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8/3/26 #ContentChat: Growing Your Content Team Without Creating More Chaos · #ContentChat

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome back to content chat and to week 11 of our 12-week content foundation series.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Eric Heeld.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: So over the past 10 weeks, we've been building our content foundations that allow our content operations to scale.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've talked about brand voice, style guides, audience personas, taxonomy, planning, workflows, documentation, review processes, and last week focused on how AI can help remove friction from your content operations without replacing the people who make your content valuable.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to be talking about something that almost every growing organization eventually faces, which is how do you know when it's time to grow your content team?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, maybe even more importantly, what kind of help do you actually need?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because the answer might not be making a hire.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually one of the biggest mistakes that I've seen organizations make because it's always tempting to assume that any big gnarly content issue is going to be able to be solved by just throwing more people at it.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: You think, oh, if we just hired another writer, or if we finally had a dedicated content marketing manager, or what if we brought in an agency, or we added a social media specialist?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: You think that everything would just automatically start working, but that's pretty much never what actually happens.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, that new person they inherit the same unclear priorities, that non-documented, totally inconsistent workflows that are in place, and those sudden but inevitable approval bottlenecks.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hiring that new person for the content team doesn't make the work any easier.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you just are having more people experiencing the same chaos and confusion.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in this situation, more is not better.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen this happen repeatedly throughout my consulting career.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: An organization will hire talented people because content production feels slow.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then six months later, the leadership team is saying, Why is this all still taking so long?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Why haven't you gotten through your backlog?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because you hired the wrong person, unless, of course, you know, you had one of those Frankenstein job descriptions that said you're looking for a content creator, strategist, writer, editor, video star, social whiz, aka somebody who was going to use AI to make it look like they were all of those things, but in fact, they were not.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, unless that was what happened, the answer is usually that you hired people and then you place them in a system that wasn't designed to help anyone succeed, let alone a new hire.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: To use a, you know, an example I think we can all relate to, could you imagine hiring an incredibly talented chef?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: But you put them into a kitchen where none of the ingredients are labeled and they're all in exactly, you know, in these non-sea-through white containers.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Half the equipment is broken, but it's not clear until you try to use any of it which half of those uh pieces of equipment are broken.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's recipes that have been documented, but everyone has their own version of that documentation in their notebook, their laptop, or wherever it is, or in their head.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: No one agrees exactly about what the things on the menu should or should not include.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then then it's the ordering process.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Orders arrive through email, hallway conversations, sticky notes, random meetings, people walking through the door, people posting on social media.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Ugh, right?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: How is that person going to be successful?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna spend most of their day trying to figure out how the kitchen works instead of cooking.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, content teams are not all that different.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same kind of thing.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you add more people, that doesn't automatically create more capacity.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it just creates more coordination for whoever it is that's leading the team.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: They have to do more communication, more review cycles, and it all ends up with more opportunities for inconsistency across your content program.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why this chapter comes at the end of the book, right before we wrap everything up, because if chapter 10 had been earlier, it would have been easy for people to come away thinking, great, build a bigger team, durr.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's you know a great solution if I have budget for it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing is, is it clearly it isn't something that can come early in the process.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that you cannot do until you have all the other foundational elements in place.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: The systems have to come first, then the people.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have documentation before you can delegate anything.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Governance has to come before you can have the growth of your team.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Once those foundations exist, every new contributor can become productive so much faster.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what today's podcast episode is going to be all about.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a hiring guide, it's about building a content operation that allows people to do their best work.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And those people can be employees, freelancers, agencies, fractional leaders, subject matter experts, or even AI.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So throughout the series, we've talked a ton about scaling content without losing your voice.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: But this is really going to be more about scaling the humans behind that content without overextending yourself and your team.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there are four big ideas we're going to explore today.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: First, how to recognize when you actually need more support and what kind of support makes sense for the challenges you're facing.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Second, how to think beyond the old debate of in-house versus agency and instead build the right blend of talent for the specific tasks that you need to get done.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Third, why onboarding and documentation, not hiring, is what determines how quickly new people become successful.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, why governance is still the thing that makes growth sustainable no matter how large your content operation becomes.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Does that sound good?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with something that sounds simple but trips up organizations all the time.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you know when it's actually time to expand your team?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Spoiler alert, it's not because there's budget that somebody's trying to spend, or because you can get an FTE from somewhere else.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: You need to make sure that it's really time.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: When people ask me how I know and how I made the decision in my in-house roles or made those recommendations to clients, I'm not using how much content's being produced or even how much content people think should be getting done.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I really look at that parking lot list.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I look at what's not happening because they're not the right resources in place.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there's always that stuff that someone says, oh, this is such a great idea, and we're gonna get to that eventually, but it just sits there on your content roadmap, and that eventually just doesn't happen because there's no capacity or you don't have the right skill sets in-house to do the thing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are always these kinds of strategic projects that end up losing out to whatever feels most urgent or has the highest paid person requesting it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty normal, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: But when it becomes normal that your content strategy and what you say you're going to achieve can't happen with the team that you have, that is where the real opportunity for growth lips.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So think about what's happening within your own organization.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you have dozens of customers you want to interview or multiple customer stories you've been meaning to write because you have all of these fantastic transcripts of uh really great meetings.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe everyone agrees executive flat leadership's important, but no one ever has time to interview executives and to turn those conversations into publishable content.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you know your website needs a refresh because your content needs to be updated, your SEO and GEO programs have stalled.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: You keep talking about, oh, wouldn't it be great?
