Don't Blame the Plants. Fix the Soil.
by Adrian Belina, Co-Founder @ Little Buddy
You don't need better creatives. You need a better creative system.
Your company is exactly as big as you are. Not as big as your talent, or your market, or your reputation. As big as the one or two people still holding the whole thing together in their heads. The work's good, the clients are happy, and you've quietly become the ceiling. Most creative leaders never figure out that the thing capping their growth is them, so they go looking for it everywhere else.
Usually they go looking for it in talent. You need a CD yesterday and hiring takes months. A pitch lands and your best people are booked. A senior gets promoted and can't manage anyone. Every project runs differently depending on who's on it. Reviews feel subjective, promotions feel arbitrary, and you're the one refereeing all of it. Every leader I know reads that list and reaches for the same fix: hire better people. It never works, because it was never a talent problem. It's what a company looks like when the person running the creative is the system.
Pablo Vio and I have been creative partners for 20 years. We ran the creative department at Jam3, part of a larger group that built it to 225 people before we sold it, and I can tell you the thing that let us grow wasn't better creatives. It was getting out of the fire. You can spend your whole career as a firefighter, sprinting from one emergency to the next, feeling essential the entire time you're strangling your own company. Or you can become the fire marshal: build the thing that stops the fires before they start, so the work runs, and grows, without you standing in the middle of it.
That layer, the system underneath the work, is the whole difference between a shop that stays the size of the people running it and one that actually scales. It's also, and this is the part nobody tells you, where the money is. So, here are three pieces of it, the ones I'd build first if I were starting over tomorrow, and what each one pays back on the other side.
The Talent System
aka. Always Be Scouting.
The single most expensive thing you can do is start looking for talent at the moment you need it. By then you're desperate, you're slow, and you're burning out your current staff to cover the gap while you scramble. Growth shows up as more work than your system can handle, and if you can't move fast, you either turn it down or you break your people catching it.
So we stopped treating hiring as an event and started treating it as a habit. A creative leader should be scouting talent the same way a salesperson works LinkedIn. A couple hours a week, ideally blocked on the calendar so it actually happens. Not through a recruiter. You, personally, because you're the one who knows what good looks like and who's quietly doing the best work in your corner of the industry.
We kept one shared board on Trello, Pablo and me plus a few trusted CDs. Somebody spots an interesting portfolio, shares it, and the rest of us weigh in… an ”Ooh amazing”, or “heard they're a nightmare, pass”. Two buckets each separated by role: future hires, and freelancers we could call tomorrow. Over the years that freelance list ran past a thousand people across every role. And when we really liked someone, we didn't wait for a job to open. We reached out and said we don't have a role right now but we love your work and want to meet you. So the next time we were hiring, we didn't post anything. Job postings get you 400 applications and 390 of them aren't for the job. We just called the people we already wanted.
The freelance bench does something people underrate. When the big pitch lands and your best people are booked, the instinct is to throw a freelancer at the pitch. Do the opposite. Put the freelancer on the safe, middle of the road work and free your best people for the thing that matters. Your leads always run the project, so the client relationship stays with someone who isn't going anywhere. Freelancers stay in the supporting roles, like a general contractor you talk to while you never meet the electrician. Use them enough and you learn who actually fits. It's try-before-you-buy for full-time hires, and at the end of the year the spend on any one freelance category tells you exactly when it's time to make it a real seat.
If your staff are your kids, good freelancers are your cousins. Not immediate family, but they know the house, they know how you do things, and they show up when it counts.
Here's what the whole system buys you. Growth is just more work than you can currently handle showing up at the door. If you can move on it fast, it's revenue. If you can't, it's revenue you hand to someone else, or a job you win and then break your team delivering. The bench is how you say yes without flinching. Speed to capacity is the difference between growth you can catch and growth you have to turn away.
The Creative Report Card
aka. Define It. Develop It.
Every creative shop has the same two people. The one who's brilliant at the craft but can't hold a room, and the one who can sell anything while the work isn't quite there. And every year, review season, both of them hear some version of "you're doing great, keep it up," which helps no one and is why reviews feel subjective in the first place.
