Client anonymised at their request.
Task
The group had built a digital experience division by acquisition, merging several agencies into one mid-sized business that now had to compete at a level none of the founding companies had operated at.
We came in five months into the integration. The mandate was growth: a sharper proposition, go-to-market strategies across five sectors, a new business approach that could win in a hard market, and a leadership team who had to make the step up the new operating model demanded.
That was the brief. It was not the problem.
Pilot
We took the business model apart vertical by vertical.
Not a strategy exercise. An interrogation of contribution. Where revenue actually came from. Which sectors carried which. Where the operating logic of one part of the business was compatible with the group’s, and where it quietly was not.
Alongside it we worked with the leadership team directly. The commercial and experience officers, the sector leads, the studio heads. Sounding board on the roadmap, sector growth propositions, a qualification framework for new business, and talent and succession mapping across the senior team.
Three days a week, inside the building.
Transformation
The finding pointed the other way from the brief.
The division’s model was fundamentally at odds with the wider group. Different clients, different economics, different rhythm, different definition of good work. Integration was being pursued because integration is what groups do. But the closer these businesses were held, the more each constrained the other.
So the recommendation was separation. Let it become its own thing, with its own brand and operating model, inside the group but not folded into it.
Then the second half, which is the half that matters. A recommendation to separate is worth nothing if the separated business cannot stand up. Losing the parent’s cover means losing the parent’s reasons to be chosen.
So we built the capability that would replace it. We trained the team to create and optimise their own strategy product, deliberately, as a competitive moat. Not a workshop. The capability had to exist inside the business and outlast us.
Result
The division launched as a distinctly branded agency with its own published commitments to its industry, drawing the legacy teams together under one identity.
The parent group simplified from a portfolio of overlapping agencies into a small number of clearly defined businesses. Easier to navigate, easier to manage, easier to sell.
The new agency remains part of the group and operates fully independently.
Why it worked
Most transformation work adds. This one subtracted.
The systems problem was visible from the start: several merged businesses, overlapping propositions, an integration proceeding on the assumption that closer is better.
The empathy problem was that the people inside the division already knew their work did not behave like the rest of the group’s. The operating model kept telling them it should.
Structure was the constraint. Not ambition, not talent, not the market. The business was being asked to be something it was not built to be.
Separating it took a decision. Making the separation survive took a capability.