Stories / Marketing Agency

Agency Owner: On-time delivery 98%, team retention up 60%

A full order book, a burnt-out delivery team and roughly a third of projects shipping late.

Anonymised at the client's request · figures verified · published with written permission

The situation

Revenue was up 40% year on year and the founder was working past midnight three nights a week to make delivery hold.

Every escalation route ended at the same person. Two senior people had resigned in six months, both citing 'chaos' rather than money.

There was no shortage of process documents. There was a shortage of anybody who believed the process documents described reality.

What we did

STEP 01
Mapped where work actually waited
We tracked eleven live projects for two weeks. 61% of elapsed project time was queue time — work sitting finished, waiting for a review nobody owned.
STEP 02
Wrote a RACI per account, on one page
Responsible, accountable, consulted, informed. Named humans, not job titles. Printed and pinned. Any project without one didn't get scheduled.
STEP 03
Fifteen minutes, standing, every morning
Three questions per account: what shipped, what's blocked, who unblocks it by when. Anything longer than two minutes became a separate conversation.
STEP 04
Killed the founder's approval bottleneck
Approval authority up to £5k moved to two account leads. The founder reviewed a weekly sample instead of every deliverable — hardest change of the whole engagement.

The numbers

Measured over 90 days

What didn't go to plan

One account lead couldn't work without the founder signing off and left in week seven. That was the right outcome, but it was not a comfortable one.

In their words

“I took a two-week holiday in month four and nothing caught fire. That had never happened in nine years.”

Founder · Marketing Agency

The lesson

Systems create freedom. Heroics create dependency.

Mapped where work actually waited