So, alongside the normal 360, we built what we called the creative report card. We broke down what it actually means to be a creative here into about 25 points across five sections: hard skills, soft skills, values, communication, the rest. Specifics like typography, UI and even savviness in creative tech on one side. Pitching, client relationships, managing, speed, responsibility on the other. Four or five people who worked with that person scored them, and we averaged it.
The scores were never for the person. We never showed them a number. We used it to have a real conversation, here's where you're strong, here's one or two things worth growing, and the report card just made that conversation specific instead of vague. It also settled the promotion question quietly, because now you could see that your Senior Designer scored an 8 on craft and a 5 on client, and the answer isn't to force them into a management track they may hate. It might be to send them toward design director, and not creative director. A low score isn't always flaw to fix, either. It's only worth working on if it's on the path the person actually wants. I always believed that their own goals and the company's goals should be pulling in the same direction, and when they are, everybody wins.
And when everybody is winning, people stay. Turnover is one of the most expensive things an agency does. Help staff become the people they want to be, put people where they compound instead of where they stall, and you keep them longer, they get better, and their value keeps climbing. The efforts pay off exponentially as the system grows.
The Playbook
aka. Play it. Run it. Break it. Stop. Repeat it.
Process for its own sake is bureaucracy, and creatives often view too much of it as the antithesis of creativity. The point of process is alignment, everyone from a producer to a developer to QA building toward the same thing, so a project doesn't run differently every time depending on who's leading it.
At Jam3, we built something we called the Creative Checklist. To be honest, it was more of a project playbook, how a job ideally flows from kickoff to launch, inspired partly by Pixar 22 Rules of Storytelling in Creativity Inc. Some of it was obvious. Most of it was the non-obvious things, the moves you only learn to make early because you got burned making them too late.
A simple one, was the project vision one-pager. Before the work starts, the creative lead writes down the vision for the project. Not the client brief, the vision, what we're actually trying to do here. Everybody reads it, and not just the designers. The producers, the strategists, motion team etc. One project, one vision, everyone aligned up front on what’s about to happen. Another one revolved around the concept we called “the developer cookie jar”, our fix for the oldest fight in the building. Creatives always have more ideas than the timeline allows, and the developer is usually the one stuck saying no. So, we wanted creatives to learn how to pick their battles. Every time you let a "no" go, you effectively put a cookie in the jar. Bank a few cookies, and then when you really need a favor later, that thing that is really going to make a difference in the project, you've hopefully built up enough good will and you can take a cookie out of the jar. It's putting emphasis on the importance of managing expectations and having some empathy for the person downwind of your ambition.
The best adage when creating process is the one my old partner Jordan Cuddy used to give, “You have to know the rules first so you can break them later.” The playbook isn't a cage. It's the thing that lets someone deviate on purpose, tell a team member exactly why, and own it if it goes sideways. That's not less creative freedom. That's the kind worth having.
The payoff here is margin, and it's the one people miss because it's kinda invisible. A misaligned project bleeds, rework, friction, the same argument had five times (or five hundred), hours nobody scoped. An aligned team runs like navy seals. Multiply that across every job in the building and the difference is your entire profit line. Better still, once the playbook lives in the company instead of in your head, projects run well when you're not in the room. And that's the moment the work can finally scale past you.
Fix the Soil
None of this is about hiring great creatives and getting out of the way. The talent is the plants. What I'm describing is the soil, and most agencies never tend it. They spend too much time making good work, and not enough building the system that makes good work possible, so they stay exactly the size they've always been.
There's more to the layer than three pieces, the way you turn seniors into leaders before you need them to lead, how onboarding carries all of it to every new hire. But the through-line is the whole point. Creativity and growth get treated like opposing forces, as if scaling a creative company means diluting the work to feed the machine. It's the opposite. The system is what protects the work while the company gets bigger. Speed to capacity lets you catch growth instead of declining it. Putting people where they compound keeps your best talent and makes it better. Alignment turns chaos into margin and lets the work run without you. Those aren't the boring parts of the business you do so you can afford to be creative. They're the reason a creative company can grow at all.
It may sound funny coming from a CCO, but trust me: spend a little less time being brilliant inside the work, and more time building a brilliant system around it. Be the fire marshal, not the firefighter. That's the whole trick. It's how you stop being your own ceiling and finally unlock the growth you've been chasing.
Adrian Belina, Little Buddy
