Painting Over a Band-Aid

Speaker A: Uh, from aloft studio in riverside, california, I'm daniel jester and this is the e commerce content creation podcast. Hey folks, welcome to episode 176 of the E Commerce Content Creation Podcast. 176 episodes is more than Star Trek Voyager. So do what you will with that information. In uh, this episode I am flying solo and I'm talking about again about the incredible complexity of the work that is done within the E Commerce photo studio. Maybe it's PDP images that are happening in that studio, maybe it's marketing or other editorial images. I'm not as concerned about that. I'm just talking about the incredible complexity of taking a physical sample, turning it into a digital asset and meeting all of the needs of the business along the way. It's incredibly complicated and I'm talking about a new self serve workshop package that I have available on my website. So check it, listen to the episode, Check out the episode. I'm going to tell you about the workshop package that you can buy from me. Uh, this is a workshop that I do. I'm available to do it. Hire me to facilitate this workshop for your team as part of uh, a larger studio audit or just this one off kind of improvement thing. We can absolutely do that. But I do have a workshop available that you can download, uh, the entire package of everything you need to facilitate this workshop. And uh, I'm going to talk about it later on in this episode. But before we get into that, I do have some housekeeping that I need to do. I have a sponsor that I need to tell you about. Uh, big surprise, it's the Cow company. Kow and Cow, uh, returning as a sponsor. They are a full service post production and retouching provider and they have you completely covered for 2D image editing, 3D modeling, digital twins and video editing. They are a one stop shop for post production and derivative next gen asset assets. Assets. Assets. No, I got it right. No, uh, need to retake that one. The Cow Company processes over 50,000 images every day and their customers love them for their low price, great quality and easy communication. Whether your goal is to save money, improve vendor relationships or expand your external resources, the Cow company should be on your short list of post production vendors. They've put together a special inquiry page. If you'd like to learn more, book a call, head to onboarding.thecow company.com that's K O W in cow. Do I need to tell you about anything else? Uh, I think that's it for this episode. The other big thing is the Workshop package that I have, which I'm going to go over in the episode. So let's get into it. This is the E Commerce content creation podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Jester, flying solo for this episode. And uh, what are we going to talk about for this episode? I'm going to continue. I'll tell you what we're going to talk about. I'm going to continue what might become sort of a series of speaking directly to the executives at a given brand or retailer and like just really try to hammer home this idea that they're thinking about their content, thinking about and supporting their content and studio teams. All wrong. All wrong. I need to be honest with you up front. This is a little bit of self promotion as well, because I have, we'll call it a new product that's going to be available on my website that is going to hopefully be a really helpful tool to help gain some kind of perspective on this idea. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about where, where, where do we want to start? I guess what, uh, I guess the best way to kind of describe this is to kind of tell you about how I've been approaching, uh, my consulting work with studios and some of the things that I've been working on. I have a thing, a product sort of service, I guess that I call a studio audit. And the studio audit is effectively, um, it touches on some workflow stuff. It definitely touches on some process stuff, but it's a little bit more designed. And as it's evolved I think I have squarely pushed it into the sort of physical space side of studio production. So the studio audit is really about the physical studio itself. How is it laid out, how do samples enter in and flow through the space, how does the team interact with the space, how does the team use the space to manage its workflow? Because for me that's one of the things about sort of physical production lines that I really, I don't know, I really enjoy that aspect of working in that sort of environment is that there are these like, there's all kinds of visual cues that you can use to convey information throughout a studio. And it's a really interesting way of leveraging that unique part of the process. So there's the physical space, how samples flow through, how the team uses the space and interacts with the space, how the tools use the space and interact with the space, and how that space influences and impacts the digital side of uh, the workflow. Which I have done some studio audits that looked at Both things. And some of those studio audits have been for sort of like targeted things. And that's something that I can and will probably continue to do. Um, which is doing this service called the Studio Audit, which can be as broad as. Let's just look at everything, let's just look at everything, let's see everything, let's identify the tools, the team, the processes, the workflow. But I've also done some studio audits where the, there was a specific goal in mind for the engagement. I've been in some studios with some very advanced workflow systems. Um, and that's something that I think, you know, listeners of this podcast, many of them that have researched some of these tools, may be aware you have tools that were developed from people with like sort of functional working knowledges. Working knowledge, not knowledges of how studios operate because of other sort of endeavors in the past. And I'm guess I'm kind of describing um, in particular Creative Force, which this was. You know, the story of Creative Force is that the two