S. office, who referred them to my friend’s company.

By the time the client called, he had sunk over fifty grand into their system and, amazingly, was still unaware of just how badly done it was. The reason they had called the automation vendor, besides the fact that their contractor was nowhere to be found, was that “the sound quality wasn’t very good.”

It turned out that the reason for that was that a single run of 12/2 speaker wire ran from the rack location into the attic. In the attic the techs found the line ran into a sealed Ziploc bag, stuffed with silica gel anti-moisture packets, in which there was an off-the-shelf Radio Shack 12-way impedance matching speaker selector switch, with all the buttons pushed in, with lines running out to the 12 speaker locations in the house. Out of a 30-watt distribution amp they were getting maybe 2 watts per speaker. Astonishing.

In the end, the team overhauled it, added almost all new gear, fished all new wiring (in a 100 year old home to boot) and racked everything properly. The client ended up with what they should have had in the first place: a beautiful proper system that they can enjoy and show off to their friends.

Image via AV Advisor

 

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