Throughout my career I have led the sourcing, evaluation, and contracting for agency partners behind multi-million-dollar advertising 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 negotiated 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

The steepest challenge in agency sourcing isn't only selecting the best agencies. It is designing a roster both the client and agencies can actually support.

On a creative-agency search where 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. The model optimized for channel-level craft at the expense of something a small internal team depended on: the stability and senior account leadership an integrated agency model provides. That role then fell to the internal team. They took on the day-to-day management across agencies, each of which was also working to coordinate with each other.

Designing for how the work will run

The best roster on paper is not the best if the client can't actually support 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 capabilities), and its budget and hiring constraints. Those conditions determine whether a structure will hold, and they must shape the recommendation, not surface after it.

The same thinking applies to the process itself. A competitive review has to be fair and transparent enough to earn an agency's real investment, and structured enough to give the client a defensible decision. And the agreements that follow have to consider how the work will actually run, not just what was promised in a presentation.

The core of it

Worked this way, an agency search produces more than a signed contract. The client gets a decision it can be confident in, arrived at through a process its stakeholders participated in and its agencies respected. It gets a partner structure matched to actual staffing and funding, rather than one it will spend the next years working around. It gets agreements that hold up as the work evolves, and renewals that don't revisit settled questions. And it gets relationships that last, because the relationship was built to work from the start.