The Studio & Ecommerce Collective
The Studio & E-commerce Collective is the podcast for studio and e-commerce production leaders. Hosted by Rich Summers, CEO and co-founder of Lets Flo, each episode digs into the real challenges of running high volume e-commerce studios, from sample management and shoot workflows to scaling content production without losing your mind. Featuring conversations with studio directors, production managers, photographers and the people who actually do the work, this is honest, practical and built for the people on the studio floor, not the boardroom. Part of The Studio & E-commerce Collective, an industry community bringing together events, a newsletter and this podcast.
The Studio & Ecommerce Collective
#5 Putting a Number on Studio Chaos
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Most studio leaders already know where the time is going. Chasing approvals, reconciling spreadsheets, answering status requests that should never have needed to be asked. The problem is not identifying it. It is quantifying it in a way that the business will act on.
In this solo episode, Rich walks through the methodology behind the Studio Chaos Calculator, a tool built from over a hundred studio visits that helps studio leaders put a real figure on what operational inefficiency is costing their teams. Five categories: status chasing, data reconciliation, rework, manual admin for creatives, and visibility overhead. Each one a drain that compounds quietly across every product, every shoot, every launch.
The Studio Tax is not a people problem. It is a systems problem. But without a number attached to it, it rarely gets the investment it deserves.
This episode gives you the framework to build that case. Medium-sized studio teams are typically losing between £250,000 and £750,000 a year to this overhead. Most do not know it until they run the numbers.
The Studio Chaos Calculator is free to use at letsflo.co/the-collective. It takes around five minutes and produces a breakdown you can take straight to the business.