We Didn't Need More Staff. We Needed Fewer Fires
May 6, 2025
In post-production, the reflex is almost universal. Things are behind? Hire another AE. Deadlines slipping? Add a coordinator. Mix notes late? Pull in the editor for double duty (and pay the overtime).
It feels logical. More chaos must mean we’re understaffed. So we throw bodies at the backlog and hope it stabilizes.
But here’s the part most teams don’t realize: Post doesn’t spiral because you have too few people. It spirals because the same five problems keep starting fires, and no one’s patching the wiring.
The Cost of More Hands (Without More Structure)
I’ve worked on teams with four people and felt in control. I’ve worked on teams with ten and felt like we were drowning.
What I’ve learned—over and over—is that more people without a clear system just adds overhead:
More handoffs
More inconsistent updates
More people checking on the same thing
More chance that something critical gets missed because everyone thought someone else had it
When you grow the team without fixing the friction, you’re just multiplying the points of failure. And even worse, you’re burning out good people trying to patch chaos with effort.
The Shift: From Firefighting to Factory Logic
We started asking a different question. Not: “Who can we hire to help with this?” But: “Why does this keep breaking in the first place?” What we found, again and again, were repeatable fires, not emergencies:
Notes not getting passed to finishing on time
Deliverables getting missed because they weren’t tracked past export
Producers resending the same link three times because no one knew the latest version
Timecards late, scripts lost, VO cues missed, because ownership was fuzzy
These weren’t staffing problems. They were system problems. So instead of hiring more, we built less. We reduced headcount, but increased structure. Simplified the flow. Made handoffs obvious. Surfaced problems before they escalated. It didn’t make things robotic, it made things repeatable.
Because for all its creativity, TV post is a production pipeline, and once you treat it like one, everything gets easier.
What We Built (and What It Prevented)
We didn’t throw more tools at the chaos. We just removed the gaps: the spots where things always stalled, got missed, or required someone to follow up twice.
Here’s some of what made the biggest difference:
🔄 Automatic Status Updates, Role-Based by Default
We stopped assuming people would know when to act and built a system that told them.
Every time a segment changed status—cut approved, notes complete, VO uploaded—the right people got notified.
Writer/producers, AEs, editors, finishers, colorists, mixers, they each saw what mattered to them without the noise.
No more asking “Is this ready?” or “Do I need to do anything here?” The system made that clear.
Fewer questions. Faster movement. Zero manual check-ins.
🎙 Direct VO Upload from Artist to Action
Voiceover used to be a bottleneck. Now it’s a trigger. We integrated directly with VO artists’ recording setups so that:
As soon as a pickup is recorded, it drops into a specific Drive folder
The system generates a direct download link
Notifications go out instantly to the AE, editor, or story team who needs it
That VO that used to sit in limbo for hours or get buried in a producer’s inbox now moves the moment it exists.
📆 Smart Timecard Reminders That Actually Reduce Chasing
Payroll wasn’t just a financial issue, it was an emotional one. Chasing timecards feels bad for everyone, so we automated it with logic-aware reminders:
Custom triggers for due dates and holiday schedules
Targeted pings to anyone who hadn’t submitted
Quiet confirmation tracking, so no one had to double-check who still owed one
Timecard submissions went up. Late approvals went down. And the team stopped playing hall monitor every Friday.
The Results: Half the Team, Double the Control
In one year, we went from needing 6–7 post staff per show to running multiple high-volume series with three. That wasn’t a flex. It was a function of structure. No one was rushing approvals at midnight. No one was wondering if finishing got the right cut. No one was emailing “just checking on this” 14 times a day.
And the creative didn’t suffer. If anything, it got better, because the team wasn’t drowning.
The Real Win: Calm Is Scalable
The biggest difference wasn’t the budget savings. It was the tone of the work. People stopped reacting, and started anticipating. Stress levels dropped. Burnout slowed. Output went up. Not because we pushed harder, but because we removed the things that made everything feel urgent.
If You’re Staffing to Survive, You’re Already Overbudget
I’m not against hiring. But I am against hiring solely as a patch for structural failure. Because, when you step back, it’s almost always the same story:
The team is great, the talent is there, and the intentions are aligned. But the system is messy, and the mess creates the workload.
We didn’t solve that by working harder, we solved it by working cleaner. And once we did, the same team could deliver more, without feeling like they were constantly behind.
If that’s something you’re aiming for, I’m always happy to talk through what made the shift possible.