Benjamin Fink
Active Member
I work for a college in west central Minnesota, and we would like to bring in a consultant to walk through a number of spaces on our campus and help us start planning for upgrades to our audio and lighting systems. We have a performance venue in our Student Center that is due for a new set of speakers, a very reverberant ballroom with a sound system that we would like to eventually overhaul and potentially add stage lighting to, and a recital hall that is due for an upgrade to the lighting and sound equipment and acoustic treatments. We have a rough understanding of what we think we need, but I'd like to bring in someone with fuller product knowledge and experience with systems design (especially since we went through a recent renovation on our campus where our architects didn't work with any theatrical consultants on the project.)
We don't currently have definite timeframes (or funding) to do these projects, but would like to bring in someone to assess our existing equipment and help us identify where the weaknesses are in our systems that should be prioritized, and give us some rough price points for upgrades that we can bring to the decision makers on campus and start saving up for or fundraising. Since we don't have immediate plans to move forward with these projects, would a consultant be able to work up a few options in different price points and give us a framework to use for planning and prioritization that we can flesh out later as we decide to move forward on each project?
What should we expect to pay to bring someone out for a site visit and work out some rough recommendations, and does anyone have companies in Minnesota or the upper Midwest that they would recommend? In the beginning of 2020, I had reached out to a company that had been recommended to me and their estimate for a site visit and design development was around $12k. Is this roughly the cost of entry, or could we lower the cost by going through a smaller company or requesting a less detailed set of estimates?
We don't currently have definite timeframes (or funding) to do these projects, but would like to bring in someone to assess our existing equipment and help us identify where the weaknesses are in our systems that should be prioritized, and give us some rough price points for upgrades that we can bring to the decision makers on campus and start saving up for or fundraising. Since we don't have immediate plans to move forward with these projects, would a consultant be able to work up a few options in different price points and give us a framework to use for planning and prioritization that we can flesh out later as we decide to move forward on each project?
What should we expect to pay to bring someone out for a site visit and work out some rough recommendations, and does anyone have companies in Minnesota or the upper Midwest that they would recommend? In the beginning of 2020, I had reached out to a company that had been recommended to me and their estimate for a site visit and design development was around $12k. Is this roughly the cost of entry, or could we lower the cost by going through a smaller company or requesting a less detailed set of estimates?