The Situation
This client is a small event marketing agency specializing in corporate brand activations. With a lean team, every inefficiency lands directly on the people doing the work. There's no operational buffer to absorb it.
Tasks, assets, and communication were siloed across four different platforms that didn't talk to each other. The team was context-switching constantly, losing real hours every week just locating files and status updates.
What We Found
Fragmentation across tools
Nothing was connected. Changes in one tool never updated the others, so version control was entirely manual, and easy to get wrong.
Approval bottlenecks
No defined, automated approval workflow. Work stalled while waiting on a response, with zero visibility into where anything actually stood.
Asset reformatting as a time drain
Assets were being rebuilt from scratch, over and over, because there was no template system and no consistent file organization.
The Fix
Three targeted interventions, one process change and two tool optimizations, meaningfully reduced the time lost to reformatting, approval chasing, and asset hunting.
Build one AI habit before anything else
Start running client briefs and recaps through Claude before writing them from scratch. The habit has to exist before any system can support it.
Activate the AI features already inside their design tool
Brand kit, master templates, and auto-resize, all already included in their existing plan, and none of it was turned on.
Define the approval workflow before automating it
Where does feedback live? Who has final say? What does "done" look like? Answer those first, then configure the tools to match.
Restructure shared storage in one afternoon
One top-level folder per client, a consistent naming convention going forward. No need to touch anything old.
The Result
Estimated time reclaimed across the team by week 8, with zero new software cost in month one.