One swing of the hammer

A sculptor stands in front of a rough block of marble. Inside, a perfect statue waits to be revealed… But to find it, she just has to start chipping away.

At first, it’s messy. Dust flies, chunks fall, and by the end of the day, her “sculpture” barely resembles anything identifiable. But with each pass, she sees what works, what doesn’t, where to cut deeper, and what to smooth over.

Processes are like that, too.

If you ask most agency owners, they’ll say they need SOPs and processes in place. And, in a perfect world, we’d just open a blank doc and crank out everything in a logical order, smooth and ready to go in one pass.

With expectations like that, it’s no wonder a lot of us never get very far documenting our processes — it’s just unrealistic.

The process, like sculpting, is messy.

I learned this firsthand while working on my Layout to Live series, building our Black Friday page from scratch. After creating hundreds of sites using the same stack, I thought it’d be easy to just hit record and go. But within minutes, I realized the audience was getting whiplash from all my back-and-forth moves — jumping around and doubling back to fix things I’d missed.

So, I scrapped that recording, started over, and jotted down each step, one by one, to follow as I recorded. It felt like wasted time at first, and my initial list was a disaster. Even though I’d done this work dozens of times, the number of steps was just too much to keep organized from memory alone.

But that “shitty first draft” was the turning point. That rough list made it obvious where I needed to organize, refine, and optimize.

When it comes to creating processes, it’s easy to throw in the towel halfway through because you expect it to be right the first time. But if you embrace the first draft as just that — a rough starting point — then you can chip away until the real process is revealed.

The sculpter didn’t expect her perfect vision to come to life with one swing of the hammer — and we can’t either.

Once you get that first rough draft down, momentum takes over. And, just like that sculptor, you start to see exactly where you need to adjust.