Ever finished the actual work on a site in an afternoon, then watched the project drag on for another two months?
That gap used to haunt me. For years I blamed myself for it.
Then an envelope turned up in the mail and it finally clicked.
Forty pages and a logo
We spent a full year chasing one client for the copy on a single About Us page. One page.
We did follow-up calls. Reminders. Everything either of us could think of.
Then one morning it showed up in an envelope. Forty pages of website copy, handwritten out, and on page one, the logo he wanted printed. 😅
Gosh, it was crazy. And the maddest part is that by then I wasn’t even shocked.
I’d built hundreds of sites out of a bedroom, then a spare room, then an office. The more we grew, the clearer one thing got.
The work itself was the fun part. Creating things was never what was killing us.
It was everything around the work. The waiting. The chasing. The endless back-and-forth.
The shelf
Here’s the shape of it, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Every time a task passes from one person to the next, it hits a shelf and sits there.
It’s like handing someone a baton and watching them put it down, because they’re mid-race on something else. Not out of laziness. They’re just busy with their own thing.
By the time they pick it up, a week’s gone. By the time it comes back to you, another week.
Now count the handoffs in a normal project. Brief to design. Design to client. Client feedback to you. You to dev. Dev back to client. Every arrow in that sequence is a shelf.
The actual work in there might be three days. The project takes two months.
And I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too for years. That’s a client problem, right? Clients are slow. Clients don’t reply.
It isn’t. It’s just as true inside a team. Ask anyone who’s ever waited four days for a review from the person sitting eight feet away.
It’s even true when the team is just you. You put the thing down to handle something urgent, and the shelf is your own to-do list.
Where the money leaks out
The shelf is invisible, which is why it doesn’t show up in your numbers. But it costs you, and here’s exactly how.
The follow-up you meant to send never goes out. “I’ll do it tomorrow.” Tomorrow turns up with its own fires. That’s a proposal that never gets chased and a job you never find out you lost.
The marketing block you put in the diary for Tuesday gets skipped. There was client work sitting in front of you, and client work always wins. Which is exactly why the pipeline empties out three months later and nobody can work out why.
The monthly report you used to send quietly stops. We hope nobody notices, because clients don’t read them anyway, right?
That last one still gets me, because I did it too. And it was the stupidest thing I ever cut.
The report was never about being read. It was the one small thing that turned up before anyone asked for it. That’s most of the reason a retainer feels like value instead of a tax.
Calling it busywork is how you talk yourself out of the thing that’s keeping the client.
Why hiring didn’t fix it for me
The obvious answer to a capacity problem is more people. That’s what I did. And more people is genuinely better in a lot of ways.
But every person you add is another handoff. Another shelf. When my team grew, the number of things sitting and waiting grew with it, not down.
That’s the bit nobody warns you about. You hire to go faster, and you get a faster team with a longer queue.
Which is why I stopped thinking about this as a people problem and started thinking about it as a movement problem. The question isn’t “who does the work.” It’s “what happens to the work in between the people.”
Everything we’ve built since comes from sitting with that question. Not how do you build a website faster, because building was never the slow part. How do you stop the work from sitting down.
Something that picks the baton up the moment it’s put down, at 4pm on a Friday, on the night you’re at your kid’s thing, is a different kind of team member than another pair of hands. It doesn’t have a queue of its own.
So if your projects drag even when the work is easy
Hear me out on this one, because I wish someone had said it to me a decade earlier.
It isn’t you. It never was.
You are not slow. You are not disorganised. You are running a relay where half the runners are standing still, and you’ve been blaming your own legs.
It was never the work. It was everything around it.
Next up I’ll show you what that gap was actually costing all of us, in money. I sat down with more than fifty agency owners to work it out, and the number was worse than I expected.
Where’s the shelf in your projects? I’d bet you already know which handoff it is. 🤘
