Someone in Your Corner

He was proud of the number.

We were talking after his venue opened. He told me what he had spent on the sound and lighting, the whole audiovisual package, the way a man tells you what he paid for a watch. The figure was enormous, and he said it as a boast. To him, the size of the number was proof of the quality of the thing.

He had paid about double what the job should have cost. Some of the equipment he had no use for. Some of the work was cut short in places nothing would show for years. He did not know any of that, and he has no way to find out. Opening night will not tell him. Neither will the next five years, because a system that underperforms never announces itself. It costs him a little every night, and everyone assumes that is what the money bought.

He was proud, and I was doing the math.

I did not tell him. There was no point bursting his bubble. Reality will do that later, when he has to rebuild because the thing he was sold does not serve the mission it was intended for.

That money could have gone to staff. To marketing. To payroll through the first slow winter, which is what closes places like his. It was not extra money. It was working capital, and part of it bought equipment he will never use, from a man who knew he would never find out.

Thirty years in, that still makes me angry.

He was not careless and he was not lazy. He had built something real and he was trying to do right by it. What he did not have was the knowledge, and he had no one in his corner protecting his investment who understood what was being sold. The knowledge was there at that table. It was just sitting on the other side of it.

He asked questions. They were the wrong questions, and he had no way of knowing that. He asked the things anyone asks when the subject is not their own: what it costs, how long it takes, whether it will be loud enough. Every answer led back to the same order form. The questions that would have protected him never occurred to him, because nobody had ever told him those questions existed. Starting with the simplest one. Is anyone at this table working for me?

I have written about this gap twice, from two sides. In The Psychology of Sound, from the guest's side. People cannot tell you that the room holds onto sound too long, or that the music is sitting on top of the conversation. They only know they left tired, and they are not going back. In The Price of Getting It Wrong, from the owner's side, by way of Jim Brown, an AES Life Fellow who spent his career trying to get churches to listen to this before it cost them twice.

Both pieces described the gap. Neither one asked what sits underneath it. Who is supposed to close it, and who pays them.

If you serve on a capital campaign committee or a building committee, that question belongs to you now. You did not ask for it. You volunteered to help your church build something, and somewhere along the way you became responsible for a decision nobody prepared you for.

The knowledge sits on one side of the table

The first system almost always costs nothing to design. The architect brings in a contractor, the contractor produces a drawing and a bid, and nobody writes a check for the drawing. That feels like generosity. It is a sales cost, and it comes back to you in the price of the equipment, the same way a free consultation comes back to you in the price of the surgery.

A drawing that only earns its keep if you buy from the man who drew it is not really a drawing. It is a purchase order with a floor plan attached. He has every reason to fill it with what he sells and no reason to fill it with what your building needs. Sometimes those are the same thing. Often they are not, and nothing about the arrangement requires them to be.

Then it fails in the ordinary ways. Feedback, which your volunteer learns to prevent by keeping everything too quiet. Music that arrives as mud. Seats the sound never reaches. A pastor who cannot be heard from the back pew, which is the only one of these your congregation can actually name.

So the church tries again. This time it is someone from the praise team who ran sound for a bar band, or a member's brother-in-law who installs paging systems in office buildings. Good people. Wrong expertise. Loving something is not the same as being trained in it. That system fails too.

On the third try somebody finally hires a consultant who works for the church instead of on commission, and the money from the first two is gone.

Sometimes nobody meant for any of it to happen. The arrangement produces it on its own. The contractor answered every question he was asked. Nobody at the table knew which questions were missing, and a missing question never raises its hand.

And sometimes it is exactly what it looks like. The man I described at the start was not an accident. He was chosen. Someone measured how little he knew and priced accordingly.

From where you sit, those two look identical. Same drawing, same confident answers, same number at the bottom. You cannot tell them apart, and you will not find out which one you got until the building is full and something is wrong.

You are being asked to decide too late

By the time an audiovisual proposal reaches your committee, most of what determines how your room will sound has already been decided. The ceiling height is set. The surfaces are chosen. The size and shape of the space, the glass, the beautiful hard floor, all of it is drawn, approved, and sometimes already built.

Then somebody hands you a bid for loudspeakers and asks you to fix the sound with it.

No loudspeaker fixes a room. You can spend a great deal of money aiming better sound into a space that will scatter it anyway. Sanctuaries are the hardest case of all. What makes a sanctuary feel like a sanctuary is height, stone, and hard surfaces that carry an organ and a congregation singing together. Those same surfaces take a spoken sentence and smear it before it arrives.

The cheapest acoustic fix ever made is a change to a drawing. It costs an architect an afternoon. The same fix after the building is finished means panels and fabric. It means a consultant standing in your new sanctuary, explaining why something has to be bolted to a wall you just paid to have plastered.

