Ask any general contractor where the late surprises come from on a build, and audiovisual is almost always on the list. Not because AV is the biggest line item — it rarely is — but because it's the one trade whose scope is easy to underestimate when you're pricing the job, and expensive to fix once the walls are closed.
The pattern is predictable. AV looks like a handful of screens and a couple of speakers on the drawings. It gets carried as a rough allowance, or quietly rolled into the electrical number. Then, partway through the build, the questions start: Who's running this cable? Where does the equipment actually live? Who was supposed to reinforce the wall for that big display? Why is there no power or internet at the podium? Every answer that wasn't settled up front becomes a question to the design team, and too many of those questions become change orders.
Here's what tends to go wrong, and how to keep AV from eating into your contingency.
1. AV depends on other trades — and those links get missed
On paper, AV looks self-contained: the screens, the speakers, the gear. But for any of it to work, other people have to do their part first. The electrician has to put power where the equipment lands. Someone has to run the cable pathways through the walls. The framing crew has to reinforce the wall so a heavy display doesn't pull out of the drywall. The internet connection has to be there.
When AV gets priced as if it's just a box of equipment, all of those dependencies fall into the gaps between trades. The AV company assumes the contractor is providing the power and wall reinforcement; the contractor assumes the AV company is. Nobody priced it.
The fix: when you're pricing the job, treat AV as a coordination item, not a shopping list. Make sure someone has clearly assigned the power, the cable pathways, the wall reinforcement, and the internet connections to a specific trade — and that the AV company has confirmed what it's expecting other people to handle.
2. "We'll handle the AV" hides the most important question
A bid that just says "AV per plans" skips over the question that causes the most trouble on site: who's buying each piece, and who's installing it? Sometimes the owner buys the screens and the AV company hangs them. Sometimes the AV company supplies the mounts and the contractor's crew installs them. Sometimes the in-house IT team wants to provide the control gear themselves. Every one of those splits is a change order waiting to happen if it isn't written down.
The fix: ask the AV company for a simple "who buys it / who installs it" list — every major piece of equipment, with the responsible party named next to it. It takes them twenty minutes and saves you several rounds of back-and-forth later.
3. The behind-the-wall stuff gets cut before anyone understands it
When budgets get tight, the cable pathways inside the walls are an easy target — you can't see them in the finished room, so they feel optional. Then the AV design needs a cable route that has nowhere to go, and you're cutting open finished drywall to add something that would have cost a fraction of that during framing.
The fix: protect the behind-the-wall pathways. Even if the AV equipment itself gets scaled back or postponed, leave the empty conduit and cable routes in place. Running them during the build is cheap. Adding them after the walls are closed means demolition first, then the work, then patching everything back up.
4. The schedule treats AV as a final touch — but it isn't
Most people picture AV at the very end: hang the screens, plug in the speakers, done. But a big part of AV happens early, while the walls are still open — running cable and reinforcing walls alongside the electrical and low-voltage crews. Miss that window and the AV company is fishing cable through finished walls, or worse, you're opening walls back up to do it.
The fix: put the early "in the walls" phase of AV on the schedule as its own checkpoint, lined up with the electrical and internet wiring — not as a last-minute item three days before you hand over the keys. Part 3 of this series digs into that timing — it's the single thing that trips up the most projects.
5. Nobody owns the handoff at the end
The system "works" on opening day, but the owner gets no documentation, nobody formally tested and tuned the controls, and six months later a simple support call turns into a guessing game because there's no record of what was actually installed. That's not a change order on your books — but it's the kind of thing an owner remembers when they're deciding who to call next time.
The fix: make the final testing and a simple "here's what we installed and how it works" handoff a required part of the AV scope, signed off before closeout. A clean finish is the cheapest good impression a contractor and its AV partner will ever make.
The common thread
Every one of these problems is a coordination problem, not an equipment problem. AV doesn't blow up budgets because the gear is exotic — it blows up budgets because the line between AV and the rest of the build was never clearly drawn. The contractors who keep AV change orders near zero are the ones who bring the AV company in early, as a planning partner, instead of treating them as a vendor who shows up at the end with a pallet of screens.
How ASC works with GCs and primes
At ASC, most of our work comes through general contractors, prime contractors, and AV resellers across Florida and Alabama — so we read a set of drawings the way you do. We'll review the AV scope before you commit to a number, point out the cross-trade dependencies that turn into change orders, and hand you a clear "who buys it / who installs it" breakdown you can hold every party to. The goal is simple: no surprises once the work is underway, no finished walls coming back down, and a clean handoff to the owner.
Bidding a project with AV in it and want a second set of eyes? Send us the drawings — we'll turn around a scope review that tells you exactly where the gaps are.