‘Tech consultants should be vendor agnostic’

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Charles Adkinson is very honest and forthright in his approach. He is outright plainspoken and calls a spade a spade when it comes to business dealings too and does not play to the gallery.

Working for Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams, Inc. (WJHW), Adkinson averred, “We keep everything honest and compete fair and hard for business. So, we are brand and vendor agnostic. We want to go out and help competitively procure equipment.”

Charles Adkinson is the Principal, Client and Market Development for Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams, Inc. (WJHW), PMY’s wholly-owned design firm. He is also the Senior Vice-President of Sport and Entertainment for the full-service technology solutions provider – the PMY Group – for the United States. Adkinson has been a senior member of WJHW since 2015 and brings his extensive background to focus on technology leadership for critical large-scale projects. Additionally, he serves as a senior member of the design disciplines for LED, Video Production and major infrastructure projects.

In a candid conversation with ‘Coliseum’, Charles Adkinson, Principal, Client and Market Development for WJHW and Senior Vice-President of Sport and Entertainment, PMY Group, minces no words in stating that “Good consultants shouldn’t be in the business of telling an owner/client what they want to hear. The true consultant is one that really focuses on how to protect their clients and protect the budget. When you are a consultant you have nothing to sell but your time, knowledge, experience, and opinions. We sell impartiality and the way we execute our work and that is what is valuable.”
 

WJHW

Carrollton (US)-based the Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams, Inc. (WJHW) is a global design and consulting firm specializing in state-of-the-art technology solutions for the venues, the infrastructure and major events. With over 34 years of experience the WJHW has built a reputation for delivering innovative and practical designs across a range of industries including sports, entertainment, education, civic spaces, and performance venues. It is part of the PMY Group.

Charles Adkinson presents three case studies. The first one pertains to the dernier cri look SoFi Stadium.
 

Case Study 1

Adkinson and his team took up the gauntlet of “designing once-in-a-generation display of our proudest showpiece – the 70,000-capacity SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California (US). Anybody can design. There are amazingly, immensely talented people who can draw and draft and conceptualize things. Our chance truly was to design and then actually see a successful build of an iconic once-in-a-generation display. The visual display was actually bigger than what we deployed. So, my biggest complaint about it was actually we made it too small.”

Adkinson and his team sat with the design team and did a serious think about “what the display had to be, what the client wanted, what we could do responsibly with the budget we had and what we had committed to get the project done for from a design perspective. We basically redesigned it and changed the overall geometry a tiny bit and now the seating bowl is completely outside the orbit of the display. So, we changed the overall shape and quite a bit of additional design services had to go into this.”

Adkinson said they had to do a lot of coordination and he drove home the point that “one should be willing to have those tough conversations as a consultant and not just stand by the purity of the creativity to design.”

The end result is that the SoFi Stadium display “is amazing and on the cover of every sports magazine”.
 

Case Study 2

Adkinson and his team were asked to put up a light-emitting diode (LED) board up for a small outdoor stadium – “There was lot of scope creep in the project, no Project Manager, the owner did not know how to build sport stadiums, and how to run the sports stadiums. We sat down as an organization and identified the goals of the project, got their stakeholders aligned, we generated the documents, we went through a bid process, a lot of back and forth with the vendors, the fair, transparent process and when it was all set and done we were able to basically get some nice, reasonable offers. The end result is that the owner is happy, they were very pleased that they got sort of a million dollars more than they were going to get the first time for the same amount of money.”

He pointed out that it was not a win-win scenario and the owner profited and by paying Adkinson and his team “pennies on the dollar” they were able to get “million dollars of technology in a project that was executed on their budget and on their timeline”.
 

Case Study 3

Another Tier 1 professional sports team reached out to Adkinson and his team for their arena.

He shared that the sports team said they really did not believe they need a consultant “because you will tell us to spend more money” but they were under pressure from their stakeholders.

Adkinson further shared that it was a challenge to “tell them the sincere, honest truth and they were not believing the professionals in the industry who told them they had an unrealistic price and an unrealistic timeline. I told them pay us a few dollars if you want us to project-manage it but there is no point in going to take for a bid. And so we were comfortable giving an honest opinion even though we might be essentially walking away from work but our job is to protect the client in that case.”

Adkinson and his team found “30 things of concern in their eight-page proposal and that included no LED content management system, no electoral contracting, no structural engineering, etc. The owner was obviously shocked and concerned and fortunately did not hire us. We got nothing out of the deal but I am proud of our behavior there.”

Basically, he tried to drive home the fact that the client got all the information without having to pay anything – “They got the milk so why buy the cow”.
 

Wrap-up

Charles Adkinson wrapped up with his piece of advice, “The key to being a successful technology consultant is to being a partner. We should be able to protect them from their contractors and one should be willing to have that difficult conversation.

And then lastly, have a responsibility to fairly define and support the procurement of technology – being agnostic from the vendors, being agnostic from the brands and not necessarily just in technology but in learning about the client’s organization.”

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