Notes on Agency Ops.
Diagnosing and fixing broken agency infrastructure.
An ops audit and overhaul playbook scoped for a hypothetical 10 to 50 person advertising agency. Six pain points diagnosed, eight initiatives proposed across mindset, decision rights, performance metrics, utilization, intake, documentation, client satisfaction, and automation.
From ad-hoc leadership patterns to a named weekly and quarterly rhythm.
Built the leadership operating cadence: Monday pod huddles with month-to-date client performance, an explicit channel mapping between Slack, ClickUp, and synchronous huddles, and a quarterly ops cadence migrated from a spreadsheet into the work system itself.
Fractional ops for a category design studio.
Hardened the delivery spine at a small category design studio ahead of an Executive Producer handoff: a team-wide listening tour, a rewritten project briefing and kickoff SOP, variance tracking in ClickUp, and a roles-and-responsibilities framework for the incoming partner to own.
A task force built around one question: do cross-functional teams collaborate well?
A company-wide pulse put cross-functional collaboration satisfaction at only 11%, down from 50% the prior July. I initiated and led a task force to improve it: baseline survey, theme analysis, scored idea pipeline, five-phase rollout, and a cross-pillar coordination rhythm. A repeat survey with a 10-percentage-point improvement target came in at 2x that.
Scaling a studio to meet demands across 20+ deliverable categories.
I rebuilt the SLA for an in-house creative center of excellence at a large financial services firm. Afterwards, stakeholders could plan against a matrix instead of negotiating many of their requests.
From an embedded team to a formalized 45-person studio.
I took the small in‑house creative arm of an AdTech SaaS company and built it into a global studio with a departmental structure, assigned leadership areas, a hiring pipeline, and a cadence of weekly, monthly, and quarterly operating rhythms.
How I eliminated role ambiguity in a 30-person creative team.
I inherited a career ladder and role cards format from my predecessor, which my team found to be ambiguous and hard to understand. Every other department also used a separate, unique framework. I set out to standardize and simplify my department’s career framework, and to set an example for the rest of the company.
Try as you might, timesheets will never be accurate.
Asking employees to track time spent against certain clients, projects, or task types often appears to be the logical solution when one wants to evaluate the profitability of their agency’s services. But does it yield reliable data?
Erik can seamlessly move between dealing with the C-Suite team right down to rolling his sleeves up and getting into the dirt if necessary. He mentored me from being a mid-level Project Manager into a Senior Creative Producer.
I start from scratch where others start from templates.
My scope can flex from being a monthly advisor to a fully embedded Head of Ops. Every engagement starts with two free thirty-minute calls. See how I could help you.
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