Most committees never hear this, because the person who would have told you has not been hired yet. The order is backwards. Acoustic judgment belongs at the start, while the building is still lines on paper and changing it is free. By the time it shows up as a bid, you are not choosing a sound system anymore. You are deciding how much to spend making up for a room nobody asked about.

Whose money this is

A restaurant owner who overpays is spending money he earned. That is his to lose. Painful, survivable, and nobody else's business.

Your committee is spending money that was handed to you.

Some of it came from people who gave out of comfort. Some came from people who gave out of almost nothing, who put an envelope in the plate during a week when that envelope mattered at home. Nobody on your committee earned a dollar of it. You were trusted with it, and that changes the question in front of you. It is not whether you got a fair price. It is whether you honored that trust.

Wasted money does not disappear into a line item, either. It comes out of something else, and that something usually has a name. A roof. A staff position. A family kept in their house one more month.

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much. (Luke 16:10)

We usually read that as a standard for the people handling the money. It is equally a standard for the people selling to them. I have spent my career on the selling side of that table. The temptation there is not to lie. It is quieter than lying. It is letting somebody's lack of knowledge do your negotiating for you.

The system will outlive this committee

Most building committees serve two or three years. A system designed properly serves twenty.

The people who will live with your decision are mostly not here yet. Children who have not been born. Families who have not moved to town. A pastor nobody has met, preaching to a congregation that will inherit whatever you choose this year and assume the building was always like this.

They do not get a vote. They get the consequences.

And the committee that buys the first failed system is almost never the committee that has to buy the second one. By then the members have rotated off and the campaign has closed, so the failure looks like bad luck instead of a decision somebody made on a Tuesday night without enough information.

Deciding well for people who will never know to thank you is most of what stewardship means.

Questions that are hard to answer dishonestly

You are not going to become an acoustician before the next meeting, and nobody expects you to. What you need is a handful of questions that are hard to answer dishonestly, and the nerve to ask them.

Who pays you, and how. If any part of the answer is a percentage of the equipment, you know which way the advice will lean before you hear it.

What happens to your fee if we buy nothing. An advisor tells you nothing changes. A salesman's answer gets complicated.

What are you assuming about this room. Ask what reverberation time he is aiming for, which is how long sound lingers in your space before it fades. Ask to see where the sound actually reaches across your seating, and where it does not. Somebody who has studied your building can show you both. Somebody who has priced a package will steer you back to product features.

What did the last three churches our size spend, and what would they do differently. Then call them yourself, without your bidder on the phone.

Watch how the questions are received even more than how they are answered. A person doing honest work is usually glad you asked. A person counting on those questions never coming will treat them as an insult.

So I split my own business

I built my practice so I could give the same answers to those four questions every time.

I am also a man who draws systems and sells equipment. I know exactly how that reads after everything above. The difference is not who I am. It is where the money comes from. My advice is paid for on its own, whether you buy a single piece of equipment from me or not, which means its loyalty is to you. A free drawing is paid for by the sale, and the sale is what it will be built to produce.

The consulting runs through Arkira Partners. The equipment and the installation run through Viation. I own both, and I say so in the first meeting, because the goal was never to hide the relationship. The goal is to protect the client, their vision, and the budget. That means structuring the work so that what I recommend cannot be moved by what I sell.

I write the request for proposal and I recommend vendors, but I do not hand you a closed list. Invite anyone you like. If another vendor suits your building better, or suits it equally well for less money, I will tell you so, and I will tell you why.

I also turn work down. Sometimes because I cannot honestly be the independent voice at the table. More often because the budget will not do the job. There is always a package that meets the price and fails the purpose, and somebody will always be willing to sell it. I would rather tell a committee to build in stages, or wait a year, or go raise more, than hand them the version that fits the budget and ignores what the work truly requires.

Stewardship is not the same as cheap

Somewhere in most building committees, somebody says we need to be careful with this money. That is exactly right, and it is usually the moment the committee starts reading the bids from the bottom up.

Careful does not mean cheapest. Careful means the money does the most good for the longest time. Sometimes that means spending less. Often it means spending once instead of three times.

The alternative has a cost too, and it never appears on a bid. Two systems bought and written off. Years of volunteers apologizing for the sound. A congregation that has quietly stopped expecting to hear the sermon and decided this is just how their building sounds.

You do not need to spend more, and you do not need to spend less. You need to know what you are buying before you buy it, and the person helping you know should have nothing to gain from your saying yes.

I am not here to help a church spend as much as possible, and I am not here to sell the biggest system a budget will tolerate. I am here so the money people gave, some of them out of very little, buys something that still serves them in twenty years.

I want to be the reason your church only buys one system.