A little over a year ago we blogged about our strategic decision not to own production equipment. Fast forward 18 months and we’ve now got a warehouse full of production equipment and a BMG-branded sprinter van. A lot of the points outlined in my initial post still hold true: owning gear requires continual maintenance and equipment becomes obsolete fairly quickly. So why the complete 180 in our stance on equipment ownership? It’s all about our commitment to serving clients. Let me elaborate in my latest, slightly-amended blog – why we started investing in production equipment.

Owning Production Equipment Gives You Flexibility

Between inventory maintenance, insurance and freight logistics, there’s a lot of not-so-exciting details that go into owning production equipment. But beyond the minutia, we’ve found that owning equipment gives us a lot of flexibility, which ultimately benefits our clients. After over a decade of working with various rental houses throughout the country, we have some leverage in negotiating prices, but we’ve found that owning our own production equipment gives us the ultimate flexibility. We can set our own rates, allowing us to compete on projects big or small. And having access to our own ground transportation allows us greater control on when gear arrives and helps negate freight costs, which can add up fast.

Production Equipment Allows us to Serve a Broad Range of Projects

We’ve strategically invested in production equipment that make up every live production: video switchers, cameras, audio mixers and comms systems. Each of our systems have some level of scalability, which allows us to handle projects of any size while still meeting the creative needs of our clients.

Repeating Client Needs

At the first of each year, we can look at a calendar for the upcoming 12 months and get a pretty good sense of which events we’ll be working on. Having some level of predictability in our workload helped us in pulling the trigger on our equipment purchases. We’ve invested in technology with our client’s needs in mind – purchasing items that we know can be used on specific projects for specific clients. We’ll continue to invest in technology that benefits our client’s needs whenever possible.

It’s been a busy buying season, but we’ve already seen the benefits of strategically investing in our own production equipment. If you’d like to learn more about our production resources, or if you need support on an upcoming live production, contact us any time.