The brief I was handed
Jackson Dawson had a strong global reputation and a Latin American presence that wasn't living up to the rest of the network. The regional operation needed to be rebuilt rather than tuned. That meant rethinking the go-to-market, the client mix, the team structure, the financial model, and the position the agency occupied in the minds of its target clients.
What I changed first
The quickest wins came from positioning, not capability. The agency's strongest suit was creative and strategic work in and around automotive, and the market was under-served by firms that genuinely understood the category at depth. Rather than broaden, I sharpened. We stopped chasing briefs outside the sweet spot and doubled down on the one territory where we could legitimately claim to be best in region.
The second change was operational. A creative business grows or dies on its pipeline and its retention. I built the commercial rhythm the agency had been missing: how we identified accounts, how we pitched, how we closed, and most importantly how we kept clients past the first project.
The numbers
Why it worked
The core decision was to be famous for something rather than available for everything. Every internal debate, every pitch decision, every hiring choice was filtered through a single question: does this make us harder to replace by the clients we most want? Over seven years that compounded into a position in the market that competitors couldn't easily copy because it had been earned structurally rather than bought.
The second thing that worked was treating the agency like a product. Agencies typically sell service. The better posture is to sell repeatable outcomes: the specific combinations of strategy, creative, and production that reliably deliver. That framing let us price against value rather than against hours, and it let us scale without the typical creative-business trap of needing proportional headcount growth to support revenue growth.
What the work taught me
Running an agency taught me the difference between briefs and outcomes. It also taught me how brands actually buy creative work, which is rarely the way they say they do. That insider view is what now makes me useful on the other side of the table. When I advise a client on how to brief their agency, I'm drawing on seven years of having been the agency that was briefed.
It also shaped how I work as a fractional operator. Everything I now do for clients is recognisably the same discipline I applied to Jackson Dawson LATAM: sharpen the position, fix the commercial rhythm, focus on the accounts that compound, and refuse the ones that don't.