CASE STUDY

Managers leveled up so the CEO

could step back.

Mollie Elkman · CEO & President · GroupTwo

INDUSTRY

Advertising & Marketing Agency

ENGAGEMENT

Ops Playbook + Manager Coaching

TIME FRAME

Results in the first
60 days

SCOPE

Full team, middle-manager development

RESULT

CEO shifted, agency uplevel.

THE SITUATION

CEO stepping back. Managers not

ready to step up.

The managers needed hands-on support she wasn’t able to give them anymore. So we up-leveled them,

Mollie was shifting her role at GroupTwo. After years of being in the center of everything, she was moving toward a different kind of CEO seat, and her managers needed to absorb a lot of what she’d been doing. They weren’t ready.

Work wasn’t being tracked consistently across the agency. Accountability was soft. Her managers were capable people who hadn’t been developed into the leaders the agency needed them to be, and without Mollie doing what she’d always done, the gaps were showing.

She didn’t want to put the transition off. She wanted the team to actually make the leap with her, which meant investing in the systems and the people at the same time.

THE WORK

The Ops Playbook System,

plus direct coaching for the managers.

GroupTwo needed two things at once: an operating system that could run without Mollie in the day to day, and managers who could seamlessly implement it. We installed the Ops Playbook across the full agency and I worked one-on-one with her managers on the pieces of the job they hadn’t been developed into yet.

WHAT WE BUILT

WHAT CHANGED

Clear, simple processes

→ Everyone on the team got on the same page about how work moved through the agency, which ended a lot of the low-grade confusion that had been slowing things down.

Consistent work tracking

→ Utilization and capacity became visible in a way they hadn't been. Which meant billable hours stopped leaking and the team got sharper on what they could actually take on.

Manager coaching on accountability

→ Her managers learned how to hold their teams accountable without Mollie in the room, which is the actual job of a manager and something no one had taught them.

A CEO-ready leadership layer

→Mollie could step into her new role knowing the managers beneath her were actually managing, which is what made the whole transition possible.

THE RESULTS

What changed for

Group Two.

Team Utilization

INCREASED DRAMATICALLY

Clearer systems and sharper management cut the cost of low-grade inefficiency across the agency, and team hit new highs of billable capacity, 

“When we started working with Lia, we were going through a transition where my focus as the CEO was shifting in the company, and our managers needed hands-on support that I wasn’t able to provide. With her Ops Playbook mapping out clear and simple processes to get everyone on the same page around the systems we needed to continue to scale, and her coaching of our managers on how they could hold team members accountable, Lia up-leveled our entire team, and implemented systems to save us time and money across our agency. I highly recommend working with Lia if you want to take your team and company to the next level.”

Mollie Elkman

CEO & President, GroupTwo View on LinkedIn

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