When I start working with someone. I take inventory. I want to know what they have. I want us to be on the same page about what we have to monetize. If I were to work to sell pencils for a company, I’d want to know how many pencils they have in stock, ready to go.
This became really clear to me when I started working for a company that was in a major change. They had dozens of employees, yet had just had a major downsizing, so the CEO was in charge of a lot of stuff suddenly. I was trying to make marketing materials. While the boss was in charge of important meetings and big things at the company, I was also texting him to get the Youtube password. There was a ton on his shoulders because the organization didn’t have a clear organization of assets. They had a style guide, they had photos, they had lots of things, yet they weren’t organized in a way that a person like me could access them.
This happens with freelancers also. Sometimes a thing like a list of past clients has never been constructed. Sometimes it takes a year to get video files over to an editor.
I learned this lesson, and still, my employees get a message from me occasionally saying “Oh yeah, I did this thing a year ago…” or “I have this half-finished project”
It is worth our time sometimes to organize what we have. It helps us individually to see the value we have, and it helps us to scale and to be ready for outside help.