This year has been one of the toughest of my career. Anyone working in production will know exactly what I mean. Work slowed down, the rhythm shifted, and I found myself having to rethink my business, my structure, and my approach to how I work.
For me, that meant stripping everything down — the way I run jobs, the way I collaborate, and the way I manage my time. It meant accepting that the model I operated on for years wasn’t built for the reality I’m in now. The only way forward was to go even leaner, more deliberate, and far more efficient.
Efficiency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the operating system. This became the foundation for how I now think about pre-production.
Two Sides of Pre-Production: Predictable and Unpredictable
When I zoomed out, I realised my entire workflow could be divided into two major sides.
1. The Predictable Side
This is everything we already know how to do before the job even starts.
The tasks we repeat. The templates we reuse. The systems and checklists we’ve built up over years. It’s the infrastructure-heavy part of pre-prod — the schedules, the budgets, the calendars, the databases, the coordination.
It is repeatable. It is systemisable. And crucially: it should not command our energy. The predictable side is where duplication lives. It’s where hours disappear if you don’t have structure. It’s where inefficiency quietly accumulates until you find yourself doing three roles at once.
2. The Unpredictable Side
This is the real work. The part you can’t script. The part no template can automate.
The location that falls through. The creative that changes direction. The weather that forces a rethink. The talent availability puzzle.
This part relies on intuition, experience and giving yourself the time you need to solve these challenges. The more time you spend on the predictable side, the less capacity you have for the unpredictable side.
The Industry Is in Flux — And Leaner Models Make Sense
At the same time, the entire production landscape has been shifting. Not in one specific way, but in the broader sense. The work is changing shape. The demand is harder to predict. The competition is steeper than ever.
In a landscape that feels this fluid, the only logical response is to become more adaptable. To build a structure that bends rather than breaks. For me, that means rethinking what a production company needs to look like to be healthy and sustainable.
Large internal teams, fixed hierarchies, and heavy overheads don’t match the reality we’re navigating. Leaner operations — smaller teams, hybrid roles, flexible collaboration models, and smarter systems — simply make more sense.
The Predictable Side Is the Real Bottleneck
What I realised (painfully at first) is that the predictable side of pre-production is the thing that weighs you down when you’re trying to run lean. These tasks used to be spread across production managers, coordinators, accountants, assistants. But when you reduce your internal team, all of that lands on you.
And here’s the problem: You cannot shrink your team and still work in a workflow built for a bigger team. That’s where the work collapses under the weight of repetition. Without rethinking the predictable side, you end up exhausted, behind, and mentally underwater before the real creative problem solving even begins.
Which led me to the shift: Efficiency isn’t about working faster. It’s about eliminating duplication. It’s about designing systems that hold the predictable side so you don’t have to.
Efficiency Is an Allocation Problem, Not a Speed Problem
This is the philosophical heart of all of this. I’m not trying to be faster. I’m not trying to be a machine. I’m not trying to cram more work into fewer hours. What I’m trying to do is allocate my energy intelligently.
If I can reduce the hours spent rebuilding documents, rewriting emails, restarting processes, handling admin manually, duplicating basic tasks etc.…then I get more time and clarity for the unpredictable side — the part of the job that actually defines the outcome.
Now I try to follow one rule: The predictable side should be solved once. The unpredictable side should have your full attention.
The Producer as System Designer
This is the role shift I see happening. Producers aren’t just operators anymore. We’re architects of our own workflows. We design the systems that allow us to move quickly, think clearly, and stay balanced in an industry that can easily pull you under.
Being efficient isn’t about being clinical. It’s about being prepared. It’s about putting intelligence into the infrastructure so that you can be fully human when things get chaotic.
Part of what I’ve been building — from crew management tools to automated accounting workflows to smarter templates — comes from a simple idea: Build once, automate the rest.
The more I navigate this new production landscape, the more I realise that efficiency is the thing that gives you clarity when things get messy.
It’s the thing that lets a smaller team operate like a bigger one. It’s the thing that keeps you calm when everything else is chaos. It’s the thing that makes the unpredictable side manageable.
Systemise the obvious. So you can stay present for the things that actually matter.