Doing more with less is getting old. How Ops leaders can finally get the budget they deserve (pov)
I’ve worked in digital marketing agencies long enough to know that “we’re a fast-growth business” can mean two very different things depending on which side of the ops budget conversation you’re sitting on. For the leadership team, it means exciting things: new clients, bigger pitches, expanding headcount on the delivery side. For me, it means the gap between what the business needs operationally and what it’s actually invested in is growing faster than our client roster. This year, I’m doing something different…
Digital agencies scale fast, and that’s genuinely exciting. But the operational infrastructure rarely scales at the same pace as the revenue ambitions and the people caught in that gap are usually the ones keeping everything held together with spreadsheets and sheer determination.
In a fast-growth environment, the default assumption is that ops will “figure it out”. Not to shine my own apple, but we usually do because that’s who we are. But every time we absorb the pressure without flagging the cost, we make it easier for leadership to believe the current resourcing is fine. It isn’t fine and budget season is the right time to say so clearly and back it up with evidence.
What I did differently this year
Rather than coming to our initial budget talks with a list of things I needed, I came with a picture of what our growth trajectory actually demands from an operational standpoint and what it’s currently costing us to paper over the gaps. I pulled together data on where senior time was being spent on miscellaneous non-billable admin as well as below-the-line tasks. I quantified the hours lost to manual processes that should have been automated six months ago. I mapped the delays in our onboarding process and calculated how long it was taking new hires to reach full productivity, and what that lag was costing in output. I looked at our project management workflows and identified where work was being duplicated or dropped in the handoff between teams. None of it was complicated analysis and I worked closely with our Head of Culture for the task. It confirmed the stuff I already knew, but I got it written down and gave it a number. I’ll be going this frequently throughout the year from now on.
Translating ops into the language of growth
One thing I’ve learned working in digital agencies is that leadership responds to growth language. So instead of framing my budget asks around operational problems, I reframed them around growth constraints. You can buy me a coffee for that one *wink*
Simply put, we can’t onboard clients at the speed our BD team is winning them without a better ops infrastructure. We can’t scale from 40 to 50 people in the next 18 months without investing in the systems and support that make that growth manageable. We can’t keep asking our senior strategists and account leads to absorb operational tasks without it showing up in their output and eventually in our retention numbers.
When you frame operational investment as the thing that unlocks growth rather than the thing that supports it, the conversation changes. Leadership isn’t hearing “ops needs more resource.” They’re hearing “here’s what’s standing between us and the next stage of growth.”
The technology conversation
Fast-growth digital agencies tend to accumulate tools quickly and audit them rarely. Part of my budget preparation this year was a full review of our tech stack, which turned up three platforms we were paying for that had meaningful overlap with tools we were already using well, and two genuine gaps where we were relying on manual workarounds that were quietly destroying productivity. Don’t get me started on AI platforms, I’ll leave that with our FD…
Anyway, the net result was a budget ask that was actually lower than last year in some areas and more targeted in others. Coming to leadership with a story about smarter spending rather than just more spending made the conversation significantly easier and it demonstrated exactly the kind of commercial thinking that ops sometimes gets accused of lacking.
What I’d say to other Ops Directors heading into budget season
You already have the data. You already know where the friction is, what it’s costing and what would be possible if it were resolved. The job now is to organise that knowledge into a story that connects operational investment to the business outcomes your leadership team cares about most, whether that’s faster client onboarding, improved margins, better retention or the ability to scale without chaos. Fast-growth agencies are brilliant at investing in the things that win business. The ones that sustain their growth are the ones that also invest in the infrastructure that keeps the business running once the work is won. That’s the case I made this month for next year and it landed. Your turn!
