From High-Growth Chaos to a Real Business

Eugenio founded Huecco nearly four years ago. It's a performance agency that helps brands expand internationally through paid ads and creative.

We met Eugenio after another client of ours referred him to us. When we first spoke, he was clearly distressed by what was happening inside the agency.

Last year the business grew fast. On the surface, that's the win every agency founder is chasing. Underneath it, the growth arrived faster than the structure could carry, and Q4, his peak volume season, stretched everything past the point it was built for.

The catalyst

After that Q4 period, Eugenio knew something had to change. The issue was not whether he could continue selling. The problem was whether the agency could continue delivering without everything eventually breaking. Winning clients is the easy half. Keeping them is the hard half, and keeping them comes down to team and process.

The market sells founders the front end, how to sell, how to grow, how to close. Eugenio worked out that the front end is the easy half. The retention half is where the real business lives, and it's the half almost nobody teaches.

What we deployed

Building autonomous pods

We designed the agency around a pod, a creative strategist, a creative coordinator, and a media buyer, built to carry 6 brands cleanly instead of the founder carrying all of them in his head. Once that first pod was running and holding weight, we stood up a second pod. That's what let him add clients without the delivery quality sliding backwards.

End-to-end creative delivery process

Then we went after the hardest part of the whole operation: UGC. For a performance agency running Meta and TikTok, user-generated content is where delivery breaks down. There are too many moving parts, and too many places for it to stall:

• Sourcing creators
• Shipping product
• Getting briefs approved
• Chasing raw footage
• Editing
• Revisions
• Client sign-off

We mapped the entire UGC pipeline into a repeatable line: creators pulled from a categorised database, briefs and creator checklists separated so nothing slips, editing routed automatically through the board, strategist review before anything reaches the client.

Two changes did the heavy lifting on speed. We pushed real QA ownership onto the Creative Coordinator, so she now owns the process itself and checks the quality of the UGC before it moves down the line, instead of the founder being the last check on everything. And we rebuilt the creator incentive so creators are rewarded for faster turnaround. The slowest link in UGC is almost always the gap between briefing a creator and getting usable footage back, so we attacked it directly and cut the time-to-value across the content pipeline.

Building a high-performance team

We also made a call on the team that founders tend to duck. Part of what we do with clients is assess the existing team against the new version of the business, not the old one, because the person who fits the agency you're leaving behind isn't always the person who fits the one you're building.

Eugenio's Operations Manager looked like a strong fit at first glance. Hard worker, did the job. But once the new structure started taking shape, it was clear she wasn't right for where the business was going, and we told him so. Letting her go was one of the harder calls of the engagement. It was also one of the necessary ones.

He came in expecting a team that would solve his operational problems for him. He left with the ability to build, measure, and improve the process himself, which is why the systems he runs today already look different from the ones we started with.

Talent without process is just a faster route to burnout. Structure is what lets good people do good work without breaking.

Results

Since we started working together, Eugenio has doubled the size of the agency. But I do not think the growth is the most important part of the story. The more important part is that the agency now has a stronger foundation underneath that growth.

He has a real team. People operate inside clearer roles and processes. The work is less dependent on information sitting inside one person's head. And the client experience has become something the team can deliver more consistently.

The other major change is that Eugenio is no longer the only thing holding the operation together. Before we worked together, too much knowledge and decision-making routed back through him.

The closing word

The deepest change was how Eugenio thought about the reason for building the agency at all. When we met, growth was largely about chasing the highest number possible. But growth without a clear purpose had already taken him somewhere he did not enjoy being.