Event
Clockwork: The Agency Process and Operations Conference
topline infoRmation
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.
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Event Manifesto
The agencies that run like clockwork don’t just “get things done” – they design their operations to be the engine for everything else.
Event curated by:
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Abi Donoghue
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“Fast-paced used to be a selling point. Now efficiency beats urgency,” is what one COO told me.
Agencies are still expected to move quickly, but the margin for chaos has disappeared. With AI accelerating delivery, clients want certainty, not necessarily super human speed. Teams are also stretched thinner, and the systems that “mostly worked” are starting to crack under pressure.
From the conversations I’ve been having, agencies don’t seem to be in a place where new tools are the focus. They’re in a place where ops leaders are having to step up even more.
AI hasn’t reduced the need for operational leadership, instead it’s made it more visible. I’m seeing ops leads pulled into conversations about structure, pricing, performance, and risk.
Not because they want to be, but because that’s where the cracks show up first.
What used to live in spreadsheets, workarounds, and “we’ll fix it later” now has consequences.
Resource planning, utilisation, recoverability, and performance frameworks aren’t back-office concerns anymore. They’re how agencies stay profitable without burning people out.
Culture shows up in systems. In how feedback is given, how expectations are set, and how early problems are addressed before they become expensive ones- especially as new employee laws come in this year.
But above all, despite everything automating, judgment still matters. Developing people still matters. Craft still matters.
Clockwork is a space for the ops leaders doing that work.
The ones quietly shaping their agencies survive and what comes next.
From pipeline to profit. Synergist connects your projects, resources, and financials in one place – streamlining work and giving you the data you need to grow profitably. See problems coming, make smarter moves, and scale confidently. The UK’s leading agency software, built to flex for your agency’s unique needs.
SPEAKERS
⏳ Speakers
How Did Born Social Redesign Its Operating Model With Client Clusters?
“We realised we had brilliant people, but they were just all posted in one place.”
That was the uncomfortable realisation Emily Simou Hall, Operations Director at Born Social had a few years ago.
The agency had grown quickly, landing large global clients and ambitious briefs. Behind the scenes though, the operating model wasn’t keeping up with them.
The biggest accounts had strong teams and leadership. But smaller clients were struggling, often staffed with juniors or lower performers. And of course the agency wanted to keep scaling, win new work, and even pitch for competing brands.
Something had to change.
So Emily took a step back and asked a fundamental question: how should the agency actually be structured to scale?
“We got in a room, wrote everyone in the business on whiteboards, and started moving people around,” says Emily. “We weren’t scared to disrupt what felt untouchable.”
The result was a new operating model built around client clusters – essentially mini agencies within the agency.
Each cluster had its own leadership structure, dedicated teams, and growth forecast. The goal was simple: give every account the right structure, spread talent more evenly across the business, and make resourcing more predictable.
At first, the idea felt risky.
“In an agency, saying to someone ‘you only work on this account’ felt really scary.”
But over time, the benefits became clear. Teams developed deeper expertise, work improved, and clients built stronger relationships with consistent teams.
At Clockwork, Emily will share the full story of how Born Social redesigned its operating model, what worked, what didn’t, and how the structure is evolving today.
Stop Being the Bottleneck: Building Teams That Run Themselves
“I just dropped my pen and left. And I never went back.”
Zoe Makin says that casually but it was a sign of a complete operational breakdown.
Because at the end of the day, burnout isn’t a mindset problem, it’s a systems problem. And in ops, the system is often you.
Back when she was head of English, Zoe hit the point where she “physically [didn’t] have time” to do what was being asked. She walked out mid-breakdown, left her stuff in the building, and walked away from a 10-year career.
She’s now gone from self taught intern to COO. And at Clockwork, Zoe will be sharing how to avoid becoming the bottleneck in your operations processes and how to build a team that can run itself.
Zoe now runs ops with one core principle: calm is contagious. When someone brings a “massive problem” to you, your reaction sets the temperature for the whole organisation.
She’ll share her “nine whys” about the root of a problem, her emotional regulation loop that keeps her and her team afloat, and how Minimal Viable Launch builds radical ownership so decisions don’t stack up on the COO’s desk.
How to Keep on Top of Over-servicing
“We worked out that in some months, we were over-servicing our clients by 300 hours a month.”
Alex Holliman didn’t find this out through a clever dashboard. He found it out because his team kept saying they were drowning, and the numbers said they shouldn’t be.
“There’s this disparity,” he says. “Because there should have been all this time that we had.”
