This story takes place from 2007 to 2014. I went to school for television production. I worked in a TV studio on several TV shows and documentaries and was so good that I later opened up my own video production business. But the thing you need to know about this industry is that the starting cost can be massive when you begin. You can't do the work unless you have the equipment, so at minimum, you need to spend $25K on equipment before even opening your doors. And so during the first couple of years when my company was still in the red and paying off the cost of equipment, I decided I would take on a side job that could provide a consistent livable income.

With my previous experience in TV and being an expert at several different types of equipment, it was just the edge I needed to get into a position at an upscale luxury hotel in my city. By upscale, I mean it was THE luxury hotel. One of the oldest hotels in the midwest and the fanciest, non-chain hotel in the entire state. Think the Plaza Hotel of the midwest. Let's call them Fancy Hotel. It was 2007 and I was just starting out as their brand new Audio Visual Technician.

As an AV Tech, I literally made all events at the hotel happen. A few hours before your event, I would be the one in the ballroom setting up everything. The lights, sound system, projectors, screens, and even some stage elements. I was the difference between your event looking impressive or your event happening in a bare bones room. If your event called for it, I would also be the one in the back of the room operating the tech table. This is one of the areas my previous experience in the TV studio came in handy. I was already used to the high-paced experience of operating a live event, so I was right in my element. After the event, I would then have to strike the room and get it ready for the next event.

I was good at my job. Very good. So good in fact that within six months of being hired, I became their lead technician. Meaning it was my call to make sure every event was set up and ready on time. I managed a team of 3 other techs and made sure every event was ready to go. I can honestly say that I've never missed a deadline on an event, even when turnaround times in a ballroom were measured in minutes rather than hours. I learned in the TV industry that when the event starts at a scheduled time, no matter what the show must go on. So I always figured out a way to make it happen.

A little background on how the Fancy Hotel ran. I had several layers of bosses.

Immediately above me, there was the director and the salesperson. The sales person handled the months of planning, contracts, and billing of clients, and the director was the linchpin that connected all the activities of the hotel to all the activities of the AV department.

Together, we were just one branch of a larger AV company that we'll call Alpha AV. Alpha AV is a nationwide company that has locations in hundreds of hotels across the country.

My branch of Alpha AV worked for Fancy Hotel. Along with having the event guests at the hotel as clients, the hotel itself was also considered a client.

Alpha AV was under a contract that granted us residency at the hotel. Fancy Hotel would throw all AV business our way in return for a percentage of the profit as well as providing all hotel AV needs for a reduced cost. Hotel events could be as simple as a projector and screen for a weekly staff meeting or could be as difficult as a huge company event for the parent company.

The hotel is owned by a large corporation, we'll call them Billion Dollar Corporation or BDC for short, that owns several upscale luxury hotels all over the country, but the home office for BDC was only 3 blocks away from Fancy Hotel. So Fancy Hotel was the flagship hotel for the entire corporation. The hotel that BDC would hold all its events at. The hotel that was always under the microscope and held to the highest standards.

Over the years of working side by side with BDC, I made some pretty big connections. Since I was an AV tech with a video production company, I was able to negotiate that into a very profitable situation in which I started to handle the corporation's video production work when needed in connection to a hotel event. Whenever they had a presentation to give that required more than a simple PowerPoint, I made the video. So needless to say, I became very well known among the staff at Fancy Hotel and the staff at BDC. I was also well known among the event staff and executives I worked with at the hotel. I had event planners, executives, politicians, and CEOs that remembered my name because I was that guy that made their large events happen. They trusted me. I was sometimes the only outsider present in a room where secret meetings were taking place. And I was even vetted by the secret service so that I was the only AV tech in the city with the security clearance to be in the same room as the president.

Those years with Alpha AV were some of the best years of my professional career and I received constant praise and recognition from clients, the hotel, and BDC. But all things must come to an end and in 2012, Alpha AV's contract was up. BDC had the choice to either renew the contract or go with a different AV company.

Enter Beta AV. Over the last year and a half, they've been growing and moving into our territory. It was no secret that a couple of Beta AV's executives had the ear of some of the BDC executives, so it was no surprise when the decision was made that in order to cut costs, Alpha AV was underbid and Beta AV would become the next resident of the hotel. Did I mention this was a national deal? For the last 5 years, Alpha AV had been the AV company at EVERY hotel of BDC nationwide, and now every location was switching to Beta AV.

When it came to our hotel, the flagship hotel, there was a stipulation entered into the contract. I had to come with the deal. I knew the clients and the clients knew me. They trusted me. They knew the work I produced was quality and it would ease the transition considerably. So there I was, traded like an asset in a multimillion-dollar deal. On one 20-hour day in May of 2012, I moved Alpha AV out of the hotel, clocked out for the last time, and immediately clocked in with my new position as the lead AV tech for Beta AV and moved all their equipment in. Considerably less and cheaper equipment.

The transition started out rocky, to say the least. The clients trusted me, and the hotel trusted me, but I could tell my new company still saw me as a member of a rival AV company. An extra person that they were required to hire. The contradictions started almost immediately. I had been running the storage rooms for five years and so I knew where to store the equipment in the most efficient manner possible, but they made sure to correct me and make sure we moved the equipment in the way they wanted it. Over the next two months, they quickly learned that I was correct and the equipment made its way into the proper spots.

The AV office also went through some changes as it became off-limits for us technicians. It was to be an office for the director, the salesperson, and for clients. There was to be no reason for us technicians to have to cross paths with the clients. In the five years with Alpha AV and my years at Beta AV, never had a client actually set foot in the AV office. We always came to them, they never came to us, so all this new policy did was take away my desk and anywhere else for my technicians to sit in our downtime between events.