co founders, Thomas and Tice, had co founded a company that was around removing the background for E commerce imagery, E commerce websites and that sort of thing. And then the process of selling their service to E Comm. Studio teams spent some time in studios and recognized that there was an incredibly complex process of production that was happening. And there really wasn't any, there really weren't any tools, technological tools dedicated to the way that studios need to operate in the unique sort of environment that they operate in. And so that's kind of what led to the development of Creative Force. So that's like Creative Force, right? They were sort of studio adjacent. But then you have teams like let's Flow. And I'm um, gonna be really super honest. I don't know the let's Flow story super in depth. I might get some of this wrong, but as I understand it, this tool was developed internally, I think at burberry. I'm not 100% sure about that, but I think it was developed at Burberry and was ultimately found, they found that they could kind of package this thing up and use it at other places. And it kind of was spun out into its own, its own thing. And there are studios out there that have really robust, really thoughtful tools that they built for themselves that were properly developed and have been properly supported. Um, in some cases, you know, properly supported in a photo studio is something that we're going to get into in terms of like what that actually means. Because sometimes it does mean like one person knows how to support and fix and improve this tool that we built or this set of automations or whatever the case may be. But uh, so you have these sort of tools that have started to kind of crop up around that. I have been a part of studio audits where the goal was, we want to know like we're at a decision point, do we continue to support our internal tool or do we adopt uh, an externally available tool. And so we went into the studio audit, we did the whole thing, we looked at the workflow space, we looked at, I gave recommendations around layout and different things like that. And ultimately, you know, the, the outcome of, of some, it just varies. And at least one case the answer was not to abandon the internal tool in favor of moving to an external tool because the internal tool was working really well. It seemed really stable. My recommendation was to I believe, find ways to further integrate that tool into the post production process, which is a really challenging part. And then also like, you know, documenting and ensuring the longevity of that tool in the event that people, you know, the person responsible for that thing, and this is true at a lot of studios, the person responsible for the code that they use, the little like code snippet that they use to automate things on set when that person leaves, if they leave for whatever reason unexpectedly, that can create a real challenge for the teams that are left to continue to do the work. And that is something that has been true of some of some studios that I have offered some studio audit proposals for where they have lost the hit. There was like, whether it was layoffs or through just a typical attrition for a studio, they have lost people who were largely responsible for developing the automation or the, the, the, whatever, the little bit of things, the, the, we'll call it the Band Aid. And I don't want it, I don't want that to be denigrating. I don't want that to be denigrating. But the way that I define Band Aid is like looking at one issue. An example of this is like, you know, I, I know at Amazon we had a script that was constantly monitoring the Capture folder of Capture1 and the Output folder from Capture1. And the expectation, the way that that process worked was that those two should always have an equal number of files present in them. And if at any point you no longer have an equal number of files present, then um, you may be missing, you may have missed um, processing some images. And so that, that to me is like, that's a great tool. It's a great tool. I'm not taking anything away from the person who developed it, who saw that problem and solved it. But it still very much is a band aid intended to fix that one issue at that one point. Because that issue can come up again and again all throughout the digital side of the workflow. But at that point onset it can do this thing. It can check for potential missing or misprocessed images. Doesn't catch misnamed images because if the accounts match then it won't trigger that there's anything wrong. It's not looking at image names. But anyway, that's uh, that's too specific about that thing. So, you know, this is a thing. This is, this is one of the things that I wanted to talk about is that at this point, with as many years as some of these studios have been open and with the tenure of the studio teams that, that are working in these spaces, some of these band aids have been painted over and the studio audit can kind of surface some of those things. But I have definitely sort of made the studio audit again pushed it more into the physical side of things because this is another area where I think studios can benefit from pulling themselves out of the day to day a little bit and really looking at their space and how they're using it and if it makes the most sense to use it that way. Because typically it ends up being layer upon layer upon layer of we need to do this part of the process, we're gonna put it here and then a few months or years later we have to do this other. We have to add this other thing, this other part of the process that we need to add for whatever reason and we're gonna do it in this spot. And over the years you end up with a lot of disjointed processes have like connective tissue, but they're not happening physically anywhere near each other. And it's not something, it's. It's not always the most intuitive thing to think about or catch, especially in the day to day. And so that's, that's the physical about it. And the thing that I have kind of developed