Lauren managed to enter the board room a few minutes before the meeting began, and blinked in surprise at the sight of Brendan, the marketing department head of their modelling agency, Fine Talents Inc.
“Am I late?” Lauren glanced at her watch, as she slowly made her way to one of the many empty seats, choosing the one directly across from Brendan. She started setting up her laptop, preparing to wait for the others to discuss a plan of action that would hopefully get them out of the slump they were in.
“We’re all that’s in attendance, I’m afraid.”
Lauren frowned, but Brendan answered before she could ask the question.
“Yes, the CEO assigned all four of us, his cross-disciplinary team I believe he called us, to review and recommend ‘what next’ as we turn this agency around. I have spoken with Serena and Andrew. Serena is taking a few models to some fitness modelling auditions and is booked for the rest of the day. Andrew is in the middle of a career management workshop for some of our existing models. Both asked us to carry on in their absence.”
Lauren sighed in frustration. “Well, this is a prime example of one of the many issues we’re facing. Everyone seems to be overloaded with work, our output is lower than it should be, and we don’t even know what the main cause is.”
“I’d say the main cause is we’re trying our best to control costs and improve our job margins. Everyone is trying to implement the changes our profitability review recommended,” Brendan added.
“Yet, our performance is down on what it was six months ago, and whatever plans we have made and are implementing, as you said, are not exactly showing any tangible improvements, and may not for another 12 months.” Lauren looked at the business’ revenue from the last six months and saw that the business was still barely breaking even.
“This meeting was supposed to help us regroup and come up with a better plan of action. I suppose it is more frustrating to think about this because we know what Serena and Andrew are doing right now is important, yet the results of those endeavours hardly contribute to noteworthy organisational benefit.” She finished, looking at Brendan somewhat helplessly.
“I’ll admit this meeting, it was a last-minute decision, but they both agreed that drastic changes are necessary. We really do have a challenge to face. We are repeatedly finding we have to compromise on the changes agreed. For example, the recent decisions we’ve been making have been continuously prioritising one department, mainly Andrew’s since the priority was given to retaining our models. As a result, your and Serena’s department has been suffering access shortages to models and this has pushed up your overtime costs. Now, with the company-wide board meeting looming over our heads, everyone’s agreed to cut a new plan that will pull us back in the right direction. The one thing I think we can all agree on is that ‘It is clear now that what makes sense to operations does not make sense to accounting, and vice versa.’ The agenda today is to go over everything we’ve done so far and see where improvements can be made.”
Fine Talents Inc. was a small modelling agency, consisting of three main departments. The marketing department was in charge of both representing their models and finding the right jobs that fit them, as well as pitching their models to any creative directors who might be interested in hiring them. Brendan mostly handled this side of the business. Next was the model management department, which focused on guiding models into different types of modelling based on their interests. The model management department primarily represented fashion, fitness, and editorial modelling. Lauren took over the fashion and editorial models while Serena managed the fitness models. Andrew, on the other hand, was head of the career management department. His duties consisted of providing career guidance and support to models, helping them to develop their skills and build their careers, which was particularly useful to new recruits.
“Yes, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.” Lauren looked over the notes she’d made and wanted to address in the meeting. “Another fashion designer has decided to cut ties with our agency, siting inflexibility and repeated disruptions to their test shoots, and all the models working on his collection are being sent back right after his fashion show. That’ll conclude sometime this weekend.”
“What triggered this?” Brendan asked with a frown.
“Our models have not been attending all the rehearsals booked as we had one-off jobs lined up for them some days. Since these were our more talented models, we decided to skip a few days, thinking it would not be a big issue considering their experience, but…” Lauren trailed off, whilst she consulted her list. “Here’s another. A local fashion house seemed interested in forming a long-term partnership with us and wanted to see our models in some of their newest fashion collections, maybe even test their runway skills. They were on a strict timeline and needed the models ASAP, so I sent a few over. Unfortunately, this clashed with a few of our advertisement slots, and they cancelled our advertising contracts.” Lauren took a deep breath before continuing. “The good news is that the fashion house has agreed to partner up with us. However, they won’t be needing any models until their autumn fashion week event which isn’t for another month. We incurred costs as a result, but no new sales.”
“Did you update the task management board?” Brendan questioned.
“Yes, I cancelled the tasks that were affiliated with the advertisement slots.”
“Bother, another case of prioritisation gone wrong, eh?” Brendan stated, shaking his head with a sigh. “Overall, our costs are getting higher due to such issues.”
OK, let’s just have a run-through of everything we’ve done so far and see where we’re at. It’ll help us get an overview of the situation and see what needs changing. We’ll soon have the board meeting with our CEO to review our reports for this month, and we need to have some semblance of a solution in place by then.” Brendan said, before starting them off.
