Throughout my career I have led the sourcing, evaluation, and contracting of the agency partners behind multi-million-dollar operations, running competitive RFI and RFP processes end-to-end, authoring the SOWs that governed each relationship, and negotiating terms that met the client's requirements while remaining workable for the agency. That work builds on years of experience on the agency side responding to client RFPs, which shaped how I run them as a client: with an eye to what makes a process fair, answerable, and worth an agency's investment. The engagements below are representative.

Running a competitive review end-to-end

For an agency-of-record search covering an incumbent and eight challengers, I ran the full process: writing RFI questions against the client's procurement and governance requirements alongside executive input, narrowing the field through structured review, and building the RFP around the leadership team's stated challenges and priorities. I managed a bidder-question process that distributed every answer to all candidates, keeping the review transparent and defensible, and I organized the internal scoring across leadership, advertising, analytics, media, social, and digital that narrowed the field to finalists, set the presentation schedule, and drove final selection. The outcome was a renewed partnership that held for the next six years, governed by an initial SOW I wrote and by the renewals I handled in the years that followed.

I ran the same disciplined process, at a scope suited to the need, to select a production agency: narrowing a finalist field to a decision and establishing the SOW and subsequent renewals that structured an ongoing relationship.

What makes a roster work

On a creative agency search, I contributed to candidate evaluation, RFP development, scoring, and finalist interviews. The engaged strategy consultant recommended distributing responsibilities across a set of best-in-channel specialist agencies, chosen for their strength in each discipline. I raised a concern early, as did others on the team: the model optimized for channel-level craft while overlooking a practical requirement, coordination. Splitting the work across many agencies removed the central account-management layer that holds a program together, and left a small internal team to coordinate across multiple agency account teams who were themselves trying to align with one another. In practice the roster proved demanding to operate for exactly that reason. I include it because the lesson sits at the center of how I approach sourcing: the best roster on paper is not the best roster if the organization can't actually run it. A sound recommendation weighs more than each agency's strengths. It has to account for the client's culture and internal dynamics, its staffing (both headcount and whether anyone holds the specific capabilities the model demands), and its budget and hiring constraints. Those conditions determine whether a structure will hold, and they have to shape the recommendation, not surface after it.

The core of it

Sourcing and contracting agency partners is, at its core, translating an organization's real requirements into a fair, transparent process and a set of agreements that hold up over time. It draws on procurement and governance fluency, the operational knowledge to write SOWs that anticipate how the work will actually run, an honest read of the organization's culture and internal dynamics, and the judgment to design a partner structure it can realistically sustain.