What I Walked Into
A department in genuine trouble. Client relationships were damaged and the clients were angry. Production schedules were not slipping by weeks. Some projects were four to six months behind. The team was fragmented and the technical infrastructure was dated.
The harder problem was internal. The company did not want this function to exist. Video was disliked across the organization, and leadership would have shut the vertical down if contractual obligations had allowed it. That is the part most turnaround stories leave out: I was not handed a struggling team to improve. I was handed one the business had already decided against.
The Diagnosis
The problem was not talent or effort. It was that nobody had defined the narrative architecture the work was supposed to serve. Every asset started from a product brief, which meant every asset sounded like a product brief.
In B2B electronics the audience is a design engineer: expert, time-poor, and unusually good at detecting content produced to hit a quota. Content that leads with the product loses them in the first fifteen seconds. Content that leads with their problem keeps them.
The Framework
I rebuilt the operation around two principles that sound like slogans and function as engineering constraints.
Content is king, but only content someone finishes. Volume is not a strategy. A hundred assets nobody completes is worth less than ten that hold an engineer to the end. So the metric that governed the pipeline was completion and engagement, not output count.
The customer is the hero, not the brand. Borrowed from StoryBrand and applied without apology: the engineer is the protagonist with a problem, the client's product is the tool that helps them win, and our client is the guide, not the star. Reordering that in every brief changed the work more than any production upgrade.
What I Rebuilt
- The team and culture. Rebuilt a fragmented department into a cross-cultural team of 10+ across the US, Germany, and the Philippines, running a follow-the-sun cycle so work moves while one region sleeps.
- The messaging framework. Defined value propositions, proof points, and a review process that keeps 600+ annual assets consistent in voice and positioning across multiple client brands, regions, and formats, without requiring me in every approval.
- The production pipeline. Industrialized the workflow so output scaled without proportional headcount.
- AI where it belongs. Deployed AI-augmented workflows that cut production costs 60% and time-to-market by up to 90%, with human judgment held on strategy, positioning, and anything carrying the brand.
- The P&L. Took ownership of budget, revenue targets, pricing, and margin, and ran the function as a business rather than a cost center.
Where AI Stops
The efficiency numbers are the easy part to quote and the least interesting part of the story. AI has made content production nearly free, which means volume is no longer a differentiator and technical buyers now discount most of what reaches them.
The judgment that makes the pipeline work is knowing where automation has to stop. I use it aggressively at points of operational friction such as transcription, assembly, versioning, and localization, and never on positioning, message, or anything that carries the brand. In engineering-led markets credibility is the entire asset, and it is far more expensive to rebuild than to protect.
The Operation
Production stills · studio and location, downtown Boise, 2023–2024
Year One: Right the Ship
The first year was operational triage. Get the four-to-six-month backlog current. Stop the bleeding on delivery. Rebuild the team and the infrastructure underneath it so that "on time" became a thing we could promise rather than hope for.
The measure of that year was not growth. It was that we stopped losing.
Year Two: Rebuild the Trust
The second year was about credibility, internal and external, and it produced the result I am proudest of. I won back the major accounts the department had lost. Not replaced with new logos: the specific clients that had left because we failed them.
That is a harder sell than new business. A prospect has no history with you. A client who left has a documented reason not to come back, and the only argument that works is delivering differently, visibly, over time.
Year Three: Build a Real Business
With delivery reliable and trust restored, the function could finally grow on purpose. Orders from our two largest accounts, Digi-Key and Mouser, increased substantially. Just as important, I deliberately built out the long tail so the book was no longer hostage to two relationships. Concentration risk is the quiet way a service business dies, and a healthy tail is what makes the whales safe rather than terrifying.
The result is a function that is self-sufficient and still growing: a trusted, predictable revenue source rather than a line item the business worries about. Most in-house media divisions live with a permanent low-grade anxiety: are we worth what we cost, and will someone decide we are not? That question stopped being asked here. The department the company once planned to close is now one it plans around.
Changing What the Company Believed
The revenue and margin numbers are the outcome. The actual work was cultural, and it took three years.
A function the business has written off does not recover through better project management. It recovers when the organization changes its mind about what the function is for, and that only happens when the work is visibly good, delivered when promised, and tied to money the business can see. Every schedule we caught up on, every client relationship we repaired, every asset that outperformed expectation was an argument.
What I could control directly was the team. People do their best work when they own their scope, and when they believe good work will be recognized rather than absorbed. So I gave the team real ownership, defended it upward, and made sure credit landed publicly on the people who earned it. A department that had been treated as overhead started behaving like a business, because the people in it were finally trusted to run one.
What This Demonstrates
That storytelling discipline and commercial discipline are the same discipline. The framework that makes a documentary hold an audience is the framework that makes a technical explainer hold an engineer. Apply it consistently across a function, it shows up in the margin.
← All case studies