What Gets Lost When Creative Agencies Scale, and How to Get It Back
By Amie Pascal
For many creative agencies, the first few years are a period of passion and intuition. A small group of talented people work with a handful of clients, and a day-to-day emerges that runs on trust, competence, and everyone knowing everyone’s name. Great work gets done collaboratively and easily with the right person, who is only three desks away. New projects land because someone’s direct relationship with a client is strong. It’s an organic system that works beautifully…until it doesn’t.
I’ve led and advised creative organizations for years, ranging from tiny boutique studios to 50-person in-house design groups to agencies pushing into the hundreds, giving me a first-hand view of how scale affects work in the creative industry. The trajectory I often see is both tragic and familiar, with a small, talented group growing rapidly, then coming apart at the seams as it scales up, a victim of its own rapid success.
But I’ve also seen it play out differently. Along with my NoCo partner, Tsilli Pines, I’ve experienced a version of growth that keeps creative at the center, and lets the agency benefit from the resources and project variety that scale affords, yet continue to produce great work (and be a great place to work). We were both fortunate enough to see and help drive this kind of transition first-hand—and now teach key approaches to leaders looking to preserve quality alongside scale.
Something happens at the forty-person mark.
When I joined the digital agency Instrument in early 2009, it was a studio of about ten people, with incredible skill, tremendous passion, and very few systems in place. The studio ran on the labor of a few people wearing many hats. One of the founders ran to the Apple Store on my first day to get me a laptop; one of the developers managed our servers. As a Producer, I was managing projects while also registering a product trademark and procuring snacks for the developers who sometimes forgot to eat. At that size, these were meaningful operational efforts, but not a system to rely or build on.
From that starting point, I was at the heart of Instrument’s dramatic growth to over 300 people, including a 51% acquisition by MDC Partners (now Stagwell) in 2018. Tsilli joined the leadership team that year, and we navigated numerous challenges of scale together. As members of the executive team, we were in the room for most of the decisions that shaped how the agency handled growth.
When a creative studio grows, many of the methods and systems that first made it successful stop working. One of the systems to commonly fail first is one nobody built on purpose: resourcing. At Instrument, it was what we’d call the “one pool” model, where everyone in the studio was available for any project, with work allocated informally based on who was a good fit, who was free, or even who was a favored talent.
Somewhere around 40 to 45 employees, this model started to break. This happened as I was building Instrument’s business and deepening our relationship with Google. We were landing repeat work and growing one-off projects into an account, but couldn’t rely on having the right team members available as other leaders landed new projects. Too much work might sound like a good problem to have, but it meant I couldn’t plan a runway for growth because the necessary people weren’t reliably available. Every growing studio hits this point eventually: the demand is there, but the system to meet it isn’t.
Thankfully, we recognized that the “one pool” model had stopped working, and it was time to get intentional about organization design. We formed dedicated teams, committed to specific accounts or types of work with a single business leader who directed the team’s resourcing.
This kind of structure seems obvious in retrospect, but it was a significant change from how the studio had operated since its founding. And it turned out to be the single most important structural decision for enabling the agency’s growth. That team model became the architecture on which everything else was built, with key cultural elements at our core.
Change is going to happen, so center your culture around it.
Maybe even more important than the model was the mindset that went with it. One of Instrument’s hidden competitive advantages was a culture built on the idea that change was the norm. This was so intrinsic to the way we approached our company that I couldn’t see it until Tsilli pointed it out. She had come from a 45-person studio, expecting a 180-person agency to be firmly entrenched in its existing systems. Instead, she found a pro-change attitude from top to bottom that said: “You have a better way? Let’s try it!”
That kind of attitude is the result of intentional reinforcement through daily operations. One small example: I would rearrange my team’s seating three to four times a year, timed to new projects and shifting collaborations. People never got so entrenched in their physical space that change felt like a disruption. They got used to seeing things differently, collaborating with different people, and adapting to new perspectives (literally). It sounds trivial, but it meant that when a genuinely big org change came along—like a wholesale team restructure in 2019 that affected more than 200 people—the groundwork had already been laid and people were primed to accept that change.
The restructure also required a massive communication rollout designed to keep people optimistic and excited rather than confused and resistant. We had been through earlier, more painful versions when the communication wasn’t as planned and orchestrated, learning the hard way what doesn’t work. Then we crafted what does work to shepherd people through change.
Resistance to change in the creative services industry is understandable. Most creative professionals have gone through at least a few rounds of reorgs, growth, and acquisitions in their careers, changes that often sap their ability to do good, innovative work. The suits take over, efficiency and utilization dominate, creativity bleeds out, and it all starts looking like the last season of Mad Men.
That’s no way for an agency to retain the kinds of people who make the best work. Having said that, poorly managed change isn’t the hardest challenge leaders face as creative orgs scale. From our direct experience on the ground, and as advisors today, there are three challenges of even greater impact that we’ve repeatedly seen.
Three unintended consequences when agencies scale.
Once an agency is past that initial breaking point and growing fast, the big problems tend to follow a pattern.
