Tight review cycles stretch them.

Sloppy process slows things down over the long run. Tight process requires a little more time and focus from stakeholders up front, but entire projects will finish much more quickly. This can save more than $3.4 million over the course of creating 500 deliverables.

THE HAPPY PATH IS THE FASTEST PATH. It’s also the cheapest. The first round of work is Round 0: kickoff, research, and letting creatives find out what doesn’t work. It takes a few days, but doing it right lets your team finish projects in three rounds, each shorter than the last. Here’s how that looks with typical content creation roles.

A mature team can do Rounds 1 and 2 in a few days each. Round 3 will be minor tweaks—call it half a day—if everyone adheres to standard brand tools: service level agreements, RACI models, customer journey maps, audience personas and proto-personas, value propositions, positioning & messaging language, messaging hierarchies, style guides, creative briefs, etc. It can be tempting to dismiss these tools. Don’t. They save you money now; later they become the prompts you need to leverage AI and automation.

YOU WILL REPEAT ROUND 0 IF YOU IGNORE THESE TOOLS. Insist on a strong brief, demand that reviewers adhere to brand tools, and ignore input from unqualified people, otherwise you’ll repeat Round 0 as a Penalty Round before you see anything usable. These take 3-5 days longer than doing things right the first time, so they’re expensive. Here’s how that looks.

Indulging two Penalty Rounds on each of 500 deliverables makes your reviews cost $6,225,000. Cutting one saves over $1.8 million and cutting two saves over $3.4 million. Both save thousands of days against deadlines.

PENALTY ROUNDS ARE EXHAUSTING. They’re unplanned so they wreck schedules and increase stress. Good ideas die amid the confusion, people make more mistakes, remaining cycles seem harder, and user engagement tanks.

PENALTY ROUNDS PULL IN SENIOR PEOPLE. The more chaos you tolerate, the more senior they need to be. Instead of creating value for your brand, they’re fixing issues that you could have prevented. My figures don’t reflect their involvement. You can calculate those costs for your own org, but they’re probably horrifying.

GETTING TO THREE ROUNDS IS HARD. As you go, your process will get even smarter. The benefits go far beyond saving time and money.

·      Your people won’t burn out as quickly.

·      You can target audiences more precisely, so you get better results.

·      You can create smarter deliverables (@$5,475 each), spend less time making them (@$150/hour), or both.

Let’s talk about what you could do with that $3.4 million you saved.

johngaineswrites@gmail.com 206-498-0798