★Service

Commercial AV · Kansas City.

IntegrateIT installs and supports commercial AV for businesses in Kansas City, Missouri and Overland Park, Kansas. We are an Overland Park, Kansas integrator founded in 2021 by Daniel and Moran Alon: Control4 Platinum Dealer with a Control4 Certified Showroom, Crestron Elite Partner, Lutron Certified Installer, CEDIA member, BBB-accredited. We design, install, commission and support commercial AV across the whole metro on both sides of the state line — downtown and the Crossroads, the Northland and the Missouri suburbs, Overland Park, Leawood, Lenexa and Olathe in Johnson County: conference rooms and boardrooms, lobby and large-format displays, distributed audio for restaurants and retail, signage, and certified video conferencing. Commercial AV fails at the seams, so one contractor owns the whole room — the pathway, the rack, the programming, the commissioning and the training are one scope with one number and one phone to call. What a buyer can verify before signing: each dealer tier in the manufacturer’s own locator, the five-year workmanship warranty in writing, exclusions printed beside inclusions on the proposal, and an owner set — rack elevations, cable schedule, as-builts, admin credentials in your name — handed over at commissioning. Phone: (913) 804-7575 or office@integrateit.tech.

Below: why the seams are where these projects go wrong, what actually sits inside a commercial AV scope, how a downtown tenant space differs from a Johnson County shell, the rooms this work covers, what goes into a conference room and what video conferencing adds to it, what commissioning has to produce before we leave, and the commercial work we turn down.

What breaks is the handoff, not the equipment

When we are called to look at a commercial room that does not work, the display is rarely broken and the microphone is rarely faulty. What broke is a handoff. The electrician put the box where the drawing said and the furniture arrived four inches to the left. The IT group locked down the switch port after the room was commissioned. The signage player is fine but nobody was ever given the password. The audio contractor tuned the dining room and the kitchen exhaust was not running that day. Every one of those is a coordination failure sitting between two vendors who each did their own part correctly.

That is the argument for buying commercial AV as one scope rather than as parts. It is not a claim that our hardware is different from anyone else’s — most of it is the same hardware. It is that the pathway, the rack, the network segment, the programming, the calibration and the training all belong to the same people, so there is nobody to point at. It costs more than the cheapest bid on the table and it is worth it in rooms that get used every day by people who are not going to file a ticket when something is mildly wrong. They will just stop using the room.

What is actually inside the scope

A commercial AV bid that only lists equipment is hiding the expensive half. Here is the whole shape of it, in the order it happens.

• Pathway and rough-in. Conduit, back boxes, ceiling coordination and the fire-stopping at every rated wall we cross. This is the part that is cheap before the ceiling closes and expensive after, which is why we want to be in the coordination meeting rather than on the punch list.
• The rack. A built, labeled, ventilated rack in a location that has power, cooling and a door that locks — not a shelf in a supply closet. Rack elevations go in the submittal so the GC knows the footprint before the walls go up.
• The network segment. AV traffic gets its own lane. We build on Ubiquiti and hand your IT group a written addressing scheme, the ports we need open, and the reason for each one, rather than asking them to trust an appliance they have never seen.
• Control and programming. The part that decides whether the room is used. One button, sensible defaults, a graceful failure when a laptop is missing. We are a Crestron Elite Partner and the programming is done in house, so a change in year three is a phone call rather than a re-bid.
• Commissioning. Audio measured in the finished room with the mechanical systems running, display geometry and color set, every source tested on every destination, and the whole matrix walked once more with the furniture in place.
• Documentation and training. As-builts, cable schedule, credentials in your name, a one-page run book, and a session in the room with the staff who use it. Covered further down, because it is the deliverable most often skipped.

Downtown brick and timber, or a Johnson County shell

Kansas City gives commercial AV two very different jobs, and the honest answer to “what does this cost” changes completely between them. In the older commercial stock — the brick-and-timber and mid-century buildings downtown and in the surrounding business districts — the ceiling is often the underside of the deck, the walls are masonry or plaster on block, the risers belong to the landlord, and the plan you were handed reflects a floor plate that has been remodeled several times. There is no plenum to hide in and no easy path from the closet to the far conference room.

So we design those rooms to be seen. Surface raceway is run on the structure lines so it reads as part of the building rather than as an afterthought. Speakers hang as pendants or mount to columns instead of disappearing into a ceiling that does not exist. Displays land on wall or floor structure we have verified rather than on a mount trusting old masonry. And every penetration the landlord has to approve gets approved in writing before a bit touches the wall, because in a tenant improvement the thing that delays a project is almost never the equipment.

New construction in Johnson County is the opposite problem and the better one. In an Overland Park, Lenexa or Leawood shell we are in before the ceiling grid, the conduit is in the drawings, the rack room has power and cooling on the mechanical plan, and the coordination happens on paper where it is free. That is the same argument we make to residential builders on our new-construction low-voltage page, and it holds harder on the commercial side, where a change order after the ceiling closes is measured in weeks of tenant delay rather than in drywall patch.

The rooms we are called about

• Conference rooms and boardrooms. One-button start, a display sized so the person at the far end of the table can read the smallest thing anyone will put on it, and audio that survives a hard-surfaced room. When the room has to be a certified meeting platform, that is its own discipline — Zoom Rooms and Teams Rooms covers it properly.
• Restaurants and bars. Zoned coverage so the patio, the bar and the dining room can each be set without fighting each other, and a preset the manager can hit at open — built on Q-SYS, which puts the processing, the amplification, the loudspeakers and the control surface in one design file rather than in four products that have to be persuaded to agree. The full argument, including why the volume war starts at seven in the evening, is on restaurant audio.
• Clinics and medical offices. Waiting-room audio and video that is quiet enough to talk over, patient-education displays in exam rooms, and a network design that keeps AV devices off the segment your practice management system lives on. Not clinical imaging — that is a different specialty.
• Retail and lobbies. Music distribution that stays even across a store, and screens that carry a message rather than a screensaver, driven by BrightSign players. Content operations live on digital signage, and a single large canvas lives on video walls, built from Just Video Walls or the Media Resources commercial platforms.
• Multifamily and mixed-use amenity space. Clubrooms, fitness rooms, leasing offices and rooftops, usually alongside the building network. That work sits with MDU networking.

