Is This Your Story?
When you’re under or at image retouching capacity, life is good. You can schedule so far ahead it’s like you can see the future. You blaze through your shot list every day and spend all your time in the studio, getting creative.
You try alternate lighting setups, new angles, maybe try out some different stylists. At the end of each day you know you’ve nailed it, and everyone else sees that too as soon as your images get back from post.
The second you go over capacity, everything changes. Because your graphic designers are overloaded in post-production, nothing else seems to matter. No one cares about the Spring season because Fall isn’t ready. You’re being interrupted constantly by people asking for their images, wanting to know when they’ll be ready, why they aren’t ready yet, “Can’t you just do mine now?”
Dominos start falling. You have to put in extra hours removing backgrounds, cropping, color correcting, brushing out wrinkles, firing off emails to keep everyone in the loop. Your perfect schedule is a mangled wreck of missed dates and shifted shoots.
More art directors and VPs start appearing in your studio, and now there are too many cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got someone looking over your shoulder and giving advice on every shot, every decision, and now you need three people to sign off on next season’s schedule.
You have to fix the problem. Maybe you hire the IT guy’s niece on the cheap and pray it works, or see if your intern knows Photoshop. Maybe you have to reschedule and stagger your shoots to avoid going over capacity.
Maybe you outsource to some guy you can’t understand who keeps butchering your images, if he actually returns them. Maybe you decide to hire another image retoucher and asset coordinator. All of a sudden you’re spending your time in interviews, on meetings, in quality control explaining what’s happening and what you need to happen, endlessly.
You need to scale.
Help Me Scale