“There have been fewer creative projects due to the recessionary pressures of the last few years and we’ve changed our strategy accordingly. Instead of simply depending on existing partnerships with select creative directors, magazines, and fashion houses, we decided to market our models to a wider market. This includes accepting one-off jobs which we didn’t used to do. This helped keep us afloat whilst we weathered the recession, but now that the economy is expanding again, accepting miscellaneous advertisement jobs is not doing our branding any favours.”
Lauren nodded, continuing from where Brendan left off.
“So, a few months back we started reaching out to local fashion houses and magazines to revert to our original brand of supporting and being affiliated with specific names, and they were very positive. However, we still accept miscellaneous work, so we aren’t facing any gaps in modelling jobs while we reach out to more people. Now we have a backlog of demand, but output hasn’t increased. This increase in demand does however mean models have been jumping between assignments, which in turn means that our model’s skill development, being Andrew’s area of career management department, was being deferred. While career management felt like it was dispensable at the time, we subsequently have had some models leaving the agency as they felt their futures here were too ambiguous.”
Lauren sighed for what felt like the thousandth time. “Thus, we are now focusing on doing small group workshops like the one Andrew is conducting right now and we assigned them higher priority.”
“And that means we haven’t had enough people to meet with the local creative directors for meetings and we have resorted to taking our models to open auditions like Serena is currently doing.” Brendan offered.
“Which takes us even further from our management style and the general direction we want to take the company. I’d swear, whatever yardstick one of us uses to measure how well we are doing, it invariably hurts the others,” Lauren said. Lauren then looked through her laptop until she pulled up the task management board that their company used to manage their daily tasks.
“Let me summarise. In our efforts to realign ourselves with our company motto, we have been in talks with multiple local artists, but our models have been busy fulfilling one-off jobs, and we haven’t been able to align our models well with the test shoots. This means our costs are higher due as we move models around to manage our customer promises. The problem seems to be that we’re constantly juggling between developing our models, resourcing the modelling contracts we have won, and resourcing the modelling contracts we want to win.” Brendan concluded.
“Here’s an example, Andrew is scheduling a team-building outing for the models?” Lauren observed, seeing the task in Andrew’s channel of their task management board. “Hang on, what is going on here?” Lauren asked looking at the upcoming tasks. “We have a backlog, and clients to meet, yet this looks like Andrew has most of the models away for the week.”
“Yes, remember how you were saying that the model’s career management was being deferred. Well, priority was given back to Andrew to stop the exit of models to other agencies. We found that many of our models are reporting feeling insecure and afraid for their futures, so Andrew suggested a trip might help. His idea was that having the means to go on a trip itself might be a confidence boost for our models as it shows that the agency is doing OK.”
“Yeah, tell that to accounting,” Lauren remarked drily. “Approving this means that the models will not be available for any jobs or auditions for a few days, which I believe is much more real to them than their current fears. While this might be impactful to Andrew and what his department stands for, we will be taking a commercial hit if we don’t have access to our models.” Lauren gave Brendan a meaningful look, making him nod glumly.
“Yes, having uncomfortable conversations with accounting has become somewhat of a norm around here… that should also go into the list of issues we’re facing and a problem we want to solve ASAP.” Brendan mused and jotted down ‘What makes sense to operations does not make sense to accounting, and vice versa,’ before continuing.
“I’ll have a chat with him. In the meantime, we definitely have to change our approach to scheduling. It sounds like we are perpetually chasing our tails. It doesn’t seem to matter what we prioritise. It is damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.”
Lauren mused for a while before deciding to state the suggestions she’s been ruminating over for the last few days.
“Here’s a thought. We have been scheduling each model’s time keeping them fully deployed. Maybe it’s not the models we should be scheduling but the modelling engagements. Think about it. Do we really benefit when a model is fully loaded? Does that make them more or less available for test shoots, auditions, or career management? Currently, we pack each model’s schedule and then we spend time and cost chopping and changing the model’s assignments.”
“Your point?” Brendon asked.
“I think we are wasted a lot of a model’s week, and this full loading approach means every week one model or another is overloaded and feeling overwhelmed. I do agree, it is affecting their mental state. I think we need to pick one thing that is consistently loaded, and schedule that. A focus on our constraint, so to speak. Not make work to keep everyone busy. Maybe it is about getting the most test shoots done a month that we can, maybe it is client auditions, but I think even Andrew will agree that it is not adding more and more career management tasks for models to engage in. Don’t misunderstand me here, we do need all three. I suggest we figure out what it is we need to schedule, such that we get more of it done every month and that in doing so we increase our overall output in both the short and long term.