Conference rooms and video conferencing

Conference-room AV is the work Kansas City businesses call us about most, and the question under it is always the same: will the room start on time, and will the person on the other end of the call be able to hear us. “Conference room” covers four fairly different jobs, so it is worth setting them out. The wireless layer across all four is usually Barco ClickShare, a line we carry and install, from the C-10 in a huddle space up to the Hub Pro room systems in a boardroom.

Where the room is too large or too bright for a panel, projection takes over, and the line to look at first is Panasonic, carried and installed under distribution. Panasonic organises its own range by light engine and brightness rather than by marketing tier — fixed-installation 1-Chip DLP and LCD for a boardroom, lecture room or gallery, large-venue 3-Chip DLP where the image has to cover an atrium — and its SOLID SHINE laser light source means there is no lamp on a replacement schedule, which is the line a facilities budget actually cares about. Panasonic also builds the professional displays behind a lobby or a classroom, and PressIT360 for guests presenting without a cable.

• Huddle rooms. Four to six people, one display, and a single bar carrying the camera, the microphones and the speakers. One cable to a laptop, nothing to configure at the table, and less to break. For a small room used by people who arrive with a laptop this is frequently the correct answer, and we will say so rather than sell you a larger room.
• Conference rooms. Eight to sixteen seats, a display sized off the worst chair rather than off the drawing, a camera that reframes as people join, microphones placed after the room has been measured, and a controller on the table with one button that starts the meeting. This is the room that gets used daily, and the room where a bad handoff between trades shows up fastest.
• Boardrooms. Processing for echo cancellation and mix, a ceiling or table microphone system chosen for that specific room, camera framing that finds whoever is speaking, and a control layer that ties the display, the shades and the lighting into a single press. Crestron earns its place here — we are a Crestron Elite Partner and the programming is done in house, so a change in year three is a phone call rather than a re-bid.
• Training and multipurpose rooms. Usually two surfaces, or one video wall doing both jobs, so the far end and the content are readable at once; a presenter microphone plus a way for the room to ask a question back; and combinable audio where an air wall splits the space into two rooms and then back into one.

What lands in the room is the same short list every time, and every item on it is a decision rather than a purchase. A display or a video wall, sized off the furthest seat and the smallest thing anyone in your business actually puts on a screen. A camera framed for faces rather than for an empty table. Microphones and speakers chosen after the room is measured, because a hard, glassy room and a carpeted one want different answers and no processing fully rescues the wrong one. A room controller that gives one button to start and fails gracefully when somebody forgets a laptop. And apresentation path — a cable at the table that works with whatever was brought into the room, plus wireless presentation for the guest who has nothing to plug in. Video between rooms runs over structured cable on AVPro Edge or Blustream, and the pathway, the rack and the network segment underneath are the same scope described further up this page.

Where a room has to join a meeting from its own calendar, we build certified Microsoft Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms — platforms we design and commission rooms for, not partnerships we claim. A certified room buys three things: a hardware and firmware combination the platform vendor has validated together, so a software update does not break the room on a Monday morning; a central update path, so patching is not somebody standing on a chair; and a console that says a room is unhealthy before a user does. It earns its cost where meetings are scheduled and guests are in the room. In a four-person huddle space it is usually management overhead nobody wanted.

Then the half that decides whether you buy from anyone twice: what happens after the install. Meeting-room platforms update constantly, so firmware goes out on a schedule and outside working hours, room health is watched centrally rather than discovered at nine on a Monday, and somebody named owns it — your team or ours, and we will set it up and train yours if you would rather hold it. Commissioning ends in the room with the people who press the button, and the credentials are issued in your name. What ownership includes after handover, and what is genuinely optional, is set out on our service plans page.

Commissioning is the deliverable, not the install

A commercial system is finished when someone who was not there during construction can walk in and use it. That means the last week of the job is not cleanup. We measure the audio in the room as it will actually be occupied, with the kitchen or the rooftop unit running, because a dining room tuned on a quiet Tuesday morning is tuned for a room that never exists. We test every source on every destination rather than the one path the demo will use. We set the control defaults to the state the room should be in when the door opens.

Then you get the folder: rack elevations, cable schedule, as-built drawings, network addressing, admin credentials issued in your name rather than ours, and a run book short enough that a new hire reads it. Training happens in the room, with the people who press the button. Rooms do not fail because staff are careless. They fail because nobody was ever shown, and the first person who guessed wrong told everyone else it was broken.

Where we are the wrong call

Stadium, arena and large-venue production AV is a different trade with different crews and different rigging, and we do not bid it. Clinical imaging and diagnostic display calibration is outside our scope. And on pure commodity work — a screen on a wall awarded to the lowest number — we are usually not the right answer, because the part of our price that matters is coordination, concealment, commissioning and still answering the phone in year four.

What we do bring is a residential finish standard applied to commercial work: wire concealed where concealment is possible, racks built to be serviced, and control programming that assumes the user has no manual. Every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system. Send plans or an RFP to office@integrateit.tech, or plan a site walk and we will look at the rooms first.

Common questions