A Planner's Guide to Production Budgets
Labor is almost always the biggest line item on your production budget. And unlike gear, it doesn't discount. Rates are rates.
But not discountable isn't the same as not manageable. This guide shows you the five decisions that build that number, and how to interrogate every one of them.
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Questions about a labor line you're staring at right now? Email michaelh@yourAVdept.com.
The labor number on your proposal isn't a fixed cost of doing business. It's the output of a handful of decisions, most of them made before anyone sends you a price.
Once you can see those decisions, you can have a real conversation about them instead of asking for a percentage off and getting nowhere.
Before anyone counts technicians, somebody has to answer a question only you can answer: how many mistakes, miscues, and delays are acceptable?
There's a spectrum, and both ends are achievable. Technical disaster is cheap. Perfection is extremely expensive. Almost nobody wants either end. In practice, my clients target excellent execution: the show moves like clockwork, the room never sees the seams, and the handful of things that go sideways get solved before anyone notices.
That's the target. Everything that follows is about hitting it without overpaying for it, and it comes down to four levers your production company pulls in response to the target you set, plus a fifth lever that belongs to you.
Four of them belong to your production company. The fifth one is yours, and most planners never think of it as a labor decision at all.
Mostly a question of geography. Why a top-tier market like Las Vegas or Orlando is not automatically a cheap or easy one, and why the gap between the best crew and the available crew is widest exactly where the work is busiest.
Size is mostly duplication. Complexity is where the money is. A 2,000-person general session can be a simpler labor problem than a 150-person executive meeting with live switching and a CEO who rewrites his slides at 11pm.
Known versus unknown. A line-by-line look at what it actually costs to fly one technician to a three-day show, and the pattern most good companies follow: key positions travel, everything else goes local.
The single biggest dollar driver, because crew size multiplies against days, hours, and rates. Plus the four things that quietly inflate it: set and strike days, overtime, union house rules, and concurrency.
Your schedule sets your crew size. Compress load-in and the work doesn't shrink, it just happens in fewer hours, which means more bodies at premium rates. Which leads to a trade almost nobody runs the numbers on: an extra half-day of the room is frequently cheaper than the crew it replaces.
Roughly $3,500 to remove a specific risk in a specific position, versus $0 to accept it. That's the judgment call your production company makes for every single crew member.
| Cost to travel one technician · three-day show | |
|---|---|
| Round-trip air | $600 |
| Hotel, 5 nights | $1,250 |
| Per diem, 5 days | $375 |
| Travel days (2) | $1,200 |
| Ground, bags, parking | $150 |
| Premium over hiring local | ≈ $3,500 |
Illustrative. Your actual numbers will swing with the market, the season, and how far out you booked.
Across a full crew, that one decision can move your labor budget by five figures. Which is why the question on a proposal isn't "why are we flying people in?" It's "which risk does each of these people remove, and is it worth the premium on this show?"
The next time a labor line comes back higher than you expected.
Which positions are you traveling, and what does each one cost me over hiring local?
What's the labor pool like in this market, and how did that change the crew plan?
Is this crew size driven by the complexity of the show, or by the schedule?
Where's the overtime exposure, and what would it cost to remove it?
If we cut one person, what breaks?
Any production company worth hiring will have real answers to all five. The answers will tell you where the money is actually going, and usually where some of it doesn't need to go.
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