Diagnosing and Fixing Broken Agency Infrastructure

Scenario

To set the stage, we assume that an established small ad agency (somewhere between 10 to 50 employees) has approached me for advice on how they can solve a collection of perceived operations issues.

Those pain points are:

1. The agency in general appears to exhibit a “task completion mindset” and feels stuck in “survival mode”, which greatly limits the strategic planning foresight and the quality of strategic recommendations to the agency’s client. A maturation towards a “strategic mindset” is desired.

2. While the agency has grown its headcount significantly over the past few years, it’s management and decision making structure has not evolved. To this day, all day-to-day decisions are made by 2-3 functional leaders, which creates workflow bottlenecks. Leadership desires an increase in autonomy and ownership of middle managers.

3. To remain competitive in the market, leadership is wondering if there are any operational changes that could result in increased creative work quality.

4. The agency is experiencing underutilization and would like to address it in order to increase productivity.

5. Standardization of processes, templates, and best practices is perceived to be lacking.

6. Clients of this agency are notoriously performing poorly when it comes to providing strategic context in their agency briefs, and vague in their feedback during production. They also tend to churn rather quickly (in less than 1 year).

My Proposal

In this scenario, I see key initiatives in eight areas to be set in motion:

1. Strategic Mindset Shift

2. Bottlenecks & Decisions

3. Creative Performance Metrics

4. Utilization & Resourcing

5. Intake & Approvals

6. Process Documentation

7. Client Satisfaction

8. Automation & AI

1. Strategic Mindset Shift

Problem

The agency is stuck in a task completion mindset. Teams often continue doing what hasn’t worked instead of pivoting. Work isn’t of high strategic quality.

Solution

1. Implement a Creative Strategy Lab: Weekly sessions where Strategists and Creatives proactively experiment with new creative concepts based on trend analysis, competitor research, and past performance data.

2. Embed a Strategy Checkpoint before creative execution, where Strategists must justify how each concept will contribute to significant breakthroughs in the client’s marketing strategy. Make this part of the agency’s SOP on all project schedule templates.

3. Introduce structured Creative Retrospectives to analyze why creative concepts failed or succeeded in the market and ensure learnings are applied in future projects. Do this ideally after the conclusion of every project, but at least once per quarter on every client.

2. Bottlenecks & Decisions

Problem

Heavy reliance on functional leads for decisions creates bottlenecks. The current hierarchical decision-making slows down execution.

Solution

1. Redesign approval hierarchies to empower middle managers (= direct reports of the functional leads) to make decisions about the work without needing top-level sign-off. Create a feedback loop for review of decisions made in weekly 1:1’s between functional leads and their direct reports, where past decisions can be reviewed, and advice can be given for future decisions.

2. Create pre-approved playbooks and decision trees so project teams can make informed calls without escalating every issue. Document these in the agency’s curated knowledge base.

   Examples

   • If client tenure > 1 month, allow middle manager to approve. Else functional lead must approve.

   • If most recent client NPS ≥ 7, allow middle manager to approve. Else functional lead must approve.

3. Restructure internal workflows to reflect new autonomy levels and track accountability.

   • Create or modify automated workflow routing rules to assign approval task to middle manager, integrating logic of aforementioned decision trees.

   • Set automatic deadlines for approvals.

3. Creative Performance Metrics

Problem

Data visibility issues: Internal dashboards for operations are weak compared to client-facing ones. Creative team does not consistently track time or resource allocation.

Solution

1. Audit existing list of metrics and evaluate for relevance and coverage of all company-level goals. If needed, retire or modify existing metrics, or implement new ones. “What gets measured get’s done.”

2. Improve internal dashboard to provide real-time visibility on creative performance (e.g. using Looker, Tableau, or any existing workflow management tool, if possible).

3. Communicate trend evolution of metrics to the entire agency regularly and transparently. This aligns everyone’s motivation and engagement behind shared goals.

4. Utilization & Resourcing

Problem

Team is underutilized due to inefficiencies in workflow, strategy bottlenecks, and lack of clear resource planning. Perceived utilization is between 50%–70%, but ideally should be 90%+. Actual utilization is not measured (i.e. no timesheets). Capacity planning is not granular. There is no knowledge about how many projects or clients an individual can handle. No formal tracking of resource allocation per client, therefore lacking ability to attribute staff cost to client revenue.

