Wave Maker Member Spotlight – Jeanna Garrett
What company do you work for?
PIVIUM
Please describe your role?
As President of PIVIUM, I lead a team of awesome AV professionals who are charged with bridging the gap between technology, content and audio-visual integration. My career includes a variety of roles in the construction industry, across administration, management, accounting, and finance, and now I’m leading the company as it expands its footprint in today’s evolving marketplace
If you worked in another industry, what struck you when you first entered the AV industry?
Coming from the construction industry, I found it interesting how low priority the integration of AV technology tends to be in the building process. Considering how integral technology has been to our everyday lives, I think this aspect must be prioritized—and this is what my team and I focus on communicating to our clients!
If you have been in the industry a while, what are some of the biggest changes you have seen, if any?
The technology and all its various applications have just exploded in the last decade. That’s good news for the industry and opens up plenty of opportunities for integration firms across all types of verticals and spaces.
Do you have any recommendations for must read books relating to business; being a woman in business, business in general or motivational books?
Shameless plug for our VP of Engineering, John Campanella’s book “Digital Rise: The Journey of AI, VR and XR”. It’s the first of several in a series he has created. You can find it on Amazon!
What do you do in your free time?
I spend a lot of time tending to my fur babies, Dax, a German shepherd, and Gizmo, his furry feline brother. I love being outdoors so that also includes hiking and camping with my kids, family, and fur babies too!
If you could give any advice to a young woman starting out in AV and may be facing challenges unique to being a female in a male-dominated industry, what would you tell her?
Always remember who you are and be proud of that. As women, we tend to have many identities projected onto us, and when we are not firm in who we are and what we value, we have the potential to be subject to another’s idea of who and what we “should” be rather than who and what we truly are at our core
When asked how they got into the industry, almost everyone states they fell into it. Now that some colleges are starting to offer tracks for AV, do you think that the industry will change?
AV is being highlighted on the proverbial “map” of industries more and more as technology becomes more cemented in our everyday lives. With the addition of AV tracks to the curriculum of higher learning institutions, I’d like to think this will open more pathways for both 1) a younger workforce and 2) women in the workforce having access to other more male-dominant roles like installation and integration. We shall see!
