Repositioning a global agency from capacity to expertise.
Built the strategic position, product suite, research function, and marketing engine that transformed a 250-person agency from flexible BPO to cultural intelligence firm.
I joined 1021 Creative, a 250-person global cultural intelligence agency, as the VP of a division that didn’t exist yet. The company had a decade of strong work behind it for major consumer platforms, but it sold itself by what it could spin up rather than by what it knew. The de facto pitch was a flexible BPO: tell us what you need, we’ll build the team. That model was working, but it had a ceiling, and the largest client was starting to ask questions the company couldn’t credibly answer about its technical depth.
My mandate was to give the company a coherent market position. The work landed on “cultural intelligence firm” as the new spine. We provide the intelligence engine, sold at whatever depth of integration the client needs. The flexible delivery model didn’t go away, but now it had something to sell.
We codified the offering into a product suite with defined tiers and pricing, replacing adhoc scoping. Built the calculators, the frameworks, the SOPs. Created a stable of standardized proposals. Tightened pricing discipline. Meeting-to-proposal turnaround went from weeks to days.
In parallel, we stood up the company’s first research & intelligence function, in direct response to the largest client raising concerns about technical capability. We built it across new tools, a senior data hire, contract analysts, and the company’s inaugural upskilling program in partnership with HR. The function protected $13M in annualized revenue from the largest client and closed the gap between what sales was promising and what delivery could credibly produce.
I also founded and chaired the Marketing Cohort, a cross-functional group that ran 1021’s marketing strategy and execution end to end. Out of it, we built an employee newsroom: a stable of contributors drawn from the actual expertise inside the company, producing a consistent stream of marketing and thought leadership content the business hadn’t had before. Content cadence went from a couple posts a month to several per week, and industry event presence tripled YoY. The Cohort was how the company finally had a marketing function running on intention rather than adhoc cycles.
Productization, function build, and marketing under one strategic spine. This was foundational to the company’s transformation from flexible service shop to cultural intelligence leader.