for the workflow side of everything, the, the more like digital side and what happens when once assets are created and how do those things flow through the process and not actually once assets are created because there's plenty of pre production stuff that happens in the digital world, but obviously it gets vastly more complicated once assets are made and being processed and being sent out and being retouched and being reviewed, feedback is being given on them. So I have developed A couple of, it's up to three workshops now and I have like some ideas for a fourth workshop. Uh, the one that I want to talk mainly about for this kind of podcast is called, I have dubbed it Process and Perspective. It's sort of, I named it that for a particular engagement that I was invited to come do, which was a great experience working with that team and conducting this workshop. And it was through that process, that engagement that we really dug into the workflow side of things. We, we, we, we touched on and toured the studio space. But it was really around more of the digital side of the workflow and like following things from pre production, how, how shot lists are requests are made, how shot lists are put together, how sample requests happen, how um, some of the other pre production tasks happen. And that's broken into kind of the way that we ended up doing it was, it was two workshops. There was the main process and perspective workshop, but before that it was less of a workshop. We called it more of a working session that was specifically around the post production teams. And that kind of happened out of a matter of necessity because of the schedule of what was going on with the team at the time that we did these workshops. But I'm really, really glad that it did happen that way because the post production side of things, by covering in depth the post production process, we really were able to kind of like, I don't know, it helped set up a lot of context around how the rest of the digital side of the production process happens and how all of that work gets done and how those handoffs occur. And for that reason it was like you were able to get sort of familiar with some of the tools that were used to facilitate the post production side of the process and then understand how they came to be in that, that position because of the rest of the part of the process. Post production workshop or working session, it's, it's right now it's less of a refined workshop and more of just like a working session. But I am kind of closing in on a more defined workshop. But the process and perspective workshop I have developed, I have taken what I've learned from doing studio audit so far, from helping with some of the digital workflow side of things for some teams and then doing this particular workshop with a team really was able to kind of give me the final bits of data points that I needed to feel really comfortable making this something that I'm going to make available. So the thing, the thing, the product that I have coming is this, this workshop, the tools that you need to conduct this workshop are going to be available on my website for studio teams to purchase so that they can do that with their own team. And it's going to include all of the worksheets, it's going to include the schedule, it's broken into four segments. Each segment has very clear goals around what you're trying to do and to achieve and the information trying to get. And ultimately the goal is to walk away with seven to ten, uh, quick wins. These are not necessarily high impact changes, but you certainly can come up with high impact solutions for things. High impact. What I sort of defined by that are like significant changes to the way that the workflow happens as opposed to the quick wins which are generally designed to be, not designed to be. The way that you identify a quick win is that ideally it's something that doesn't cost a lot of money to implement. You don't need to get approval for a big budget to implement that thing. Ideally it's just sort of a process change or consolidation of tools around those kinds of things. But I like to find things that first and foremost come from the team itself. That's why this is a workshop. Having engaging the team to identify invisible work and points of friction and potential points of failure, I think really goes a long way toward creating a list of quick wins that the team will want to implement and will want to test and feel a lot of ownership around that. But the quick wins are again, should be something that is not super expensive and it is something that can be tested fairly easily and then can be undone if there is some unintended consequence. So that's one of the things that the workshop is designed to kind of surface is like, okay, if we did do this, how hard would it be for us to just switch back to the way that we were doing it before? Because that's a real concern. Studios need to be producing assets sometimes on a daily basis. And so this, a project like this part, uh, of the reason that I, I think it's not done as often as it could be is because it can be pretty disruptive. But you know, this is, this is an important, I think, opportunity to sort of reset around some of those things. And I know a lot of teams are kind of in that place ment, so to speak right now with the way things are rapidly evolving for creative and studio teams. So yeah, so there's, I'll get into the details about the workshop being available on my website and how you can buy the materials and the support that you need from Me. In order to conduct those workshops in your own studio, come up with a list of quick wins and hopefully find ways to might be incrementally improving, maybe incrementally improving things for your studio team. Or it might be, you know, sometimes they're pretty big. Sometimes they're pretty big quality of life changes for the team on set, removing a lot of friction and a lot of possibility for costly, time consuming errors and those kinds of things. But the reason that this is so useful goes back