Solution

Implement a standardized Creative Workload Model:

1. One option is to assign point values to each creative task, e.g. 3 points for high complexity tasks like the creation of a net-new creative concept, 2 points for a medium complexity task like the production of a concept resize, and 1 point for a low complexity task like addressing client feedback.

2. Each team member is assigned a daily maximum capacity, e.g. 7 points. Incoming client work is then assigned based on available capacity (i.e. “who can fit in a 3 point task by Friday?”) rather than existing subjective conventions.

5. Intake & Approvals

Problem

Creative requests from clients lack strategic depth. Too much reliance on informal approvals by clients. Revisions can be excessive, with some clients having too much input and others giving none.

Solution

1. Review the client briefing intake process: Ensure that a standardized creative briefing template (which ideally is a ClickUp form, so that briefing information flows into the internal workflow automatically) includes must-have inputs before any work can start. Require strategic alignment upfront. A kickoff call or form submission where clients articulate business goals, not just requests.

2. Set revision limits to reduce endless back-and-forth with difficult clients (e.g., 2 revision rounds max unless explicitly contracted otherwise). Consider introducing flat fee up-charges per extra round on the most notorious accounts. Emphasize the benefit of faster execution when revision limits are adhered to.

6. Process Documentation

Problem

SOPs exist, but are weak in several areas across the agency. Project types are not standardized, meaning no clear templates exist for common work streams. The workflow management tool is cluttered with outdated documentation, affecting efficiency.

Solution

1. Develop (or review and centralize, if the information already exists) an Operations Playbook, documenting standardized project types and execution workflows, role-based responsibilities and handoffs, and KPIs with their tracking methodologies.

2. Review and edit existing documentation, focusing on creating a cleaner, structured hierarchy for active work and best practices.

3. Implement templates for repeatable tasks and workflows in your workflow management tool.

7. Client Satisfaction

Problem

Clients do not proactively provide feedback unless prompted, making it hard to improve service quality. Current feedback system relies on occasional surveys, which don’t get completed.

Solution

1. Prepare and host Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and establish them as the designated arena for relationship-level (i.e. not project-level) client feedback. Agree with clients to prepare feedback for each other, and split presentation time equally between agency and client.

2. Shift to live feedback sessions on projects where clients have been known to provide little to no feedback. Make client attendance a mandatory blocker on the schedule. This might feel rigid and painful at first, but clients will eventually appreciate the speed increase and higher satisfaction with the work, thanks to their participation.

3. Automate the delivery of a customer satisfaction survey to the client as soon as a project launches. To increase completion rate, two characteristics of the survey are extremely important: it has to be simple and short (= no freeform text fields), and agency account managers have to tout the mutual benefit for both sides of the minute spent completing a survey. Use NPS methodology. Ask clients to rate the agency’s performance on quality of strategic insights, on-brief character of creative work, speed of project execution, and quality of customer service.

4. Track client sentiment trends on client-facing Success Dashboards. Capture key qualitative feedback from QBRs there as well.

5. Identify early warning signals for at-risk clients, e.g. if the rolling average NPS in any of the four measured categories dips by 2 points or more over the course of one quarter, or whenever the primary client stakeholder changes, automatically trigger an internal account review and planning session with agency leadership.

8. Automation & AI

Problem

Automation features of tools already in use are currently underutilized. AI tools for creative production and testing have been explored but are not yet fully adopted. Agency doesn’t take advantage of an AI assistant to serve up proprietary knowledge from it’s internal knowledge base.

Solution

1. Automate routine workflows, e.g.

   Auto-create new projects based on client intake form submissions.

   Auto-assign work based on capacity.

   Auto-update project statuses based on approvals.

   Auto-route tasks to next owner based on project schedule.

   Auto-notify clients of overdue feedback/approval responses.

   Auto-forecast project milestones based on chosen project template mapped against current team capacity.

   Auto-deliver client satisfaction surveys after every launch.

2. Test and implement AI-powered creative production and testing tools as they mature, e.g. smartly.io or superads.io.

3. Utilize the intranet’s available AI assistant, so that agency users can query the platform for relevant insights more easily, making the discovery of good content in the vast repository less reliant on a cleanly organized index or folder structure (which is a pain point today).

Conclusion

Every creative services business is faced with unique challenges, and there never is a one-size-fits-all approach to solving them. I like being a creative problem solver and first-principles thinker, who finds the missing links between various aspects of a firm.

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