Operating model design
Turn a founder-dependent studio into a system: how work enters, who owns it, how it moves, what "done" means. Designed for the size you're becoming, not the size you were.
- Future-state design
- Roles & RACI
- Intake to delivery
You can make the work. What you don't have is the machine underneath it — scoping, resourcing, margin, governance — that lets you take on more without losing the thing that made you worth hiring.
Build the operating model →You have volume, markets and a content supply chain under pressure. What you need is a model where AI compresses the cost of production without flattening what the work actually says.
Redesign the pipeline →Twenty years inside creative production — Lucasfilm, Netflix, HH Global, ADM Indicia — spent on the same problem from both sides of the table: how good work gets made repeatedly, profitably, and at pace, across markets, without the operating model eating the craft.
I'm not a strategy deck. I build the operating model, install the AI stack, run the change through to business-as-usual, and leave the team able to hold it without me.
Most creative businesses hit the same ceiling: revenue is capped by the founder's calendar, margin is invisible until it's gone, and every project is run from memory. The fix is infrastructure, not effort.
Turn a founder-dependent studio into a system: how work enters, who owns it, how it moves, what "done" means. Designed for the size you're becoming, not the size you were.
Scoping standards, resourcing and capacity models, escalation paths, SLAs, reporting rhythm. The unglamorous layer that decides whether growth is profitable or just busy.
A real toolchain across brief intake, concepting, copy, localisation, review and delivery — chosen for your workflow, integrated end to end, and adopted. Not a pilot that dies in a Slack channel.
Rate cards that survive contact with reality, scope-versus-utilisation discipline, margin visibility in-flight rather than at reconciliation, and the early-warning signals that let you intervene before the money's gone.
Enablement, champion networks and career pathways so the new way of working outlives the engagement. I'm measured on what your team can do after I leave.
For businesses that need a COO-grade operator but not a COO salary. I sit in the seat, run the function, hire my replacement.
The hub-and-spoke model was a cost equation dressed up as a strategy. AI has removed the penalty that made it necessary — which means the model is now the constraint, not the answer.
From business case to operating team: capability mix, structure, tooling, workflow, governance and the migration path off incumbent partners. Built to a defined commercial target, not a headcount guess.
Map brief-to-market end to end, find where time and margin actually leak, and rebuild the pipeline with AI embedded at the stages that pay for it. Measured on throughput and cost per asset, not tool count.
Redistribute where volume work happens now that distributed production no longer carries a cost penalty — and rebuild consistency as a system of brand governance rather than a centralised bottleneck.
Scope architecture, SOW structure, SLA design, performance frameworks and the review rhythm that makes roster performance legible. Fewer surprises, better leverage, defensible spend.
Local teams have inherited three jobs — brand consistency, market relevance, and data-literate creative judgment — and were funded for one. This builds the third.
Where a multi-agent system genuinely earns its place — project management, resourcing, traffic, status — designed and prototyped by someone actively building one, not selling one.
Three questions. You'll get the engagement I'd actually recommend, and an enquiry already written — so the first conversation starts somewhere useful instead of at the beginning.
Four shapes. Most engagements start with the first one, because the diagnosis is usually not what the brief said it was.
Workshops, interviews and data across the delivery system. Output: a mapped current state, quantified friction and margin leakage, and a prioritised roadmap with a business case attached. Enough to act on, on its own.
2–3 weeksFuture-state design across people, process, technology and commercials — structure, workflow, governance, tooling and the sequencing plan to get there without stopping the work that's already in flight.
6–10 weeksI sit inside the business and run the change: stack build, enablement, champion network, governance stand-up, and the discipline to push it from pilot into business-as-usual. This is where most programmes fail and where I do my best work.
3–6 monthsStanding counsel for founders and operations leaders — pressure-testing decisions, reviewing commercial structures, keeping the AI roadmap honest as the landscape moves under it.
Ongoing / monthlyVariations, resizes, localisations — one person directing the right stack now does what a team once did in shifts. Call that the 60 percent. It's real, it's banked, and it's the least interesting thing that happened.
The mistake is treating it as the headline. Speed was always the constraint most likely to ease. Building your entire transformation case on it means you optimise the part that was going to get cheap anyway — and underfund the part nobody has built yet.
The 40 percent is the work that doesn't have a name: new ways to find what an audience actually responds to, new ways to design for a person instead of a segment, and the judgment to know which of a hundred generated options is the one. The tool doesn't make the move. The hand does.
Not to extract more output from the same headcount against the same scoreboard — but to give teams the capability, the tooling they actually own, and the measurement framework to prove the 40 percent is happening at all.
Serato in the hands of someone who learned on vinyl is a fundamentally different instrument from Serato in the hands of someone who never did. The Tool Doesn't Make the Move — The Bodega
This is the argument I bring into every engagement. If your transformation business case is entirely made of hours saved, it is a cost programme wearing a strategy's clothes.
Years in creative production & operations
APAC markets run simultaneously at Netflix
Artists & technicians led on Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Continents — Vancouver, Singapore, regional APAC
Aamir Ameer Ghani
Singapore PR (Canadian)
Ang Mo Kio, Singapore
BFA, Film & Video
Emily Carr Institute of
Art & Design, Vancouver
Writes
The Bodega
I've spent twenty years on the same question from every angle available: how does creative work get made well, repeatedly, and at pace — without the system that produces it quietly destroying the thing worth producing?
I started in animation and VFX — Vancouver, then Lucasfilm in Singapore, where I ran studio delivery on Star Wars: The Clone Wars across 120+ artists and technicians, rebuilt pipeline workflow, and co-designed the Jedi Masters Program with the Singapore Government to build the talent the industry didn't yet have. Craft first, then the machinery around it.
At Netflix I designed and ran the APAC creative marketing production operating model — 10+ markets, always-on, permanently under-resourced relative to ambition — and sat as the bridge between global product and technology teams and the regional reality of actually delivering. That role taught me the thing I now sell: platform capability is worthless until someone translates it into how a team works on a Tuesday.
Since then: content operations across the APAC studio network at HH Global, integrated production direction across APAC at ADM Indicia, executive producing at Heckler, and operating model advisory for independent creative businesses. Along the way I ran a Singapore F&B business as Managing Director for four years, which is a faster education in margin than any consulting engagement.
Now I do it independently. I build AI-enabled production stacks end to end, I'm actively developing a multi-agent framework for creative and marketing production — specialised agents for project management, resourcing and traffic — and I write about craft, culture and technology at The Bodega. The through-line is the same one I've had since animation: go deep into the craft, stay curious about how the tools actually work, and you'll see things other people miss when the ground shifts.
Best first step is a conversation about what's actually going wrong — usually it's not the thing in the brief. Bring the messy version.
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