Developing a Scalable Creative Operations System

Turning Founder-Led Creative Into a Scalable Engine

€6-figure/month DTC Wellness Brand (under NDA)

The Problem

This brand was already winning — consistently doing €6 figures per month in revenue — but growth was fragile.

Creative performance depended heavily on the founders’ energy and intuition. When they were hands-on, ads worked. When they stepped back, momentum slowed.

On paper, everything looked fine:

Strong product–market fit

Aggressive paid spend across Meta, Google, YouTube, Snapchat

Editors, media buyer, agencies, and contractors all “doing the work”

But in reality:

Creative strategy lived in people’s heads

Testing was reactive, not planned

Winning creatives weren’t logged, iterated, or compounded

Founders were constantly pulled back into Slack, Monday, and ad accounts

The team was busy — but there was no creative operating system behind the output.

The Intervention

I came in as an outside operator to translate founder instinct into something the team could actually run without them.

Not to replace creativity — but to protect it.

My role was to sit between:

founders

internal team

agencies

…and design the missing Creative Ops layer that connected ideas, execution, and performance into one system.

The System (How It Worked)

Using their existing stack — Notion, Monday, Slack, Shopify, Triple Whale, and ad platforms — I designed a Creative & Marketing OS v1.

Upstream (Strategy & Planning)

Central idea & testing backlog (Notion)

Clear weekly planning rules:

new concepts vs iterations

video vs static

product focus split

Simple decision logic: test → kill → iterate → scale

Execution (Production & Launch)

Standardized creative statuses in Monday (Idea → Scripted → In Production → Ready → Live → Completed)

Consistent naming + tagging so creatives were traceable across tools

Reduced Slack noise by making Monday the source of truth

Downstream (Performance & Learning)

Unified view of:

creatives launched per week

new vs iteration mix

format mix

performance by concept / strategist

A creative log that captured concept → spend → result → learning

Dashboards that made performance patterns visible without digging into ad accounts

No new tools. No heavy process. Just enough structure for creative output to compound instead of reset.

The Outcome

The founders finally had:

Visibility without micromanaging

A creative engine that didn’t collapse when they stepped away

Agencies working inside a system, not alongside it

A clear line between ideas, output, and revenue impact

At a €6-figure monthly scale, even small improvements mattered:

Better iteration instead of creative churn

Less wasted spend on underperforming concepts

More predictable growth driven by systems, not adrenaline

The biggest win wasn’t efficiency — it was removing founder dependency from creative execution.