Pros
PSAV is one of, if not the, largest AV and event services providers in North America. There are over 600 locations scattered across the country, and partnerships agreements have been signed with many of the best hotels and convention centers in the world. Many of these location are highly desirable places to work, and with so many of them, there are almost always job openings at all the various levels of the organization. Advancement within the organization does happen, and a technician over time can rise to a position in senior management, particularly if they are willing to move around. The work itself can be rewarding and extremely interesting. There are many opportunities to provide services to some of the largest corporations in the world, and to work a variety of events. Creativity is strongly encourage, and employees are given a great deal of personal empowerment. During a very difficult recession, particularly for the hotel business, the company has managed to keep itself together finically, which is commendable given the economy we are in. While it varies from position and region, the work does generally pay well, be it hourly or salary. It is at least competitive pay. The company does offer benefits like a good a healthcare plan, paid vacation and other benefits. Though I have rated it poorly and listed a number of bad things about the company here, on the whole the company continues to improve itself and gets better at what it does year after year.
Cons
PSAV’s size is both a blessing and a curse. A successful freelance producer and former employee I once worked with called it the “McDonalds of the AV business” The analogy has a lot of truth to it. With so many locations spread out so far it is difficult to maintain consistency across the brand. There is very little support from the cooperate management for those operating in the field. The company utilizes an internally develop software application for managing location billing, inventory, sales operations, etc. that is horribly and disturbingly inefficient. Many of the top sales people in the company simply (and wisely) refuse to use it for generating quotes, instead coming up with their own templates. But not all locations have those resources to dedicate entirely to sales, and everything eventually has to be entered into the software anyways, leading to double and triple entires into a system that generates confusing invoices both for clients and hotel partners alike. Sadly, a director who might be better serving the company with their technical knowledge, sales, or services skills, will be spending the bulk of their hours doing overly redundant data entry on this horrible system. HR is non existent. It’s as if we do not have an HR department, seriously. Beyond recruiting, I have no idea what they do. If acknolgement and feedback are important to you in your work you will not like working for PSAV, because you will not get any. PSAV is Sale driven company. The prevailing attitude with the upper management and throughout the origination is “sell it first, and then go find the people and gear”. I’m not saying that this is a bad approach, in many ways it makes a lot of sense. But what we are selling is technically and logistically challenging, and I am not personally comfortably selling something unless I feel confident in our ability to execute. PSAV can and does successfully execute technically challenging events all over the country every single day. But there is very little consistency across the brand, because there is no emphasis on quality control, and very little on operational logistics. All of the emphasis is instead on sales. There is also an over abundant use of unscrupulous sales tactics that lack any integrity. Operations are terrible, there is so little inventory control. There are regional asset mangers, but I’ve never met one and have no idea what they do. They do not actively mange the regions assets, which is frustrating considering how much equipment we have. Our horrific inventory control bureaucracy only makes it things harder. Cooperate makes decisions about the inventory using the information the internal software generates, but the software is terrible and not giving them a clear picture of what is happening, no one uses it anymore than is absolutely necessary. The “garbage in, garbage out” principle very much applies here. If you become a director you will be put at a hotel and told to do whatever it takes to keep the hotel happy. Well what makes the hotels happy is when you agree to doing events for free, or events at ridiculous discounts. Push back too much against this, and your hotel will simply complain to your RVP that you are not doing your job, and you will be replaced. No servant can serve two masters, and replacing directors who have found themselves in this exact position is how I have advanced my career, by valuing the hotels satisfaction over the profitability of the business. But the hotels will never be satisfied, and will instead use this position to exploit us and cut their own operational cost.There is a bureaucracy to try and prevent this, but it is burdensome and does not go far enough. What happens is there is a large grey area of favors, and it creates tremendous amount of stress, and a significant loss of profitability. The scenario plays out differently at each location, but I have yet to work somewhere where this wasn’t a significant problem. It is also a problem that is not unique to our company but our industry as a whole. There are other divisions besides hotel services, but I could not say to much about any of them, as the divisions rarely work together. Corporate tries hard to “bring down the silos”, changing division names and such, and while they have made some progress, there is still a long way to go. Many of the other divisions maintain a superior attitude towards the hotel services division and look down on it, particularly nation sales. With so much of the gear being sub-rented, so many of the high end technicians being freelance, and the lions share of the profit going to the hotels in the form of commission, it’s hard to understand how or why PSAV even exist. People who are passionate about the AV business, or just want to do the best possible work they can for their clients, would be better off working independently or with another company.
