Editor’s note: Customers who provide a testimonial receive a catalogue of questions for guidance. The opinions expressed are entirely their own, and there is no obligation to follow the suggested questions.¹ We thank The Lighting & Sound Company for sharing this feedback.
About the company
The Lighting & Sound Company is a full-service event production company specialising in lighting, audio, video, staging, drape and event design for concerts, corporate events, weddings, festivals and live experiences. Founded in 2014 and based in Richmond, Virginia, the company combines technical expertise with creative design to deliver seamless productions nationwide. With a strong focus on quality, reliability and its commitment to “Event Perfection”, The Lighting & Sound Company helps clients bring events of all sizes to life through innovative production solutions and exceptional on-site service.
What has changed for you since introducing CrewBrain?
“Before CrewBrain, our scheduling lived across a home-baked integration, crew texts and a lot of back-and-forth phone calls. Crew would find out about calls too late and availability was a guessing game. Since integrating CrewBrain with Current RMS, everything crew-facing runs through one system. Staff see their schedule, confirm or decline, and get call sheets in one place. As the office, we finally have a single source of truth for who’s working what, when and where. The biggest shift is that scheduling went from a reactive scramble to a planned, repeatable process.”
Which modules are the key features for you?
“The scheduling and staff planning module is the core of it for us. Availability polling is a close second, since it removes the guesswork about who we can actually book for a given date. Time tracking and qualifications/skills tagging also matter a lot, since we run a mix of lighting, audio, staging and CDL-driving roles. Being able to filter crew by what they are actually certified or skilled to do saves real time when staffing an event.”
What added value do you get from these features?
“Concretely: no more chasing people by phone to ask if they’re free. The availability requests handle that on their own, and crew respond on their schedule instead of ours. That alone probably saves us tens of hours a week during busy season. Call sheets and shift confirmations going out automatically mean fewer ‘I didn’t know I was working’ moments, which protects us on show day. And having qualifications attached to each person means whoever is building the crew list can staff correctly without needing to personally know everyone’s capabilities.
Overall, it’s better clarity, fewer errors and less time spent on administrative coordination that used to eat into the day.”
Do you use an interface?
“We use the interface to Current RMS, which is our rental and equipment management system. The value there is that we’re not building the same job twice. A project created on the rental side flows into crew planning without someone re-keying dates, client names and venue details by hand. That saves time and, more importantly, cuts down on transcription errors between the two systems. When the equipment side and the labour side are describing the same job with the same data, we spend less time reconciling discrepancies and quoting is more accurate because equipment and crew live in a connected picture.”
Further development and support
“Updates come regularly and tend to be genuine improvements rather than churn, and it’s clear the product keeps developing. When we’ve reached out to support with questions, responses have been prompt and actually helpful, which matters a lot for a small operation that can’t afford to sit on a blocking issue. Knowing the platform is actively maintained gives us confidence in building more of our workflow around it. CrewBrain has been incredibly helpful getting us online with the Current RMS integration and continues to help us solve operation-breaking problems.”
We would like to thank Logan Adams, Director of Operations at The Lighting & Sound Company, for his open feedback and insights into day-to-day work with CrewBrain.
¹ The question catalogue covered changes after introducing CrewBrain, relevant modules, practical value, use of an interface or API, and further development and support.
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