The situation
A growing independent agency had no performance marketing function. Clients were buying paid media elsewhere, the agency was referring away revenue it should have kept, and it had no credible answer when performance questions came up in pitches. I was hired to build the department from nothing and own it commercially.
The work
Proposition first. Before hiring anyone, I defined what the department would sell, how it would be delivered, and how it would be priced so that the P&L worked from the first client rather than after some future scale point. The service lines were built on repeatable process: documented ways of working for planning, activation, optimisation and reporting, so quality depended on the system rather than on any one person having a good week.
Then the team. I grew the department from zero to ten people, hiring for trajectory and training against the frameworks, so each new joiner made the department more capable rather than just bigger. Planning ran on established strategic frameworks that gave clients a consistent, defensible logic for how budget and effort were allocated, and gave the team a shared language.
Commercially, I owned the full P&L and led new business pitching throughout: shaping the offer, fronting the room, and pricing work to be won and profitable. Growth had to come from both directions, new clients in, and existing clients buying more because the work earned it.
The results
The department went from not existing to a ten-person team with a £2.2m annual P&L, growing at 17% year on year. The agency gained a durable revenue line, a credible performance answer in every pitch, and a team that could deliver to standard without its founder in every meeting, which is the real test of whether a department has been built or just assembled.