Those were just changes that screwed with us technicians. Over the next year, the changes this new AV company made started to affect the clients. A pattern started to emerge which the clients began to pick up on. Clients who had the same event at the hotel year after year for decades suddenly noticed a steep rise in the cost of everything. And then when the clients arrive and take a look at the ballroom, it's nowhere near as fancy as in previous years. In short, we were overcharging and underdelivering. I would try to slip our clients some of the equipment I knew they needed, but the new sales guy put a stop to it whenever he caught me. If they didn't pay for it, they didn't get it.

A whole year of this occurred with clients getting bare bones for what they paid for. My reputation held for a little bit, but clients soon realized my hands were tied and I wasn't allowed to give them the exceptional level of service they expected from me. Sales started to slow down and events started to use outside AV companies more often.

After a year of this steady decline, there was a shake-up in the hotel. The AV director took this decline as a sign that it was time for him to retire and the sales guy moved on to another position. When they left, a new director transferred in from another hotel. He's taking on both positions as both the director and sales. The previous duo may have been bad at the job, but this new guy made them look good by comparison.

How do you fix charging too much? By charging even more. How do you talk to your clients? You talk down to them and make sure they know that you know more than they do. I literally had to take an active role in pushing him out of events when he would start to openly argue with event planners. I may not have had official authority over him, but at points when he took things too far with clients, I was not above treating him like a child and banishing him to his office. Over the years I built up my reputation in the city as THE AV tech that everyone wanted to work with and this guy could undo all my hard work and destroy my reputation in a single interaction.

When this new director took over, the writing was on the wall. Beta AV was a sinking ship and the captain of the flagship hotel was drunk with power and actively aiming for the iceberg. I was still friends with many of the executives at BDC, so I still had a sentimental connection to try to stick with the hotel and rescue it from the downward spiral. I had to figure out a way to retain the clients. But that's very difficult to do with the way the new director was crippling our reputation.

Beta AV was corrupt all the way to the top with policies that valued money and power over giving our clients what they need for their events. At our lowest point, we had staple events that were held consistently at our hotel for decades suddenly switching to other hotels. Do you have any idea how much attention it attracts in a billion-dollar corporation when you're AV company is responsible for losing the hotel millions of dollars in events?

The decline was getting bad, and the final straw came when the decline affected the hours. We four technicians were lucky to get 10 hours of work a week. Clients at the hotel just weren't going with us anymore, and so there were not enough hours to go around. An AV tech doesn't work at a normal set time. They work only when there's an event to work, so if there is no work, then there is no hours. If there are no hours, then there is no pay. And as an AV technician, you need to be ready to go whenever an event was scheduled, so having a supplementary part-time job to fill in the gaps was impossible.

We had it. I started to orchestrate a little operation in our massive amount of free time. We all started looking for new jobs. And by us all, I don't just mean the four technicians at fancy hotel. A similar decline was happening at all the other Beta AV hotels in our area, and so I convinced every technician in the area to start job searching if they weren't already doing so. As luck would have it, our job searches were all receiving some very promising results at roughly the same time. So a synchronized event was possible.

Now nothing can be proven I had anything to do with it, but a friend of mine at Alpha AV, my old director who was now promoted into an executive position may or may not have been given a sufficient heads up on what was about to happen. A hint or two may have also made its way somehow to a couple of friends I still had at BDC. BDC was really getting pissed off at Beta AV, but they were locked into the same 5-year contract and had no choice but to endure the decline until the contract was up...unless something significant happened to break that contract.

Suddenly, within the same week, every AV tech in the region put in their two-week notice at the same time. This happened, seemingly coordinated right before a large event at Fancy Hotel for BDC. As I said before, Fancy Hotel was the flagship hotel where BDC held all their corporate events, and now the only one left to set up and run their largest event was the lone incompetent Beta AV director.

This problem created a massive ripple effect through Beta AV. The biggest yearly event, for their biggest client, at the flagship hotel was in jeopardy and they did not have the manpower to deliver what they promised. They were in breach of the contract. But lucky, Alpha AV somehow heard about all these problems coming up and was able to swoop in and provide the most impressive AV setup BDC ever had at their event.

This series of events really impacted Beta AV's worth as a company and Alpha AV was glad to step in and make Beta AV an offer. Alpha AV ended up absorbing Beta AV. All equipment and personnel became part of Alpha AV. Alpha AV also absorbed the existing contract which BDC was happy to allow them to do. Alpha AV moved back into every BDC hotel nationwide. Events returned to the hotel upon hearing this news and the reputation was restored.

My plan went exactly as well as I hoped it would. The mass quitting I organized was the final nail in the coffin to take down a multi-million dollar AV company. Alpha AV was able to expand back to the size they were before and is still at all of BDC's hotels to this day. BDC was hemorrhaging money due to Beta AV, and they were quite relieved to be rid of them.

Unfortunately, the story never really had a happy ending for me. As I mentioned, I held onto the position for far too long. I should have gotten out two years earlier than I did and in those two years of minimal hours for minimal pay, I ended up in a financial black hole that I just finished digging myself out of last year. My car was repossessed, my condo was foreclosed, and my business was forced to close its doors as I had to sell all my equipment just to get by. From that point on, I was forced to give up on following my dreams and instead follow the money instead. To get positions that paid big rather than positions that allowed me to do the kind of work I love to do. Beta AV took everything from me, but I can proudly say that I was the one tech responsible for taking out an entire company.