⚙️ The Agency Process and Operations Conference
• Are you on a journey to improve your agency’s process and operations?
• Join us for an afternoon of inspiring talks and case studies, to help you decide what will help you put your best foot forward in 2026.
Thursday 13th November 2025 – 1.30pm to 5pm
The British Library, Kings Cross
The agencies that run like clockwork don’t just “get things done” – they design their operations to be the engine for everything else.
When your ops are strong, projects run smoother. Clients get better results. Teams work with less friction. That means that you can actually grow, without drowning in chaos.
But too often, operations are left to muddle along in the background… until things start breaking.
What We’re Hearing from Agencies Right Now
- “We’ve got too many systems that don’t talk to each other.”
- “Our ops haven’t kept up with our growth – we’re firefighting every week.”
- “Nobody knows where to find the right information, so we waste time reinventing the wheel.”
- “We’ve automated everything and it’s somehow harder to get things done.”
Agencies are rethinking their structures from the ground up: streamlining processes, fixing broken systems, making teams more agile, and finally getting a grip on tools and workflows.
This is where Clockwork comes in – to take a look at how agencies are designing their operations for scale, sustainability, and sanity.
You’ll hear from leaders who’ve been through the messy middle – restructuring teams, cutting unnecessary complexity, and getting crystal clear on how work flows through their agency.
We’ll cover:
- Foundations that scale: how to build processes that support growth instead of slowing you down.
- The right tools, in the right order: choosing tech that actually works together.
- People & performance: turning “creatives who hate systems” into process champions.
- Measuring what matters :using data and dashboards that drive better decisions.
Clockwork is your chance to step back from the day-to-day, see what’s working (and what isn’t), and leave with a plan to keep your agency ticking along smoothly.
Meet other people improving how their agency runs
Clockwork is an afternoon that will help you get inspired, and meet other agency process and operations people that you can learn from.
We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
It’s aimed at agency leaders and their process or operations leaders – but anybody can come.
- Our venue is the Knowledge Centre at The British Library. We have the entire building, so you will explore the venue interacting with different agency leaders. We mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
Profitable Projects & Retainers
“Every single day, profit is leaking out of your business”
Peter Czapp, co-founder of The Wow Company, says, “It leaks in the details, in projects that drag, retainers that balloon, and teams that don’t know when to push back.”
Agencies often think that smart positioning and healthy rates are enough to keep margins strong.
But in reality, the cracks usually show elsewhere.
That’s what this talk at Clockwork is all about: how to stop profit from slipping through the cracks, and keep more of what you earn.
If you’ve ever watched a project bleed profit, or a retainer turn into a slow drain, Peter will give you the tools to plug the leaks and protect your bottom line.
“Profit is protected in the details. Let’s deliver like it.”
Building Processes That Work Without You
“If you haven’t got traction, you’re pretty much hallucinating your vision.”
That’s how agency founder Paul Trilk frames EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, that helped him scale, and survive a shock no one plans for.
Paul tried OKRs and “all the systems.” None stuck. But EOS did. Why? Because everyone owns it.
“Most businesses don’t work on real data,” he says. “They work off ego and gut feeling.”
Then came the test: Paul was diagnosed with cancer. He stepped out of the business for months… and as it turned out, the team actually ran the business better than he did.
That experience cemented the culture: clarity, accountability, and vulnerability. “All leaders do not know all the answers. Just admit it.”
You’ll leave with two tools you can use immediately, the two-page Vision/Traction Organiser and a simple visionary/integrator check, plus a blueprint to implement EOS without “the whole thing bursting into flames.”
You Should Treat Ops Like a Product (Not a Helpdesk)
“Ops isn’t plumbers fixing a leak,” says Olivia. “We’re here to upgrade the system.”
At NOVOS, Olivia has reframed operations as a product: internal teams are the customers, and the ‘product’ is the operational ecosystem – systems, rituals, and UX- that powers the work.
Instead of reacting to complaints, she now runs discovery, ships betas, collects feedback, and iterates in sprints with a visible roadmap. And It’s already paid off.
Testing this approach to projects such as performance reviews and simplifying an entire operational ecosystem, consolidating multiple fragmented processes into one streamlined system.
“I was once terrified of the change,” Olivia admits. “But this time, the pushback never came.” The difference? Real user research, phased migration, and internal ‘marketing’ so everyone knew what was changing and why.
If you’re done firefighting and want ops that actually sticks, come hear Olivia’s playbook: treat ops like a product, not a helpdesk. Hear the missteps, challenges and learnings as well as the wins of approaching Ops as a product.
Define the problem, test on a willing team, publish release notes, and keep iterating. Version 1.5 that lasts three years beats Version 1.0 that dies in six months.
“How Simple Ops Moves Rocketed Our Profit”
“It’s not that deep, guys.”
That’s how Lisa Paasche sums up the changes that took her agency from scraping by to selling for millions.
