Sometimes, despite diligent planning, jobs end up happening all at the same time. The residential AV company I work for sometimes can't cover all our work with employees, so we occasionally have to look for local contractors to help us meet deadlines. Hiring new permanent employees only makes sense if there will be enough work to keep them busy 3 months, 6 months, a year or more from now.

And it's not always easy to find the right talent to fill the gaps... or sometimes ANYONE, and you're never sure they won't cost more time than they save you. How common is this with the rest of you?

How often does this come up for you in a given year, how easy is it to find contractors, and have you found any resource or method that makes it easier to locate qualified temporary help? Does this happen more with residential or commercial? My guess is the latter, but nearly all of my experience is with resi.

I work for a luxury residential dealer that does projects across the country. I work with guys from other firms all the time. We partner with guys for everything from wiring pulling to system service. I even had a guy meet me on Long Island to splice a cable for me in a crawl space because i couldn't get my belly under the duct work. The better/maybe best place to find partners is right here at RemoteCentral or over at esiorg.com or integrationpros.org. Another good place is through your reps & manufacturers.

One of the things we have done to avoid having people sitting around waiting is to have the electricians at each project pull cable. We provide them with a detailed wiring plan, labels and we sell the client the accessories and cable. We meet with them at the beginning and end and several times during to check progress. In 10 years i think we may have had 2 or 3 bad cables. Keep in mind these are mid 6 and 7 figure projects with hundreds of wires each. As long as you spend some time educating them about carefully pulling cables...no knots no stretching etc and provide them with the parts and plan things go very well.

For one-offs you could check out OnForce.

I have a small av company and I sub for people about 20% of the time. They have found me in a couple different ways. One was I took over a job and I wasn't certified for that control system. I reached out to a local company and they ended up bringing me on as a sub. Two my ex wife put my card on a community board at a local grocery store and the guy remembered working with me years ago. Three was keeping in touch with my former co workers. And One and three combined I do a fair amount of work for a company that asked a guy I sub for who do you use for over flow work . He named me and his top guy said I worked with him before he can handle the job.