case study
turning a team cut into a scalable creative engine
How restructuring saved six figures without losing quality.
60% smaller design team
75 clients & no creative churn
6-figure annual savings unlocked
2 designers promoted
overview
building a scalable, profitable team.
When margin pressure forced a 60% cut to my in-house design team, the easy answer would've been to just ask the two who stayed to work harder. I didn't do that. Instead, I rebuilt our entire creative production model — and turned a painful headcount reduction into the most scalable system the team has ever run.
challenge
do more, with less.
In late 2025, the agency I lead creative for needed to raise margins without sacrificing the service our clients had come to expect. That meant taking my design team from five people down to two, while keeping the same roughly 75 active clients fully serviced. No pressure, right?
solution
building the new engine.
Rather than stretch two designers to cover five people's workload, I stood up an offshore production team as our new engine — building every system it needed from scratch: SOPs, brand guidelines, a structured ticketing and QA process, and hands-on training. At the same time, I saw an opportunity in the two designers staying on. Instead of just asking them to produce more, I retrained them into Creative Strategists, building a new client-facing Creative Strategy Sheet and Tracker that gave our accounts something they'd never had before — structured performance reporting and a real testing roadmap.
impact
leaner, smarter, better.
Within a few months, the new model was carrying the majority of production at a fraction of the cost, contributing to six-figure annual savings. Our two strategists elevated the client experience with reporting they'd never received before, and our ~75 clients didn't just stay serviced — they got a better experience than before the change. What started as a forced headcount reduction became the operating model I later scaled across our broader agency network.
Leafside creative strategy pitch
I built a retention-minded creative strategy for LeafSide that reframed their meals from occasional purchase to easy health habit.
turning AI rollout into real adoption
Training six agencies to actually use new AI.
Vivrelle luxury creative strategy pitch
I developed a more strategic creative direction for Vivrelle that aligned tiered membership messaging, aspirational visuals, and post-click experience into one cohesive pitch.