1 Client relationships get more transactional.
In the early days of an agency, accounts grow best when the team is doing excellent work and they’re genuinely good to work with. As client trust deepens, the work gets better and the relationship expands naturally. At Instrument, I grew the Google relationship from a single $30,000 project to a $20 million account over seven years, not through aggressive upselling or typical big-agency tactics, but by delivering innovative, high-quality work, project after project, on time and on budget. We started out a good partner—and became one of their best.
That ethos and those approaches come under pressure when an agency scales, particularly post-acquisition. The strategy of low-bidding projects and then “getting them with change orders later” is an open secret of the creative agency world. But it’s an approach that eventually poisons the trust that produces lasting client relationships. When Business Development tactics start treating clients as revenue streams to optimize instead of humans with business problems to solve, creative output invariably suffers. Clients that frequently work with agencies are used to being treated cynically, and this presents an opportunity: be the exception. Treat your clients like partners, and not only will your relationship improve, your creative teams will get what they need to deliver top-notch work with impact that keeps clients coming back for more.
2 People are treated as “resources.”
This is the erosion that does the most damage when it accelerates within an agency after an acquisition or outside investment. The pressure to maximize utilization often leads to centralized resource management. Teams are viewed through a spreadsheet that turns individuals into interchangeable units defined by availability rather than the specific strengths, experience, interests, or relationships that make them most effective.
As we heard one Creative Director put it: “availability is not a skill.” The intelligence required to cast people thoughtfully onto projects—knowing who has a special skill, who collaborates effectively, who’s ready for a stretch assignment, who needs a change of pace—can only be held by leaders who know their people at a human scale. One central pool of hundreds of people is not a human scale.
That’s one reason why the team model helps preserve the human dimension no matter the org size: it keeps groups small enough that the team and discipline leaders can hold a meaningful depth of knowledge about each person. When “warm bodies” are indiscriminately pulled across an agency to fill gaps in a utilization spreadsheet and optimize for a set of metrics, people develop habits and attitudes that destroy the conditions for producing great creative work. We can attest that taking a human-centered approach to resourcing is one of the best ways to retain wildly talented people and continue to make top-tier work, at any size.
3 Knowledge gets siloed.
When Tsilli joined Instrument as VP of Creative, the agency was 180 people across five teams. Each team had adapted to its own account’s requirements, with different tool stacks, different methods, and different ways of pitching new business. That model worked within each team, but the expertise that one team built through hard experience was invisible to others facing similar challenges. People were often solving the same problems independently, in parallel, because there was no mechanism for sharing what they knew across teams. (It also made it very difficult to move people between teams, which limits careers as well as shared knowledge.)
The fix for us was social, not technical. For the Creative discipline, Tsilli implemented systems and designed rituals, including monthly discipline meetings where designers showcased methods from their current projects, and Creative Director councils for comparing approaches. Some solutions also bubbled up from employees, such as Slack channels organized around emerging capabilities, like machine learning, where practitioners could follow each other’s experiments across teams.
Tsilli worked with me and the other discipline VPs to systemetize approaches across the org, ensuring the ownership of mobilizing information across teams. This was one of many challenges that we solved long after the need arose. Today, we advise organizations in similar situations to be proactive, instead of reactive, about these kinds of strategic fixes.
Some problems shouldn’t be ignored.
One of the most common problems we see in creative organizations is leaders kicking strategic problems down the road. Sometimes this is because they’re so focused on delivery that they don’t see the fissures that have formed. Sometimes it’s because the leaders don’t have the right people or the right know-how to solve the problems. And sometimes, leaders see the problem but won’t address it because they think implementing more structure will make the company too “corporate” or rigid.
Spoiler alert: useful process, intentional structure, and proactive problem solving make these orgs more, not less, creative—and are essential as a company grows. Good vibes and cool work only go so far. If an agency is scaling quickly and not meeting the new needs of the organization with new methods and infrastructure, the door is wide open to chaos and loss. Talented people will opt out before they need to; projects will be harder than they need to be; clients will become unimpressed; inefficiencies will crop up and take root all over the org.
By the time most leaders realize they need more or different structures, they’re already a year behind. Like any creative effort, building systems that fit the culture and way of working takes time and knowledge. At Instrument, we built the plane as we flew it. We learned the long, hard way which systems matter and realized after the fact when they should have been in place (well before they were).
Tsilli and I love to be able now to help creative leaders see these breaking points before they hit, and to teach them how to implement the right infrastructure. Done thoughtfully, these shifts are what enables any creative agency to sustain their culture, keep their people, and do their best work, no matter how much they grow.
Is your creative organization navigating a growth transition? Whether you’re a 30-person studio figuring out what comes next or a 150-person agency trying to fix what is broken, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line here to start a conversation.
Amie Pascal is a partner consultant at NoCo. Previously she was Partner and VP of Business & Production at Instrument, where she built and scaled a nearly $20M business with Google and other Alphabet companies, as well as conceived and implemented key methods that powered the agency’s growth from 10 to over 300 people.