to that thing again around the idea of those band aids sort of being put in place and then getting painted over. And then it becomes for some people on the team, some parts of the process become what we call invisible work. So an important task that somebody has that isn't necessarily like in their job description, uh, but it is a thing they have to do in order to move those assets onto the next process or the next part of the process. A great example of this is, um, you know, one team had one important part of the process was somebody on the team needed to go through the images and pull image names so that they could pull them into a spreadsheet and then rework them and apply them to other sets of images, uh, that they, that had gone through a different part of the process. And that's like, you know, this is not an unfamiliar concept to anybody listening to this podcast. But for, you know, when you send this episode to Chief Moneybags, you can explain to them that there are tons of these subtle moments of, you know, what you call sort of invisible work that have to happen in order for things to kind of continue on through the production process. This is as good a time as any, I think, to put a really fine point on something that I say a lot on the podcast, but I'm going to continue to say it and I'm going to, I'm going to dedicate a lot of this episode to this particular idea, which is that the studio, the. The, the E. Comm photo studio process and the creative production process for a lot of teams, but in particular the studio teams, not just the E. Comm. Studio teams, but the. If you have in house photography teams who are creating marketing assets and editorial image and above and beyond. It's not, it's not isolated to just pdp, but PDP images certainly are a significant part of this. This is an incredibly complex and highly interdependent workflow with tons of handoffs and tons of dependencies and so many variables. And this is not my opinion. Sorry, I dropped my acrylic cube you probably heard that. I'm not gambling, I'm not playing D and D. I just dropped my, uh, acrylic cube I was fiddling with there. You know, in any given production process, you've got pre production, production, post production, and then like I think it's worth kind of splitting out image review separately from post production. Even though it kind of happens within the post production step. It falls under the umbrella of post production. But image review is one of the more time consuming, resource intensive and costly parts of the whole process. The process of having those images reviewed by the stakeholders that need to review them, providing their feedback and then acting on that feedback when it's needed to be acted on in between each of those parts. Pre production, production, post production and every round of image review, those are all handoffs, at least one handoff. And handoffs in a production process are the areas where things can get missed. If visibility or communication or alignment breaks down in each of those handoffs, those are potentially significant failure points. And that does happen. But even within the studio, like going to, again, we're, we're talking about how complex this process is. There's that side of it and within that there are these layered processes. So like there you can argue that like inventory management is one of the most complex processes for any retail business. That's true. It's super complex. Most of us who have worked in studios in fulfillment centers recognize that it's very complex. Studios have to do that too. Studios have to be equipped to be inventory managers as well for those samples that are in production. That's like part of that. I've said this before, and I'll say it again, that your studio represents like basically an entire business model unto itself by virtue of having all of these different disciplines. It's very, it's extraordinary cross disciplinary, the studio space. You have so many different types of professionals that need to inhabit that space to be able to make that process work. And, and one interesting thing about this, going back, I started to say earlier, I think I got distracted when I dropped my acrylic cube, but I was starting to say earlier that this is not, at this point, this is not. I never really kind of stated it as an opinion, but like I, you know, I'm always kind of prepared for somebody to argue with me around something like this. Uh, but at this point, like I don't, I don't, I don't think it's my opinion. I think it's like an objective fact. And I'm basing that off of how many workflow maps I have made in the last several years, um, especially coming out of these workshops and studio audits where the part where photography happens is one square and there's dozens of other squares and dozens of other handoff point, not dozens, but several other handoff points and loops and all those things and basically photo production is like one of those squares. The part where photography actually happens is one of those squares. If you look at these process maps, I love a, ah, process map. I think they're, I think they're beautiful works of art and I love making them. But this is, you know, like this is an extraordinarily complex process and I think one of the things that makes it really unique, really unique amongst the complex processes that any fashion or retail business needs, uh, needs in order to operate is that the inputs are physical and it needs all of the infrastructure to support physical inputs. And I'm talking about the samples and the, but the outputs are all digital. And that's like the sort of crux of what makes this so complicated. So complicated because just by virtue of having the physical samples and the photography being a physical process that has to happen in reality, in person, you need the space. You need the space to store the samples, you need the space to build the sets, you need the space to do the shooting. You know, it's, it doesn't just appear to be a room of computers. It is a highly functional production space that