A famous comedian decided in 2022 to launch his own agency, where his company would take care of his entire artistic career, such as shows, contracts, and productions, as well as those of other artists.
For many years being managed by a third-party company, the now CEO needed to structure his new company to adapt to the new reality.
This work involved both the financial and administrative structuring of the company, as well as the structuring of departments, mainly the marketing department.
This case study covers the macro structuring of the company in the marketing sectors, while administrative and financial structuring also took place in parallel.
The team that already advised him continues with him, but they needed direction and leadership.
First Step: Defining the Company’s Mission and 10-Year Vision
To align the company’s reality with the new scenario, it was first necessary to understand the company’s long-term vision.
A vision was defined where it was questioned: What is the company’s goal, and why does the company exist?
After a deep process of reflection, its mission, values, and types of clients who would work were clearly defined.
Through this positioning, all team members were aligned with the company’s values, including decisions on which new businesses and partnerships would be worth closing.
After this definition, a 10-year visualization process was carried out on where the company should go to achieve its goals.
With this 10-year vision, we broke it down into smaller times of 5 years, 3 years, and finally 1 year, to define the priorities that should be pursued.
Conducting this 10-year journey ahead and projecting it to the “current year” helps define priorities and ensure that the long-term vision will be executed.
If a new project arises that is not aligned with the 10-year vision, it can be more easily discarded (or even embraced if it has the potential to transform the future vision).
Even if the 10-year goal is not achieved exactly as defined, this is a guide for the company and people to know their positions.
Structuring of Departments and Processes
The next step was the structuring of departments and processes with their respective responsibilities.
The team was having communication and demand management issues.
To solve this, we separated the departments and clarified the responsibility of each within their department.
For example, there were overloaded departments with more functions, and there were also external professionals adding bottlenecks and complexity to the fulfillment of simple tasks such as posting on social media.
So we created the “marketing” department and held two selection processes to relieve the workload that was happening.
This new department needed to have its processes defined.
The marketing department internalized and became responsible for:
- Video editing;
- Day-to-day shoots;
- Management of social media schedule;
- Campaign boosting;
As most commercial demands are already pre-planned, the Marketing department changed the publication planning.
All publications scheduled for the next 3 to 6 months could be previewed through the ClickUp tool.
This way, whenever a publication outside the schedule needed to be made, it is possible to plan and align with clients in advance, including showing the increase in publication reach with the new schedule management.
Training, Replication, and Monitoring
To support the company’s growth (new artists), various training sessions were also held with the internal team.
“Standard Procedures” were created, recorded training sessions, covering a wide range of day-to-day tasks and activities.
This was done for two reasons:
- To ensure that any new team member can be trained in the company’s main processes;
- To have a replicable process whenever a new artist becomes a client of the company;
This way, the team is ready and trained to handle most demands, and what was once a bottleneck (external professionals) becomes extra resources when additional specialized labor is needed.
Several reports and monitoring points were also created that cross-reference information from various departments and the performance and evolution of the marketing department (both in task completion and in the growth of social networks).
Next Steps and Challenges
After completing this work, the company has its administrative and financial processes aligned and organized, with a structured cash flow and clear goals to be achieved.
The biggest challenges still are the company’s profitability in negotiating new contracts, and exploring new ways of monetization that do not depend exclusively on the time of its talents (such as brand and product licensing, and other actions and services that can be provided).
In addition, after completing the work, the company needs to continue following the defined processes and remain aligned with the long-term vision.
