Driving real results for agency leaders
I’ve spent fifteen years doing hands-on agency work — building operations, restructuring teams, sitting in the leadership meetings where the real decisions get made. My advisory practice builds on that foundation. Here’s what the people I’ve worked with have to say.
Case Studies
From Stuck to Strategic - Fire&Spark
WHERE THEY STARTED
A 10-person SEO agency doing $1M–2M in revenue, with a founder who was stuck. He was burning out, couldn’t step away from the business without things falling apart, and had a major decision he couldn’t think clearly about.
Internal strategic projects kept stalling — the ones he knew mattered most. Meanwhile, a key operations leader needed to be replaced, leaving a gap nobody was filling.
He’d tried forcing himself through it, but the problem wasn’t discipline. It was direction.
WHERE THEY LANDED
Over five years of working together, Fire&Spark more than doubled in size and revenue. Gross margins, net profit, and staff retention all improved.
The biggest shift was a confident decision to focus on digital health brands. That clarity didn’t come from a single breakthrough. It was built one conversation at a time.
Dale restructured his team, stepped back from daily operations, and developed a real AI strategy. And along the way, he rediscovered what he actually enjoys about the work.
“Katie calls me out when I make a hasty decision or ignore important input from my team. She helped me have a healthy journey, not just build a successful business.”
From Merger to Management Clarity - Reason One
WHERE THEY STARTED
A roughly 30-person digital agency coming off a challenging merger and a pandemic. The cultural and vision foundations for the “new” agency were in place, and the culture was coalescing—but the operational framework and team upskilling needed to meet the agency’s new health-sector-focused mandate were still very much works in progress.
The problems were stacked: pipeline issues related to building a new, vertically focused brand, inconsistent execution, and a managerial structure that wasn’t built for what the agency needed to become. The partners had delegated most of the day-to-day to focus more on the strategic aspects of the business, only to realize that a reenvisioning of their roles was also required.
They tried consultants, EOS, and promoting from within. The consultants weren’t plugged in long enough to make a real impact. EOS had good elements, but it was too rigid for how they worked. Internal promotions sometimes meant putting the right person in the wrong seat and missing the fresh perspective the agency needed.
WHERE THEY LANDED
Over three years of working together, Reason One went from roughly 30 to 43 people, restructured its team, changed its service model and pricing, and made confident decisions about the agency’s direction. The revenue pipeline is in strong shape, and the business runs efficiently.
But the shift Sean and Ben point to first isn’t a number. “The most important change was greater candour and accountability within our management team, and how that began to flow through to other stakeholders,” he says. The leadership team developed a real willingness to have hard conversations and translate them into action.
The turning point? “When our quarterly and annual planning meetings stopped ending in tears,” Sean says.
“Katie is the rare kind of human that will help you get to clarity and action on crucial matters in your business faster than you and your talented team will get there on your own.”
Testimonials
“You likely won’t meet many folks who can offer such a valuable opinion or insight on just about anything you can ask. She has the ability to break down huge problems and then start to solve them in priority. She is extremely fair, but she’s also not afraid to hold people accountable. I would highly recommend her to any team that is looking for a plug and play awesome human and expert level problem solver. ”
“I can’t recommend Katie enough. She supported us a few years ago with Project Management cover and based on that experience it was a no-brainer for us to reach out to her when looking for operations support. She’s helped us level up our internal processes and established regular cadences which have become foundational to our workflow. She’s also been a great support for our project managers, stepping in to provide guidance as we were hiring new team members.”
“Scriptorium reached out to Katie to help us improve critical project management processes. Her keen understanding of process and template development played an important role as Scriptorium grew and hardened processes. I highly recommend Katie Bedford for growing organizations that need to take a fresh look at established processes. Katie offered valuable insights to help us build out new processes and templates that were compatible with our organization’s culture and have served us well as we grow.”
Want to find out what a different kind of conversation looks like?