Picture this: You’re a marketing manager or director of a mid-sized consumer goods company, and you need help. Your e-commerce website is out of date, your brand is decent but not quite as distinctive as you feel it could be, your email database is thorny, and you’re paying out thousands per month in ad spend without fully knowing its effect.

On top of that, your current marketing team of 2 is stretched to their limit, managing individual contractors is a hassle (plus you don’t have the budget for as many as you could use), and due to the nature of bootstrapping and seed funding, you haven’t yet hired an agency.

All of these are solvable problems, and together they describe the ideal scenario where hiring an agency that can solve several challenges at once can prove a reasonable, profitable investment.

The trick is to figure out what comes first, who to hire, and how.

Given the trend of moving creative in-house, plus the iterative nature of product work, how can agency & client teams work better together?

Successful creative work requires constraints and a process — shared between client and agency — in order to flourish.

Forming a new creative agency model that can better serve the brand, marketing, and design needs of Small & Medium Businesses.