Doejo - Head of Strategy
Where // Chicago, IL -- Doejo is an innovation agency focused on designing and creating digital products and custom platforms for enterprise publishing. We make apps, sites, products, brands and experiences for companies that believe in great design and thoughtful engineering. We fuel ideas that grow.
Why // Building things in the digital world these days is easy. It’s almost too easy. It contributes to a level of noise that can be difficult to break through. As a result, the importance of building the right thing is paramount. Once you identify, address, and reach your intended audience it’s critical you have an understanding of how to create value for them. Our clients and our incubation arm gave me a perfect sandbox to develop, hone, and lead initiatives to deliver on this promise.
What // My mandate was to develop and deploy a framework to drive agency-wide growth and efficiency. Traditionally, digital agencies grow through headcount and incremental rate increases, but we believed in the power of doing things with small teams. In collaboration with the rest of the leadership team we rethought everything about our work, including our engagement model, how we ran kickoff and discovery sessions, our success metrics, and the future of our team and their competencies. My hybrid role allowed me to serve as the lead digital and business strategist and business development manager. I led discovery sessions with clients, shaped engagements and contracts, and pushed agency wide strategy and planning initiatives centered around operations, HR, business development and finance.
Skills/Key Activities: Business Strategy, Business Development, Operations, Business Modeling and Portfolio Mgmt
Results // We grew our topline by closing $650k in new deals, extending engagements with existing clients, and focusing on shorter timelined and higher value design and rapid prototyping engagements. This strategy helped us to drive 36% growth on 2016 revenue per head vs 2015. We also evolved our hiring strategy to position our people as external innovators or extensions of our client’s team, instead of production teams for hire. We encouraged our people to be thought leaders in their respective disciplines, whether it be thru more consistent writing and sharing, speaking engagements and conferences or simply leading our internal monthly studio wide sharing sessions.