SOPS

This ones for the growing brands.

SOPS or as we humans know them – “Ways we get shit done” are an incredible tool to help build out a streamlined system that you can communicate to your clients and your vendors or staff on how to do a specific thing. Have you ever felt your project is lost, or getting derailed? Here’s some tips on building your brands SOPS (we have cultivated a bunch throughout 10 years of production work).

Define outcome early.

With every process, you will no doubt, have an outcome you want to achieve. This is usually video or stills in our industry. Define this, with a simple “scope of work” document. This will help ground clients and vendors when they get too enthusiastic and start throwing in a lot of extra concepts, or ideas, that will take ample amounts of time.

Walk through your process verbally, with a non creative, KISS.

Drafting a friend or family member to tell me what I’m saying in my SOP allows me to see where problems can start to arrive. For example a simplified video SOP looks like this for us:

 

Stage 1. Script / concept meeting – Building out the idea.

Stage 2. Pre-Production (We organize and prep for the agreed upon script / or story that we’re telling).

Stage 3. Production (We make the shots for the script and build out the visuals)

Stage 4. Rough build – Using the script as the guide we build the rough cut. Client offers input for flow, or clarity of message.

Stage 5. Editing and colour. (Making the video look cool, adding any last minute additions clients want ie overlays or messaging).

Stage 6. Final / Delivery

 

By having a non creative read this and tell you what it means you’ll discover if there needs to be more clarity for them. Often clients have some knowledge of this process, but don’t understand the flow of an edit, or project. For tricky clients, we’ve had sign offs on each stage, preventing backtracking.

Above all, keep it simple.

Adjust and learn

Even the best laid out SOP needs adjusting time to time. You may notice clients are trying to add overlays early, add a line that clearly states when thats the time.

Finally… Limit revisions

One major production killer is the client who loves to do a million revisions. We have a process now where we are clear on what “stage” we’re on, and explain that we’re happy to continue to tweak, but subsequent edits will be billed hourly past the initial scope of 3 revision rounds (Rough/Colour/Messaging). Clients get more focused when every macro tweak costs them.

 

Hope this helps, and may your brand grow to the empire you dream of!

Ash

 

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