How agencies can redesign strategic work without hiring more strategists
The easiest way to scale strategy is to hire more strategists. It is also expensive, slow and not always the problem you need to solve. A 50-person agency might say it has three strategists. That sounds like three units of strategic capacity. It rarely is. You may have one exceptional strategist, one perfectly decent one and a junior who is still learning what good looks like.
The first job is therefore not to make all three people faster. It is to raise the floor.
Formalise what good people already do
Experienced strategists often carry process and frameworks in their heads. They do not consciously say “now I will apply framework X”. They know which questions need answering and which gaps will cause problems later. That is useful expertise. It is also difficult to scale if nobody has made it explicit.
Start by formalising the process enough that more people can move through it consistently. Which decisions come first? What needs to be true before the work moves downstream? Which frameworks help with which kinds of problem? What does good output look like? Then train people on it. This is not glamorous. It will improve strategic capacity before most technology purchases do.
Use frameworks to support judgement
The purpose of a framework is to help somebody reach a conclusion faster without forgetting something important and discovering the omission three steps later. It is not there so the strategist can prove they filled in a framework. Some assignments need the full process. Some do not. Sometimes the right answer is obvious enough that the strategist should write it down and get on with the work. A scalable process needs to support judgement, not punish it.
Protect the time that makes work better
Efficiency is often defined as how quickly somebody can finish the job. That definition is too narrow for strategy. There are parts of the work I would happily accelerate. Research preparation. First-pass structure. Comparing large amounts of information. Recovering relevant client context. Drafting material that needs a senior review.
There are parts I would protect. Time with clients. Time with creatives. Time to look at an apparently sensible answer and ask whether it is actually good. The aim is not to minimise strategist hours everywhere. It is to stop wasting expensive judgement on work that does not need it.
Scaling strategy means raising the floor
The wrong version of scaling is three strategists producing twice as many decks. The useful version looks different. More accounts receive proper strategic attention. Juniors can complete more of the work to a reliable standard before they need senior intervention. Senior strategists spend more time making good work exceptional instead of assembling every first draft.
Smaller accounts stop losing strategy simply because the flagship client is busy this week. That is an increase in strategic capacity even if the headcount remains exactly the same.
The HBS and BCG experiment found that less strong performers could gain substantially from AI on suitable tasks. Raising the floor is therefore a possibility worth testing, not a guaranteed result of buying software. Measure both correction time and the quality of decisions.
Why “do more with less” lands on senior people
When the work stays the same and resources shrink, the unfinished thinking usually reaches the person who can rescue it. A junior needs another review, an account team needs an answer tonight and a pitch needs a senior in the room. Each request sounds modest. Together they turn planned work into evening work.
Delivery can conceal the problem. The client gets the presentation and revenue per employee may look healthy, while training, thoughtful review and recovery time disappear. Count the interventions as work. Otherwise the agency mistakes senior goodwill for a repeatable operating model.
Change the mechanism: improve the incoming brief, state the review criteria, remove a redundant approval or make an accepted decision available to the next person. Track whether senior rescue time falls. If it does not, do not count the new tool or process as a capacity gain.
Smaller accounts may gain the most
There are diminishing returns to putting more senior strategy time onto an account that already has a great deal of it. The extra value of another hour on the flagship client may be modest. The extra value of introducing proper strategic thinking to an account that currently gets almost none can be large.
That is why scaling strategy is partly a distribution problem. The agency needs a way to move good thinking to where it changes the work, rather than where the resourcing model happens to make it easiest to allocate.
Do not turn every gain into throughput
Agencies are very good at converting efficiency into more work. Save four strategist hours and the immediate temptation is to add another assignment. Sometimes that is right. If every gain becomes more throughput, the organisation arrives at exactly the same quality problem with better software. Decide what recovered capacity is for.
Better work. More strategic coverage. More senior review where it matters. More time with clients and creatives. More ability to notice the strategic problem nobody has briefed yet. That is how an agency scales strategy without pretending the only lever is headcount.
Mirel’s approach for agency leads is intended to support that wider distribution of strategic work.