is very complicated in and of itself. And that again, that part, that photography part is just like one square of that part of the process. Then when you take into account that there needs to, there are, there are generally enough exceptions to the prescribed process of making images for E commerce that they just become embedded in the process itself. Your process has to be both stringent enough to make the results scalable and repeatable, but flexible enough because you could have up to who knows what percent of uh, uh, products that come into the studio that are, that would be considered an exception as part of a production process. Like for example, like you know, color switches color, changes color. We called it Color Author at Amazon, where you are only shooting the one copy of the sample that you need to shoot because you can adjust the colors to create all the other ones. And that saves time and money at least from the studio side of things. But that is like in the, in the context of like a production line and thinking about how to manage those things, that becomes an exception. And every time you get a round of approval that becomes or uh, uh, feedback like something goes, gets kicked back through the review process, that becomes an exception. And those all need to be handled and brought back into the workflow as gracefully as possible. And that could be a very high percentage of the stuff that you manage in that studio. So there are all these exception processes that have to be embedded in the process itself. It's, it's, you know, it's an incredibly complex multi function workflow that's bridging physical and digital realms, those two worlds together in a way that not really any other business unit has to do that it right now absolutely relies on physical samples, physical space and hands on labor. But the assets that they produce are digital and customer facing. All of those assets are customer facing marketing material. And I'm including PDP imagery in that because that's what it is. You have to have that to be able to show customers the product so that they can buy it. And that makes studio teams uniquely vulnerable to friction on both sides of that, the physical process and the digital side. And then you've got a layer on top of that that the studio usually has to work with. Incomplete or evolving information, whether that's incomplete sets of samples, incomplete data sets that they need in order to build their processes out. Partial product lists, constant changing to shot counts or styling notes or creative direction or color needs. That's like, that's the antithesis of a streamlined, standardized production process is there's all like that. You just never really know what you're getting and then you never know how that could change throughout the production process itself. But these teams are expected to operate with precision and repeatability and sometimes speed and sometimes aggressive speed. Uh, you know, that's a lot, that's a lot of like mental overhead for your studio teams to manage. And they in every case have risen to the occasion. I say this, I've said this about creative force and I say it about my own consulting practice. In this space, nobody comes to me because their studio isn't producing assets. They typically come to me or go seek out a tool while it's working. They know that they're at risk. They know that it could break down at any time and they want to be sort of reassured that their processes and their tools are there to support them when things get crazy. Because the content needs from production teams and studios have only gone up and budgets and have headcounts have not grown, uh, proportionally to that. And then you take into account that they often, almost always lack dedicated technology, dedicated operational or engineering support. You know, it's not uncommon for traditional production processes to have dedicated Process engineers. I have worked in studios with process engineers. And while I think the implementation of that role in those studios or that studio left a lot to be desired, I do think it's an interesting idea for the team that has the sort of like long term roadmap that it makes sense for that kind of a role. But you know, that's, that's one thing. That's, that's, that's one thing. And that's also a pretty specialized skill. There's the people out there that can do it. Uh, if you're thinking about hiring like a process engineer for your studio space, connect with me and we could talk about it because there definitely are people who could do it, but they don't put themselves out there in that kind of role. But the other big issues here is that there's little, usually there's little to no documentation. And most of those Band Aid solutions that have been painted over are maintained by tribal knowledge. Like somebody knows how to do that thing, somebody knows why they do that thing. And they may be the only person who knows how and why that thing happens. And those people leave their jobs for various reasons. And things can get pretty precarious from that point. So I think, you know, when you are thinking about when you're talking to. And I guess I was, I kind of dropped the premise that I was talking to chief moneybags about that. But send them that whole clip. That whole clip. Because I, uh, can't say this enough and I don't think the people who are responsible for the purse strings. Purse strings, yeah, we'll go with it. Really truly understand what is happening in their studios and how complicated it is and how much that very complicated process relies on like an automator code thing that somebody built in 2015 and that person hasn't worked there for five years. That's a real situation. The studio stands out in a way. It's regarded as the cost center. But I mean, you tell me the work they do is public facing. The work that your studio teams do is public facing facing. It's all marketing work. You could make the argument that the PDP is something different, but it's all marketing and it's all public facing. It's high volume almost all