“There are only 12 notes.” That's what a professor told Paul Nicholson, a saxophone player who could play anything put in front of him but was terrified of making music up on his own. The line stayed with him and became a mantra he repeated whenever things got crazy and chaotic: when something feels overwhelming, strip it down to what's actually essential.

In this episode, Paul, now a creative leader with more than 20 years’ experience building and running in-house creative teams, and the author of There Are Only 12 Notes: Leadership Lessons from Music, discusses what that idea looks like in practice at three levels: a team member who's resisting a change, a department going through several changes at once, and a boss who adds to the chaos instead of calming it.

Key Topics Discussed

• How to find out the real reasons your team members resist changes
• Why one-on-one conversations land better than a town hall when you're introducing a change to stakeholders
• How to simplify an urgent request without cutting corners
• What to do when the leader above you wants to rebuild the entire process after every mistake

Connect with Jesse

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net

Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.InFocusConsulting.net/assessment

Show Notes

Blown budgets and missed deadline are typically seen as production problems. Roma Ahi, President of Makers, sees it differently: by the time an issue reaches production, it's really an alignment problem that started weeks earlier and just took that long to surface.

Roma also explains why she recommends placing a Chief Production Officer in the C-suite alongside the CMO and CCO, the clear signs that a brief wasn't aligned before it went out, and why in-house teams need the the standing to walk away from an impossible ask.

About the Guest
Roma Ahi is the President of Makers, a production agency that works alongside in-house creative teams and external agencies on projects ranging from social content to national campaigns. Before joining Makers, she spent eight years as VP of Production at a Toronto agency, leading an integrated production team across video, experiential, digital, and events for major financial, CPG, and beverage brands. Her path there ran through broadcast TV, politics, and news, giving her a wide-angle view of how production gets done across very different industries.

Key Topics Discussed

• The depth-versus-breadth split between in-house teams and external agencies, and how teams on both sides undercut their own value by trying to claim the other's strength
• Why in-house teams rarely ask their production or agency partners for strategic advice before a brief is even written, and what that costs them
• Why performance metrics are so rarely shared with the people making the work, and what changes when they are

Connect with Jesse

• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at www.infocusconsulting.net or jesse@infocusconsulting.net

In this solo minisode, Jesse breaks down a mindset most in-house teams don't realize is holding them back: waiting for permission to change.

Jesse discusses "identity-based resilience" (the idea that lasting change starts with deciding who you are, not just what you'll do differently) and walks through what that looks like in practice for a creative team that's stuck in reactive mode.

In this episode:

• Why believing nothing will change is often what guarantees it won't
• The three-step shift: decide, define, act
• Why this is as much about protecting the business as it is about protecting your team

Get your team's starting point:
If you're not sure where to begin, take the free Creative Ops Assessment at infocusconsulting.net/assessment. It takes about three minutes and shows you exactly where your team stands today.

Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/assessment

Show Notes

AI keeps getting better at producing creative content, faster and at higher volume than ever before. For some leaders, that raises a difficult question: what does a creative team actually contribute beyond execution? Meredith Bailey, Founder and CEO of StreamWork, has a front-row seat to this shift. She works with in-house creative and marketing teams every day, and her answer to that question is clear: the human judgment that determines what should ship and what shouldn’t can’t be replicated by AI. As volume goes up, that judgment matters even more.

About the Guest

Meredith Bailey is the Founder and CEO of StreamWork, a proofing and approval platform built for in-house creative and marketing teams. Before founding StreamWork, she spent over a decade in marketing at Apple, Google, and YouTube. Across every role, she kept running into the same problem: the review and approval process was broken, and it was consuming time that should have gone to the actual creative work. She built StreamWork to fix it.

Key Topics Discussed

• Why the final stakeholder sign-off is uniquely human, and why that becomes more true as AI-generated volume increases
• Why being one of the first industries disrupted by AI has given proactive creative teams a head start most other functions don't have
• The value difference between creatives who execute the brief and those who push back on it
• How to make a legitimate business case for adopting AI tools, before your organization spends money on the wrong thing

Connect with Jesse

• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at www.infocusconsulting.net or jesse@infocusconsulting.net

In-house creative teams often have no idea how their work is performing. No data, feedback loop or connection between the assets they're producing and the business outcomes those assets are supposed to drive. Jess Abdulnour kept running into this problem, and eventually built a system to fix it.

