The $7 Idea

I had been thinking about a problem that will be familiar to anyone who works in a small specialist team inside a much larger organisation. Over time, you develop processes, standards, checklists, workflows and ways of doing things that work remarkably well.

The problem is that much of this exists in people’s heads.

Some of it is in project-management software. Some is buried in emails and messages. Some is in documents nobody remembers creating. And quite a lot of it simply becomes, “Ask the person who knows.”

I work in media, so I wondered whether I could build a very simple website that documented how we operate.

For roughly seven dollars, it seemed worth finding out.

That was the entire business case.

Start With the Problem, Not the Platform

The original idea wasn’t particularly strategic.

I wanted somewhere to put things.

These weren’t problems requiring an enterprise software platform. They were problems requiring somewhere coherent to put information.

So I built something.

My philosophy was simple:

Make the smallest sensible investment. Build something real. Test it against reality. Let usefulness determine what it becomes.

If it was useless, I had lost seven dollars.

Then I Noticed Something Else

As I began putting the pieces together, I realised the website was doing something I hadn’t originally intended.

It was making the operation visible.

This matters because specialist teams can look very different depending on where you are standing.

From inside a media operation, you see planning, logistics, pre-production, interviews, photography, video production, editorial, approvals, asset management, technical standards, equipment, travel, training and institutional knowledge.

From several levels above, you may see something considerably simpler:

Neither perspective is necessarily malicious. One simply has considerably less information than the other.

And that creates an interesting problem.

Nice to Have

Creative departments are particularly vulnerable to being perceived as a luxury.

Everyone likes having good photography.

Everyone likes having good video.

Everyone likes having stories told well.

But when budgets tighten, liking something isn’t necessarily enough.

If the organisational understanding of a media team is essentially “the people who make the videos,” then perfectly reasonable questions follow.

These aren’t inherently unreasonable questions.

The problem is that it is difficult to evaluate the answer if the operation underneath the finished product is invisible.

And suddenly my seven-dollar website had another possible purpose.

From Service to Function

There is a significant difference between providing a service and operating a function.

A service sounds transactional:

A professional media function looks more like:

Underneath that are standards, systems, equipment, technical knowledge, workflows, templates, documentation and people who have learned how to make all of those pieces work together.

The website could make that structure visible without ever having to argue for its importance.

That distinction became central to my thinking.

Present Media as an operation, not a service request.

Into the Woodwork

There is a metaphor I like for what happens next.

A nice-to-have resource sits on top of an organisation.

A genuine function becomes part of the woodwork.

I don’t mean this in the cynical sense of making something impossible to remove. I mean becoming part of how an organisation naturally operates.

If a system becomes where processes are documented, where people learn how to work with a team, where standards live, where new staff are onboarded and where leadership can understand how the operation works, it gradually becomes part of the organisational architecture.

Nobody needs to announce:

“We are now a strategically important department.”

In fact, I’d strongly recommend not doing that.

Build something useful instead.

Don’t Make It Boast

This led me to another principle:

Do not make it boast. Make it demonstrate.

I don’t want a website saying how hard everyone works.

I don’t want a page explaining why a department deserves more resources.

And I certainly don’t want corporate prose announcing that we are “leveraging innovative storytelling solutions to maximise stakeholder engagement.”

Life is too short.

Then allow people to reach their own conclusions.

If someone looks at the operation and thinks:

“Wait. How many people are doing all of this?”

that’s considerably more powerful than telling them the team is under-resourced.

Changing the Resource Conversation

This also changes the language around money.

If Media is perceived as a collection of creative people making content, additional expenditure can easily look like:

spending more money on videos.

If Media is understood as an operating capability, the question becomes:

What level of media capability does the organisation want to operate?

Those are profoundly different questions.

The second allows sensible conversations about capacity, geographic coverage, quality, turnaround times, equipment, people and expected output.

It moves the discussion away from defending individual expenses and toward designing an appropriate level of capability.

Again, the website shouldn’t make that argument.

It should provide enough information for the argument to become unnecessary.

Then the Idea Got Bigger

Once I started thinking of the website as documentation of an operating model rather than simply a repository of information, another question emerged.

Could the model be replicated?

Not the website.

The model.

Strip away the particular people and locations and there is a fairly simple architecture:

Underneath it are repeatable standards, templates, interview methodologies, technical processes, editorial systems and approval workflows.

If one regional operation can make that work consistently across many geographically dispersed locations, perhaps another region could adapt the same model.

I think there is an important discipline here:

Don’t announce that something is scalable. Make it work.

If someone else eventually looks at it and asks, “Could we do this here?”, you have a far stronger proposition than if you started by declaring that you had invented a globally scalable solution.

Let other people discover its replicability.

The View From Above

There is another audience I hadn’t initially considered.

Senior leaders often know surprisingly little about specialist operations several layers beneath them.

Again, that’s not necessarily a failure. They have an entire organisation to think about.

A simple, well-designed window into an operation can therefore be useful.

Suddenly something previously represented by a handful of names and numbers on a spreadsheet has shape.

That is useful both to the specialist team and to the people responsible for making decisions about it.

The View From Outside

Then the idea took another turn.

Large organisations frequently talk about the capabilities they provide to the businesses, divisions or organisations within their network.

“Marketing support” is a good example.

It’s a perfectly legitimate phrase.

It’s also abstract.

Imagine instead being able to demonstrate an actual functioning capability.

Now you aren’t describing a benefit.

You’re showing evidence that the capability exists.

For someone evaluating whether to join, invest in or partner with a larger organisation, that distinction matters.

The website isn’t the thing of value.

The capability is the thing of value. The website simply makes it visible.

Closing the Loop

There is one more piece that makes this particularly interesting for media.

Traditionally, production can operate something like this:

But connect a professional media operation with digital performance and analytics and the loop becomes:

Or more simply:

Produce → Deploy → Measure → Improve

Now the media function isn’t simply producing attractive things.

It is participating in a measurable system that can learn.

That is a much more mature organisational capability.

The $7 Progression

What amuses me about all of this is where it started.

There was no grand plan.

It was approximately:

Whether it ever travels all the way down that path isn’t particularly important.

That’s part of the point.

I’m increasingly suspicious of starting with enormous visions and then attempting to force reality to cooperate with them.

I’d rather start with something small that solves an actual problem.

If nobody finds it useful, kill it.

If people start using it in ways you hadn’t anticipated, pay attention.

Sometimes the most interesting strategy isn’t deciding what something will eventually become.

It’s building something useful enough to earn the right to become more.