Disorganization is costing you time & money

This past summer our business helped a ministry move all of their digital assets onto a robust website where they could host a podcast, share weekly content, and provide replay access for students in their school of ministry. Until that point, everything had been hodgepodge— tossed together in whatever made sense to the person touching the content at that exact moment. 

One of my first tasks was to comb through 400+ videos the ministry left stored on Vimeo…

(As a side note: I’m not sure why so many people use Vimeo and YouTube as places to store their content.  Doing this, rather than using a file system you actually own, is akin to leaving your Christmas decorations, your collectibles, or other keepsakes for safekeeping in random person’s garage. Really, logically think about it.)

The number of videos was only one of the issues I faced. The bigger, more cumbersome obstacle was that every single video was  randomly named. That is, no one used a “naming convention.”

• Some videos were abbreviated using the speaker’s last name and some form of the date. 
• Others were cataloged based on what week of the 12-week course they were in (without actually listing the course to which they belonged).
• A few were posted by date only— with no consistent form of sharing the date. Some featured a 4-digit year; others had 2 digits. Some listed the month first, others listed the day first, and others listed the year first.
• About ten videos had nothing more than the topic posted.
• I could go on… 

There were no folders and— without any labels to denote what clearly went where— I had to push through a few minutes of each of these videos in order to find out what they were actually about.

This wasn’t an isolated instance. The more I work with content creators, the more I realize the randomness of naming and sorting things is the norm. 

Another look + lessons learned

For a season, I managed the digital assets of a different organization. Their coaching program emphasized the importance of well-defined, written-in-detail systems. 

The problem was, well, to quote one of the coaches, “Sometimes, I feel like we don’t smoke our own stuff.”

I concurred. Especially when it came to those systems. There wasn’t a written process to be found anywhere in the organizational documents.

At some point, it became comical rather than frustrating. 

I distinctly remember transferring all of the digital assets (ironically, once again, from Vimeo) to the new website. I was in the process of creating the client dashboard— the space behind a paywall where the people we were serving could login and see all of their courses (very similar to the experience you have with Netflix or Hulu or other streaming platforms). Until this point, the organization had been using a hidden page hosted by SquareSpace, with Vimeo vids embedded throughout it for their “paywall.”

There’s nothing wrong with SquareSpace, by the way. If you have a brick-and-mortar shop and need a static website, SquareSpace works great. If you’re a $1MM or more organization that equips C-suite leaders to gain new momentum and scale their organizations, you need something… more.

Because this organization (yes!) had their framework written, I knew what I was looking for as I scanned all those Vimeo files. Their videos were labeled no better, though. They were uploaded and named with no foresight given as to the notion that somebody— at some point in the future— may want to comb back through these and actually, with minimal effort, be able to determine the flow.

Here’s where it gets interesting…

Selling the old

I called the administrative assistant, who was also new on the job. “I just found a complete course on Vimeo— something we didn’t even know we had!”

“What!?”

“I found a complete 20-video course.”

“Wow! What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to set it up on the new website and sell it!”

And that’s exactly what we did. The videos were from random coaching programs the client had launched at some point in the past. We uploaded them, added some text, and we had— instantly, with no additional effort— a $500 program. Over the next few months, we began selling them almost on auto-pilot (from the back-end of several funnels, the bottom of blog posts, and as a next step from a few strategically placed opt-in sequences).

A few days after that initial “guess-what-I-found” convo, I called the admin again…

“I found another one,” I said. 

“Another complete course?”

“Yes. It looks like it’s a 6-video course for business leaders, but I’m going to keep digging, because there may be more.”

As I spoke to her, I began to realize that this habit of taking great care to craft your content but then tossing it anywhere and everywhere in the same way you might toss stuff into the junk drawer of your kitchen cabinets actually costs thousands of dollars in man-hours, in addition to the opportunity cost of not being able to amplify the message. 

This time, she countered: “I’m not surprised. I just started here. I’ve been going through everything myself, and Dropbox is a disaster.”

Full disclosure: she didn’t use the word disaster. She was more… descriptive. 

At some point, I actually approached the CEO: “We’re having a hard time finding the assets we need, because—“

“It’s all in Dropbox and Vimeo,” he said.

“— it is,” I continued, “but I’m wondering if you’re OK if we move some stuff around— if we organize it a bit…”

He pushed back. Even though he couldn’t find anything— and would routinely call and ask where items (even personal things and not just business things) were, he couldn’t reconcile the notion that if he couldn’t find it, we couldn’t find it. And if we were spending time hunting stuff that should be readily accessible, then we weren’t spending time doing income-producing activities. 

And, yet again...

Later, when it came time to launch his latest book, we created an upsell from a course he already had developed before I came onboard. When I found it, he had all the videos embedded— from Vimeo— on another webpage. 

After creating that upsell, a $100 bump for a $8 book (which 25% of all book-buyers chose to purchase), I created a second upsell— for $90— comprised completely of additional videos on a similar topic that I found smattered all across his Vimeo account. These videos sat dormant in the past, yet we were able to grant them new life. As a result, 25% of the people who took the first upsell also chose to add these videos to their online library...

And, again, we learned the importance of keeping it organized...

...  because disorganization is costing you (and your team) time + money.