When Your Whole Video Team Is One Person
Every enterprise has a Steve: the one talented video person who ends up carrying marketing, HR, comms, sales and L&D at once. Chad Lakin explains why the fix is rarely one more hire, and what an operating model that absorbs demand looks like instead.
"We have an internal video team." Great. How big is the team? "...Steve."
If you have worked in enterprise marketing, you have met Steve. He is talented. He is passionate. And within a few weeks, he is underwater. Marketing needs campaigns. HR needs recruitment videos. Internal comms has announcements. Sales wants customer stories. L&D needs training content. One person quietly becomes the bottleneck for an entire organization.
In this clip, Chad Lakin, Senior Vice President of Growth at Shootsta, explains why this happens so often, and why hiring one more creative person rarely fixes it. The real work is designing an operating model where demand can grow without burning out your team.
Watch the clip above, then here is why the one-person video team hits a wall, and what to do instead.
Why does one video hire turn into a bottleneck?
Nobody plans it. You hire one capable person to make video, and word gets around fast. Suddenly every team in the building has found the video person, and every request is reasonable on its own.
The trouble is that a single queue cannot hold five departments at once. Marketing, HR, internal comms, sales and L&D all want video in the same week, and they all want it now. Each brief is small. Together they are a full-time job several times over. The requests do not slow down to match one person's capacity, so the backlog grows and the calendar slips.
What does that cost you, beyond the backlog?
The obvious cost is speed: videos that should ship in days take weeks. The quieter cost is your person. Talented creatives who spend every hour in the edit queue stop doing the work you hired them for, the ideas and the craft, and start burning out on volume. A single hire is also a single point of failure. When Steve takes leave, the whole video function stops. We go deeper on that ceiling in why one videographer cannot scale video.
Why isn't the answer to hire another Steve?
A second hire buys you a few months. Then demand catches up again, because it keeps growing while headcount does not. Every hire is a fixed cost that still cannot flex to the busy weeks, and it sits idle in the quiet ones. You end up over-staffed for the average month and still under water at the peaks. The math on that trade-off is laid out in what in-house video editing actually costs and whether to bring video production in-house.
