There are 2 ways to build a business in this industry and both of them work.
One is volume. Standardized rooms, repeatable scope, thin margin on each job, and the money comes from how many you can turn. Classroom AV is the clearest version. Hundreds of rooms, the same display, the same mount, the same wall plate. The company that wins has the tightest install process and the shortest time on site.
The other is fewer jobs, larger and more complex. Broadcast facilities, performance venues, corporate spaces where the design work is most of the value and no two are alike. These jobs come with the most demanding customers and the most unreasonable timelines. Better margin, longer schedules, and a project that goes wrong can take the profit from several good ones with it.
The complex jobs are the ones I love. I started a video production company in Huntington, West Virginia in 1997 as a low cost provider. Some weeks I shot dozens of gigs and handed over the finished piece the same day. It took me about a year to learn I did not want that work. One high profile job a month brought in what 20 quick ones did, and the big projects let me make something the small ones never could. By the early 2000s we were known for large productions with real crews and real post. Our mobilization cost alone was often higher than the entire price of the jobs I started out doing.
The lane itself is rarely the problem. Companies get in trouble when they run one model on the other one's cost structure. You cannot compete on volume while carrying a design and engineering department, and you cannot deliver a complicated build with a crew that has only ever installed the same simple room 200 times. The companies I have watched struggle were rarely in the wrong business. They were in one business with the other one's overhead, usually because the pipeline got thin and they took a job they knew better than to take.
Volume work is a real business that rewards real skill. Many successful companies in this industry are built entirely on process discipline and schedule control, and getting 200 rooms delivered on time and identical is genuinely hard. It is a different craft from the one I chose.
I sit on the sales side of a division now, and this comes up every time the forecast tightens.
Decide which business you are, then price and staff like you mean it.