the time. Going back to the idea that it's cross disciplinary. You have so many different teams. Production, creative, hopefully some kind of technical and data team that works with the studio or at least is familiar with it. Definitely samples, management team members or people who interface with those teams, not to mention the studio leaders who are operating inside of fulfillment centers have to have some really, really good soft skills to usually kind of work with the their counterparts on the fulfillment center side of things. So you know, again, this is just me continuing to build up this idea that like stop thinking about your studio as a cost center. It's not. You might have gone into it thinking like if we want to do ecom, we need a studio or at least we need images. But you are again and this is. I know that I've said this, I know I just said this on another solo episode because I, I posted the clip on LinkedIn, but it's a real, it's just a really foolish way of thinking about this incredibly high functioning team of really smart people that you have working for you as just cost of doing business. It's not that they represent a strategic edge and in fact are the teams who are largely tasked with bringing in next generation technology. It's the studio teams who are all exploring AI, cgi, all those new techs that will definitely ease the burden of some of the things we've talked about in this episode. That's the studio teams doing that. They're the ones doing that. In retail or fashion businesses particularly, that studio is one of the only functions where you have those physical inputs, samples, garments, props, people, talent, those are transformed into customer facing digital outputs. Unlike design teams or unlike logistics which definitely blend digital and physical elements like that. That's not that. While that is sort of a defining feature, as I laid it out earlier, it's not just that, it's that the studio's primary deliverable is digital and that imagery can only be created from those, as of today, from those physical samples. And then that imagery populates every part of the website, every single part of the website, and emails and social media. The studio workflow sits at the intersection of operational discipline, technical precision for sure, and creative vision. And it requires alignment along those teams and it requires tools that many teams have had to build for themselves in order to do this, to not make the work so hard to manage that it just can't get done. But again, despite that level of complexity, it's often under supported documentation is pretty lacking. And a lot of the process relies on band aid fixes to specific problems at points in time that have now been painted over and become part of the studio. So my workshop, process and perspective workshop is essentially designed to give your teams something along the lines of that sense of perspective. First and foremost, the thing that I like doing is acknowledge is helping those teams realize what they're Doing is incredible. Incredible. And helping them celebrate the wins. Because that's another one of the things that I've observed a lot being in a lot of different studios over the years is that there are some teams who have figured out incredibly elegant solutions to some age old problems. All like uh, all different kinds of problems. Some teams have figured out very elegant solutions to some of those problems but have a lot a very hard time doing this other thing and have very manual processes in this other area whereas other studios have a very elegant solution in that area but then haven't solved for this other thing. It's a super interesting almost. What's the word I'm looking for? Anthropological sort of study of how studios around the world have sort of evolved over this time. And there's like just these little pockets of things and there's some amount, I've talked about this at ah, like conferences and stuff. There's some uh, amount of homogenization around it because as people have like moved on from one studio to another and brought things they learned with them. But there's plenty of pockets of little studios who are operating purely off of like copy and pasting image names from a spreadsheet. And that's the extent of the support that they have on the digital side. So the workshop, um. I'm sorry I'm getting distracted guys, distracted by my own musings. The workshop is designed to surface a lot of these things. It's designed to give your team that perspective around what they're doing, how incredible it is, the incredible ways. And really celebrating wins is a part of that process as well. I think it's a really important part of that uh, really important part of that process. Celebrating the wins where you can celebrate them and then recognizing where there's areas to improve. So the process and perspective workshop, let's see. I think do I have a uh, URL to give you on this right now you're going to have to be on the lookout out for that. My website, danieltjester.com, i'll put something up in the menu that, that will get you there. But I do have effectively what I have is an entire kind of like packaged and ready to go workshop that you can facilitate with your team that will help both celebrate the wins of the team in the studio, help them gain a higher level perspective of how the work gets done and how the invisible work, we're going to surface the invisible work and we're going to make sure that that's like sort of do document it and look for ways to kind of ease the friction there. We're going to, in this workshop there's a segment where we go over, we go over several ideas for like sort of out of the box ideas for process improvement within the studio environment. Um, not as a means of like steal specifically that idea, although if it can be stolen, I say go for it. But more around like using those examples as an illustration of how you think about the cost benefit of implementing some of those types of changes. Um, because a lot of times you do have to, in this highly collaborative process with