we deleted the color grading and nobody noticed

today a guest who runs a video content operation walked me through how she cuts waste. it's her own version of a five step algorithm, in the spirit of the one elon musk made famous.

and her example was so simple it hurt.

color grading.

on a typical ten hour video project, color grading was eating about four hours. nearly half the job. and when she looked back, some of her best performing videos had never been color graded at all.

so she cut it. nobody noticed.

if you've been searching for how to eliminate waste in business processes, start with her first insight, because it reframes everything. compare the total time spent on a task to the total time it takes to deliver. ten hours of real work delivered over a week means the rest of that week is what she calls uncaptured potential value. the work isn't slow. the waiting is.

then the steps.

step one, question every requirement. she uses three questions. what does that mean? how do you know that? so what?

color grading failed all three. what does it mean... the video looks more polished. how do you know that matters... we didn't, we assumed. so what... the ungraded videos did fine. gone.

step two is the one most people flinch at. in her words, "we delete the stuff that doesn't matter. we should delete so much that we have to add some back later."

if you never have to add anything back, you didn't delete enough. and deletion is rarely irreversible. you can always turn color grading back on. you can't get back the four hours you spent on every video for a year.

step three, simplify what's left. only then do you speed it up, because there's no point accelerating a step that shouldn't exist.

step four, accelerate. her trick for that is small and brutal. close every meeting with who, what, when. who owns it, what exactly, by when. half the drag in any company is meetings that end in a vibe instead of an owner.

her math on quality is the part founders need to hear. she'd rather make one and a half videos at ninety four percent quality than one video at a hundred percent.

most of us are paying full price for that last six percent. and the customer can't see it.

it's like a restaurant ironing the napkins. lovely. nobody's coming back for the napkins. they're coming back for the food and the person who greeted them by name.

this matters more now that ai is in every workflow. the temptation is to automate every step you already have. automate the color grading, automate the extra review, automate the report nobody reads. that's just doing waste faster.

delete first. then automate what survives.

try it on one process this week. pick the thing your team does every time without asking why. run it through her three questions out loud, with the person who owns it in the room. if nobody can answer so what, turn it off for a month and see who complains.

most of the time, nobody does. and the hours you get back go into the work your customers can see.

long term, the companies that win won't be the ones with the most tools. they'll be the ones with the fewest steps... and the guts to keep cutting.

i keep my own version of this, how i run the show and the business with as few moving parts as possible, in the playbook.

so what's the color grading in your week... the four hours you'd never miss if you just stopped?