So Climbing Trees built a system to drag over-servicing into the light. To stop the quiet spiral where someone’s given 15 hours, but does 40.
“What we wanted to try and get the team to do was to stop unconsciously over-servicing,” Alex says. “To actually think, I’ve been given 15 hours and I’m now going to make a choice.”
They track two types: requested over-service (deliberately approved, for a reason) and unrequested over-service (the sneaky stuff).
They use simple forms, time transfers, and reporting to see what’s really going on, be it inaccurate quotes, relationship issues, deadlines, weak client management.
If you’re finding over-servicing is creeping up more and more in your agency, you should come and see how Alex tightened the system without building a huge new process.
How to Work Past the Founder Bottleneck
“It’s not that they don’t want to, it’s that they feel like they can’t.”
That’s the reality Liam Anderson, Chemistry+Industry, sees again and again when agency founders become the biggest bottleneck in their own business.
A lot of founders say they want growth. So they talk about scaling, mergers, or eventually selling the agency. But they have structured the business in a way that still depends on them being involved in everything – every decision, every approval, every problem.
For Ops leaders, this creates a constant frustration. You’re brought in to improve process, profitability, and structure, but the person who needs to let go the most is also the person who built the company.
And letting go is terrifying.
In this session, Liam, former Director of Operations at Social Chain and current fractional ops consultant, will unpack the reality behind founder bottlenecks: why they happen, why founders struggle to step back, and why one small mistake can send them diving straight back into the weeds.
He’ll share how Ops leaders can approach that conversation without triggering defensiveness, how to slowly remove the founder from the operational centre of the business, and why the goal is to strip away everything except the part of the business they actually love doing.
If you’re an Operations leader trying to move your agency past the founder bottleneck without blowing up the relationship that holds the business together, this session will give you a practical way to start.
The Right Systems Help Scale without Losing Control
“When you can’t see what’s really happening in your business anymore, that’s when things start to go pear-shaped,” says Julian Reiter, founder of Positive Group.
As his agency grew, Julian realised his intuition alone wasn’t enough. Projects were slipping, profitability was fuzzy, and he’d lost the clear line of sight he once had.
“Without the right system, you’re running blind,” he says. “You start relying on people who don’t necessarily understand what drives the business – and that’s when it all unravels.”
In this session, Julian will be joined by Jason Neale from Agency Works, to talk about how to scale without losing control – and the role a proper agency management system, like Synergist, played in helping him do it.
They’ll be tackling:
How to build data-driven confidence. This session is about creating visibility, discipline and confidence in your agency — so you can lead with facts, not feelings.
Why systems matter long before you think you need them. What happens when a founder finally admits, “I can’t keep doing this.”
The human side of scaling. How leadership, communication and visibility unlock growth – and why systems are really about people, not software.
Why implementation is critical for success. How Julian’s first implementation “totally cocked things up” – and the lessons that made it work the second time.
“Profit doesn’t happen by accident.”
But for many agencies, that’s exactly how it’s treated.
The year starts with a revenue target, “Last year was £3m, let’s push for £3.5m.”
It sounds ambitious, it feels motivating, but it’s not an intentional target.
Peter Czapp from The Wow Company believes that planning with intent flips that script.
Instead of asking, “How much revenue do we want?” You ask, “How much profit do we want to make and why?”
What level of dividends do directors expect? How much will you reinvest into growth?
Only then do you calculate your target operating profit. And only then do you determine the gross profit, and fee income, required to support it.
That process matters.
Because when you start with revenue, profit is whatever’s left.
When you start with profit, everything else aligns around it.
Timesheet confessions: The truth about time in agencies
We all know timesheets matter. So, why is getting people to do them properly STILL one of the biggest headaches in agency operations?
Behind every reminder, every Friday panic, and every “I’ll just do it later”, there’s something else going on. Quiet workarounds, invisible pressures… there’s a lot we don’t say out loud, until now.
In this interactive talk, Jay Neale, from our partners, Synergist, puts the truth front and centre-stage (literally).
Because here’s the reality: nobody is innocent.
And it’s not laziness, a bad attitude, or a ‘compliance problem’. It’s human. And it’s costing you more than you think.
We’ll dig into why teams lie on timesheets, why your data is more fiction than fact, and what actually works when hundreds of best-practice lectures haven’t.
Expect honesty, and a few uncomfortable home truths. Come ready to confess and leave with a fresh perspective on timesheets – and on running your agency.
FAQ
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