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: We should totally be repurposing that content.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we we're definitely we're gonna launch that newsletter one of these days.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh gosh, we need we need to have documentation.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: We know we do, but we just can't get there.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: When every week is getting consumed by requests that arrived yesterday, those are our capacity problems.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: However, they're not necessarily staffing problems.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: It could be that prioritization is an issue, that workflow is an issue, maybe you have approval problems, or documentation problems.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sometimes they're staffing problems, but the thing is, is it can be any one of these things.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the challenge is to figure out which one of these issues you're dealing with before you jump to hiring.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the first things I do during a governance engagement is to map how content actually gets created today, not how everyone thinks it gets created, how it actually gets created.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So who is doing the requesting for a specific channel for a specific type of content that you create on a regular basis?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the approver of that request?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Who's writing it?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Who's editing it?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: How many review cycles with the subject matter experts are happening?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Where does it get stuck?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Who's usually left waiting on whom?
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then what's the final approval look like?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's really interesting to me how often the bottleneck isn't where leadership thinks it is.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Leadership might assume, oh, we need another writer or we need to bring in an agency.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna tell you the place where I've seen most content workflows get stuck is executive review.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's because the executive is out of town on business or on vacation and nobody knew that when the timeline was approved.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: But more frequently than not, there's something else going on there.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And hiring another writer isn't gonna solve an executive review problem.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you're gonna have twice as many drafts waiting in that same queue.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Another thing I see happening frequently is marketing will think that they need more social media support.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: But after looking at the workflow, you can discover that one blog post could easily become 10 social media posts if someone actually had time and kind of a recipe for repurposing that content so that they weren't having to start from scratch every single day looking at the weekly social calendar.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: In that situation, the problem isn't content creation, it's content operations.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And these are very different investments.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: One requires hiring another creator, and the other requires creating a better system.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: I see this especially with organizations that have grown quickly, adding on lots of people, having people's roles expand and grow, or absorbing other organizations.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, what happens is the processes that worked fine when you had three marketers sitting in a little cluster together doesn't work when they're 15 scattered across multiple locations.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: When you have that many people, people are naturally going to be specializing and you're gonna have new approval layers.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: More products are launching, salespeople are gonna want customized assets, regional teams need localized messaging, executives want support for their thought leadership goals, and customer marketing wants advocacy stories.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: So all of a sudden, what used to be one person's job has become dozens of interconnected workflows, and that's growth, and that's fantastic, but it's also complexity.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And complexity has a really keen way of disguising itself as a staffing issue.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you figure out what's really going on?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a role audit is something that can frequently help you get to the bottom of it.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of saying, hey, we've got an open headcount, who should we hire?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Ask what work actually exists.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Write down all of the recurring activity your content team performs.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, your planning, your interviewing subject matter experts, the writing, the editing, the designing, the SEO and GEO optimization, publishing, social promotion, analytics, updating the evergreen content, content inventory management, AI workflow and prompt development, maintaining documentation, managing freelancers and agencies, training subject matter experts, approvals and reporting.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big list, right?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: But think about all of those lenses, all of those activities.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now look at who owns each activity.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where the real insights come in, because you're probably gonna see that there are a bunch of work that has no owner.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's something in frequently reporting, which is something that I've done for a number of clients over the years.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Reporting is frequently something with no owner that everyone just thinks, oh, well, this must be happening, someone else is doing it, or we'll just wait until we're asked to do that for the dashboard.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, that's terrible.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's happens, right?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're those things that just don't have an owner.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Things that you want to get to, but you're not getting to it, but you know someone should.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's the situation where some people end up owning all the things.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: They become the bottleneck because they're simultaneously trying to be a content strategist, project manager, editor, writer, publisher, analyst, and my personal favorite marketing therapist.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a role, that's several jobs wearing one name badge, and that person is headed for Burnout City, okay?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: The third thing you're probably gonna find out is that there's work that's happening multiple times with multiple people doing the same thing because nobody realized someone else had already done it.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that is actually the one that makes me feel the worst because none of us have time to be duplicating someone else's efforts.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: None of us have that time.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: You might think, uh-uh, that doesn't happen.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it does.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Raise your hand if your organization has three different teams, each maintaining their own slightly different messaging documents.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, been there.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what about the multiple versions of the same customer story?