Last Minute BookingsOne person with a calendar has a perfect system, because the system is their memory. Two people have a system that mostly works. Six people have a problem that shows up as double bookings, and is really a problem about who owns which hour.
The three questions that break first
Who decides when someone works? With contractors, they do. That is most of the point, and it is also why a schedule you control centrally will be wrong within a fortnight.
Whose client is it? If a client books whoever is free and comes back asking for that person, is the relationship theirs or the studio’s? Decide before it matters, not during a disagreement.
Who fills a gap? When a contractor’s two o’clock cancels, that hour is their loss, in a room you are paying for. Neither of you is fully responsible for it, which is why it usually stays empty.
Fix availability before you fix anything else
Most people start with rosters and rules. Start instead with a single question: at any moment, can anyone see the truth about what is open, without asking a person?
If the answer is no, every other process you build sits on top of a guess. If the answer is yes, a surprising amount of the coordination stops being necessary. Contractors post their own hours. Gaps are visible without anyone reporting them. Nobody is the switchboard.
The order that works
- One source of truth for availability, that each person maintains themselves.
- Written answers to the client-ownership and gap-filling questions. One page is enough, and it is worth having before the first argument rather than after.
- Only then, pricing and commission. Those are easy to change later. Habits about the calendar are not.
Growing from one to twelve is mostly a question about who can see what. Get that right and the rest is arithmetic.