In 2014, her agency had a healthy turnover but less than £100k profit. “I remember thinking, ‘What the hell?’. We were working harder than ever, but the margins were collapsing.”
Lisa’s solution wasn’t a shiny new strategy. It was the basics:
- Timesheets. “If you don’t fill them in, you don’t get a pay rise.” Within six months, her team was tracking everything — and Lisa finally knew which clients and services made money.
- Forecasting. A simple hybrid model she built herself, later praised by Omnicom’s finance team. “I thought they’d change everything. They told me, ‘Don’t touch it – your books are perfect.’”
- Transparency. She opened the numbers up to her whole team. “If people don’t understand the margins, they won’t care about them. But once they see it, they start making smarter decisions.”
Profit shot up massively in just two years, setting up a successful sale. In this session, Lisa will show you the deceptively simple ops moves that transformed her agency, and how you can apply them to yours.
You’ve Got to Let Go to Grow Your Ops
“Operational overwhelm can cripple you – the never-ending could/should do list crippling the growth of the business while causing you to have a personal meltdown. Being so lost in day-to-day ops and tasks that you can’t look up and figure out your overall direction of travel or business plan.”
For Lee’ann Kaufman, when iseepr’s revenue doubled from £1m to £2m, this became her week-to-week reality.
“Weeks can get especially messy for founders that are simultaneously running their business and delivering client services.”
Planners are rearranged to fit last-minute client demands, deadlines and unforeseen team issues. Strategic planning time gets pushed back to ‘next week’ (again). And urgent trumps important.
The toll builds quickly.
Feeling burnt out. Like you can’t switch off from the weight of what hasn’t moved forward that week. Slow growth and progress across the business, and the guilt of being a decision-maker bottleneck who ‘hasn’t had time to get to that yet…’. Plus the potential loss of strong team members who have become disenchanted that the business isn’t really working as well as it should be.
In this breakout, Lee’ann shares why building a trusted senior team became her way out, and how it helped her overcome operational overwhelm and retain a sane work-life balance.
Scaling Your Ops Through Rapid Growth
“We went from 12 people to 21 quickly.”
That’s how Bottled Imagination’s Kate Boddy describes the growth spurt that forced the agency to scale, fast, without losing its head.
“I had two weeks to get a new tool set up,” Kate says. She rolled out Asana at pace, then handed ownership to the PR team so project management didn’t bottleneck with ops.
To shield people from the surge, leadership created a protective layer – spreading pressure across a few seniors so juniors weren’t thrown in the deep end. They also moved to pods with a PR Account Director at the top, added a buddy system, and got strict on onboarding.
“Just because you’ve got people coming in doesn’t mean the workload gets lighter until probably a month down the road.”
Not everything was flawless. With seniors focused on new wins, they left some renewal conversations late and learned the value of a regular senior “pulse” on client calls. “You can get a vibe that something’s not quite right,” Kate says, if the right people are in the room.
Now, as the next growth wave approaches, the team is calmer, with talent pipelined, scenarios mapped, and clearer triggers for when to hire or spin up a new pod. If you’re bracing for rapid growth, Kate’s playbook shows how to scale quickly – without burning your team or your clients.
Running Your Agency on Data, Not Gut Feel
Most agencies work hard, deliver great work, and still struggle with one thing – clear visibility. Profitability, utilisation, hiring triggers, real delivery capacity. When these numbers are unclear, decisions become instinct-driven and expensive.
This session focuses on someone who has lived that challenge and rebuilt the operating rhythm of an agency from the inside – Laura Hudspith, COO at Hiyield.
Laura stepped into her role at a time when the business was accelerating, systems were stretched, and teams were asking for answers she couldn’t rely on dashboards to give. Margins were unclear. Resource decisions were reactive. Leadership conversations became harder because everyone was working from different versions of the truth.
In this session, Laura will share:
- how she created clarity from conflicting data
- the simple metrics she uses to guide decisions
- how she aligned the leadership team around one source of truth
- what changed in delivery, hiring, and forecasting when the numbers became trusted
- the practical steps any agency can take to escape firefighting and build a healthier operating model
Facilitated by Supo’s founder, Iouri Prokhorov, the conversation will unpack the real behaviours, habits, and rhythms that give operations leaders control – regardless of the tools they use.
This isn’t about software.
It’s about running an agency with confidence.
If you’ve ever hesitated over a hire, questioned your margins, or felt like you were working hard without clear visibility, this session shows what to track, how to track it, and how operational clarity transforms a growing agency.
Clockwork – FAQs 🤖
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event sharp at 1.30pm, so try to arrive by 1.15pm.
The afternoon’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by Agency Hackers facilitators who make sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and a great lunch to keep you going throughout the day.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are all agency leaders with interesting stories to tell about agency process or operations.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is mainly for agency leaders and operations leaders – but it’s potentially of interest to anybody interested in making their agency run letter.
Basically, anybody can attend if you think it looks up your street.