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or duplicate slide decks because no one knew which one was the approved one, or somebody wanted a slight different tilt to the way that they were presenting it.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hiring more people or bringing on additional outside resources, that's not going to solve those governance issues.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: But once you've completed the role audit, the next question becomes much easier, which is answering where do we actually need more capacity?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where you have to evaluate if you need another full-time employee, or do you need somebody with deep expertise in a specialist area for a limited amount of time?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you need a freelance writer who already understands your industry.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you have a bunch of stuff going on, maybe you need an agency because you're launching in five new markets at the same time.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And definitely that's the kind of ramp up and scale that an agency is going to be really good at.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it also might be that you need somebody to help you build out those operational systems that allow the team you already have to work more effectively.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And these are really different investments, and each solves a very different problem.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I always encourage leaders to watch out for burnout, masquer masquerading as productivity when you're trying to do this evaluation.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, we all have that person on the team that they're our heroes.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: They meet those impossible deadlines, they always say yes, they're sending answers to emails at 10 at night, they're taking their laptop on vacation, they're constantly saying I've got it, until suddenly they don't.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And probably that person is you, the person who's listening to me talking about this.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, burnt getting burnt out is not evidence that you have resilience, it's evidence that your current operation model isn't sustainable.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: You can sprint for a while, but you've got to run a marathon if you're actually managing content within an organization.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: The content never stops, it always needs to be refreshed, it needs to be given a second look.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have new content all the time.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the goal isn't finding people who are willing to work harder.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're not looking for somebody who commits to being in the office seven days a week.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Words I actually saw in a recent job listing.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, are you insane?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's about building a system where they don't have to, all right?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: So once you've decided you really do need more support and you understand what the goal is that you're trying to do, what it is that you need to get done, that's when you need to ask what kind of support is going to work.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because today, hiring another full-time employee is only one option among many, and in a lot of situations, it's not even the best option.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the second big focus of this chapter is about building the right mix of talent.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: So something that I've 100% been a part of is helping organizations see that content work is about building a great team, and it's not necessarily about having a bunch of full-time in-house employees.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the high-performing content organizations that I've worked with actually have relatively small internal teams, talking like two or three people, or in one case, they don't even have a person per se who owns content.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thing is, is that they know exactly what they should own and what they shouldn't.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like for the longest time, the conversation about building content operations, building the content team, has been framed as either should we build an in-house team or should we outsource content to an agency?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think that's the right question.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because we have better options.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Which means the better question is, you know, which work requires someone who lives and breathes your business every day versus which work benefits from bringing in outside expertise or somebody with really deep experience doing a specific thing.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: These are two very different things.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that as somebody who loves to get in and build things, create processes, and never was excited about being a maintainer.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: That maintainer role, not for me, but the building things, figuring stuff out, 100% my wheelhouse and what I always thrived at.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I've literally, I only had one job where I stayed for 10 years, and that would be Schwab, where they recognized that about me, and so they gave me project-based work instead of having it be more of a linear maintaining things on an ongoing basis.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that worked really well for me.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're thinking about how you want to go forward, I think it's important that you make sure that your internal team owns things that really define your organization.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So even if you work with an expert to define your messaging, your positioning, your brand voice, and your editorial priorities, that's something that ultimately somebody within your organization needs to be that brand steward and the person who owns the relationship with the executives and your customers and that organizational cross-functional alignment.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those are things that you need somebody who's internal because they depend on context and the trust that's built over time in understanding not just what your company says they're they are and what they say that they do for clients, but the the why behind it.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's great about external partners is they often shine because they bring something that your internal team doesn't have, including they don't have a bunch of history of somebody saying no to doing something.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: They have a new perspective, they have specialized expertise, they have the bandwidth, and they have the time to actually support doing whatever the thing is.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's literally why you bring in those external resources.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if your team's currently operating at full capacity, just keeping the business running, and you have a huge product launch in, let's say, in 90 days, hiring a full-time employee for that three-month spike is not going to be smart.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's not going to make any sense.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to spend the first 90 days onboarding that person, which is going to be more work for the existing team, and it's not actually going to help you manage that spike.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you bring in a specialist agency or experienced freelancer or consultant, that's probably going to be a lot faster ramp, which means it's going to be a much better way to invest in your team and your content.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, let's say you need to redesign your website, that doesn't mean you need to hire somebody on staff to be a permanent UX designer or writer for the website.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you might just need specific expertise for.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: One project.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I tell you, I've done, I guess, a half a dozen really large-scale website rewrites over the past three years.