Episode 11 brings Rich Summers back together with Johan Santos, fresh off onboarding a major client themselves the week before. The two have led dozens of studio onboardings between them, inside and outside their work together, and this episode pulls together what separates a tool launch that fades into old habits within months from one that genuinely changes how a studio works for years.

The last ten percent is the hard part

Most of an onboarding looks the same across clients. The standard practices transfer, the setup is familiar, and getting to ninety percent complete is, in Johan's words, fairly easy. What makes the difference is the final stretch: the edge cases, the processes a team forgot they still relied on, and the small details that only surface once someone actually tries to use the tool for their own specific job. This last ten percent is tedious rather than difficult, but skipping it is exactly what turns a promising launch into a frustrating one.

Treat the people side with as much care as the technology

It is easy to focus entirely on the software when a new tool comes into a studio, but the people side is where launches actually succeed or fail. Every department (photography, sample management, post-production, production planning and IT) needs a seat at the table before launch, not a piece of software thrown over the wall once it is ready. Giving teams ownership over how the process unfolds, rather than simply announcing a decision, is what determines whether people adopt a new way of working or quietly keep doing things the old way.

Team size changes the shape of this work rather than the amount of it. A small studio can move from one end of a workflow to the other in a single sitting, because one person often owns the whole process. Larger teams are more siloed, so launching a connected tool means structuring time with every stakeholder individually, in the order the workflow actually moves, so nobody is left waiting on a handover point nobody owns.

Watch for the warning signs before they become habits

The biggest early obstacle in any onboarding is the pull of "that's just how we've always done it." People are attached to the familiarity and security that comes with knowing exactly how something works, even when it is a spreadsheet held together with workarounds, not simply to the tool itself. The job is to bring people along early enough that they never need to fall back on the old way.

One clear warning sign is scope creep in reverse, when a team starts quietly carving parts of their process back out of the new tool and defaulting to email, spreadsheets or old habits instead. Sometimes that is a legitimate call. Often it signals a team that has not yet been brought fully into the new process and needs more time, not less, before launch.

Leadership sets the tone for the whole rollout

Nothing shifts a team's willingness to adopt a new tool faster than visible commitment from leadership. When management steps back entirely and expects a tool to onboard itself, adoption stalls. When leadership shows up, brings its own experience into the workshops, and makes calls where needed, the tool launches already refined, because the people with the broadest view of the studio have shaped it from the start.

That does not mean leadership should dictate every decision. The best studio leaders let their teams own the detail within their own scope of work, and step in only when a choice has consequences that ripple into other departments, or when deliberation is taking longer than the business can afford.

Momentum matters more than perfect timing

There is no single right answer to how long an onboarding should take, because team size and complexity genuinely change the picture. A large, hundred-plus studio with many specialised roles will need longer than a small team where a handful of people make every decision. As a rough guide, larger teams should be aiming to complete onboarding within two to three months, while a small, well-prepared studio can go live in a matter of days.

The deciding factor is momentum. Long onboardings invite fatigue, and fatigue is where people disengage, change roles, or simply lose the thread of why the change was happening in the first place. The right approach is to plan thoroughly, then move with pace once implementation begins, so the whole team feels the change arriving rather than drifting toward it over months.

Choose a tool that is easy to trust and easy to use

A tool earns adoption fastest when people can predict exactly how it will behave with their own data, and when the interface itself requires very little explanation. The clearest sign of a tool working is watching someone encounter it for the first time and know immediately where to click. If a team needs extensive hand-holding to find their way around, it points to a design problem with the tool itself, not a training gap in the team.

Training time still matters, especially for larger teams, because adopting a new system takes time on top of everyone's existing workload, at least until the new way of working becomes second nature.

You are buying a partnership, not just a tool

The team delivering an onboarding matters as much as the software itself. Studios should ask directly who will be doing the implementation, whether they have done it before, and whether they come from the same world the studio operates in. A vendor's team with real studio, photography or production experience will challenge assumptions constructively, rather than simply agreeing to every request just to get a launch over the line.

That distinction matters because a vendor that says yes to everything is rarely thinking beyond the immediate ask. A good partner understands the problem a studio is trying to solve, brings experience from other teams to bear on it, and is willing to say when a different approach will serve the studio better long term. These are not relationships built for a year or two. The studios that get the most value treat a tool partnership the way they would treat any long-term hire, built to grow alongside the business for years.

Think in terms of handovers, not just individual roles

Every specialist team in a studio, from merchandising and sample management through to photography, styling, production planning and post-production, needs the right tool for their specific job. This part is usually well understood. What gets missed more often is how work actually moves between those teams. A tool serving each department brilliantly in isolation can still create a bottleneck if the handover between photography and post, or between sample management and production, is left unaddressed. Mapping this flow, and making sure every handover point is accounted for, is often where the real value of a new system shows up.

Advice for studio directors bringing in a new tool

Looking at a launch in isolation from the people and processes around it is the first mistake to avoid. The goal of any new tool is to remove blockers and free up time for the work that actually generates value, not simply to digitise an existing way of working.

A closely related point is resisting the urge to recreate an old workflow inside a new system. Doing so tends to produce the same process with a different interface and a higher bill attached. The studios that get the most out of a new tool are the ones willing to rethink a process rather than simply port it across.

Long-term thinking should guide every decision made during onboarding, not just the choices that affect the first few months. A setup that works today but was not built with the next few years in mind will need revisiting sooner than expected, and the person inheriting that setup deserves a platform they can build on rather than one they have to rebuild.

Finally, resist the instinct to chase perfection before launch. Aim for the bulk of the benefit, roughly eighty to ninety percent, and treat the remaining refinements as work that continues after go-live. Momentum is more valuable than a flawless first day.

One question to ask before signing

Before committing to any vendor, ask who exactly will be delivering the onboarding, what their track record looks like, and whether it is possible to speak with other studios they have worked with. Implementation is a close cousin to consultancy, and the people doing the work matter as much as the product they are deploying.

Equally important is making sure the studio's own team understands that the leadership backing this change is genuine, and that everyone involved is open to challenging old habits along the way. A vendor can guide a rollout, but only a studio's own leadership can set that tone from the top down.