What we found
Across five conversations with your team, the same handful of frictions kept surfacing. None of them is unusual for an agency your size — and none of them is a technology problem first.
The numbers don’t reconcile.
Three financial pictures run in parallel and don’t line up, so trust in any single view is thin.
Every project starts from scratch.
The way Cedar Studios does its best work lives in people’s heads, not on the page.
Scope creep quietly eats profit.
When a client asks for more, the extra work is often absorbed instead of re-priced.
Campaign reporting is assembled by hand.
The same material gets hunted down and stitched together every cycle.
The pipeline is hard to see.
The prospect list falls out of date, and there’s no agreed read on what’s really in play.
Leadership lacks a clear line of sight.
Client health and team health surface late, through informal channels.
The Housekeeping tab covers decisions and clean-up only your team can make. The What we’d build tab describes the systems worth building once that groundwork is in place. The Our proposal tab shows how it would roll out and what it costs.
Housekeeping comes first for a reason: a system built on tangled inputs just automates the tangle.
Housekeeping
A handful of decisions and clean-up steps only your team can make. None is heavy on its own — but together they’re what turn a good system into a trustworthy one.
Pick one set of numbers to trust
Decide which source is the one you trust for which question — then a little clean-up so spend is recorded consistently and over-budget work is handled honestly rather than hidden.
Clears the way forDecide who owns what
Before a system can support an area, that area needs a named owner and a backup — for client relationships, the pipeline, scope conversations, reporting standards, and contractor management.
Clears the way forWrite down how Cedar Studios works
The foundational pieces of your methodology — how you approach strategy, how scope turns into a campaign brief, what every client gets as a baseline — mostly live in people’s heads today. Getting them onto the page is the single biggest enabler in this document.
Clears the way forAgree what counts as a lead
The prospect list falls out of date partly because there’s no shared definition of what belongs in it. Settling what qualifies something to enter the pipeline — and what moves or marks it — is a short conversation.
Clears the way forGet comfortable re-pricing scope
This one is a habit, not a tool. When a client asks for more, the move is to say “here’s what that adds to your budget” — with the language ready and an approval path agreed. The systems can flag it, but only your team can have the conversation.
Makes the most ofDecide where the raw materials live
Much of the reporting burden is really an assembly problem — performance data, creative assets, and scorecards live in different places, so every report starts with a hunt. Deciding where those materials live, per client, means a system can gather them instead of guessing.
Clears the way forWhat we’d build
Nine builds in two groups — tools that strengthen how the whole agency runs, and tools that produce work for specific clients. Expand any card to see the full picture.
Your Claude environment, set up and ready
Your own Claude instance, configured to know your business — the groundwork everything else depends on.
What you get The groundwork every other build depends onIn one focused effort, we get your team’s AI environment live and usable from day one. What’s included:
- A working session with Claire and Nate to capture how Cedar Studios talks and works — identity, vocabulary, tone, and team structure — written up as standing instructions that teach the system your business, not AI in general.
- The workspace your team logs into, organized with a dedicated project for each active client account.
- The private, secure cloud environment that runs behind it.
- A decision on where finished work gets published, plus time to get the team comfortable using it day to day.
The Creator Package
Ready-to-use tools for branded decks, pages, and one-pagers — with your brand kit built in so every output looks like you.
What you get On-brand output, on demandTwo capabilities that sit on top of your foundation and feed into everything else:
- Ready-to-use tools for building branded slide decks, long-form pages, and quick interactive pieces — published with a click.
- Your Cedar Studios brand kit — colors, fonts, logo, and design system — captured once so everything these tools produce comes out on brand without extra effort.
These are the shared engine that the per-client work draws on. Reporting, campaign recaps, and client materials all plug in here rather than starting from scratch.
A living client knowledge hub
Instant recall of everything your team knows about each client — live from SharePoint, Teams, and shared drives.
What you get Instant answers about any clientEach client gets a single living hub that holds everything your team knows about them. It does three things:
- Instant recall — ask “what did we decide about this client in March?” and get a clear, sourced answer instead of digging through folders.
- One shared picture — the team works from one complete, current view of each account instead of scattered fragments across inboxes and shared drives.
- Knowledge that stays — what the agency knows about a client doesn’t walk out the door when someone’s away or moves on.
Connecting to SharePoint and Teams is new work — once in place, all three sources run continuously so the hub stays current as each client’s history grows.
A single, trusted view of the numbers
Plain-language answers to financial questions, drawn from Workamajig and Dana’s billing workbook in real time.
What you get One trusted view of the numbersToday your financial reality is split across Workamajig, Dana’s billing workbook, and individual account manager trackers — so it’s hard to fully trust any one view. This pulls it together:
- We connect the two sources that hold the real numbers and sit down with Nate and Dana to capture the logic: how project codes work, when contractor costs land, what counts as an overage.