a lot of stakeholders and a lot of inputs and outputs, you do have to be aware of how the work that you're doing or the changes to your workflow is affecting things upstream and downstream. And so they're A big part of it is thinking about we will save time or money here, but it's gonna take longer to do this job over here, over here. How do we look at it holistically to make sure that's still the right move? So there's a segment around examples of improvements that have happened in studios that are designed to get you thinking in sort of a philosophical way of how to look at cost benefit of some of those changes and what it can do for you and what the results of those things were and what was uncovered as a result of that, that part of the process. And then this last segment is documenting those quick wins and building yourself a roadmap for improving some of those things. Um, I'm really, really proud of how this has sort of evolved and is taking shape. And so I want again as a matter of like, I know not every team has the budget to be able to hire a consultant, to hire me or any of my amazing colleagues that have been consulting in studios. But I wanted to make something that could be pretty self serve for the team, feel motivated to do that or at the very least is super informational and package that all up. So again you have segments, four segments. There's a schedule that go, that is involved with those segments. But obviously like the timing, you can kind of fill that in for each of the segments. There are pretty in depth facilitator guides that are designed to help the person facilitating the workshop to help ask probing questions, help keep moving the conversation along and keeping it focused on the goals of that segment. And then there is, there uh, are some video portions. So like I said around the process improvement examples that, that are intended to kind of get, get people thinking outside the box about how to improve things in their process. That's A video segment that I recorded so that, you know, because these are, these are things that I, you know, I don't expect the person facilitating necessarily know those anecdotes or how to kind of present them. So there's like video segments are part of it. And uh, your team will absolutely walk away with some number of opportunities to improve their process and will get alignment on some things and get a perspective on some things and really have an opportunity to think critically about their process from beginning to end and find ways to make it a better process for them to work in. Um, and I just want to point out I'm usually really careful, especially when I'm writing emails around this kind of thing. None of this is because there's like, there's no process out there. That's, that's uh, that's not true. There are processes that are bad, but they're usually necessary for some reason. And so it really is about the workshop, really is about again, celebrating wins, strengthening the things that are working, finding ways to take the things that are working and really double down on those things and use those as a foundation, identifying the things that work but we don't like them for whatever reason. Um, and then finding out if there's a way that we can, can fix those things and then find, then, you know, we have to talk about the things that don't work and nobody likes because those things do exist in the studio. It's usually in the form of inherited software, but not always. Not always. So, yeah, that's, that's it. My website, danieltjester.com I probably will just put a link in this nav that says workshops and then you can go, you can check it out there. Um, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm saying probably because I'm gonna do that now that I'm done recording this episode, but I really hope that you will check out that workshop and um, if you are interested in purchasing it. I am not sure if I'm gonna have the mechanism to buy it through my website available just yet, but there will be a way to get in touch with me to express interest. Um, because I'm just not sure this will be the first time I'm offering something like this. And so there's a part of me that for like early adopters of the, of the self serve ver of the workshop, I want to be able to have like a little conversation with that team to make sure that, that it's fitting their needs specifically. So, uh, that's it guys. Studio teams what you do is amazing. It's so complicated and most people had to build those processes from the ground up themselves. But there is time and technology available to you now, and it's a great time. It's as good a time as any to get some perspective around that process. Use this workshop. Find the things that are really restricting you. Uh, working at the level that you're able to work. By the way, none of this is about anybody just working faster. It's completely about, like, finding the things that just get in the way of the creative teams doing what they do and removing them or easing them. I mean, it is largely rooted in the classic sort of production process improvement stuff like Kaizen. It's rooted a little bit in Scrum. It pulled bits and pieces from all of these kinds of ideas, like Lean, Six Sigma, all of that stuff, bits and pieces here and there to come up with something that I think makes the most sense for a photo studio, for a creative team, to help them operationalize the parts that can be operationalized and protect the moments of creativity that need to be protected. That's it for this episode of the E Commerce Content Creation Podcast. Listen, I need your feedback. I tried the AI editing tool for this episode. I've never really liked it, but I really, really needed to get this done. Uh, and so I listened through and it sounds a little jerky in places, but if you have feedback, if it was awful, reach out to me and let me know. I'd love to know. Or is it acceptable? Is it about the information? I don't know. At any rate, see you all next week with another new episode of the E Commerce Content Creation podc.