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And in all of these situations, I was a new external person brought in just to apply that brand voice to revising all of the existing content and creating new content.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that was something that some folks were a little skeptical at first.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: How on earth could somebody do that?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that's something I've been doing for most of my career.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's something that I love doing for organizations and can be brought in.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, in all of these situations, I frequently was handed pieces of content that internal staff had tried to take a stab at doing, and that the leadership team then wanted to have the external person who'd done such a good job with the rest of the site take a look at it and revise it.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not a slam on those internal employees.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: It just shows you what having the experience and the ability to focus happens.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this is going to be the same case for video production, technical illustrations, podcast editing, accessibility reviews, all of these kinds of things are specialist skills that you may or may not have somebody on your team already who knows how to do these things and who loves them.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you're trying to hire one person who excels at every one of these disciplines, you're usually going to end up disappointed because frequently they can kind of do some or all of those things, but doesn't mean that they love to do all of those things or that they have the same level of proficiency at doing all of them.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'm thinking about building a team, I think about building layers of expertise.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so at the center, at the core, you have the people who are responsible for your content strategy who understand your business and make the editorial decisions.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're your brand protectors.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: And around that core, you bring in the specialists when they're needed.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you bring on like a freelance healthcare writer, a videographer, a website designer, a graphic designer, a technical editor, an SEO or GAO strategist.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of these people contributes something valuable and they are piled on.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: They help you build, help you grow, but the center is staying stable over time.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: So now I have a soft spot for a role that's kind of come out of this, which is the fractional content leader.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something I've spent a lot of the past 10 years being serving in that role for a range of growing organizations that didn't need, or frankly, just were not ready for a full-time head of content.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they needed someone who could come in and build that content operating system and eventually help them hire either an in-house person or freelancers or agencies that could then create the content they need and keep that content engine running.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in those situations, I would create the governance, develop the workflows, coach the existing team, establish editorial standards, all that kind of good stuff, and then I'd gradually hand this stuff over to an internal person to own it.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really a great way of accelerating marketing maturity without immediately adding manager or above executive headcount.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the thing to remember though is whether somebody is full-time, part-time, fractional, an agency or a freelancer, they can't contribute effectively to your team if they're operating without context.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Hiring another chef doesn't help if nobody can explain where anything is.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the same applies here.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's why you frequently hear things like, oh, we hired a new agency or a new freelancer, and they just don't get our voice.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, well, maybe.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: But when I hear that, instead of just taking that at face value, I always say, Oh gosh, that's really frustrating.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: What did you give them?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Did you give them your brand voice documentation and your personas and your messaging framework and examples of some great content and a style guide or a content brief?
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or were you expecting to kind of figure all that out from your website?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because those are very different onboarding experiences.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you from my personal experience, it is very, very rare that I receive onboarding that includes brand voice documentation that a content creator can actually put to use.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: Frequently, it's just very high-level brand documentation and not a lot of not a lot of documentation or guardrails for people creating content.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: But frequently it seems that everyone expects that we are, right?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that's you know why people struggle with outs outsourcing content.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because they've outsourced assumptions, not systems.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: They just assume that, hey, we're gonna hire this expert, and they'll just automatically figure it out.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: They'll just know how to do it or they'll know what's going on.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have an onboarding, a formal onboarding process for your marketing team, then you're just assuming that everyone's just gonna pick it up.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: What are they gonna pick up?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna pick up everyone's bad habits, they're gonna pick up ever whoever the most most recent person's personal opinions are about whether or not we can use the M-dash, for example.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: You need to have templates and explaining the approval process.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: You need to help have a way to share with them what's already been created.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: How are they gonna know which executive wants to do collaborative editing versus who wants a pretty polished first draft?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: How are they gonna know what terms legal won't let you use?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: That knowledge exists, but in too many organizations it's almost entirely inside of somebody's head.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the least scalable places to store institutional knowledge.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter if you have five people or 50 people.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Having that documentation and having clear ownership is what really, really matters.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have somebody who owns the editorial calendar and who owns governance, who owns quality, who owns performance measurement.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: If the ownership is fuzzy, then your output becomes fuzzy too.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if you find yourself in this kind of a situation, what you can do is stop thinking about job titles for a moment, because frequently you're not going to have all of the different ideal job titles that you would love to have in your organization.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: But instead you can think about capabilities.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what capabilities does your content operation need?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do you need more strategy?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do you need more writing, more editing?
