The diagnostic

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.

01

The numbers don’t reconcile.

Three financial pictures run in parallel and don’t line up, so trust in any single view is thin.

02

Every project starts from scratch.

The way Cedar Studios does its best work lives in people’s heads, not on the page.

03

Scope creep quietly eats profit.

When a client asks for more, the extra work is often absorbed instead of re-priced.

04

Campaign reporting is assembled by hand.

The same material gets hunted down and stitched together every cycle.

05

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The prospect list falls out of date, and there’s no agreed read on what’s really in play.

06

Leadership lacks a clear line of sight.

Client health and team health surface late, through informal channels.

How to read this document

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.

Before we build

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.

Housekeeping 01

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 for
One clear financial picture Early warning
Housekeeping 02

Decide 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 for
New-business pipeline Early warning
Housekeeping 03

Write 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 for
The Cedar Method On-brand content Campaign reporting
Housekeeping 04

Agree 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 for
New-business pipeline
Housekeeping 05

Get 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 of
One clear financial picture Early warning
Housekeeping 06

Decide 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 for
Campaign reporting
What we recommend

What 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.

Agency-wide · 7 builds Applied across your entire client book

In 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.

Two 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.

Each 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.

Today 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.

Right 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?”

Where 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 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.
Per-client · 2 builds Proven with one client first, then replicated

Two 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.

Three 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.
The buildout

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.

The full deliverable includes a phase-by-phase investment breakdown built from what we find in your specific audit.