Chances are you’ve seen the work of Corporate Audio Visual Services, an Elmsford-based audio, video, lighting, and staging company for live event production. In the last two years, the firm has produced more than 1,200 events in 1,000 different venues. Did you attend the Westchester Digital Summit? The benefit for Make-A-Wish Hudson Valley? Exhibits staged by ArtsWestchester? They were all done by Corporate Audio Visual Services.
Since 1985, the company has tried to provide service that’s the opposite of what’s given by standard, impersonal hotels. And while any AV company can have cool equipment, this company is obsessed with getting the best. The firm invests $100,000 every year in new equipment and has an overall equipment value around $1.5 million—one of the reasons it boasts a 99.2 percent success rate (measured by the frequency of having to refund money due to any client dissatisfaction).
The company has grown in terms of the number of events it produces and the size of those events. “Our typical project is about 2.5 times [the size of] what it was in 2006 when I started,” says President Joe Guilderson. That’s why the company has added two full-time employees this year (making the total 12) and invested heavily in training its 75 part-time employees. That’s the only way to move forward, says Guilderson: “The Westchester community benefits from our technical and production knowledge.”