TL;DR
A 30-person agency designed for duos, then trios, never changed as its load grew. I rebuilt it around working groups, a skills map, and one manager per trade, not more headcount. The structure changed; the size did not.
The situation as found
The parent group kept acquiring companies and signing partnerships, and each sent more work to its internal web agency in Clermont-Ferrand. The agency had been designed for a duo, one traffic project manager and one web writer, and grew into a trio when social-network management joined editorial production and audience generation. It never changed shape again, even as new countries opened and new web projects landed, until the team reached ~30 people.
Three constraints turned a growing team into a saturated one:
- Skills stayed trapped in each market’s silo, with no path to move a proven method across.
- No intermediate managers existed, so every hard decision reached one desk.
- The organization was built for duos and trios, capping one manager’s span.
That structure, not the volume of work, was the limit, the capacity problem this site frames as rescue and turnaround.
The diagnosis
The presenting symptom was that the agency could not absorb more work, and the reflex answer was a volume fix: more headcount, or another layer of hierarchy. The cause was structural, not numerical. Nothing moved a skill from one market to the next, nothing absorbed a decision below the top, and nothing captured a validated experiment for another market to reuse. The agency had hit two ceilings, the work it could take on and the people one manager could carry. Diagnosing that gap before touching the structure is the point.
What was decided, and why
The obvious answer was more headcount, a classic hierarchical layer, or more process. Adding people or a layer of hierarchy does not fix a ceiling that is about the inability to share skills and decisions, not about numbers. I chose the rebuild: thematic working groups in place of the informal exchanges by affinity, a test-and-learn mode, a skills map, monthly retrospectives, and one manager per trade. That is the structural repair behind the Crisis-Proof Builder identity. I led the team through it, not alone.
What was actually built or changed
The rebuild ran on six movements, each answering a constraint the old organization could not.
- Three thematic working groups. Content, social networks, and audience generation each got a cross-business-unit group meeting weekly and monthly, so know-how stopped being trapped in silos.
- A test-and-learn mode. The groups split tests each week, reported back what happened, and scaled what held to other markets.
- A skills map. Every collaborator self-assessed their expertise skill by skill, so anyone stuck on a problem knew who to ask.
- A monthly retrospective. Tests, wins, and losses got one shared review and gave the team medium-term visibility.
- One emerging manager per trade. A person with the appetite and the ability took the day-to-day lead, progressively, freeing me as agency head to take altitude. That is the player-coach model at work.
- Deliberate communication upward. I put the synergies and virtuous circles in front of the group’s directions, so the value was visible and fundable.
What broke, and what was got wrong
The rebuild was not a clean install. The agency was already at saturation when it began, so the new structure had to absorb the load while it was assembled, with no clean pause to design against. The management take-up was progressive, not instant, so the day-to-day still leaned on the old pattern before it released me. The part-time delegation of resources to the least well-funded projects is a real tradeoff: it lowered running costs and still gave those clients the agency’s know-how, but it is a thinner service than a fully staffed project would get.
The outcome, with its status
Measured. The agency held a viable human size of 30 while still absorbing a few additional projects. The intermediate managers grew into their roles, freeing me for level-2 support on the most traffic-heavy projects and for continuous training of the teams.
Bounded. Experience-sharing and cross-tests cleaned up the agency’s methods. The group’s directions gained confidence and granted budgets for new experiments, helped by tests already run on other markets. With the time freed up, I could launch 18-24 month plans to modernize the agency’s methods, including the mobile-first shift that had to change the whole company’s mindset. The lasting version of a reorg is the operation running without me, one of the mandates behind the who I am page.
If this is the shape of your problem, let’s talk.