From ad-hoc leadership patterns to a named weekly and quarterly rhythm.
A 25-person growth marketing agency had the pieces of a leadership rhythm without the rhythm itself. A pod structure existed. A Monday leadership huddle existed. But initiatives routed through the founder by default, and the question of what the leadership team did the rest of the week didn’t have a clean answer. I built named channels for the four distinct kinds of work the functional leaders do.
The situation
Ad Pros is a 25-person growth marketing agency. A pod structure already existed when I arrived: two client-facing pods plus a floating function. A Monday leadership huddle existed, inherited from the prior VP of Operations, with a Google-Sheet-based quarterly ops cadence that had mostly fallen out of use.
What didn’t exist was the shape of the leadership week. Initiatives routed through the founder by default because there was no agreed channel for where a Creative or Growth project should live, be discussed, or be decided on. Growth leaders reported being bogged down by client-meeting prep, spread too thin, and, in their own words from a pulse survey, “always doing, never analyzing.”
What I built
- A Monday pod huddle structure for pod leads. A fixed weekly meeting for the two pod leads and their teams: review client performance against month-to-date targets using a shared dashboard with green and red flags, triage Big Moves (the agency’s term for cross-functional initiatives), walk through the SOP list. Same agenda, same shape, linked to a persistent URL.
- Explicit channel mapping for leadership work. Slack for communication, ClickUp for documentation, Monday huddles for high-level strategy, and Slack or ad-hoc huddles for problem-solving and troubleshooting. Named in the leadership meeting, referenced when the group had to decide where a given item belonged.
- A quarterly ops cadence overhaul. Migrated the inherited Google-Sheet cadence into ClickUp so it lived in the system the team used daily, and agency operations tasks were served to leaders alongside their intra-departmental and client work. Aligned it to the quarterly OKR cycle plus the weekly pod and leadership rhythms, so a quarterly goal could be traced into the week it was worked on and the Monday it was reviewed.
- Various instruments to centralize operations. SDR daily activity tracker, OKR tracker, Growth team meeting structure, Creative production pipelines, Data insights intake and QA process, standardized Recruiting pipelines. All built and tracked in ClickUp.
The outcome
Goal-tracking collapsed from 40+ metrics to 9 core KPIs, returning roughly 40 hours a month of leadership time that had been going into reporting maintenance. Pod leads walked into Mondays with a clean signal on client performance and spent the meeting on decisions, not on reconciling numbers.
The channel mapping de-bottlenecked the founder. Creative and Growth projects stopped defaulting to the founder’s inbox because the leadership group had a documented answer to “where does this live, where do we discuss it, where do we decide it.” Big Moves got triaged inside the huddle instead of after it, so initiatives left with an owner and a next step instead of a follow-up thread.
Moving the quarterly cadence into ClickUp is what kept it alive. The Google Sheet version had quietly died because nobody opened the sheet during the workday. In ClickUp, agency-ops tasks served themselves to leaders alongside client and intra-departmental work, which is why the cadence stuck to the quarterly OKR cycle instead of slipping again.
A November 2025 pulse survey confirmed the structure side was working and flagged capacity as the remaining problem, which ran on its own parallel workstream.