08 Jun Getting your ‘own stuff’ done

If you’ in the design and printing field, it’s a familiar situation. You’ve got your own mailer to produce, or an e-shot, a pop-up stand or even worse the dreaded new company brochure that you are desperate to get out to potential punters.

It’s in the studio – job done!

You carefully lay the ground work, writing the copy and theorising carefully on potential concepts etc., and then it’s up and away to the creative team for production, marked as urgent – job done as far as your concerned. Far from it I’m afraid – because the fact is that client work must always come first and as such your in-house project will be not just at the back of the queue, but probably in the ‘if we’ve got nothing else to do we’ll have a look at it’ queue.

‘Not this week’

The job’s probably even gone behind another in-house mailer that’s found it’s way into the creative studio from your sales manager. You can place as many deadline dates on the project as you wish and persistently chase, but you will be consistently met with the argument ‘We’ absolutely flat out on client work, we can’t touch it this week’.

…And of course the same applies when it comes to the print or display production – the job gets slipped in where convenient.

The answer

So what’s the answer? The problem is I don’t really know. We all live in economic times where we are obsessed with ‘keeping things tight’. The real answer would be to take on an a creative/artwork person who is dedicated solely to in-house work – but can we really afford to do so? Conversely though, can we afford to let our marketing calendar slip? And should we send the work out – should we bo**ocks!

In what I would term a large company there would be a department dedicated to this, but in a company such as ourselves employing an average of 20 staff (6 designers), one new member represents a 5% increase in staffing.

Slicker marketing process

One way we have found to speed the process up here at adverset is to actually spend more time in the front end marketing process before passing the work on to the creative team. In other words, concept and layout are 75% there before the work reaches the studio. That way, at least it’s a simple process once the job is at the top of the pile.

Regarding the printing and production, well as long as we match the stock to a customer piece of work, we have the benefit of printing the job up together with a client order – easy peasy!

Your thoughts and insight would be welcome on this subject – even if it’s just to have a sympathetic moan!

Here’s an article which might prove useful, but probably still won’t make you feel any better if you’ contemplating staffing level issues!