The Maths Stopped Working
Ten years ago, a mid-sized AV rental company might have employed 15-20 full-time crew. Technicians, drivers, warehouse staff, project managers — all on permanent contracts, all on the payroll whether there was work that week or not. It worked because the industry was steady enough to keep people busy most of the time.
That model has been under pressure for a while now. Event schedules are less predictable than they used to be. Companies are winning bigger, more complex jobs that need 30 crew one week and five the next. Keeping everyone on permanent contracts when utilisation drops below 70% starts to hurt. And so the shift toward freelancer crew has accelerated, particularly since 2020 when a lot of permanent staff left the industry entirely.
The Freelancer Advantage
The appeal is straightforward. You scale your crew to match the work. A quiet Tuesday in January? You've got your core team of five. A festival weekend in July that needs 40 pairs of hands? You book freelancers. Your labour costs flex with your revenue instead of sitting as a fixed overhead regardless of how busy you are.
There's a talent argument too. A freelancer who specialises in RF coordination or large-format LED processing brings skills you might only need four times a year. Hiring that person full-time doesn't make sense. Booking them for specific jobs does.
But — and this is a significant but — freelancer crew comes with its own set of headaches that permanent staff don't.
The Compliance Headache
Every freelancer on your site needs to be compliant. Public liability insurance. Valid certifications for the work they're doing. Right-to-work documentation. CSCS cards if they're on a construction site. IPAF tickets if they're going up in a MEWP. First aid qualifications if you've put them down as the designated first aider on your risk assessment.
When you've got five permanent staff, keeping track of all this is manageable. Sarah's IPAF expires in March, Tom's first aid is up for renewal in September. You put it in a calendar and sort it out.
When you're booking from a pool of 50+ freelancers, some of whom you only use twice a year, it becomes a genuine administrative burden. Someone's PLI lapsed last month. Someone else has a PASMA ticket but not IPAF. A third person's right-to-work check was done three years ago and needs renewing. If any of this slips through and something goes wrong on site, it's your company's name on the risk assessment.
Availability Is a Guessing Game
The other challenge is simply knowing who's available. Good freelancers are busy. The ones you want — reliable, skilled, professional — are the same ones everyone else wants. By the time you ring round to crew up a job for next Saturday, the best people are already booked.
Most companies end up managing this through a combination of WhatsApp groups, phone calls, spreadsheets, and memory. "Dave's usually free on Wednesdays." "Lisa said she's available most of June." It works up to a point, and then it doesn't. You end up double-booking people, or worse, turning up to a job short-handed because someone forgot to confirm.
The skills matching problem
Not all crew are interchangeable. You need a lighting tech who can programme a GrandMA3, not just someone who can plug in a par can. You need a sound engineer who's comfortable with Dante networking, not just someone who can coil an XLR. When you're scrambling to fill spots, the temptation is to put bums on seats regardless of skill level. That's how you end up with an inexperienced tech trying to troubleshoot a Dante network at a live broadcast.
Building a Network That Actually Works
The companies that do freelancer management well tend to share a few common practices.
They treat it as a relationship, not a transaction. The best freelancers have choices about who they work for. They'll prioritise companies that pay on time, communicate clearly, treat them with respect, and give them interesting work. If you're consistently late with payments or disorganised with schedules, your best freelancers will quietly stop being available when you call.
They book early. For jobs you know about in advance, get your crew locked in as soon as possible. Don't wait until the week before. The good people get snapped up early, and you're left choosing from whoever's still available.
They keep proper records. Every freelancer's skills, certifications, rates, availability preferences, and past job history should be tracked properly. Not in someone's head, not in a WhatsApp chat, but in a system that anyone in the office can access. When the person who normally handles crew booking is off sick, someone else needs to be able to pick it up without starting from scratch.
The Hybrid Model
Most successful AV rental companies are landing on a hybrid approach. A core team of permanent staff who handle the day-to-day operations — warehouse, project management, key technical roles — supplemented by a reliable pool of freelancers who scale up for busy periods and specialist jobs.
The trick is getting the ratio right. Too many permanent staff and your fixed costs eat into margins during quiet periods. Too few and you're entirely dependent on freelancer availability, which means you can't guarantee you'll be able to crew the jobs you've quoted for.
There's no universal answer to that ratio. It depends on your market, your seasonal patterns, and the complexity of the work you do. A company that mostly does corporate conferences might keep a larger permanent team because the work is consistent. A company focused on festivals and outdoor events might lean more heavily on freelancers because the work is intensely seasonal.
What's clear is that the days of running an AV rental company with an entirely permanent crew are largely behind us. The companies that thrive will be the ones that figure out how to manage a mixed workforce effectively — keeping the freelancers happy, compliant, and coming back for more.