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is project management or SEO an area that you need more help in?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: What about analytics or video or design or community management?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or is thought leadership where you're really getting stuck?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: When you figure out what those capabilities are that you need on your team, then you have to decide which of those capabilities really need to live inside of your organization versus which ones can be brought in just in time when we need them.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that question is what is going to get you to much better decisions about hiring than saying, oh, what position should we post next?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so we've already established that even when you hire the right people, they're not going to become productive overnight.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us to what I think is one of the most overlooked parts of growing a content team, and which we've touched on very lightly in a couple of our previous episodes, and that's onboarding.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Onboarding is how quickly new is the key for how quickly new contributors can become successful.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about talent, it's not about their ability to be scrappy and get things done, it's about whether or not you have any systems in place.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that onboarding starts well before someone joins your team.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I feel like it's a myth that hiring, that the hard part about hiring is finding the right person.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Although, to be fair, right now, because everyone's using AI tools to screen candidate resumes and responses, candidates are now using AI to optimize every word of their resume against your job description.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so that's tough, alright?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the deal hiring is only the beginning.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: How long does it take before that newly hired person can contribute it, can contribute confidently to your team?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: For some organizations, it's a week.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: And for others, with a lot of interdependencies and alignment needed between different organizations within the company, it could be six months.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not usually because the person that you hired can't get there faster.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost always because you either do or do not have the right systems in place to onboard them and get them up to speed.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Over the past 10 weeks, we've talked about all of these different elements that go into creating the foundation for a strong content operation.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I know, you know, of course, each episode was its own topic, it was its own, you know, own focus.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: But as you can see, I mean, all of those elements are 100% what goes into onboarding.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're all things that have to be part of your onboarding program.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: When anytime somebody new joins your content operation, they're always going to be asking the same questions.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: They have to ask you, who are we writing for?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: How do we sound?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: What does good look like here?
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: Who approves what?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Where can I find previous examples of this?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Which template should I use?
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: What's the difference between this audience segment and that other audience segment?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: And if every single answer that new hire has requires interrupting another teammate, then you've created a bottleneck before that new hire has even written their first sentence.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, raise your hand if you've ever heard someone say, hey, we we don't an organization say we don't really have onboarding per se.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: What that usually means is we introduce people to the folks on the team they're going to work with and hope that they figure it out from there.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, that's not onboarding.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: Orientation is showing somebody where the coffee machine is and introducing them to the folks on the team.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Onboarding is helping them understand how to make good decisions.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a much higher bar.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: Onboarding isn't about just explaining people what their job is, it's explaining to them why your organization works the way that it does, why certain audiences are more important, why you have specific messages that you emphasize over others, why your approval process exists the way that it does, how your voice sounds different from competitors, and why it is that you made that decision for that brand voice.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: Until people understand the why, they're not going to be able to really hit the ground running and understand how they can handle situations that aren't explicitly documented.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can't create good judgment without that in place.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do you do?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do you do this kind of onboarding?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like in the past, onboarding is something that frequently HR owned in larger organizations, and it would really mostly focus on the company overall, and then maybe if you're lucky, it would have a tiny little bit about whatever team you are joining.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: I know because I've been part of the content team putting together that one-hour presentation about what marketing and content does and how you can participate on social.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: And while that's better than not having onboarding, it's really so much more helpful to have role-specific onboarding.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: So think about it this way: if you have a new writer joining the team, do they need detailed instructions about campaign reporting dashboards on their first day?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, probably not.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe someday.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, your new analytics manager doesn't need 20 pages explaining interview techniques for customer stories.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely irrelevant to them.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Role-based onboarding is what's going to allow people to learn what they need first and expand from there, and also makes the documentation a lot easier to maintain.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of updating one massive document that nobody enjoys opening, you're going to be updating smaller pieces as they change.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually, of course, the person who's onboarded into a role can even become the owner of that onboarding documentation for their role.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: I like to think of onboarding as a modular, similar to like the modular content we've talked about previously.