Case Study
HeadsUp Strategy Engine
Building a Repeatable System for Turning New Clients Into Strategy
The Setup
HeadsUp Marketing was a growing agency with five major clients, companies with multiple locations and partnerships with brands like IHG. I joined as a marketing manager, but quickly started working directly with the owner to build the operational infrastructure the agency needed to scale: project tracking, client onboarding, proposals, team syncs, automations, and our tool stack.
The creative work was good. The systems underneath it didn't exist yet.
The Problem
The team tackled every project as it came in. They'd turn work around when they could and give as much strategic context as they had, but there was no framework behind it. A client who was a seasoned marketing director got the same onboarding experience as a first-time business owner who didn't know what a persona was.
That meant a few things were breaking:
No diagnostic layer. There was no structured way to figure out where a client actually was. What they understood, what they'd already tried, where the real gaps lived. Strategy was starting from vibes, not evidence.
Inconsistent starting points. Every client engagement began differently depending on who was leading it and what felt urgent. It was up to whoever was putting the profile together to fill in the rest, and there was no shared understanding of "here's where we always begin."
The confidence gap. Walking into a first strategy call without a framework behind you feels different than walking in with one. The team was smart, but they were rebuilding the plane on every flight. And at the end, there was no shared confidence that the plane would fly.
The Solution
I built what I called the Creative Strategy Engine. A systematic process for taking a new client from intake to strategic recommendation.
The Intake Form as Diagnostic Tool
The centerpiece was a client intake form, but it wasn't just information gathering. It was designed to do two things at once:
What they answered told us where they were in terms of marketing and creative sophistication. How they thought about their audience, their positioning, their competitive landscape.
What they didn't answer told us where to start. If a client left personas blank, we knew audience work had to come before any campaign planning. If they couldn't articulate their differentiator, that was our first strategic conversation, not ad spend.
The gaps became the roadmap.
From Intake to Strategy
Once the form came back, the team would take a first pass, filling in what we could confidently answer based on research and our own expertise. Whatever remained unanswered after that pass became the foundation of our strategic brief.
If we felt well-informed after the intake and our research pass, we'd move into planning. Campaigns, channels, creative. All built on top of the documented context rather than assumptions.
The Deliverable
What the team ended up with for every client was two things:
A client/brand profile. A living document with a clear picture of strong areas, weak areas, and a shared understanding of how to approach and communicate with that specific client based on their level of sophistication.
A strategy brief. Growth opportunities tied to the gaps we'd identified, and strategies that leveraged the client's existing strengths. Not a generic playbook. A plan built on what the intake process actually revealed.
The Impact
Faster turnaround. With a consistent understanding of where to start, the team wasn't reinventing the process every time a new client came through the door. The framework gave everyone the same starting line.
Better client profiles. Profiles weren't just contact info and brand guidelines. They were built to actually serve the client. Capturing sophistication level, knowledge gaps, and strategic context that shaped every interaction going forward.
Strategy with a backbone. Every recommendation was built on a documented framework and a real understanding of where the client was. No more gut-feel proposals. The strategy was traceable back to what we learned in intake.
Confident first calls. Whether the team was sitting across from a seasoned marketing director or a business owner hearing the word "persona" for the first time, they had context, backup information, and a framework that met the client where they were. The confidence gap disappeared.
The show-your-work advantage. This might be the biggest one. When you can walk a client through why you're recommending what you're recommending, backed by their own intake responses, mapped against a clear framework, trust builds fast. It's the difference between "we think you should do this" and "here's exactly why this is the right move for where you are right now."
The Takeaway
What started as a creative project turned into a systems project, and a sorely needed one. The insight was that the quality of an agency's strategic output shouldn't depend on which team member is running point on a given day. It should be elevated by a process that makes everyone sharper. The Creative Strategy Engine turned client onboarding from an inconsistent art into a repeatable discipline, and it gave a small team the infrastructure to operate like a much larger one.