Transporeon’s social media coordinator was going on maternity leave. They needed someone to step in for nine months, keep the channels running, and coordinate content across a large, decentralised team of growth managers.
The brief was cover. What followed was something more useful.
Transporeon’s marketing content wasn’t produced by a central team. It came from 20 to 30 individual growth managers, each responsible for their own area, each producing content on their own schedule and to their own standards. The social media coordinator’s role was to catch all of that, shape it, and get it published. Without someone in that seat who understood both the platforms and the people, the workflow stalled quickly.
We didn’t operate as an external agency. Lewis joined Transporeon’s internal rhythm from the first week.
He ran the weekly social media meetings for the full growth team. These weren’t status updates delivered to a client. They were working sessions with 20 to 30 people: growth managers and content leads coordinating what was going out, when, and on which platform. Lewis chaired them, set the agenda, and managed the pipeline.
Between meetings, he worked directly with individual growth managers. Within a few weeks, team members were contacting him outside formal meeting hours for quick catch-ups on upcoming posts and events. That informal contact mattered more than it sounds. It meant Lewis had a clearer picture of what each person was planning, sometimes before the plan existed on paper, and it meant the content calendar reflected what the team were actually doing rather than a tidied-up version submitted to a brief. An external agency would have learned that through a weekly status update, if at all. Being inside the team meant learning it as it happened.
He also ran a series of workshops for 40 to 50 people across the business, focused on how the major platforms actually work: what the algorithms reward, what they penalise, and what that means for the content Transporeon’s teams were creating. The workshops weren’t about social media theory. They were about giving growth managers the knowledge to make better decisions at the point where content is conceived, not after it’s been written and scheduled.
There was some initial resistance. Any new person working inside an established team brings slightly different ways of doing things, and that takes a few weeks to settle. It settled quickly.
The most visible operational change was the content pipeline. At the start of the engagement, content was typically being reviewed, signed off, and loaded onto the platform on the same day it was due to go live. By the second half of the engagement, content was prepared and signed off two weeks or more in advance. That is a fundamental shift in how the function operates. Same-day work is ‘reactive’. Two weeks ahead is ‘planned’. It frees the team to think about quality and strategy rather than firefighting a deadline.
Alongside the pipeline change, the growth managers began thinking differently about why they were creating content in the first place. Not just what to post but what they were trying to achieve with it. That is a mindset change, not a process change, and it’s significantly harder to create from outside the building. The fact that the team sustained the new rhythm on their own terms suggests the interventions landed in the right place.
Not every engagement needs to be a full transformation. Sometimes a business has the people and the ambition but is missing a specific capability for a specific period. The question is whether the partner filling that gap operates as a supplier on the outside or as a colleague on the inside.
The Transporeon engagement started as maternity cover. It became a proof point for something we now offer formally: fractional and interim support that works inside the client’s team, not around it. We attend the meetings, coordinate the people, and build the capability so the business can sustain it when we step back.
The embedded model is not a premium version of outsourcing. It’s a fundamentally different way of working. And for businesses where the marketing function is stretched, new, or temporarily short-handed, it’s often the approach that actually moves things forward.
KEY ACTIVITIES:
Outcomes in 10 months
Transporeon
Social media support
Company based in Germany (remote working)
April 2023-February 2024
