Creative operations is often packaged as a neat trifecta of people, process, and technology. But that framing misses the point entirely. In reality, creative ops isn't a software problem or a process chart—it’s a discipline rooted in human behavior, relationship-building, and organizational alignment. When process breaks down, it rarely looks like a crisis on paper; instead, it manifests as silent financial bleed, infinite revision loops, burnt-out talent, and millions of dollars quietly slipping out through payroll waste.

In this interview with Jesse Krinsky, the Founder of In Focus Consulting, we dive deep into the true mechanics of in-house creative teams. From why treating internal stakeholders as "clients" ruins strategic value, to quantifying the invisible costs of bad briefs, we explore what it actually takes to elevate a creative team from a passive order-taker to an indispensable, business-driving partner—especially when budget pressures hit.

CMO Council: There is no widely agreed-upon definition of “creative operations”. What does it mean to you?

JK: Creative ops is usually framed as a people/process/technology discipline. But I think that framing confuses the real challenge: people aren't one pillar among three; they're the variable that determines whether the other two work at all.

Creative ops is fundamentally about *behavior change and management*. An intake process only works if stakeholders believe submitting a complete brief actually benefits them. A tiering system only works if leadership actually defends it when someone important pushes back. Tools can’t fix those problems.

It’s about relationships, alignment, and understanding. Those are much harder conversations to have. And most people avoid them because they don’t lead to a quick solution that you can point to in a week or two. But those are the changes that have meaningful and long-term positive effects.  

CMO Council: How do you make the invisible cost of a broken creative process visible to leadership?

JK: Most in-house teams are losing massive amounts of money that no one is tracking. Even if there’s no chargeback system, every avoidable revision round costs real money: not just the designer's time, but the project manager coordinating it and the stakeholders who need to review work that should have been right the first time. That cost is already being paid out of payroll, it just never shows up as a line item.

I worked with a mid-size team running about five hundred projects a year that was averaging nine revision rounds per project. We added a structured intake process and mandatory kickoff meetings, and that dropped an average of three rounds. When we calculated the value of that savings, it came to over $2 million and 22,500 hours in the first year alone.

I built a calculator for teams to quantify how much money gets lost to operational waste. If you want to see your own team’s numbers, go to www.infocusconsulting.net/cost-calculator  

CMO Council: Should an in-house creative team model itself as an internal “agency”?

JK: Framing an in-house creative team as an agency carries major risks for the team, their stakeholders, and the business at-large - with almost no upside for anyone.

Agencies exist to serve their clients. When an in-house team adopts that frame, they're placed in a structurally subordinate position. The problem actually begins with the name, because language shapes behavior. When an internal stakeholder is called a “client”, the relationship comes with a set of assumptions: the client is always right, the client's needs come first, the job is to keep the client happy. That's fine in an external agency, where the business model is based on keeping the account. But inside an organization, it's dangerous. It signals a fundamental misunderstanding of an in-house team’s value prop, which is depth. They have the ability (or should, if they’re empowered) to understand a company - its goals, leaders, challenges, politics - better than an external agency ever could.

In short: agencies work for their clients, in-house teams work with their stakeholders.  

CMO Council: What happens to a creative team that never moves past order-taker status?

JK: An order-taking team executes the brief it's given, but nobody on that team has the context to catch a bad brief before it becomes a bad asset. That shows up as media spend wasted on creative that doesn't resonate, campaigns that might ship on time but don't impact the KPIs they were meant to, and messaging that's inconsistent across markets because no one owned the strategic thread connecting them. All of that results in a massive amount of value being left on the table.

There's a talent cost too. A team that's never treated as a strategic partner doesn't attract or keep people who think that way. You end up with a team that might be good at delivering, but never develops the judgment to push back on a flawed request, which is exactly the judgment that prevents expensive mistakes downstream.

And there's the outsourcing risk, which isn't really about cost savings. If an in-house team is downsized or cut, institutional knowledge leaves with them, including the accumulated understanding of what's worked, what's failed, and why, across every campaign the team has touched. An outside vendor doesn't have that, and rebuilding it can take years. 

CMO Council: As budget pressure forces cuts across marketing, which creative teams come out the other side stronger?

JK: I'm seeing a clear bifurcation. One group of teams is coming through this period stronger, because budget pressure is forcing conversations about value and measurement that should have happened years ago. The other group keeps getting cut until the model reforms or disappears. The determining factor typically comes down to one thing: can the team connect its work to outcomes that leadership cares about? It's rarely about ability or quality. Successful creative teams are primarily the ones whose leaders did the unglamorous work of 1) understanding their business’s drivers, 2) connecting creative work to those drivers, and 3) communicating the value of creative work in terms that resonate with leadership.

About Jesse Krinsky

Jesse Krinsky, the founder of In Focus Consulting, helps in-house creative teams move from order-takers to strategic partners with real impact on their organizations. He spent 20 years as a producer and creative strategist before founding In Focus Consulting, where he brings a business lens to a function too often treated as pure execution.

His work focuses on where creative work breaks down: incomplete briefs, unclear ownership, and rework that drains budgets and wrecks timelines. These problems trace back to how creative and marketing are set up to work together from the start.