The bottleneck in expert-driven content is never the writing. It is never the editing. It is never even the research, though the research is bad enough. It is getting a busy subject matter expert to block thirty minutes on their calendar for someone they have never met, do not report to, and whose email sits approximately three hundred items below whatever fire they are currently putting out. Livia Hirsch, a B2B content strategist who helps scale-ups expand into the US market, has spent the better part of seven years converting this from a willpower problem into a process problem. In a conversation with Sophie Steffen, she laid out the workflow with the sort of clarity that makes you wonder why everyone else is still doing it the hard way.
The Real Bottleneck: Getting the Expert to Show Up
Let us be honest about the politics of the situation. You are a freelance content strategist. You need forty-five minutes with a VP of Engineering who has back-to-back meetings until 2027 and who regards your email with roughly the same enthusiasm they reserve for a LinkedIn message from a recruiter. Hirsch understands this dynamic with the weary precision of someone who has lived it repeatedly, and her solution has an elegant simplicity that borders on the obvious – which is precisely why almost nobody does it.
She never makes the initial outreach herself. Instead, she has the client’s internal contact – someone the SME already knows, already trusts, already responds to within the day – send the introduction email with three calendar slots pre-loaded. The outsider does not send the cold email. The insider does. An email from a stranger at a partner agency gets buried beneath seventeen Jira notifications. An email from the person who signs the partnership agreement gets a response by Thursday.
“I’m already an outsider from their inner circle. I’m the bottom of their to-do list. I’m the bottom of their email list. And so I have the person that they know reach out and put us in contact via email with a calendar link already.”
This is not a hack. It is not a “growth tip.” It is an acknowledgment that organizational hierarchies are real, that attention is a scarce resource, and that pretending otherwise while firing off optimistic cold emails is a recipe for a project timeline that stretches into geological time. Hirsch has simply stopped pretending and started routing around the problem.
The Four-Step Pipeline
Once the interview is actually scheduled – and Hirsch is candid that steps one and two, organizing the time and doing the interview, are considerably harder than anyone imagines – the rest of the workflow is deliberately stripped back to the studs:
Step 1: Pre-interview questions. Hirsch sends questions to the SME via Google Docs before the call. This is not mere courtesy. The SME frequently corrects terminology or flags emerging trends at this stage, which redirects the piece before a single word of draft exists. It is cheaper to discover on page one that your entire angle is wrong than to discover it on page twelve.
Step 2: Interview on Google Meet. Filmed, transcribed. No separate recording tool, no third-party transcription service. Google Meet generates the transcript. The stack remains lean to the point of austerity, which at this point feels like a deliberate philosophical position.
Step 3: Draft in Google Docs. Written by Hirsch from the transcript, shared with the SME – and here is where the workflow gets quietly brilliant – with commentator access only.
Step 4: High-level review. The SME can flag factual errors and disagreements. They cannot rewrite your sentences. They cannot, as Hirsch puts it, decide they do not like the term “magenta” and would prefer “deep purple.” They can tell you that you misunderstood a technical concept. They cannot conduct an impromptu masterclass in their preferred prose style.
The commentator-only permission is doing the heavy lifting in this entire operation. It is the difference between receiving useful expert feedback and receiving an SME’s unprompted rewrite of your introduction, complete with seventeen semicolons and the phrase “leveraging synergies” inserted where you had written something a human might actually want to read.
The Closed-Loop Model
The workflow only stays clean because Hirsch enforces what she calls a closed loop, which is a polite way of saying she has constructed a fortress against the natural tendency of organizations to turn every document into a democratic experiment. One designated person on the client side acts as the go-between. Feedback comes from two people maximum: the contact and the SME. Nobody else gets an opinion. Nobody else gets access to the document. Nobody from marketing wanders in on a Thursday afternoon to suggest that maybe the piece should “lean into the thought leadership angle a bit more.”
Fifteen stakeholders offering competing notes on tone, structure, and word choice is not collaboration. It is a Google Doc that has achieved sentience and is now holding the project hostage. Hirsch avoids this by defining the feedback loop before the first draft exists, which is the organizational equivalent of locking the doors before the party gets out of hand.
Version Control: Three Files, No Branching
The versioning system is so aggressively simple it almost reads as satire of the enterprise approach. File one: V1. File two: renamed “with edits.” File three: “final version.” All in one Google Drive folder. No approval chains. No automated workflows. No project management layer bolted on top like a decorative turret on a perfectly functional building.
This only works because the feedback loop is closed. When two people maximum are providing input, you do not need a tool to manage the volume. You do not need a Kanban board. You do not need a status field with nine possible states. The process scales through discipline, not software – a sentence that presumably causes physical discomfort to anyone who has recently signed a five-figure SaaS contract.
The White Paper Bottleneck Is Identical
The same pattern repeats at larger scale with white papers, where the bottleneck is still the review, just amplified by the sheer tonnage of the document. A twenty- or thirty-page white paper is not something anyone reviews on their lunch break, no matter how many times the project timeline optimistically assumes otherwise. Getting a client to sit down and actually read the thing is, Hirsch confirms, consistently where the process stalls.
Her countermeasure is to front-load the alignment. She sends an outline with research before writing a single paragraph of draft. The outline gets approved first, so the review of the finished piece is about execution, not direction. Nobody discovers on page eighteen that the strategic angle was wrong. Nobody suggests starting over because they have had a revelation about their brand positioning during a weekend retreat. The unglamorous truth is that the best content workflows are not built around better tools. They are built around fewer opinions, clearer permissions, and the willingness to accept that not everyone needs to be in the room.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Livia Hirsch.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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