Operational Compression
How a lean in-house team outperformed the agencies it replaced — and why it became the framework I use with every client.
Seven agencies. No unified strategy. No internal knowledge.
The advertising function was fragmented across seven different agencies — each managing a different channel, with minimal communication between them. Brand search was bidding against performance campaigns. Retargeting was overlapping with prospecting. Attribution was a mess of last-click models that made everything look great and explained nothing.
The monthly spend across multiple international markets was in the eight figures. The results were underwhelming. The institutional knowledge lived entirely with the agencies — not with the client.
The problem wasn't the agencies. It was the model.
The agencies weren't bad at their jobs. The problem was structural: no one was accountable for the whole picture. Each agency was optimising its own channel metrics, not the business outcome. And because all the knowledge lived with vendors, the client had no leverage and no ability to make strategic decisions independently.
The path forward wasn't finding better agencies. It was building the capability to own the strategy internally.
Operational Compression in practice
The framework I developed — which I now call Operational Compression — has five principles:
Own the strategy, outsource the execution
Strategy, measurement, and budget decisions must live in-house. Execution can be outsourced, but never the thinking.
Minimum viable team
Hire for breadth first, depth second. Two generalists who understand the whole funnel beat six specialists who can't talk to each other.
AI-augmented workflows
Every manual, repetitive task is a candidate for automation or AI augmentation. Not to replace thinking — to free up time for thinking.
Single source of truth for measurement
One measurement framework, one attribution model, one dashboard that everyone reads the same way. No more agency-reported metrics that don't match revenue.
Channel integration, not channel silos
Every channel brief accounts for how it interacts with other channels. No more brand search cannibalising paid social. No more retargeting everyone who ever visited the homepage.
A lean team doing the work of fifteen
Over 18 months, we built a lean in-house team that managed eight-figure monthly spend across multiple international markets. The team produced 3× the output per operator of the previous agency setup, at 40% lower total cost. More importantly, the client owned all the data, all the learnings, and all the institutional knowledge. The strategic leverage shifted entirely.
This experience became the basis of the Operational Compression framework — and every consulting engagement I run today.
Most advertising operations are fat in the wrong places
They have too many vendors, too many tools, too many reports — and not enough clarity on what's actually driving growth. The solution is almost never "find a better agency." It's to rebuild the model so that strategic intelligence lives with the brand, not the vendor.