In this episode, Jess shares the Creative ID system she developed to connect creative output to performance data without custom software or expensive integrations. But the deeper problem goes beyond data access: it's about how creatives see themselves and their role in the business, and why getting them to claim ownership of performance is harder than solving any technical problem.

Jess Abdulnour is the founder of The BrandNuè Agency and has spent 15 years working in brand strategy and creative operations for companies in regulated industries including finance, mortgage, healthcare, and legal. She has held senior brand and creative ops roles at companies including New American Funding and Camino Financial. Her work focuses on helping regulated businesses build brands that drive growth when paid acquisition channels plateau.

• The Creative ID system: how a simple field added across existing tools connected creative output to performance data
• What changed for the creative team once they could see results: from subjective approval to data-backed decision-making
• Why the mindset problem is harder to solve than the technical one, and what it takes to get creatives to see performance as their responsibility

• Download the free Creative ID Guide here: www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-id

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net

When your output is no longer the work: that's the shift that defines creative leadership. But most creatives who move into leadership roles struggle to make it. They still measure their value by what they produce, not what they enable others to produce, and that quietly undermines their teams, their influence, and their own satisfaction.

In this episode, Tyler Mitchell shares what that transition actually looked like from the inside: the late-night doubt, the identity crisis, and the moment he realized that the distance between leader and doer isn't a failure of connection, but a necessary condition for good leadership. We also discuss the leaders who got it wrong, what he took from those experiences, and what he's doing differently right now to develop the next generation of creative leaders on his own team.

About the Guest

Tyler Mitchell is the Director of Video Strategy at Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., one of the largest insurance brokerage and risk management firms in the world. He has spent his entire career in-house, moving from product photography and print layout to video production to leading a globally distributed video team. As a creative leader, Tyler has developed a people-first philosophy rooted in empathy, intentional development, and the discipline of staying connected to the creative without being involved in every step of the work.

Key Topics Discussed

• The identity shift that catches most new creative leaders off-guard: moving from measuring your value by what you produce to what you enable
• Why seeing the person behind the work, not just the output, is both the right thing to do for them and for the business
• The functional lead track that Tyler created to develop future leaders without loading them down with administrative overhead

Connect with Jesse

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net

Most companies' hiring systems weren't designed for creative work. Internal recruiters don't usually have the creative industry expertise to evaluate tone, craft, or cultural fit. And creative directors end up stuck in approval processes that take weeks when they need someone tomorrow.

Steve Potestio has spent 20 years in creative staffing. He's watched companies build systems that make it harder to hire the right creative talent. In this episode, we break down why creative staffing breaks down, what gets lost in translation, and what creative leaders can actually do to get the flexibility they need.

Steve Potestio is the Managing Director of Harvester Talent, a creative staffing firm focused on direct-to-client relationships and deep creative industry expertise. Over 20 years in the industry, he's built and scaled multiple staffing companies and watched the staffing landscape evolve from direct hiring manager access to complex vendor management systems. He's seen firsthand how procurement-driven processes strip away the subjective evaluation that creative hiring requires, and he built Harvester Talent specifically to solve that problem by working directly with hiring managers who understand what creative talent actually needs.

• How to make the business case for staffing flexibility
• Why the best recruiters push back on job descriptions instead of just executing them
• Understanding potential over immediate fit: evaluating the gray area beyond resumes and job descriptions
• How to build relationships for future roles, not just immediate openings

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net

RACIs are one of the most fundamental frameworks in creative operations, but most teams struggle to make them work. In this episode, creative ops leader Elissa Strell breaks down why RACIs fail and exactly how to implement them successfully.

Key Topics

• Why the definitions of Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed matter more than you might think
• Why creating a RACI in a vacuum guarantees failure
• What to do when your RACI loses traction
• Where to start if you're implementing your first RACI (hint: don't pick your biggest campaign)
• Why iteration matters more than getting it perfect the first time

About the Guest

Elissa Strell is a creative and marketing operations leader with extensive experience spanning both agency and in-house environments. She specializes in building the systems and structures that bring clarity to how creative work gets done, from defining roles and responsibilities to helping teams align on ownership, streamline decision-making, and operate more efficiently and strategically within the business.

Connect with Jesse:

• Take the free Creative Ops Assessment at www.infocusconsulting.net/creative-ops-assessment
• Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessekrinsky
• Have a creative ops challenge you're facing? Want to be a guest on the show? Reach out at jesse@infocusconsulting.net