Documented Engagements

Outlaw Pickle — San Antonio, TX

24,000 sq ft entertainment and pickleball venue · Ground-up technology buildout · 2023–2024

The brief

The ownership group arrived with a bid in hand from a regional integrator. The quoted figure was $195,400 for audiovisual, network, cabling, access control, and camera infrastructure across a new-construction 24,000 sq ft hospitality venue. They asked us for a second opinion on scope before signing.

We found two problems. First, the incumbent had priced enterprise DJ and pendant audio at roughly 40% above distributor MSRP with no corresponding design complexity to justify it. Second, the network portion relied on TP-Link equipment, which in 2024 became the subject of a federal advisory and is still under Commerce Department review as of early 2026. We rebuilt the proposal around Ubiquiti UniFi gear at the network core, kept the Bose and QSC audio lines the ownership wanted, and rewrote the cabling schedule so every drop was drawn, numbered, and terminated to TIA-568 standards.

How the math worked

The $57,200 gap was not a race to the bottom. It came from three places: roughly $22,000 in equipment markup that we priced through our distribution accounts instead of a general-contractor passthrough; roughly $18,000 from designing the VLAN topology correctly the first time rather than specifying a larger switch count to mask sloppy segmentation; and roughly $17,000 from trimming a cabling overage where the original scope double-counted drops in the overlap between the bar and event zones.

With the savings, ownership elected to add what the original proposal had quietly omitted: interior and exterior IP camera coverage, two additional audio zones along the exterior patio, and a managed-services engagement for the first year of operations.

What actually ships when the doors open

• Bose pendant speaker arrays distributed across eight zones, QSC high-output DJ and stage audio with zone-aware controllers at the bar and the front desk.
• Ubiquiti UniFi network core: a 10G aggregation switch, five PoE access switches, fourteen Wi-Fi 6 access points, and a UniFi Protect camera platform with twelve IP cameras covering courts, bar, and perimeter.
• Cat6 throughout the venue, roughly 180 drops, each labeled on both ends with a diagram kept in the equipment room.
• Programmable access control on four staff and back-of-house doors, with audit logging retained for ninety days.
• Lockable rolling equipment cabinets so staff can reach the gear without a contractor callout.
• 1Password business deployment for the ownership team and on-site managers.
• Ongoing managed IT: 24/7 monitoring on the network core, quarterly review, and remote help-desk access for the staff using the venue systems.

G&A Auctions — El Campo, TX

Quarterly farm, ranch, and construction equipment auctions · 26620 US-59, El Campo · Simulcast on-site and online to five-thousand-plus registered bidders

Why this one matters to us

G&A Auctions is a Matagorda County family business run by Colt Adams, Tyler Adams, and C.J. Griffith. It was founded in 2014 and now moves between eight hundred and fifteen hundred pieces of equipment at every quarterly sale. Their clientele reaches from the Gulf Coast out to international online bidders, and their yard sits a short drive from our own door. We are proud to be their IT partner.

The requirement

An auction yard is an unforgiving network environment. On sale day the property holds several hundred bidders walking gravel, a live auctioneer, a ring crew, an online bidding platform running on a separate data path, camera feeds from lot-marshaling points, and the office team processing titles and payments in real time. When the network hiccups, the gavel does not care. Whatever bid was in the air goes stale, and the integrity of the sale is called into question.

The existing setup was a consumer router, a handful of range extenders, and a shared office Wi-Fi password that had been on a sticky note for five years. It worked on a quiet Tuesday. It did not work on the third Saturday of a sale month.

What we designed

• Outdoor-rated Wi-Fi 6 mesh across the yard using UniFi U6-Mesh access points on weatherized poles, tuned so that the live-bidding workstations roam without handoff drops.
• VLAN segmentation splitting the office network, the live-auction simulcast path, the PoS and payment lane, and the guest Wi-Fi used by bidders picking up lots. A problem in one lane does not touch the others.
• Redundant internet with an LTE failover circuit so that a cut line on the highway frontage does not end the sale.
• IP camera coverage across the main lot, the staging yard, and the loadout area, with thirty-day retention.
• Microsoft 365 migration for the office team, with shared inboxes for the consignment queue and MFA on every account.
• Hardened workstation setup for the office staff — Windows 11 Pro, endpoint protection through our Guardz tenant, automated patching, and a documented onboarding runbook so the next new hire is set up in under an hour.
• Remote help-desk coverage Monday through Friday and standby coverage on sale Saturdays so we are one phone call away when it matters.

What it cost

The one-time buildout landed at roughly $14,800 for hardware, labor, cabling, mounting, and configuration. Ongoing managed IT is in the range of $480 per month for the office footprint, which covers endpoint protection, patching, 365 administration, backup for the business-critical shares, and a standing line for support calls. That is not the cheapest number in the county. It is a fair number for a business whose sale day cannot afford to go sideways.