Creative Operations

Better systems around creative work.

I’ve spent more than 25 years inside creative production — designing, managing teams, coordinating vendors, building workflows, improving systems, and delivering work against real deadlines.

My strongest contribution is often not a single piece of creative.

It is making the environment around the work clearer,
more reliable, and easier for the team to operate.

Contexts Differ

Friction Rhymes

Creative work gets harder when the system around it gets messy.

Good creative teams still struggle when priorities are unclear, files are scattered, approvals are inconsistent, deadlines collide, ownership is vague, or too much knowledge lives in one person’s head.

That is where I tend to be most useful.

I look at how the work actually moves — from intake through production, review, revision, approval, and delivery — and improve the structure around it.

What I bring to
Creative Operations

Production Planning
Schedules, sequencing, capacity, priorities, & recurring deadlines.

Vendor Coordination
Print, production, outside partners, schedules, pricing, and quality.

Creative-Team Leadership
Experience working directly with designers, writers, sales teams, vendors, clients, & leadership.

Workflow Design
Clearer paths from request to final delivery.

Standards + Quality Control
Systems that reduce avoidable mistakes without slowing the work down.

Asset + File Organization
Practical structures that make work easier to find, update, reuse, and handoff.

Tool Fluency
Adobe Creative Cloud
Figma
Workfront
Asana
Wrike
Trello
Smartsheet
Jira
Salesforce
+ more

I’ve done this at scale.

At Journal Newspaper Group, I helped transform a highly manual and chaotic creative-production environment into a much more structured operating system.

The organization grew from 7 to 13 recurring monthly publications while the production model became substantially leaner and more predictable.

I introduced & refined:

» Design standards & style systems
» File-naming protocols
» Ad approval workflows
» Shared production rules
» Page-assignment systems
» Visual production maps
» Prepress communication tools
» Review and error-prevention processes

Those systems helped reduce staffing strain, cut overtime dramatically, lower production costs, reduce errors, and improve coordination across designers, editors, sales staff, customer service, prepress, and press operators.

Selected results

13 monthly publications

Managed within a recurring multi-edition production system

250+ individual
pages per cycle

Coordinated through structured assignment and production systems

55%+ overtime reduction

Through process redesign and clearer production structure

$750K+ annual savings

Through press optimization, vendor coordination, and production-system improvements

20% print-cost reduction

More recently at Mill Creek View by bringing color pre-production in-house and improving press workflow

Creative fluency matters.

I am not an operations person
who happens to work around designers.

I came up through
design & production.

That means I understand the reality behind the workflow: revisions, deadlines, file dependencies, client changes, visual quality, production constraints, and the tension between doing great work and actually getting it out the door.

That perspective helps me build systems that support creative teams rather than bury them in process.