WEEK 20: Quality Control

In my experience at Humour Me so far, I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of clients and subsequently meet many new people. A lot of these people happened to be CEOs. I have experienced different leadership styles from them – some nice, others not so much. But there are two types of CEOs that are by far the most frustrating to work with:

  1. The Indecisive CEO: These CEOs have no idea what they want. They employ our services and then hum and haw and never make a decision regarding which of our presented strategies to follow. What’s worse, apart from never making a decision, they continue to demand more and more options from us, thus attempting to make us continue to work for free. When they finally arrive at something they are ‘happy’ with, they then take an eternity to approve costs. Sometimes, even after costs and timelines are finalised and production has begun, these CEOs will suddenly change their minds and make us rework the entire project.

  2. The Micromanaging CEO: These CEOs really struggle with the ability to relinquish control. They hire us with full a understanding of our area of expertise, and then proceed to completely hijack our content strategy with what they think is best. They refuse to listen to our reasoning and insist on doing things only their way – in essence, they treat us like an execution arm instead of a content strategy partner. They even intrude into our internal processes and attempt to micromanage those. Needless to say, this is not efficient at all and often results in additional, unnecessary work. Moreover, if we go against our better judgement and allow those CEOs to take control, we still get blamed if the content fails.

Somehow we’ve managed to acquire a client whose CEO fits into both categories.

In other news, we are currently dealing with a few issues with our vendors. A common practice I have observed among vendors is that they will initially agree to all our requirements, claiming that everything we need will be achievable within the set deadline. But once they receive their advances and actually begin working, they come across ‘unforeseen’ problems with inevitably cause massive delays in our timeline.

I must clarify that not all vendors behave like this, but the consistency of this habit across different vendors we have worked with in the past is rather alarming.

When the vendors we met with this week did the same thing, our CEO gave them a stern talking to, after which they sobered up a little and gave us timelines that they are now contractually obliged to commit to. But anyone in this industry will know that contracts are not always taken seriously. All we can do is hope that our projects will not get too delayed.

We have created a new show reel script, the voice over of which has been written and narrated by yours truly. I had hoped I would be able to share it with you in this entry, but the person who is supposed to upload the video is taking forever, so I doubt it will get uploaded today.

See you next week!

  • blog

    Hey! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give
    a quick shout out and say I really enjoy reading your articles.

    Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that
    deal with the same subjects? Thank you!

  • buy online cialis

    Great site you have here.. It’s difficult to find excellent writing
    like yours these days. I truly appreciate individuals
    like you! Take care!!

  • g

    I’m gone to tell my little brother, that he should also go to see this
    blog on regular basis to obtain updated from most
    recent news.

  • g

    This post is worth everyone’s attention. How can I find out more?

  • g

    Pretty portion of content. I just stumbled upon your weblog and in accession capital to
    assert that I get actually loved account your blog posts.
    Any way I’ll be subscribing on your feeds or even I achievement you get right of entry to persistently
    fast.

Leave Your Comment Here