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…

We stream live every Friday at about 315p Eastern/1215p Pacific and you can listen to everything we record over at AVSuperFriends.com

▀▄▀▄▀ CONTACT LINKS ▀▄▀▄▀
►Website: https://www.avsuperfriends.com
►Twitter: https://twitter.com/avsuperfriends
►LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/avsuperfriends
►YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@avsuperfriends
►Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/avsuperfriends.bsky.social
►Email: mailbag@avsuperfriends.com
►RSS: https://avsuperfriends.libsyn.com/rss

Donate to AVSF: https://www.avsuperfriends.com/support