From the Arsenal: Are you playing a filter game or a nurture game?

Story Of The Day: I just got back from a snowboarding trip in Mammoth yesterday.

While I was on vacation, I spent an hour on a 1-on-1 session with a founder,
we’ll call him Bob.

Bob was struggling to increase his capacity.
His content team was at the brink of not being able to handle the volume.

He had a team of about 12 people,
but only two or three "heavy hitters" were matching the quality he wanted.

The rest of the team wasn't there yet.
Which meant Bob was still stuck touching every part of the pipeline.
He was desperate to give himself and his A-players some relief.

To solve it, Bob was bringing in two new hires a week.
He built an "accelerated" onboarding.
So the new hires could hop on high-priority tasks immediately.

Unknowingly, Bob had built a pressure chamber.

He designed an onboard to rapidly turn entry-level talent into heavy hitters.
which meant his churn rate was through the roof.

Bob thought he was nurturing these people into A-players.
He thought providing the SOPs and checklists was enough.

It wasn't.
It was a massive expectation gap.

He needed people to handle high-priority tasks now.
But he was hiring people who needed months of nurture to get there.

The result?

Bob and his top players were now doing double work.
They were teaching while trying to hit deadlines.
The "relief" he hired actually just doubled his workload.

If your house is on fire,
you don't hire a student to learn how to be a firefighter.

You pay for the veteran who can grab the hose.
Start spraying immediately.

Takeaways: Stop hiring for potential when you actually need performance. You can't "high-pressure" most juniors into becoming a senior. Time is not on your side there.

How to Apply It Today:

1. Audit the Urgency: If you need relief this week, an entry hire that requires 30 hours of your time is more work.
2. Don't be a Hero: If you or your A-players are constantly "rescuing work", Look for peers, not students make that switch.
3. Match Talent to the Clock: Nurturing requires a "waiting period." If you don't have that time, pay the premium for talent.

Pro tip: In film, when we take on high-risk, high-priority work, we never play the Nurture game. We don't spend time teaching a new person how to do the job when the stakes are high. We find A-players we trust, put them in play immediately.

As promised: dialing in your video workflows 1% at a time.

Want help launching, scaling and upgrading videos that actually move needles?

That’s what we do inside DenimStitch.

Don't train on a live set.
-David

P.S. All of this is how to prevent you from getting into these situations in the first place. But what if you’re already in it? What if the house is already on fire and you’re exhausted? If you want to know exactly what I went over during the session with Bob and how we decided to stabilize his situation, reply "BOB" and I’ll share the rest of the story.