Growing a design studio into multi-market programme work.

A small founder-led studio, doing good work, winning bigger briefs than the year before. The founders held the creative direction, the client relationships and the new business, which is exactly where founders should be. What was not yet built was everything that lets a studio absorb complexity without the founders having to be in every room.

Build enough shared structure for more of the team to hold responsibility reliably, so the studio could take on larger and more complicated programmes.

I started on the work already in front of us. Major accounts, digital builds, plans, budgets, timelines, resourcing, suppliers. Running the real thing tells you where the friction actually sits, and most of it was visibility: who owned what, what was coming, what had been agreed, what needed invoicing.

So we made it visible. Asana across delivery, Xero into the commercial operation, clearer project cadence, forward planning and new-business tracking. Then project ownership moved outward, juniors picked up more where they were ready for it, and some creative ownership moved further into the team.

I took the delivery side of the largest accounts, which kept the founders close to clients and the creative work rather than pulled into routing.

On new business I got more involved in pitches and proposals, mostly translating creative work back into the language of the business problem behind it. Good work does not automatically arrive as a good commercial argument.

The studio could see three to four weeks of work ahead with real confidence, which changed the shape of who could be trusted with what.

The clearest test was PepsiCo. The original commission was a nutrition-sciences platform combining digital content and educational material. As it expanded, so did the operating surface: multiple markets, localisation, UX, information architecture, legal approval, internal IT, deployment, regional stakeholders and a steady supply of dependencies with no interest in which part was the interesting creative bit. It needed approval stages, stakeholder mapping, risk management and proper change control.

The client later described me as:

Which is the right measure. The operating work is supposed to disappear into a better client experience. Nobody should have to admire the machinery.

I also introduced structure before the studio needed it, more than once.

That is an easy trap when you can see a future problem clearly. A better system on paper is not automatically a better intervention today, and the founders and I sometimes had different horizons. I would handle it differently now, by agreeing the horizon first. Thirty days, ninety, six months, a year. What hurts now, what is merely possible later, and what the organisation actually has the appetite to absorb.

Timing is part of the design.