Just realized client onboarding is the real bottleneck, not our actual work

I run a small agency in Austin and for the first 2 years I kept wondering why projects always felt slow and messy. I blamed the team, the tools, the clients. Then one day I mapped out how long it really took to get a new client from the signed contract to actually starting work. It was 11 days on average. That was pure waste. I tried a simple change - a single shared checklist with deadlines for both us and the client, like sending their logo, filling out a brief, scheduling a kickoff call. First client after that? 3 days to start. Has anyone else found that the setup phase eats up way more time than the actual marketing work?

2 comments

2 Comments

tarac166d ago

Right, because who needs efficiency when you can just blame everything except the obvious bottleneck for two years. 11 days to start a project sounds like a luxury vacation compared to what some of us are dealing with.

parkermorgan6d ago

Had the same issue at my old job @tarac16, finally just started tracking every single delay with dates and timestamps in a shared doc. Nobody could argue with the receipts after that lol. Sometimes you just gotta let the data do the talking.