Most agencies are structured the same way. A senior person sells the work. A mid-level person manages it. And a junior person does most of it, following the agency’s process.
That process exists for good reason. It’s how agencies scale. It’s how they keep margins healthy on retainers. And for a clearly defined, repeating brief (run our paid media, schedule our social posts, produce our monthly newsletter) it works well enough.
The problem is that most of the businesses we work with don’t have a clearly defined, repeating brief.
They have a function that’s stretched. A role that’s temporarily empty. A channel that exists on paper but nobody is properly running. A team that knows something isn’t working but can’t articulate what, because they’ve never done this before and don’t have the reference point.
That is not a brief. That is a situation. And agency process is not built for situations.
When we place someone inside a client’s team, we don’t send them with a playbook. We send them with experience.
The difference matters. A junior person following process will do exactly what the brief says. An experienced person will do what the brief says, notice the three things the brief didn’t mention, and quietly start handling those as well. Not because they’re being heroic. Because they’ve seen enough to recognise what needs doing, and they’re senior enough to just get on with it.
Our team are grown-ups. They’ve worked in agencies, in-house, and in consulting. They’ve seen the inside of enough businesses to know that the real picture rarely matches the brief. A content calendar that looks tidy in a spreadsheet but falls apart because nobody coordinated with the product team. A social strategy that makes sense on paper but doesn’t account for how the business actually produces content. An integration that was specced by a consultancy but never built because nobody stayed long enough to see it through.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the norm. And you need people who can handle them without escalating everything back to a project manager for a scope discussion.
Sometimes a client asks us to cover a gap. Maternity leave. A resignation. A role that hasn’t been filled yet. The brief, in those situations, is essentially: keep things running. Don’t let anything get dropped.
We can do that. But what tends to happen is more interesting.
When we covered a nine-month maternity gap at Transporeon, Lewis didn’t just keep the social channels ticking over. He was running weekly content meetings with 20 to 30 growth managers within the first few weeks. He ran workshops for 40 to 50 people on how the platforms actually work. He restructured the content workflow so deadlines were met and the quality improved.
By the time the maternity period ended, the function worked better than it did before. Not because Lewis followed a transformation plan. Because he’s experienced enough to see what needed fixing and senior enough to fix it without waiting for permission.
That’s what ‘keeping the lights on’ looks like when the person doing it has done this before. They don’t just maintain. They improve. And they do it so naturally that the client sometimes doesn’t realise the improvement has happened until they look back.
This is the sentence that defines most of our engagements.
A client brings us in for one thing. We do that thing well. And because we’re inside the business, sitting in the meetings, understanding the pressures, someone eventually says: ‘Oh, while you’re here, can you help with this by any chance?’
It might be a piece of marketing that needs sorting. It might be a technology question. It might be something strategic that’s been sitting on someone’s desk for months because nobody had the headspace or the experience to tackle it.
An external agency would say: that’s not in scope, let’s write a new brief. We say: yes, we can help with that. And if it’s something outside our own expertise, we know the right people to bring in.
This isn’t scope creep. It’s how real work actually gets done inside real businesses. Problems don’t arrive in neat categories. They arrive as situations that need experienced people to recognise them and deal with them. The embedded model works because it puts those people in the room where the problems actually surface, not on the end of a briefing email sent after the fact.
An external agency optimises for the brief it receives. An embedded team helps write a better brief, because they understand the full picture, not just the slice of it that made it into the project scope.
That’s not a criticism of agencies. It’s a structural observation. If you’re outside the building, you can only respond to what you’re told. If you’re inside it, you respond to what you see.
We don’t do this for every client. Some businesses need a clearly scoped supplier and that’s fine. But for the ones where the brief is ‘we need experienced people to come in, get their hands dirty, and help us work out what good looks like’, the embedded model is what we built for.