- A regular plain-language snapshot shows where each account stands against budget and flags anything running hot while there’s still time to act.
- Anyone can ask a financial question on the spot — “how’s this client tracking right now?” — and get a fresh answer from live data.
A clear view of what’s in play
A live view of what’s in play — surfacing what’s stalled, aging, or missing the details needed to move forward.
What you get Always know what's in playRight now your pipeline lives in a spreadsheet that falls out of date. This turns it into something you can actually manage from:
- Reads your pipeline spreadsheet and flags what needs attention — opportunities missing key details, entries never properly qualified, deals sitting in the same stage too long.
- Advises rather than writes — a single owner stays the only one who updates the sheet, keeping data under control while trust builds.
- Surfaces what’s stalled or aging on a regular cadence, and answers on the spot: “what’s in the hunt, what’s stuck, what’s our win rate?”
See which relationships need attention
A regular digest spotting at-risk relationships, upsell opportunities, and team capacity strain before they become problems.
What you get Problems surface before they escalateWhere the financial picture reports the numbers and the pipeline tracks new business, this does a different job: it watches the health of your existing client relationships.
- Looks for the softer signals that usually surface too late — a client who’s gone quiet, scope creeping past what was agreed, an account gone flat when it looks ripe for more.
- Gives leadership a short, plain digest on a regular cadence: which accounts are at-risk, which look like upsell opportunities, which have stalled — each item naming the specific signal that triggered it.
- Can extend to team health — spotting workload or capacity strain — once you decide which signals matter.
The Cedar Method, made repeatable
Your planning, scoping, and reporting approaches captured once and usable by anyone on the team.
What you get Your best work, always accessibleThe way Cedar Studios does its best work mostly lives in a few people’s heads today. From a shared working track with Claire and Nate over two or three sessions, we build three connected guides:
- Strategic-planning companion — walks the team through your framework, asking the right questions in the right order and producing a draft in the shape leadership wants.
- Campaign-scoping guide — codifies the scoping judgment Nate uses to land the right engagement size by default: not so lean it creates problems, not so padded you get priced out.
- Status-report shaper — turns an agreed scope into a clean, consistent campaign update, ending the three-versions-in-three-formats problem.
Content and materials that sound and look like the client
First drafts that already sound like the client — built first for Cascade Coast Tourism Board, then replicated across accounts.
What you get Client-voice content in minutesTwo capabilities in one build, proven first with Cascade Coast Tourism Board:
- A writing system — first drafts that already sound like the client instead of generic AI, built from their brand book and real samples, with rules that strip out AI tells. Includes brand-compliant language for partner co-op programs and destination marketing standards.
- A brand kit — the client’s colors, fonts, logo, and layout patterns captured once, so the team produces on-brand materials as a fill-in-the-details exercise rather than starting from scratch.
Where this could grow: with a brand kit in place, more of your simpler creative work — social graphics, on-brand ad variations, destination guides — could come in-house over time.
The repetitive assembly work, automated
Recurring scorecards, performance digests, and quarterly decks assembled automatically each cycle.
What you get Hours back every reporting cycleThree recurring deliverables, each built first for the client where the pain is sharpest:
- Performance scorecard (Cascade Coast Tourism Board) — automates the manual tracking Claire handles each quarter: campaign deliverables, channel performance against KPIs, and reach figures.
- Weekly performance digest (Solera Hotels) — takes the weekly campaign data pull, surfaces what’s outperforming and what needs attention, and drafts the Thursday update for the client.
- Quarterly client deck composer (Cascade Coast Tourism Board) — builds the data-heavy sections of the quarterly presentation automatically, dressed in the client’s brand kit, so you start from a strong draft and spend your time on narrative.
Rollout
A four-month buildout, sequenced so each phase compounds the one before it. Each month’s work becomes the groundwork the next month depends on.
| Build | Month 1 | Month 2 | Month 3 | Month 4 | Ongoing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 — Stand up the foundation | |||||
| Your foundation | |||||
| Creator Package | |||||
| One clear financial picture | |||||
| Phase 2 — Give the agency a memory | |||||
| A living client knowledge hub | |||||
| Phase 3 — Visibility and method | |||||
| New-business pipeline | |||||
| The Cedar Method | |||||
| Early warning | |||||
| Phase 4 — Produce for clients | |||||
| On-brand content & materials | |||||
| Campaign reporting & recaps | |||||
| After launch | |||||
| Ongoing support & tuning | |||||
The sequencing is deliberate. The foundation in Phase 1 is what makes the client hub in Phase 2 trustworthy. The financial picture from Phase 1 gives the early warning system in Phase 3 something meaningful to work with. Per-client production comes last because it draws on the tools and brand kits built in earlier phases.