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Have individual pieces that are connected together, so you can have the very specific role-specific items that you kind of bring in to the plan that you put together for your new person.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And speaking of finding things and bringing all this stuff together, the accessibility of your content operations, documentation, your governance, that accessibility matters almost as much as the documentation itself.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't matter where you put it.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: It can be in Notion, it can be in Google Drive, SharePoint, Confluence, wherever it is.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: The best system, and I'm not the one who said this first, I'm positive I've heard lots of people say it, the best system is the one people actually use.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: If your team has to spend 15 minutes trying to remember where the most updated version of the style guide lives, or whether legal approved that new messaging they're using, you've created friction and not valuable friction.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Documentation should reduce questions, not create new ones.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Gotta think about where you can build the process, the documentation, the guidelines, the guide rails, how you can build that into where people are doing the work.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have to talk about AI.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: Last week we talked about using AI as part of your content workflow.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the same principle applies here.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: AI can be an incredible onboarding assistant if you have all of your content governance uploaded into an AI tool.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Think about it.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine onboarding a new writer and asking them, show me three examples of customer stories that follow our preferred structure?
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Or which template should I use for doing this kind of blog post?
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or what tone should I use when writing for this specific audience or this specific executive on our team?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't something that could be a replacement for onboarding, but it can take all of those onboarding elements that you've created and make it more accessible.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: However, AI can only answer those questions if you've documented the answers, if you've put together that strong documentation.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, AI is gonna be used to answer those questions by your new hires, but it's not going to be able to give an answer about how things are done in your organization.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, it's just going to make an educated guess based on what the meh median of everybody else is doing.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what we've spent the past 10 weeks trying to avoid.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Every document that you created throughout the series, every template, every workflow, every taxonomy list, every content brief, every quality checklist, it's not just for helping your current team.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be fuel for every future contributor to help them become successful that much faster.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's how organizations scale.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's not because every new person you hire is exceptional, although hopefully they are, but it's because the organizations made it easy for those people to do good work.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's a lot, right?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the longest episodes so far in this series.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you might be listening to all this and thinking, oh gosh, it sounds like a lot of process, and isn't all this governance gonna slow us down?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I found the exact opposite to be true.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: When you have the governance in place, it gives people more freedom, not less.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's where I want to finish today, which is talking about how governance isn't the enemy of creativity, it's what makes sustainable growth possible.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because growing your content team isn't really about hiring, it's about creating an environment where people can succeed.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that can mean bringing on another full-time employee, it can mean bringing working with freelancers, or sometimes it's gonna mean partnering with an agency or a fractional content leader.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it means realizing you don't actually need another person yet, that you need to spend that time creating workflows that are more clear, creating better documentation on what you do, having that consistent governance in place.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because adding people doesn't automatically create capacity.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's having the right systems in place that creates that capacity.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Once the systems exist, every new contributor becomes more effective, project timelines become predictable, reviews become more efficient because people know what it is they're being asked to look for in their review, what their role is.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then every piece of content that the team creates has a better chance of sounding like it came from your organization instead of that it came from 12 different people who all weighed in.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how you scale content without losing your voice.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to dive deeper, chapter 10 of Content Foundations expands upon each of the four ideas that we went over today.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: It also includes practical frameworks for deciding when to grow your team, choosing the right mix of in-house and external support, creating onboarding systems that help people ramp up quickly, and building governance that makes growth sustainable.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not quite done with the series yet.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: Next week is our final episode in the Content Foundation series.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be zooming out to talk about where all of the pieces come together.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Over the past 11 weeks, we've covered everything from brand voice and audience personas to workflows, AI governance, and building the right team.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: But final conversation is about what comes next.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: How do you keep these foundations alive as your organization grows?
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: How do you continue to evolve your content operation instead of treating governance as a one-time project?
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what does it look like to build a content program that's resilient enough to adapt to new technologies, new channels, and whatever comes next after today's AI tools?
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: We'll bring the entire series together and talk about how to make content foundations part of the way your organization operates every day.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for spending part of your day with me, and I will see you next week for our final Content Foundations content chat.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.