A client told me I was too expensive. I couldn’t figure out why — until one line in his email gave it away.

The email said our quote was too high.

I sat with it for a day. Our pricing is competitive. I know what my peers charge. I know what it costs to put a real crew in a real room and walk out with something the CEO can stand behind.

The number wasn’t the problem.

Then I read further down. He’d compared us to his local camera rental house.

Gear on a shelf. You walk in, rent a camera body, a lens, maybe a tripod, sign a waiver, and walk out. No crew. No engineer. No producer. No one in your ear when something breaks at 9:47 AM. No one picking up the phone six months later when you need footage for a board meeting.

Just a box and a deposit.

That’s when it clicked. I was a steakhouse. He’d been pricing me against a butcher.

He wasn’t wrong about the number. He was wrong about the category.

He wasn’t being unreasonable. He was doing what every buyer does when the category isn’t clearly explained. Which is on us, not him.

I’m writing this down because I think the industry is at a real inflection point, and the companies and buyers who understand what’s actually being sold are going to do fine. The ones who don’t are going to spend the next five years arguing about the wrong number on the wrong invoice.

I’ve been in live event production for over twenty years. Most of that time, we’ve sold the same thing under different names. AV services. Event production. Broadcast support.

The labels aren’t wrong. But they make the work sound like a commodity. Like you’re buying a thing instead of a capability.

Once a buyer is in commodity mode, the only question is “what does it cost.” Which means the only comparison is “compared to what.”

Compared to a camera house, we’re expensive.

Compared to an outcome, we’re cheap.

That gap is the entire story of where this industry is going.

The Gear Got Cheap and Good.

What used to cost six figures now costs five grand. Audio, cameras, switching, streaming. You can build a usable setup from a conference room with overnight shipping.

That’s a good thing.

But it means this: if you’re selling access to gear, you’re competing with retail. And retail wins that game.

The Shows Got Smaller and More Frequent.

Fewer companies are betting everything on one big annual event. More are running multiple shows a year. All-hands. Sales kickoffs. Customer events. Two hundred to a thousand people. Hybrid by default.

That changes how you deliver.

You can’t just scale a big show down and expect it to work. You need judgment about what matters on camera, what doesn’t, what survives the stream versus what only looks good in the room.

That’s not a gear decision. That’s experience.

The Stakes Went Up While Budgets Tightened.

The all-hands clip is in Slack the next morning. The quarterly gets compared to content your team watched at lunch. The work is more visible, more permanent, and more comparable than ever.

You don’t close that gap with better gear.

You close it with better decisions.

The producer who cuts what won’t land on camera. The engineer who builds the backup before you need it. The show caller who holds the beat that only works on broadcast.

None of that shows up cleanly on a quote.

But it’s the whole job.

So What Are We Actually Selling?

We sell the answer to whatever happens at 9:47 AM on show day.

The fiber line goes down and we’re live again in minutes. The plan breaks and nobody in the room ever knows. The CEO rewrites the opening at 8:52 and it just works.

Gear shows up.

Judgment shows up when it matters.

Those are not the same business. They shouldn’t have the same price.

I grew up in my parents’ hardware store, so maybe I see it this way for a reason. The shop that wins isn’t the one with the cheapest hammer. It’s the one where you walk in with a problem and the person behind the counter knows how to solve it.

Our industry is figuring out which business it’s in.

If You’re Buying This:

Stop asking for day rates. Ask who’s in the room when something breaks.

Stop comparing line items side by side. The cheapest and most expensive quotes are usually solving different problems. Make the vendor tell you which one they’re solving. If they can’t articulate it, that’s your answer.

And stop treating production like a commodity purchase. The teams that show up for you on a bad day are the ones you treat like partners the rest of the year. That’s not a sentimental claim. It’s an operational one. Goodwill is real and it shows up on show day.

If You’re Building in This Space:

Your gear list is not your product. It’s table stakes.

Your product is judgment. Relationships. Taste. The bench you can call when things go sideways. The standard you hold when no one is watching.

Lead with that. Charge for that. Stop apologizing for it.

Back to the Client.

He was anchoring to the closest number he had. A camera house gave him one. We gave him another. Ours was higher.

That’s what happens when the category isn’t clear.

The work, for all of us, is to explain it better. So when someone is choosing between “camera package” and “six people who have done this hundreds of times,” they understand those are not the same thing.

Live event production is a service business.

The sooner we all treat it that way, the sooner we stop arguing about the wrong number on the wrong invoice.

If this resonates — especially if you’re the one buying this stuff and you’ve had the “why is this so expensive” conversation with your finance team more times than you’d like — my DMs are open. I’d genuinely love to compare notes.

We’re all figuring this out at the same time.