Wildgrove stopped losing Fridays to “did they ever approve this?”

“We were not disorganised. We were organised in fourteen places at once, and none of them agreed.”Bryn Salter, founder, Wildgrove

The Tuesday question

Ask most agency owners which posts are currently stuck and you get a pause, then a search through an inbox. Wildgrove ran fourteen restaurant clients from one shared spreadsheet, a tab each, with a column headed “approved?” that somebody filled in by hand after reading an email.

It held together at four clients. At fourteen the honest answer to “what is waiting on the client?” was that nobody knew without twenty minutes of digging, and the answer changed depending on whose inbox you searched.

What was actually costing them

• Feedback arrived as prose. “Can we change the second one” sent a designer guessing, and half the time they guessed wrong, which turned one round into three.
• Approvals were verbal as often as written. When a client later objected to a post that had gone out, there was nothing to point at. That conversation is unwinnable.
• Nothing surfaced until it was late. A post stalled on a client for eight days and nobody noticed until the calendar had a hole in it.

What changed

Each client got its own workspace, built from a template rather than assembled from scratch, so the board structure, the posting cadence and the approval rules arrived with it. That part saved hours. The part that changed how the week feels was the queue.

One screen now shows everything awaiting a client and everything awaiting the team, across all fourteen workspaces, sorted by how long it has been sitting. The Tuesday question has an answer you can read in four seconds.

Feedback moved onto the work itself. A client puts a comment on the exact point in the image or the exact second in the video, so the ambiguity that generated most of Wildgrove’s rework simply stopped being possible.

Where they are now

Sign-off averages three days instead of nine. Every approval is recorded against a name, a version and a timestamp, so “who signed off on this?” is one click rather than an argument. And the report goes out on the 1st without anyone building it.