“I hear you,” agreed Brendon. “But, we will have to change our measures. Currently, we all compete for model time and that will break what you are saying. Each of our departments measures a different priority as goal number one. We will have to synchronise. It won’t be easy.”
“Agreed, I reckon the proof will be that ‘we get more done and have less-loaded models.’ When that happens, it will be clear that we can meet all three needs, Marketing, Career Management, and Model Management.”
“Sound idealistic and impossible. I like it. How can we test it?” asked Brendon.
“Let’s try and free up model time and see what really is constraining us. For example, we could change the group workshops to one workshop a week that requires mandatory attendance. We can think about team and morale-building outings further down the line, but it is off the table for now. I think we should focus on meeting local creative directors to build long-term clientele as well as improve our branding. So, we could take fewer one-off jobs. I won’t say reject all offers, just prioritise the meetings with creative directors.”
Lauren looked at Brendan, trying to gauge his reaction. Seeing his nod of approval, she went on.
“Serena and I can take a few models along with us when we have these meetings, so that they can have their practice run right away, which might help the directors reach a decision quicker, instead of scheduling this for another day. We should update our task management board with these meetings as assigned jobs so that we can look at our availability. Let’s try and clear from our tasks anything that burns model time and doesn’t convert into near-term useful outcomes .”
“Andrew might not love that, but I know Serena definitely will!” Brendan joked, a small smile pulling at his lips.
Lauren laughed, nodding her head. She’d been there, dragging her models to open auditions alongside many other models, hoping they’d be chosen. It is simply not the way they should be doing things if they want to realign themselves with our company motto.
“I like your approach. It will make our model availabilities clearer, and it won’t feel like they’re always busy, whilst nothing is getting done at the same time.” Brendan continued. “We need some sort of output measure that ties to our profit and loss measures as well, so we can show accounting that implementing our plans is producing the right financial results.”
“We’ll let Serena and Andrew finish their auditions and workshops for the day and schedule a mandatory meeting tomorrow to go over this. We might be on uncertain waters for a while, but it is nothing we can’t handle. As for the profit and loss measures, I have a few advertisement jobs lined up as well which I’ll add to the task management board so we can work our schedule around these. The key takeaway is that we are scheduling to deliver on our customer’s needs without compromising our current financial situation or branding. You know, Lauren, I do hope it is the test shoots that we discover we should be scheduling. My gut says it is, and these are billable events. So, the more of them we do the better.”
“Brendon, I think your gut is right, but let’s test and find out for sure. Once everyone’s on board with this approach, we can present a more unified outlook during our company-wide board meeting in front of our CEO.”
“Sounds reasonable. By doing this, we will have, I think you called it, a system constraint which is going to help us stay on track easier, and ensure the models have time for their career management activities” Brendan agreed.
“You might not like this though,” added Lauren. “We also need a meaningful change in reporting lines. Having us each focus on managing our own departments doesn’t synchronise us; we fight because we see each other as a disruptor, an obstacle to be pushed aside in pursuit of our own goals. We need a unifying measure that goes across all our departments.”
“Right, did you have something in mind then, Lauren?”
“I was thinking you’re the right fit.”
Brendan looked at her in surprise, making Lauren smile and explain.
“You’re our head of marketing and I was thinking, instead of Serena and I looking for clients and going for open auditions, we’ll let you facilitate that exclusively since this is outside of our scope, anyway. You’ll still be setting up jobs for our models but there won’t be anyone else making decisions behind the scenes that will clash with the schedule you produce.”
Brendan nodded, prompting Lauren to go on.
“This way, Serena and I will be organising our models based strictly on your schedules. Andrew will have a transparent schedule, where he can see the model’s available time for scheduling in career management activities.”
“Hem, I think I should say thank you, but… All right let’s try that, we can always change it back when the test results are in. I’ll work through it with Serena, Andrew, and yourself,” Brendan offered, making Lauren nod gratefully.
“Thanks, Brendan. I have a few meetings with a local magazine editor and another fashion house director, so I’ll grab the models from the workshop as soon as it’s done and head out. This will be the last meetings I’ll be organising so as not to step on your toes!”
“All the best!” Brendan smiled, before he checked his watch. “Andrew should be just about done.”
Lauren stood up on cue and, with a wave, left the office in search of some of their veteran models who were more familiar with meeting clients and performing test shoots and walks for them. There would be a more comprehensive meeting tomorrow with the rest of the missing crew, so they could jump straight into actioning the points Lauren and Brendan spoke about. For now, though, Lauren needed to focus her day on explaining the changes to those affected.